General Haller in France

On 13 July 1918 General Józef Haller reached France. He was the commander of the Polish II Corps, broken two months earlier at Kaniów. Behind him lay a journey of several weeks across a Russia engulfed in civil war and a voyage through the northern seas. According to the notes to the post-war edition of Roman Dmowski’s “Polityka polska i odbudowanie państwa”, he landed that day at Le Havre. The date of 13 July is also given by the general’s biographies, and Dmowski himself recalled that Haller arrived in Paris on the eve of the French national holiday.

From Kaniów to Murmansk

Haller managed to slip out of the encirclement at Kaniów in the confusion after the corps capitulated and, under the assumed name “Mazowiecki”, made his way through Kiev to Moscow. He set out for Moscow in secret on 8 June together with Colonel Michał Żymierski and Rotmistrz Bolesław Wieniawa-Długoszowski of the Polish Military Organisation, and arrived on 12 June. On 15 June he signed an agreement with the Polish Council of Inter-Party Union, which set up a Military Commission with him as commander-in-chief. The commission came to terms with the representatives of the Entente powers in Moscow: the Polish forces in the east were to be part of the army being formed in France, under the single command of Haller, and they were to be formed at Murmansk and Archangel. If no new Eastern Front came into being, the units were to be shipped to France. The French provided the money for this undertaking. According to some accounts, word reached Haller in Moscow that the Polish National Committee in Paris saw him as the commander of the army being formed in France.

On 20 June the general left Moscow in a French hospital train, and on 26 June he was in Murmansk, where he met the commander of the British forces in northern Russia, General Frederick Poole. Polish soldiers were to gather at nearby Kola. Haller entrusted the command of the Polish forces in the east to Colonel Lucjan Żeligowski, and the detachment at Kola to Colonel Machcewicz. He sailed from Murmansk on 3 July according to the Polish historian Henryk Bagiński, or on 4 July according to other sources, aboard a British destroyer, and reached France by way of Scotland. Other Polish soldiers followed the same route, but in July the Bolsheviks cut the Murmansk railway and arrested many of them at the stations. Even so, Polish units began to form in the far north of Russia and later fought alongside the Allies.

“He arrived just in time”

On 14 July a great parade of Allied troops was held in Paris for the French national holiday. A battalion of Polish infantry also marched in it and was greeted by the crowd with cries of “Vive la Pologne!”. Dmowski recalled that on the same day, after the ceremony, Haller appeared at the office of the National Committee, and judged that “he arrived just in time, at the very moment when we were looking for a soldier” who could be appointed commander-in-chief. “Haller fell to us from heaven,” he wrote, because since Kaniów he had already been a popular figure. On 17 July the committee co-opted him as a member.

The committee had reasons to hurry. The Polish Army in France then consisted of a single division in the making, commanded by a French general, and its oldest regiment was already fighting in Champagne. Only three weeks earlier its regiments had received their colours. Dmowski admitted, however, that it was hard to find Poles to command the regiments, and that agitation was being spread among the soldiers that they were serving in a kind of Foreign Legion. The army needed a Polish commander, and the fame of Rarańcza and Kaniów meant that the choice fell on Haller. The committee took the decision “without long discussion”, but it formally entrusted him with command of the army, which came to be called Haller’s Army after him, only on 4 October 1918, after France had recognised the army as an allied one.