Oath crisis

On 9 July 1917 a ceremony was to be held in Warsaw which the German occupation authorities regarded as a mere formality: the soldiers of the Polish Armed Forces (Polska Siła Zbrojna), the army being formed for the promised Kingdom of Poland, were to take the military oath. Instead most of the legionaries of the I and III Brigades refused. In the other garrisons the ceremonies were set for 11 July, and there the same thing happened. The refusal was organised: a week earlier, on 2 July, Józef Piłsudski had resigned from the Provisional Council of State, and his soldiers knew that the Commandant did not want them to swear. So began the oath crisis, the end of the Polish Legions in their existing form and at the same time the end of Piłsudski’s cooperation with the Central Powers.

An army without a state

After the Act of 5 November what the Germans wanted above all was Polish recruits. The Governor-General of Warsaw, Hans Hartwig von Beseler, began building the army of the Kingdom, and on 10 April 1917 Austria-Hungary placed under his command the Polish Auxiliary Corps, as the Legions had been called since the autumn of 1916. According to Polish accounts it then numbered almost 21,000 soldiers. The commander-in-chief of the Polish Armed Forces (German Polnische Wehrmacht) was Beseler himself, while in practice it was commanded by the German general Felix von Barth (PL). Voluntary enlistment went badly: at the beginning of June Piłsudski informed the Council that about 1,300 men had actually joined the army.

Piłsudski, the Council’s head of military affairs from its first days, had been repeating for months that a Polish army must be subordinate to a Polish authority. In the spring of 1917 his calculation changed. The revolution in Russia had weakened the enemy against whom the Legions had marched in 1914, and its Provisional Government had itself declared that Poland should be independent. The United States had entered the war, and the Entente’s chances were clearly growing. Piłsudski judged that binding the army to Germany for the whole war would be a mistake. On 2 July, when he left the Council, he told Legion officers in Warsaw: “All our interests and Germany’s run against each other. It is in Germany’s interest above all to defeat the Allies, and in ours that the Allies defeat Germany.” Together with him his deputy, Colonel Kazimierz Sosnkowski, gave up his work in the Council’s Military Commission.

The wording

The dispute turned on a few words. The text of the oath, agreed by the Council of State with the occupation authorities, read: “I swear to Almighty God that I will serve my Fatherland, the Polish Kingdom, and my future king faithfully and honestly on land and water and in every place, and that in the present war I will faithfully keep brotherhood in arms with the armies of Germany and Austria-Hungary and the states allied with them.” The Kingdom existed only on paper; there was no king, and no Polish government either. Piłsudski argued that an oath from a Polish army could be received only by the prime minister of a Polish government. The legionaries put it more simply. “The Legions refuse to take this oath, for how can one swear to a king who does not exist,” one of them remembered. General Felicjan Sławoj Składkowski, then a doctor in the Legions, wrote years later that “in this formal matter of the oath there was very little of the oath”: the question was whose side the Polish army would stand on.

The refusal

In Warsaw the ceremony was held in closed barracks. Almost all the soldiers of the I and III Brigades and of the other units linked with Piłsudski refused, among them the 5th Infantry Regiment at Zegrze and the 2nd Uhlan Regiment, whose legionaries, after refusing, stood before their weapons laid on the ground. The figures given in the literature differ: according to some, 166 officers and about 5,000 soldiers refused; according to the figures of the Auxiliary Corps itself, cited by the Institute of National Remembrance, 199 officers and more than 4,500 NCOs and privates. The oath was taken by a small number of soldiers from the Kingdom, mainly from the II Brigade, which under the command of Józef Haller had always been less closely tied to Piłsudski; according to some sources about 60 officers and 1,250 soldiers.

The Germans treated the refusal as insubordination. The legionaries were disarmed and sent to camps. Officers from the Kingdom were interned at Fort Beniaminów near Zegrze, and NCOs and privates in the camp at Szczypiorno (PL) near Kalisz, where the first transport arrived on 13 July. About 3,300 men ended up behind the wire. The legionaries from Galicia, Austrian subjects, were even more numerous, about 3,500. They were drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army, and many were sent to the Italian Front. The remnants of the Auxiliary Corps, above all the II Brigade, were returned to Austro-Hungarian command. The Polish Armed Forces shrank to a handful: according to various calculations, from just over a thousand to just under 3,000 soldiers.

Significance

The oath crisis wrecked Beseler’s plan. No large Polish army fighting alongside Germany came into being, and the most idealistic part of the Legions ended up in camps instead of at the front. In the east Russia had just gone over to the offensive, but Piłsudski’s soldiers were no longer to fight in it. For Piłsudski the refusal was a break with the Central Powers, alongside whom he had fought since 1914. The Germans considered him the chief culprit, and two weeks later the Commandant himself and Sosnkowski were arrested.

For the legionaries internment became a legend. In the dugouts of Szczypiorno, where the young Władysław Broniewski was among those held, the internees kept their own discipline, studied and played a game with a rag ball, after which handball is called “szczypiorniak” in Poland. The refusal of the oath also won over to Piłsudski’s camp some of those who had previously regarded him as an ally of Germany. The Provisional Council of State, deprived of its most important member and of the army it was meant to deal with, survived only until the end of August.