The POW after the Germans enter Warsaw

At five in the morning on 22 August 1915 the Warsaw Battalion (PL) of the Polish Military Organisation marched out of Warsaw for the front. About 330 volunteers under Lieutenant Tadeusz Żuliński headed east to join the 1st Brigade of the Legions. It was the most visible moment in the POW’s history after the Russians left: an underground that had worked in hiding for a year fielded an open unit for the first time. Józef Piłsudski agreed to the battalion’s departure, but stopped further recruitment and ordered the POW to be kept and rebuilt.

From the underground to the streets

On the night of 4–5 August the last Russian units left Warsaw, and in the morning the Germans entered. Even before they arrived, the Warsaw POW occupied the Viceroy’s Palace on Krakowskie Przedmieście and put up the inscription “Command of the Polish Forces”. The POW staff took over a wing of the palace and a guard was posted in front of the building. According to a plaque unveiled there between the wars, this was the first Polish soldier to stand guard openly in Warsaw since 8 September 1831. On 6 August the staff moved to a building on the corner of Wielka and Żurawia streets, the former quarters of the chief of the Russian gendarmerie.

On Piłsudski’s orders an open mobilisation of volunteers for the Legions began. The commander of the POW’s Warsaw district, Bogusław Miedziński (PL), noted that they were allowed “to send into the ranks only those members of the organisation whose attitude simply ruled out keeping them in the underground any longer and holding them back from going to the front”. Most of the volunteers were Warsaw scouts and members of the National Youth Organisation (PL). Many scouts were turned away because of their age.

Piłsudski in Warsaw

On 15 August Piłsudski came to Warsaw for the first time. The city’s youth gave him an ovation and marched in procession along Marszałkowska Street. According to an IPN study, the welcome was so warm that the German authorities “asked” the Commandant to leave the city. With his consent a march unit of four companies was formed from the volunteers and named the Warsaw Battalion. The battalion trained in barracks on Żurawia Street. It was armed mostly with former Russian weapons, and the soldiers often bought their uniforms with their own money. Women members of the POW helped to equip the unit, among them Wanda Gertz.

The march

On the morning of 22 August the battalion formed up on Wielka Street, from Żurawia towards Aleje Jerozolimskie. It set off along Żurawia and Książęca, crossed the Vistula on a German pontoon bridge, since the Russians had blown up the permanent bridges, and marched east along the Brest road towards the Bug. According to the Polish Wikipedia, after a week’s march, on 29 August, it reached the brigade near Kopytów, where it was taken into its ranks and broken up. Żuliński took over a company in the 7th Infantry Regiment of the Legions. At the end of October he was badly wounded in Volhynia, and he died on 5 November 1915.

The bidding game

The battalion’s departure closed the first chapter in the POW’s history. In the summer of 1915 most of its sworn members went to the Legions, and the organisation, which had about 1,100 members in June, practically ceased to exist. Piłsudski did not want to hand the Legions more volunteers without political concessions from the Central Powers. He halted enlistment and began the policy his opponents called “bidding”: a Polish soldier in exchange for a Polish government and a Polish army. In this game the POW was to be a bargaining chip, the cadre of a future army and an alternative to the Legions, which were subordinate to the Austrians.

In the lands occupied by the Germans and Austrians the POW suspended sabotage but went on training and recruiting members, and Piłsudski assigned more than a dozen officers of the 1st Brigade to it. On 14 September Captain Tadeusz Kasprzycki became the organisation’s chief commander. Between the wars 22 August was celebrated in Warsaw as the anniversary of the march, and in 1935 part of Żurawia Street was named after Żuliński.