294 NIEPODLEGLOSC
Berezina in May, all served to delay the Soviet advance. Then in the summer,
fortunes changed. Budyonny's First Cavalry Army smashed its way through the
Polish lines in Galicia in June, and on 4 July Tukachevsky broke out from the
Berezina. 'To the West!' ran his order of the day. 'Over the corpse of White
Poland lies the road to world-wide conflagration.' By the beginning of August,
five Soviet armies were approaching the suburbs of Warsaw. The situation was
critical. Allied diplomatic intervention had failed to produce an armistice. The
frontier line proposed by the British government, the so-called 'Curzon Line',
was rejected by Poles and Soviets alike. The British refused to give Poland milit-
ary assistance despite their clear obligation to do so. The French declined to
reinforce their small Military Mission. French military credits for Poland were
terminated. A vociferous propaganda campaign, under the slogan 'Hands off
Russia', led world opinion astray at a time when Soviet Russia was laying vio-
lent hands on its Polish neighbour. Lenin's diplomats preached peace, while his
generals practised war. German dockers in Danzig and Czech railwaymen in
Brno contrived to delay the few foreign supplies for which Poland had paid in
hard cash. On 10 August, the 'Red Cossacks' of Ghai crossed the Vistula west
of Warsaw. The scene in the capital was strangely calm. Although the police
made a number of preventive arrests, suspecting that sections of the working
class or of the Jews might harbour communist sympathies, the inhabitants
showed no inclination to welcome the Russians. The old military section of
the PPS was revived, and took the lead in the activities of the all-party Council
for the Defence of the Capital (ROS). In face of the common enemy, class
divisions were forgotten. The Workers' Battalions, brandishing staffs and
scythes, marched off to join the army in the company of the middle-
class Citizens' Watch, which had paraded beforehand in boaters and wing-
collars. Lord D'Abernon, the British Ambassador at Berlin, who witnessed the
preparations at first hand, was amazed by the nonchalance of a city about to be
stormed:
z6 July. I continue to marvel at the absence of panic, at the apparent absence indeed of
all anxiety. Were a methodical system of defence being organized, the confidence of the
public might be understood, but all the best troops are being sent to Lwow, leaving
Warsaw unprotected.
27 July. The Prime Minister, a peasant proprietor, has gone off today to get his harvest
in. Nobody thinks this extraordinary.- August. The insouciance of the people here is beyond belief. One would imagine the
Bolsheviks a thousand miles away and the country in no danger.
3 August. Made an expedition up the Ostrow Road... Curiously enough, most of the
people whom I saw putting up barbed wire were Jews...
7 August. I visited this afternoon the proposed new front in the direction of Minsk
Mazowiecki. A treble entanglement of barbed wire is being put round Warsaw at a
radius of 2.0 kilometres, and a certain number of trenches have been dug...
13 August. There is singularly little alarm. The upper classes have already left town, in
many cases having placed their pictures and other valuables in charge of the muzeum
authorities. Warsaw has been so often occupied by foreign troops that the event in itself