1OWOJSKO:
The Military Tradition
Few nations in the last two hundred years have seen more military action than
the Poles. In the eighteenth, as in the twentieth century, the Polish lands regu-
larly provided an arena for Europe's wars. In the nineteenth century, they sup-
plied the armies of three martial empires with numberless recruits and
conscripts. Yet no European nation has reaped fewer rewards for the sweat, and
blood expended. As often as not, the Polish soldier has followed foreign colours.
When marching undeir the Polish flag, or in Poland's cause, he has met, almost
invariably, with defeat. It is a sad fact, but Poland has been obliged by circum-
stances to act as one of Europe's principal nurseries of cannon-fodder.^1
By the middle of the eighteenth century, the old Army of the
Polish-Lithuanian Republic had fallen into almost total decay. It had not
undertaken a foreign campaign since the wars of the Holy League in the 1690s,
and then only as a mercenary force of the Habsburgs. Its operations in the
Great Northern War had failed to deter the country's Russian and Swedish
invaders, and had ended in 1717 with its legal limitation to a nominal estab-
lishment of 24,000 men. Thereafter, it proved both unwilling and incapable of
challenging the numerous foreign and domestic military formations which
marched around the Polish territories during the rest of the Saxon Era. It
played only a marginal role in the War of the Polish Succession, and none at
all in the Silesian Wars, the War of the Austrian Succession, or the Seven Years
War. The natural reluctance of the nobility to support the growth of a modern
standing army was reinforced by the obvious dangers of creating a force which
would pose a threat to Russian, Austrian, and Prussian ambitions. Even so,
Poland-Lithuania was not short of soldiers. Vast numbers of indigent petty
noblemen filled the ranks of a military caste of proportions unequalled in
Europe. But their contempt for state service, their pre-occupation with private
wars and vendettas, their perpetuation of the myth of the Pospolite Ruszenie,
the 'Noble Host', their dislike of drill, their obsession with cavalry to the detri-
ment of all other branches of warfare, and their opposition to the idea of rais-
ing an 'ignoble army' of peasant conscripts, put them at a marked
disadvantage in relation to all their neighbours. Private armies abounded; and
the great magnates like Karol Radziwill, Xavery Branicki, or Antoni
Tyzenhauz, maintained military establishments which would have been the
envy of many European principalities - replete with their own officer corps,