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How The Poles Saved Civilization, Part II

Among the most momentous events of twentieth-century history is the defeat of the Communist Red Army in the Battle of Warsaw in the summer of 1920, “the miracle on the Vistula,” the subject of Adam Zamoyski’s excellent recent book Warsaw 1920: Lenin’s Failed Conquest of Europe. In the aftermath of the catastrophic First World War, with its 13 million deaths, the old order in much of Europe collapsed, and though the armistice was concluded in the West on 11 November 1918, eastern Europe, Italy, and the Middle East remained on fire for another five years. This is the background to T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” finished in Lausanne in 1922, and gives it an apocalyptic quality: “Falling towers/ Jerusalem, Athens Alexandria/ ViennaLondon/ Unreal” (Part V). Four vast empires collapsed—Russia, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire, propelling several hundred million people into conditions of intermittent chaos, starvation, and war. Given the discrediting of nearly all continental European political regimes (and the Ottomans) and the demobilizing of vast numbers of soldiers and their subsequent unemployment and bitterness, Europe was a powder-keg, with fiery instruments everywhere. There were Communist and Fascist strikes, riots, and coups d’etat throughout the continent, including Berlin, Budapest, Munich, and Milan. The Bolsheviks had taken power in Russia in 1917 and defeated their “White” Russian opponents in a bloody civil war over the next three years. Meanwhile, with the advent of the Americans in the West, the Germans, who had driven the Russians to their knees in the