radically diverse; their numbers vastly smaller than the Red Army. The Poles were advised by French Gen. Maxime Weygand and Major Charles de Gaulle, who had himself been a German POW in the immediately preceding years, but no troops were given them by their nominal French and British allies.

Throughout June, July, and early August, 1920, the rapid westward drive of Tukhachevsky’s Red Army, covering several hundred miles, seemed unstoppable, and fear and fatalism seemed to possess many of the Polish troops. The Red Army came within ten miles of Warsaw and Polish Communist fifth-columnists within the city began sabotage activities. But rather than cracking, morale remained high in the city and in most units of the army, and a brilliant, risky strategic counter-attack conceived and undertaken by Pilsudskihad immense success, routing vastly larger forces and sending the Red Army reeling eastward and destroying large pieces of it.

Yet perhaps the most interesting issue raised by the Russo-Polish War and the battle of Warsaw comes down to questions of worldview, faith, and historical experience. Despite their subjection by their powerful authoritarian neighbors Austria-Hungary, Germany, and Russia, especially the latter two, for the 125 years until 1918, the Poles had a national history, and one with long periods of effective self-governance. Catholicism had kept alive their language, national self-consciousness, and moral awareness. A history of serving as a bulwark against, and victim of, barbaric, eastern invasions of Europe—Mongol, Hun, Tartar, Moslem, Russian, Cossack, or Bolshevik—predisposed them to see themselves as civilized, Christian Europeans. In the event, the “Polish