THE BOOK AND THE ROSES
By KSAWERY PRUSZYNSKI
AFTER the capture of Monastery Hill, the B.B.C. correspondent broadcast: " I watched a tiny figure coming down the tortured mine-track, the track that leads to the shambles of the building on the summit. A stream of smoke was coming up the hillside, and the entire valley of the upper Rapido seemed to be filled with a peat haze. Here I met one of the first Polish officers to come down from the top of the hill. He was tired and covered with dust after a fierce night's fighting up there. He told me that he entered the monastery shortly after ten o'clock with the first troops of a famous Polish lancer regiment . . . he had come down from the monastery with some books and two roses he had picked on the way."
This is a pleasant story. But there is another story, longer and more tragic: that of the forming of these Polish divisions, and the ears before they came into action on the Italian front with the Eighth Army. The two Polish divisions fighting with General I.eese are made up in overwhelming majority of those Poles in Russia, originally from East Poland, whose road to freedom was opened in the summer or 1941 by the outbreak of the Russo-German war and the Sikorski-Stalin pact. But for this pact these men would be somewhere in the depths of the Soviet Union lo this very day. The pact gathered them all up, from Archangel and the
steppes of Turkestan, from beyond the Urals and from Lake Baikal, from the Volga and Kamchatka and many other unknown places in the far-flung U.S.S.R. Some of them had been deported from the Polish territories occupied by the Soviet forces in 1939 ; others had been. sent to penal servitude for patriotic activities ; others still had been caught trying to cross the Rumanian or Hungarian borders to join Sikorski's army in France. In spite of their experiences, these men all hastened to join the Polish forces being formed in Russia as soon as the pact gave them back their freedom. Even the leaders of this Army were freshly released from political prisons or prisoner- of-war camps. Despite this their only desire was to come to grips with the Germans as quickly as possible.
It was not easy. These men arrived in the Polish camps ragged and bootless—and the bitter winter of 1941 was only just beginning. Far more Polish volunteers flowed in than had been anticipated by the Soviet authorities. Uniforms were to be supplied by the British and Americans, while the Soviet Union was to provide arms and food. The Russians explained—what was no doubt true—that they had not enough of these things for their own people. Only one division was equipped with Soviet arms, and even that not in full. The second and subsequent formations were almost without arms ; for military training they made wooden models of the various types of equipment. In the frosts of the Russian winter this army lived under canvas. At last Stalin agreed to move them to the milder climate of Central Asia. Afterwards, when arms were still not available and Polish-Soviet relations began to deteriorate, he consented to the transfer of the Polish forces to Iran. In February and July, successive groups of the Polish Army in Russia crossed the Soviet-Iranian frontier. In Iran British and American missions organised large-scale medical help and food and clothing-supplies for the Polish soldiers and those civilians who had been able to cross the border with them.
A part of these forces from Russia was assigned to bring the Polish troops in Great Britain up to full strength, including the Air Force and Navy. Many of these men already have air operations or naval patrols to their credit. Those assigned to the Army have been fully trained and are waiting. . . . Another part of the Polish Army in Russia joined the Carpathian Brigade from Tobruk, then in Palestine after its Libyan exploits, and the brigade rose to a division. The remainder were for the time being quartered in various spots in the Middle East.
It has sometimes been alleged that the Polish troops which left Russia did not want to fight there, that they are anti-semitic, that they do not want to fight at all, and so on. The people who make such assertions do not know—or prefer not to know—that these forces did not receive sufficient arms in Russia, that in Palestine they were on the whole on very good terms with the Jews, and finally that after two years of the Russian climate, after chronic under-nourishment and over-work, their health was complettly undermined. Unfortunately, many of them are unfit for military service altogether. All of them have had to go through a long period of rest, nourishment and medical attention, and those British and Americans who came into contact with this army of ex- prisoners and sick men can testify to the truth of this.
Nevertheless, they form the major part of the two divisions which have crowned their months of fighting in Italy by the capture of Monastery Hill. These soldiers are fighting the Germans. There are no deserters amongst them, while countless Poles forcibly con- scripted into the German Army are coming over to them from the German lines. Their British and American comrades have nothing but praise for these enduring allies, who are proving their loyalty incontrovertibly on the field of battle. And that officer who came down from the Monastery after the battle, holding a book and two roses in his hand? He had behind him the same long and weary journey as those other comrades. of his who, through Murmansk and the Urals, Iran and Iraq and now Italy, will pass back to what, if it is only a few blackened walls, or only a few square yards, hardly to be identified, of bare ground, is still for them home in Poland.
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