Pilsudski

PILSUDSKI belongs in a gallery of romantic nineteenth-century revolutionaries, along with Kossuth, Mazzini, Garibaldi, Kropotkin, Savinkov, and some of his own devoted countrymen. No one is so well fitted to tell the story of his life, which possesses the sweep and dash and thunder of a Chopin polonaise, as his wife, who was nurtured in the same atmosphere of passionate, repressed Polish nationalism as her husband, who shared his dangers and poverty as a wandering, hunted revolutionary, and who only escaped from her unfortunate country after doing what she could in warrelief work. One naturally does not obtain from such a source a critical objective analysis of some of Pilsudski’s failings and mistakes as a statesman, although the author obviously took a keen, intelligent interest in her husband’s political work and is probably correct in setting down as the two main causes of Poland’s fall its poverty and the formidable German espionage. But one obtains an extremely sympathetic picture of Pilsudski the man, the idealistic patriot, whose spirit is summed up in one sentence of his writings which Madame Pilsudska cites: ‘To be vanquished and not surrender — that is victory.’ W. H. C.