more cohesive, since they enjoyed the common base of Warsaw.
These considerations were given added weight by the distances involved and the nature of the terrain. It is a long way from anywhere to anywhere else, and the scarcity of good roads and towns combined with a profusion of rivers to make that distance problematic. Both Napoleon and Hitler discovered that it is not only the severe winter conditions that can destroy an army: the baking heat of summer and lack of water are just as inimical to the troops, and annul the defensive advantages of most rivers.
There were virtually no metalled roads in much of the area, only tracks that fluctuated between the status of boggy morass and dusty sandpit. Bridges were scarce — over 7,500 had been destroyed by the Germans before they left in 1919. Railways were the only reliable means of getting from one place to another, but the Germans had blown up 940 stations, and the mostly single-track lines were thinly spread over the area. The Poles had inherited three discrete railway networks, built with, respectively, Berlin, Vienna and St Petersburg in mind, which did not mesh comfortably around Warsaw. The Russians used a wider gauge than the rest of Europe, and as that part of their network which was on Polish territory had been converted to suit the others, this meant that with every advance by either side all the tracks had to be converted one way or the other so that supplies could reach the advancing army, unless an adequate quantity of suitable rolling-stock had been captured in the advance.7
Means of verbal communication were just as limited. The telephone network was vulnerable to snipping by marauding cavalry. Radio communications were primitive and prone to breakdown. The use of aircraft for the delivery of orders was not favoured, as too many pilots had got lost and touched down in the middle of an enemy grouping. Orders in the field were often carried by mounted galloper. Yet liaison and intelligence were to play a decisive role in the events.
One of the most important weapons in the Bolshevik armoury had always been propaganda, aimed at subverting the population behind the enemy’s lines and even the troops in his ranks. Given the nature of the terrain and the scarcity of forces with which to seal its frontiers, Poland was permeable to Russian agents, who spread propaganda and disaffection, and to spies, who sent back information.
While the Poles did not indulge in propaganda behind enemy lines, they did have a valuable network of intelligence agents, mostly Poles stranded in Russia by the Revolution. They had also developed an efficient intelligence-gathering system based on listening in to enemy radio transmission. During the Great War all the combatants had developed receivers that could eavesdrop on the other side’s communications, none more so than the Austrians, who found it difficult to obtain intelligence on what was happening on the other side of their eastern front by more conventional means. They invested more resources than any other participant into developing their monitoring technology; and they employed officers of Polish origin, who were both more familiar with the Russian language and had a long tradition of encryption and decryption reaching back through a century of conspiracy and resistance. Polish officers had also served in the monitoring services of the Russian, German and French armies, and as a result the intelligence-gathering unit set up by the Polish army at the beginning of 1919 had a wide knowledge of existing techniques and an unsurpassed range of skills. By the summer of that year it had broken the Russian codes, and by the beginning of 1920 it was listening in to every radio station in western Russia, and intercepting and decrypting 50 per cent of all communications reaching and leaving the Red Army’s Western and South-Western Fronts. This was a valuable weapon in what was going to be an unequal contest.8
The overall strength of the Red Army at the start of 1920 was five and a half million, which compared favourably with the Polish peak of just under one million. The balance was redressed to some extent as less than one seventh of the Red Army’s total were combat effectives, while the Poles managed to put a quarter of their overall strength into the field. The Red Army could only muster seventy operational divisions against the twenty the Poles could field, and they were, if anything, weaker than the Polish ones. That still left a considerable imbalance.9
And the millions of men loitering in base camps all over Russia did constitute a vast stock of cannon-fodder which could be fed into the front line when required. So while the Red Army appeared to be incapable of concentrating more than a fraction of its forces against the Poles at any one time, it was able to keep that figure more or less constant. The Poles had no corresponding pool of manpower behind the lines. This meant that the Red Army staked very little in a game in which the Poles were forced to stake all, that it could afford to lose a campaign, while the Poles could not survive the loss of a major battle.
While the Polish army was formed on a conventional modern Western model, it lacked the equipment, the reserves and the technical resources to support it. And it was ill-prepared for the conditions under which it was going to fight. The entire theatre of operations lay well within the developed world and the ambit of European culture, but the infrastructure of modernity was stretched very thinly over it and, like thin ice, was liable to give way under strain, taking with it all vestiges of civilization, and plunging it back into the conditions of the seventeenth century. A soldier trained in the twentieth would suddenly find himself deprived of the support system he had learnt to rely on, operating in a primitive environment populated by an often feral peasantry motivated solely by the instinct for survival.
The Red Army, on the other hand, had grown out of revolution. It had evolved doctrines, strategy and tactics adapted to the worst conditions of the Russian Civil War and to the most exacting terrain. Being the numerically stronger of the two, and because it is easier to destroy a weak order than to uphold it, it was, sooner or later, bound to impose on the Polish army a type of warfare for which the latter was fundamentally unprepared.
The Russian Civil War was a vicious political war, and the rules that govern behaviour in international conflicts do not apply in such wars. Here, there was no room for notions such as respect for the enemy, who was perceived as a form of vermin which must be exterminated. As a result, rank, courage and loyalty, which might earn a soldier the respect of his captors in normal circumstances, only served to make his end more gruesome. This had some curious consequences.
While fanatics stuck to their guns, the majority of combatants caught up in the Russian Civil War saw it largely in terms of personal survival, manifest in a determination not to be on the losing side. Desertion was instinctive when things started going badly. Entire divisions changed sides, and some managed to change back again when the fortunes of war deserted their new ally. This meant that a minor setback, if unchecked, could turn a recently victorious army into a disintegrating rabble within a short space of time.
These conditions heightened tension and fear, which the soldiers of both sides relieved with drink and drugs — thanks to its proximity to Turkey and Afghanistan, the whole of southern Russia was liberally supplied with a wide range of narcotics. They also found relief in almost random brutality. They allayed feelings of insecurity by taking them out on someone else. Whites would do unspeakable things to captured commissars, Reds to officers, landowners or priests. Failing that, there were always the Jews, whom both sides slaughtered with profligacy.
The opponents of the Soviet regime gloatingly pointed to the Jewish origins of Trotsky and other prominent Bolsheviks, which, they claimed, gave substance to the cataclysmic theories contained in the Protocols of the Elders ofZion, a grotesque confection purporting to be the blueprint for a Jewish plot aimed at world domination. This did not prevent the Bolsheviks from preying on exactly the same anxieties and prejudices by pointing to the role of Jews in the great capitalist conspiracy to enslave the working class. The poor Jew trying to eke out an existence in some shabby shtetl who knew no more of Trotsky than he did of the Rothschilds was guilty by association in the eyes of both sides.
If the war with Poland was not technically a civil war, it was certainly regarded as an ideological one in many respects. The average Red Army ranker was a drafted peasant who might have survived a couple of murderous campaigns of the Great War, then been caught up in the barbarous maelstrom of the Civil War, who did not know what he was fighting for or why, who longed only to go back to his village, who was dressed in rags, covered in lice, suffered from chronic diarrhoea, was perpetually hungry and above all scared, and who expressed his fear and his sense of deprivation by raping and killing anyone