Chapter 8: The Thirteenth Point

Paderewski was playing a war relief benefit the next afternoon. He had played so little except his Chopin since his return to the United States that he was preparing for the much-heralded Carnegie Hall recital with even greater care than usual. It was Monday, January 8, 1917.

While he was practicing, a message came from down the street that Colonel House would like to see him. Very little else would have taken him away from the piano at that moment, but he was soon in the Colonel's study.

Colonel House came quickly to the point, as usual. "Next Thursday I am going to leave for Washington, and I wish to have with me your memorandum on Poland."

What the Colonel meant was this: he had decided that the time had come to present President Wilson with a full-scale study of the Polish situation. What he needed from Paderewski was a memorandum telling exactly what he wanted for his country and how he thought it should be accomplished. It was the sort of document that half a dozen trained diplomats might work over for three weeks!

Paderewski felt as though a large mallet had just thumped him on the head. "Thursday! But I have my recital tomorrow! And besides, it is impossible to prepare such a document without the necessary data, and besides--"

"I must have that memorandum by Thursday morning!"

Paderewski had by this time learned one thing about the Colonel. He might be a man of few words, but he meant every one of them.

He walked back to his hotel slowly. At all costs, he told himself, he must keep his wits about him and not panic. During World War II there was a Seabee slogan that would have appealed to Paderewski, had he heard it. "The difficult we do immediately. The impossible takes a little longer." He himself operated along these lines. This job was impossible. It would take a while. He went up to his rooms and began practicing for four hours.

The program of that Tuesday afternoon recital included the Beethoven C minor piano sonata, Op. 111. This is one of the most taxing of all the sonatas in the kind of intellectual demands it makes on the performer. In addition to the Beethoven he played the Schumann "Butterflies," one of his favorite recital pieces, and his own piano sonata Op. 21. Shorter works by Chopin, Liszt, Mendelssohn and his composer-friend Stojowski completed the program. And as usual in a Paderewski recital, the encores he played so generously were almost as extensive as the printed program.

Next morning the critics were enthusiastic about the pianist's "bravura performance." They spoke of the wild delight of the audience which agreed to go home only after the lights in the hall had been turned off. It was, in other words, "a typical Paderewski recital audience," wrote the man from the _Tribune_. In it were "men and women of society, musicians, and many young persons, even boys and girls who will grow up to tell their juniors about the time 'when I heard Paderewski.'"

Yet neither the critic nor the boys and girls knew what a fantastic scene they had just witnessed: Paderewski locked in absolute concentration on Beethoven and Schumann and the others, while the fate of his country waited silently for him on his desk.

When the recital was finally over--and he did not deprive the audience of so much as one bow--he went home and ate dinner. Then he went to work on the memorandum. Thirty-six hours later--at eight A.M. on Thursday morning--it was delivered to Colonel House. Paderewski went to bed for the first time since Monday night.

His fatigue seemed well worth it a week later when the Colonel came back from Washington. "The President was very much pleased with your memorandum," he said. "Now get ready. The first shot will be fired very soon!"

On January 22 President Wilson addressed Congress on "Essential Terms of Peace in Europe." Paderewski, who was touring in the South at the time, picked up a newspaper the next day and read these words: "No peace can last or ought to last which does not recognize and accept the principle that governments derive all their just powers from the consent of the governed, and that no right anywhere exists to hand people about from sovereignty to sovereignty as if they were property. I take it for granted ... that statesmen everywhere are agreed that there should be a united, independent, and autonomous Poland, and that henceforth inviolable security of life and worship ... should be guaranteed to all people who have lived hitherto under the power of governments devoted to a faith and purpose hostile to their own."

The words swam before his eyes. For the first time, the fate of Poland had been publicly mentioned as an official concern of the United States government.

On April 2, 1917, President Wilson came to an anguished but inevitable decision. He called upon the Congress to declare war against Germany. Full mobilization of the country's manpower was immediately begun. Two days later, Paderewski, addressing the "Union of Polish Falcons," the most important Polish-American group, called for the formation of a separate Polish army, to fight side by side with the Allies. An independent Polish army, he felt, would prove to the world as nothing else could that there was truly a Polish nation waiting for its moment of rebirth. After almost insurmountable difficulties, he finally won his point, and the governments of France and the United States allowed him to go ahead with his plans for the formation of the army. Two training camps for Polish volunteers were founded, and soon twenty-two thousand Polish-Americans had enlisted in "the Army of Kosciuszko." For help in transporting so large a number of men to Europe, Paderewski turned to the Secretary of the Navy, Josephus Daniels. He, in turn, knew just the man to assign to the Paderewski case--a young Assistant Secretary named Franklin Delano Roosevelt whose admiration for the pianist dated from childhood. With Roosevelt's enthusiastic, red-tape-cutting aid, Paderewski's volunteers were quickly sent to Europe. There they joined with the European Poles to form an army numbering nearly one hundred thousand men, fighting under the banner of the white eagle.

Statesmen who had once believed that Poles could never be united were now confronted by the fact of a hundred thousand men joined by a common oath. "I swear before Almighty God, One in Three, to be faithful to my country Poland, one and indivisible, and to be ready to give my life for the holy cause of its unification and liberation. I swear to defend my flag to the last drop of my blood, to observe military discipline, to obey my leaders, and by my conduct to maintain the honor of a Polish soldier."

The Polish army paid tribute to Paderewski in a superb and moving way. His name was inscribed on the membership list of each company. Every day at roll call, when the name "Ignace Jan Paderewski" was read, one hundred thousand voices shouted back, "Present!" This honor had been paid to a soldier only once before in history--to Napoleon. It had never before been paid to a civilian.

And then at last came the day on which the unselfish labors of the last three years bore glorious fruit. On January 8, 1918, as the war entered its last phase, President Wilson spoke to Congress on the peace that lay ahead. He offered a fourteen point program for what he hoped could be a just and permanent settlement of the world's disputes. The thirteenth of these points was this: "An independent Polish state should be erected which should include the territories inhabited by indisputably Polish populations, which should be assured a free and secure access to the sea, and whose political and economic independence and territorial integrity should be guaranteed by international covenant."

As Paderewski read the electric words, he realized that they were taken almost verbatim from the memorandum he had written for Colonel House after his Carnegie Hall recital exactly one year before. Paderewski's work in America had been crowned with a success that not even he, full of faith as he was, could have imagined.

In Poland, news of the thirteenth point brought life-saving hope to the hearts of the beleaguered Polish people. On an entirely different level an earlier incident had already kindled a new flame of courage in the hearts of the people of Warsaw. It had happened during the final rout of Russian troops by an advancing German army. To gain time for their retreat, the Russians blew up the Poniatowski Bridge that spanned the river Vistula in the very heart of the city. The devastating roar of dynamite smashed windows and shook buildings for miles around. Even the solid Zamek shuddered to its foundation stones. The blast almost uprooted the statues in Palace Square. As the powerful vibrations ripped past him, King Sigismund tottered but stood firm. Yet even in their fright the people who ran through the square seeking shelter could not fail to understand his message. Soon the magical words were flying through the city. "_Sigismund has shaken his sword!_"

At last the signing of the Armistice on November 11, 1918, brought the long horror to an end: Paderewski's work in the United States was over, the greatest tour in his career a complete success. The next step in his mission would have to be carried out in Paris, where the statesmen of the world would soon gather to write treaties and to rearrange the border-lines of Europe.

In Arthur Balfour, the British Foreign Secretary, Paderewski had a powerful friend. The experienced statesman now gave him some strong advice. It was essential, as Paderewski knew better than anyone else, that Poland be represented at the Conference table. But the Allies would never recognize a Polish government unless they felt that it truly represented all factions in Poland. At the moment most Allied leaders leaned toward Dmowski's Polish Committee in Paris. But others were asking, "What about Pilsudski?"

What, indeed, about Pilsudski! A hundred times a day the name drifted across Paderewski's mind like an ominous shadow.

Jozef Pilsudski, the soldier-hero of Poland, had fought his country's enemies for years on home ground. He had escaped from both Russian and German prison camps to organize a Polish army and a Polish underground. At the end of the war he had marched triumphantly into Warsaw and been acclaimed Chief of State. The government he had organized was strongly socialist, almost communist in character. It represented the left-wing factions in Poland, just as Dmowski's Polish National Committee represented the right-wing factions. Naturally the peace negotiators would not do business with both groups.

"Someone," Balfour said, "must unite these factions. Someone must go into Poland and persuade Pilsudski to cooperate with Dmowski to form a government that is truly representative of all Poles." Obviously there was only one man in the world who had any hope at all of accomplishing such an assignment.

On Christmas Day the British warship that had carried the Paderewskis safely through the treacherous mine-infested waters of the North Sea dropped anchor in Danzig, Poland's ancient seaport.

Danzig was in German territory and the Germans were not in the least enthusiastic about welcoming the man who was trying as hard as he could to relieve them of their share of Polish land. In the city of Poznan to which Paderewski proceeded from Danzig, a procession of school children carrying Polish flags was fired on by sniping Prussian soldiers. The windows of Paderewski's hotel room were shattered by flying bullets, while he himself calmly tied his necktie. Street-fighting between Poles and Prussians immediately broke out and lasted for three days. "There is no doubt," Paderewski wrote to Colonel House, "that the whole affair was organized by the Germans in order to create new difficulties for the Peace Conference."

But no amount of threats and terrorism could stop the people of Poland from lining the railroad tracks between Poznan and Warsaw to cheer and shout and weep tears of joy while they waited in the snow to catch a glimpse of the man whose name had shone like a beacon of hope for four devastating years.

Paderewski reached Warsaw on New Year's Eve. The ovation that he received from the jubilant city was heart-warming, but it was not really significant. Tens of thousands of people in Warsaw might be parading the streets in his honor; but the success or failure of his mission depended on one man alone. On the first day of the hopeful New Year, Paderewski presented himself at the Belvedere Palace for his first meeting with Marshal Jozef Pilsudski.