DEATH OF PILSUDSKI

Evening Post, Volume CXIX, Issue 111, 13 May 1935, Page 9

DEATH OF PILSUDSKI

(! POLISH; DICTATOR; ; SUCCESSOR APPOINTED ~ GENERAL RYDZ-SMIGLT, United X'ress Association—By Electric Telegraph—Copyright. ■ (Received May 13, 1 p.m.) ; .WARSAW, May 12. Obituary: Joseph Clemens Pilsudski, First Marshal of Poland and In-' spector-General of ' Polish Armed Fprc.es and Minister of War since 1926. He was 57 years of age. (Received May 13, 2 p.m.) , WARSAW, May 12. General Bydz-Smigly has, been appointed to succeed Marshal Pilsudski, who died of kidney trouble, from which he had been suffering for several months. General Rydz-Smigly is popular with the army, and was one of the besttrusted of Marshal Pilsudski's assistants. General Edward Rydz-Smigly, Inspector of .the Polish Army, was bom in 1886. He served in Marshal Pilsudski's'Polish Legions during the Qreat War, and was appointed an Army Commander in 1920. PILSUDSKI'S CAREER j Born of noble Lithuanian stock in December, 1867, bred on a great hereditary estate of more than 30 square miles near Vilna, Joseph Pilsudski, while a youth studying medicine' at; the Kharkoff University, saw this inheritance lost to his family .through the systematic inj ustice of a Russian Governor. His elder brother, Stanislas, for a trifling offence, was sent to spend 15 years in lonely exile.on the Pacific island of Saghalieh, since then seized by the Japanese. From these happenings he was forced into a life of revolutionary Socialism, during which he took part in secret gatherings, plots, risings, arrests, and escapes. ■ It was a life infinitely more fascinating to the young man than any safer, career. Without any military training, against the ridicule, even, of his comrades, and with certain death pending in case of discovery, Pilsudski through a series of. years succeeded in organising and • drilling a secret Polish army of several hundred officers and ten thousand men, ready to take the field in quick time. These became ' the nucleus of a Polish national army that, from its first inception,' has never hstened to any other commandant. The army was formed in • 1908 and TISf 11™^ 16 J Great War b«>ke out in 1914 Pilsudski's forces were known as the Polish Legions. • He was in coinhesitation in flu-owing inhis lot with hesitation in throwing in his lot with Germany, for had not Russia held three-quarters of his distracted country under an iron rule for many years? ' In 1916 he resigned command and ■ became Head of the Military Commission created by the Provisional State Council under the proclamation of the independent Poland by Austria and Germany on November 5, 1916. ' But he was quickly and rudely disillusioned. When the Central Powers talked of an "independent Poland," and talked «f absorbing the whole military manhood of the country into-'-their armies, Joseph Pilsudski loudly protested and stubbornly refused to allow ' his countrymen to be decimated in a" quarrel that was not theirs.- He ' promptly found himself a prisoner in the fortress of Magdeburg, where he remained until after the war was over. Then, leading1 his veterans, he disarmed and drove out the German garrisons that had occupied the towns of Poland for many1 months. "In 1918 General Pilsudski was all the Government Poland had, an unconstitutional king in reality. He became Polish Chief of State and Commander-in-Chiel. / *£? armies defeated the Bolsheviks in the battles of Warsaw and Niemen l!L August and September, 1920. In 1922 he left the post of Chief of State and became Chief of General Staff. In 1923 he retired from service and from political life; but in May. 1926, he - occupied Warsaw at the" head of his devoted troops, and assumed sirareme authority over Poland. ' - It was under the dictatorship of the Marshal that -Paderewski made his brief i excursion into statesmanship, but a close friendship between the two survived that experience: • A figure above middle height, some- ", what bowed even at fifty-sixv but ' appearing erecb and even -taller on the rostrum or in the saddle, his hair still black, thick, and wiry, eyes deer> set, piercing, unfathomable under snaggy brows, aptly describes his personal appearance. Socialist in thought though he was,,.he was- staunchly opposed to the Russian Bolshevik ' method of government, all his energies being to give Poland an autonomy that would raise her above the quarrels of the surrounding nations. '