Imperial Service, Alienation, and an Unlikely National “Rebirth”: The Poles in World War I

Describing the “war experience” of a whole people is always difficult, given the complexity and diversity of actual human experience. This holds true even for the official warring nations that acted within a unified legal and political framework. Poland, in contrast, was one of those nations that took geopolitical shape in Central Europe after World War One by territories taken from the three “eastern” powers Germany, Russia and Austria-Hungary that had all lost the war, if with very different general outcomes. In any case, due to the positive outcome for the Poles in terms of state-building, both Polish historiography and