Postcard - Headquarters of the Polish P.O.W. in 1914/15

In the summer of 1914, the secret Polish Military Organisation was founded. Among the first members of the Supreme Command were Aleksander Tomaszewski, Dezyderiusz Zawistowski, Konrad Libicki, Marian Zyndram-Kościałkowski, Tadeusz Żuliński, Wacław Jędrzejewicz and Bogusław Miedziński. Their figures, in Austrian uniforms and caps with legionary eagles, are immortalised in a joint photograph from 1915.

The fate of the Peacekeepers turned out differently. Żuliński, a young doctor and legionary, died from wounds sustained near Kamieniucha in Wołyń in 1915. He was buried in the Lychakiv Cemetery in his home city of Lviv. Zawistowski, an officer of the 19th Volhynian Lancer Regiment, died in 1939 near Kamionka Strumiłowa. Tomaszewski, headmaster of a Warsaw secondary school, was murdered in Kharkov in 1940.

Kościałkowski, who in his youth commanded diversionary units of the Polish Military Organisation (POW), held the posts of Białystok Voivode and Warsaw Mayor, and from 1935 Prime Minister. Until the outbreak of WWII, he held the post of Minister of Labour and Social Welfare. He died in exile in Great Britain.

Jędrzejewicz, who as a member of the Polish Peasant Party led the Free Military School in Warsaw with Libicki, became one of the leading politicians of the Second Republic. In the 1920s, he was responsible for Polish-Soviet diplomatic relations. Later he headed the Ministry of Religious Denominations and Public Enlightenment. In September 1939, as liaison officer at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, he took part in the evacuation of the Polish State Treasury. In 1943, he founded the Józef Piłsudski Institute in America, where he remained until his death.

Libicki, an MP in Estonia, a certified officer of the Polish Army, chief director of the Polish Telephone Agency and Polish Radio, and co-founder of the Józef Piłsudski Institute in London, also died in exile.

Senator Miedziński, Minister of Post and Telegraph, was also in England after World War II. In 1918, he participated in the formation of the Provisional People's Government of the Polish Republic in Lublin. As a former military man, he was granted land in Polesie between the wars.