Postcard - Headquarters of P.O.W. during exercises in 1917

In August 1914, an underground Polish Military Organisation (Polish abbrev. POW) was established in the Kingdom of Poland. Its members were drawn from the Polish Rifle Squads and the Riflemen's Association. In its declaration, the organisation stressed that its aim was to regain Polish independence through armed struggle. POW members soon joined the ranks of the Polish Legions. In the autumn of 1918, they took part in disarming occupying armies stationed in various Polish cities. In December of that year, the Polish Military Organisation was disbanded by order of Józef Piłsudski.

One of the exercises of the Supreme Command of the Polish Military Organisation in 1917 was immortalised on a photograph. Surrounding the Commander were the future founders of Polish statehood – Prime Minister Wacław Jędrzejewicz, independence activist Janusz Gąsiorowski, Post and Telegraph Minister Bogusław Miedziński, and Generals Tadeusz Kasprzycki and Henryk Paszkowski. They were accompanied by legionaries, later journalists: Karol Krzewski-Lilienfeld and Władysław Denhoff-Czarnocki, and Jan Zdanowicz-Opieliński (pseudonym Wojsznar), who died in November 1918 in Lublin.

Among them there was also Stefan Pomarański – a scouting instructor, co-publisher of ‘Zamojska’s Files’, an infantry major of the Polish Army and a doctor of humanities, who died in 1944 in the Flossenbürg concentration camp.

The photograph of the figures standing in a line was reproduced on a commemorative postcard issued for the construction of the Monument to the Fallen Peowiak Family in Warsaw in the 1930s.