Polish Cartel

The principals, each with two seconds, arrived simultaneously at the barracks near Belvedere Palace in the drenching rain at daylight. There were few formalities. The seconds conferred for a moment, examined and loaded two long dueling pistols and stepped off the distance of 15 paces.

"Are you ready, General Szeptycki?"

The umpire glanced to the right where a huge man in the uniform of a General of the Polish army stood bareheaded in the rain.

"And you, Count Skrzynski?"

Count Alexander Skrzynski, onetime Foreign Minister and later Premier of Poland, nodded bleakly. He was much slenderer than his opponent; he wore a silk soft shirt, open at the neck.

". . . . Fire!"

With an abrupt, nervous sweep of his arm General Szeptycki raised and discharged his pistol. He had missed. No change appeared in the handsome, slightly mocking visage of the Count, but the gentlemen who watched him bring his lean weapon slowly into position knew that they were about to witness a tragedy. Count Skrzynski did not know how to miss; he was one of the deadliest shots in Warsaw. "One . . ." said the umpire, telling off the first of the five seconds which the Polish code allows a duelist in which to return his opponent's fire. "Two. . . ." With an almost unbearable suspense the aides saw the Count take aim. The General had refused to shake his hand one day in the Cracow Military Club and when asked for an explanation replied that there was only one tongue in which gentlemen explained such things to each other. Thereafter--"Three . . ."-- he accused Count Skrzynski of having engineered the coup of General Pilsudski, and now--"Four ..."--he waited, in a rainswept field, for--"Five. . . ." Count Szeptycki tossed his pistol to a second.

"I will not shoot. ... If any gentleman here finds it necessary to take further issue with my honor, let him fire at me. I will not return his fire. I shall not resort to this stupid, inconclusive, and barbaric method of settling a quarrel which has been forced* upon me. I had hoped that because of my services to Poland no Pole would take my life. I have been shot at and missed. Had I shot I would not have missed. But I, for my part, I am unwilling to shoot another Pole. . . ."

The second cased the pistols. Without shaking hands, the principals resumed their cloaks, got into their motors, drove back along the grey road to Warsaw.

* General Szeptycki, a blustering fellow, is known for his many quarrels. Two years ago he tried to force Marshal Pilsudski into a cartel but the Marshal indignantly refused.