Page 129 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

the frontispiece depicted two more soldiers, this time dressed in long military coats with binoculars

around their necks and stealthily making their way through a snow-covered forest. If both images

indicated the competence with which heroic border guards navigated demanding eastern

environments, they also reminded readers that KOP soldiers found themselves constantly under

threat. Indeed, the KOP soldier became nothing less than a “living border post,” a man who bravely

entered a hostile world on the state’s fringes and was himself transformed into a physical symbol of

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the border.

[INSERT FIGURE 3.3a and 3.3b]

Figure 3.3a and b: Images of KOP border guards from the front of two yearbooks (1926-7; 1927-8).
Source: Beata Czekaj-Wiśniewska et al. (eds.), Korpus Ochrony Pogranicza: Jednodniówki w
zbiorach Centralnej Biblioteki Wojskowej, 5.

While a narrative of environmental mastery undergirded KOP claims that their soldiers had

come to civilize both people and places, the threat of the uncivilized environment and the dangers

that it posed to KOP soldiers (who were, after all, outsiders) did not disappear. Such fears were not

without a basis in fact. Internal reports indicated that the soldiers’ task (like that of the police) was

fraught with obstacles, many of which were related to the region’s specific historical and

geographical conditions. Extinguishing fires in border communities—one of the many quotidian

tasks that KOP was charged with executing—often proved problematic because of the poor quality of

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the roads and the distances that had to be traversed. In April 1925, a battalion stationed in the town

of Dederkały in Krzemieniec county claimed that the poor standard of roads created an unsatisfactory

94 “Organizacja służby zdrowia” in Czekaj-Wiśniewska et al. (eds.), Korpus Ochrony Pogranicza, 26.
95 Fires were a particular problem in Volhynia because buildings were often constructed from wood and straw. See
“Działalność Urzędów Ziemskich na terenie Województwa Wołyńskiego: Okres 1921-1924r.,” AAN PRM (Part 4)
26/13/5.

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