Page 131 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

Franciszek Cieślik, had relatives on the other side and escaped across the border to join them. 101

Another soldier, Private Paweł Kicuła, reportedly deserted because he feared being punished for

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stealing a watch, while Mikołaj Stolarz allegedly fled after having been found asleep at his post.
But demoralization could also come from KOP’s side of the border. Indeed, if stories of

desertion did not make their way into the organization’s propaganda, the idea that soldiers were

under threat because of their contact with their fellow Polish citizens did. The yearbook for 1924-5

reported, for instance, that despite attempts to get buildings erected as quickly as possible, the desired

barracks were often not built in time for the first battalions who arrived in late 1924. This situation

meant that soldiers who were initially deployed to the border had to live with local populations and

became vulnerable to their “demoralizing influences.” 103 Like the narratives told about military

settlers, those recounted about KOP border guards also rested on assumptions about how gender

dynamics functioned in a far-off borderland, both in terms of the soldiers’ self-confident masculinity

and their potential for moral and physical corruption at the hands of local women. The idea of

biological degeneracy, which had been common in discussions of the border in the early 1920s, again

seemed alarmingly relevant. An article in KOP’s first yearbook emphasized the risks that came with

exposure to the venereal diseases that Russian, German, and Austro-Hungarian soldiers had left in

the bodies of local women. Moreover, the article even claimed that elements hostile to the Polish

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state deliberately infected women in order to “weaken our detachments at the border.” As such, the

physical and moral robustness of incoming Polish men came under threat from hidden microbes, as

much as from direct political agitation.

101 “Zestawienie wypadków zaszłych na terenie 1-szej Brygady K.O.P. za czas od dn.1.X do dn. 31.XII 28 r.,”
ASGwS 541/102.
102 For Stolarz: Ibid. For Kicuła: “Zestawienie wypadków zaszłych na terenie 1-szej Brygady K.O.P. za czas od
1.VII do 30.IX 1928 r.,” ASGwS 541/102.
103 “Zakwaterowanie,” in Czekaj-Wiśniewska et al. (eds.), Korpus Ochrony Pogranicza, 22.
104 “Organizacja Służby Zdrowia,” in Czekaj-Wiśniewska et al. (eds.), Korpus Ochrony Pogranicza, 25.

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