As such he was the first to lead troops into Russian territory, and at the opening of the war made a skirmishing advance out of Galicia into Russia on the side of the Austrians. He was recalled, as leading an “irregular body,” and in order to regularise that irregular body, the Austrian command found it somehow reasonable to embody him and his legions in their regular army. There they remained till December, 1915, partaking in the Austrian retreat and, subsequently, in its advance. By this time the Germans had taken possession--though largely with Austrian troops--of the territory of the Kingdom of Poland, and had seen the potentiality of Pilsudski in the way of raising a Polish army, consisting not merely of the legions, who were a body of a very few thousand men, but of a Polish force, consisting, so they hoped, not of a few thousand men, but of at least 700,000, to fight in the interests not of Austria nor of Poland, but of Germany. With this in view Germany managed, without detaching the Polish legions from the Austrian army, to include them in the general advance to the Stokhod front in December, 1915. There they served till the late summer of 1916, when Pilsudski, after constant friction with Bernhardi, who was the German commander of that section, suddenly refused to serve there any more, and, by flat mutiny, withdrew on August 28th a number of his troops from the front and marched them back to Warsaw. That there had been friction between him and Bernhardi there was no doubt, but the reason for his withdrawal of himself and his division was a much more honourable and consistent motive: it was in fact his invariable purpose of fighting the most obvious of Poland’s foes that dictated it. For a year now, Germany, and in a minor degree Austria, had been in possession of Poland, and had altogether shelved the question of Polish independence. It was for that alone that Pilsudski cared, and his mutiny was without doubt due to political motives. At any cost he wanted Polish independence, and he transgressed every code of military discipline in order to provoke a political crisis. Just as, when the Russians were in possession of Poland, he fought against the Russians: so now, when the Germans were in possession, he refused to fight against the Russians. But in each case his motive was perfectly clear: he would not support an enemy of Poland, and his action, doubtless, contributed to induce Germany to declare the independence of Poland.