When the World War came, the Polish people in many lands, especially in the United States, volunteered for service on the French front. On June 22, 1918, the first division of Polish troops in France was presented with flags at a solemn ceremony, and listened to an address by the French president. Soon large numbers of Poles were fighting the Austrians and Germans in Italy and in Russia, although they knew that capture meant court-martial and death, since Austria and Germany considered them deserters, as they indeed were. The supreme commander of Polish forces, General Josef Haller, had been a colonel in the Austrian army. But he decided to desert the Austrian army to lead an "Iron Brigade" of Poles against the enemies of freedom. Eighty-eight officers and twenty-six privates in his regiment were captured by the Austrians, court-martialed, and sentenced to death. When offered pardon by the Emperor Karl, they refused, saying, "We are soldiers of the Polish Nation. The Austrian government has no right to grant us pardon even as it has no more right to inflict punishment upon us than upon the soldiers of France and England." Facing death, these men wrote to the Polish Parliamentary Club in Vienna, their reasons for desertion,--namely, the unfair treatment at the hands of the Austrians and their love for Poland. They had heard a rumor that the Polish organization was about to secure a more liberal sentence for them by agreeing to the cession of certain provinces of Poland. So the prisoners further wrote:-- "We value greatly the love of our countrymen and we were touched deeply by the generosity with which they thought of us, but we desire to protest most energetically against relief and concessions secured for us to the detriment of our country and the ancient rights of our nation. "Do not permit our personal lot to weaken the united Polish front, for the death penalty can affect us only physically. The sufferings undergone by our grandfathers and fathers, we will continue to endure and with the sincere conviction that we are serving a free, united, and independent Poland." A few days after they were condemned, the Polish National Committee sent a message to Italy declaring that representatives from all classes of the Polish people had met at Warsaw and proclaimed the union of all Poland. Italy, France, and Great Britain formally recognized the Polish national army as independent and Allied, and on November 4, 1918, Secretary Lansing, in a letter, to a representative of the Polish National Committee, stated that the United States Government also wished to recognize officially the independence of the Polish army as a part of the Allied forces.