at the dinner table, all the more so because Józef was quite favourably disposed to the national camp, whereas his father regarded National Democrats to be ‘a mentality rather than a political party’. The First World War, with several evacuations and returns to Ponikwa on account of its proximity to the frontline, led to the family’s drastic impoverishment. They witnessed soldiers’ and workers’ revolts at the time of the Bolshevik Revolution. Their numerous peregrinations also meant that Józef had to frequently change schools, from Tarnów to Warsaw (Konrad Górski School), and then to Lwów (Adam Mickiewicz Gymnasium). As a sixteen-year-old, Józef Bocheński witnessed Polish-Ukrainian fighting in Lwów, but his parents did not allow him to participate. After graduating from high school in 1920, he volunteered to join the 8th Uhlan Regiment and saw action in the Battle of Komarów. These war experiences reaffirmed his conviction that defensive warfare was a justified means of conducting national politics. He studied law at the University of Lwów in 1920–1922, and then political economy at the University of Poznań in 1922–1926. However, he was not attracted to studying as much as to other aspects of student life. In the academic year 1924/1925, he was president of the university’s Brotherly Aid Association, and was also active in the Corona Academic Corporation as well as the Monarchist Organization, of which he was president in 1926. The views that Bocheński then espoused could be perceived as leaning towards the ideals of National Democracy – though he later reflected that in his youth for a time he considered himself to be an anarchist. In the student press, he actively condemned the May Coup and took part in anti-Piłsudski demonstrations (his brothers, by contrast, were fervent supporters of the Marshal). In 1926, Józef came to the conclusion that he faced a completely wasted life. Feeling that he was no longer a Christian, a Catholic or even a person of faith, he broke his engagement with Maria Franciszka Bocheńska (his cousin) and entered a seminary. He did this to discipline his exuberant personality in an institution whose feudal, anti-democratic nature, by his own admission, he found attractive. According to Włodzimierz Sznarbachowski, a close acquaintance, that was also the intention of Józef’s autocratic mother, Maria Bocheńska, who understood well her oldest son’s character (just as she felt her youngest son should become a diplomat, and Alexander, a natural-born farmer, should be