Poland is commencing the New Year with her face towards peace and the hope in her heart that she may never have to fight again. For her the war has lasted two years longer than for any other country. During the past six years she has had to fight on five separate fronts. Her devastated area is greater than that of France. She has cities which have been captured and occupied seven separate times since 1914 by the armies of seven separate nations. She is sick of war. She has elected a peasant for her prime minister—a man who belongs to the class which gains nothing but sorrow from bloodshed. All that Poland asks from the New Year is the quiet in which to convalesce from her wounds, so that she may gather strength to construct her nationhood along the lines of states-manly righteousness. As the clocks above Warsaw struck the hour of midnight, the prayer in every heart was, “God give us peace with the New Year.”
How badly she requires peace and how bitterly she stands in need of the world's mercy, no one can conceive who has not been here. She is a land of widows, cripples and orphans. She has two millions of under-nourished children, of whom only one million are being cared for. She has a million refugees within her borders. Her mark, which was originally worth twenty-five cents, has sunk to an exchange value of one-sixth of a cent. The barbed wire entanglements come up to the very gates of Warsaw. The threat of a Bolshevist invasion in the spring is like a brutal hand, clapped against her lips, silencing laughter. It compels her, against her will, to keep her army mobilised; if she disbanded, she would make invasion certain. Every man she keeps under arms loses her a little of the world's sympathy. She knows that, but she does not dare to be unprotected. She is a nation in rags. Until the American Relief Administration came, she was a nation of funerals.
And yet none of her misfortunes have quenched her unconquerable valor. In Cracow stands the famous church of St. Mary's. Centuries ago it was a watch-tower against the invading Tartar; a soldier was kept constantly stationed there to give warning on a trumpet of the first approach of danger. In the fourteenth century, while rousing the city to its peril, the trumpeter was struck in the throat by an enemy's arrow. His call faltered, rallied and sank. Then, with his dying breath, he sounded a last blast, which broke off short. The broken call saved the city. Ever since, to commemorate his faithfulness, there has never been an hour, day or night, when his broken trumpet-call, ending abruptly in an abyss of silence, has not been sounded from the tower. The man symbolises the soul of Poland—the soul of a dying trumpeter who blows a last blast of warning above the sleeping roofs of civilization.
Poland will surely die in her watch-tower unless the sleeping world whom she protects, awakes and comes to her rescue. She is dying gamely, with her back to the wall. She does not whine—she does not slacken in her effort. The smallest children make themselves sharers in her sacrifice. If you go to the American soup-kitchens you will find tiny mites of six and seven shivering in queues to secure the rations. They are there because they are the only members of the family young enough to be spared. If you question them, you will find that they have left still younger babies locked up in the squalid rooms that they call home. To prove their assertion they show you the key that they carry round their necks. From dawn to dark the elder children and parents are out at work.
A little girl of eight came to the officials of the Relief Administration the other day with a pathetic request. She came by herself and explained that the idea was entirely her own. She wanted to be sent to America. But had she relations in America? No. Then had she no one whom she loved in Poland? Yes—her father and mother. But would she want to leave them? At that question she began to cry. It would hurt her very much to leave them; but she was so young. There was no other way to help; she could only eat and there was so little food. If she went away, there would be more for someone else.
This magnanimity of devotion, touches every class—especially the women. There is an order in Poland known as the Gray Samaritans. They are Y. W. C. A. girls of Polish blood, recruited in America, and are among the most gallant helpers that the American Relief Administration possesses. Their business is to go into the most remote villages, many of which lie far away from railroads. The story of the privations of their travels would fill volumes. In these villages they establish feeding-stations, train the peasants in their management and then pass on to the next point where the need is greatest.
Another order of purely Polish origin is The Women's Battalion of Death. They started in Lemberg, in a crisis of invasion, when not a single man was left. The last man, if he may be so called, had been a hoy of fourteen, who had been shot by the enemy as he was searching for protection for the women. In their dilemma the women armed themselves. The movement spread; and so the Battalion of Death became a permanency.
On New Year's Eve I went to visit them; they were housed in a damp building across the Vistula, which had formerly been used as a prison for captured Russian soldiers. Its passages had a mildewed smell; they were stone-paved and dark as a dungeon. A door opened. We felt our way across a vaulted cellar crowded with gray-blanketed, unlovely beds. Another door opened. The sound of fresh, young voices rushed to meet us and the tinkling of a worn piano. In a bare, chill room the girl-soldiers of Poland were gathered. It was their New Year's festival. I think the first thing we noticed was the merriment of their eyes and the roundness of their close cropped heads. It would have been easy to have mistaken them for boys in their dingy khaki. A Christmas tree stood in the corner robbed of all its presents. They had been dancing as we entered and were halted, still in couples, gazing towards us shyly. They looked children. In a land less sorely pressed, they would have had their hair in pigtails and have been romping in school. Certainly they were not a sight to inspire terror. The youngest was fifteen—the average age eighteen to twenty. You would never have imagined that they were a Battalion of Death. Then you talked with them and understood.
There was one girl who was a sample of the rest. She was pretty, despite her shaven head; her complexion was high and her eyes frank. She was the kind of a girl who ought to have had her suitors. Yes, she had seen fighting; it was in the trenches at Vilna. They had held on too long after the retreat had commenced. The first thing they knew, the Bolos were upon them. They came firing as they advanced and her companions were falling. At the last moment, to save herself, she had shammed death and hidden herself beneath the corpses. Then followed the story of her escape, told casually, as though it were the sort of thing that might happen to any girl. She was just nineteen and of gentle birth. When the fighting was at its height, there had been girls of title in her battalion; it had been recruited from all ranks, the same as the men's. Now that the ordeal was over for the moment, the girls who remained were mostly peasants. Why did she remain? I asked many of them that question before the evening was ended. The answer which they gave me was always the same, though phrased in different words, “To help Poland.”
They didn't mind how they were employed, so long as they helped. They didn't care how much they suffered, so long as they helped. They were guarding stores of food at present because they were more honest than the men. But they would work in soup-kitchens, anywhere, at anything. If the war sprang up again, they would fight.
They were mere kiddies, most of them, laughing and irrepressible. They wanted to be free to live, to possess lovers, to be mothers, to have children. But, like the trumpeter of Cracow, they would not desert their post while their warning might save the sleeping world.
At the State Reception at the Winter Palace, I gained a further glimpse into the heart of Polish heroism. I was speaking to Prince Sapieha, the Minister of Foreign Affairs. He pointed to the fireplace of the Reception Room. “It was standing there,” he said, “that Tsar Alexander II gave the death blow to our hopes. We had heard that he was generous and we had believed that he would free us and give us justice. There in front of the fireplace he met our patriots who had come to plead with him. Before they commenced, 'Point de reveries'—no dreams, he said. That has been our answer through all the ages, whenever we have complained to our oppressors. They have told us, 'No dreams;' but we have gone on dreaming till at last our dreams have come true. We dreamed the seemingly impossible; and we have dreamt ourselves into freedom.”
Some weeks ago a haggard man limped into the headquarters office of the American Relief in Warsaw. He had come to seek assistance for his daughter. She had just escaped from Kharkov, where she had been held a prisoner by the Bolshevists for many months. Her health was broken with hardship; if something were not done for her, she would die. Unfortunately he could not offer money; but whatever was done for her he would consider a debt, which one day he would repay. By profession he was an engineer. The Georgian Government owed him the equivalent of over three hundred thousand dollars. He had only that day recovered his daughter and learnt of her condition. While she was being taken prisoner at Kiev and carried a thousand miles into the interior, he had been cut off in the Caucasus by another Bolshevist offensive. She had been escaping while he also had been escaping, and neither had known of the other's predicament. From places as far apart as continents, after life and death adventures, they had both reached Warsaw on the same day and had arrived at the house of a relative within a few hours of each other. He was almost as spent as she was. From being rich he was penniless. She was the apple of his eye; she was only fourteen and in danger of dying. There was no one to whom he could turn in his distress. So he had bethought himself of the Americans.
Upon investigation his story proved correct. His daughter, Wanda Marchzcloska, was in the last stages of exhaustion. The American Children's Relief took her in hand, feeding her first of all on milk, a luxury in Poland, till at last she was brought back to strength. Her story is worth recording, as illustrating what relief work is doing and the kind of sufferings which children are called on to endure in this outpost of civilization. This is how she told it.
She was in Kiev with her mother when the Bolshevists stormed the city last May. In the confusion she got separated, her mother escaping while she was taken prisoner. With ten other Polish girls and eighteen boys, she was herded by rail and road to Kharkov, a town very far in the interior. On arrival there, after many miseries, they were lined up in the square and sentenced to be shot. On the instant that the sentence had been pronounced it was carried out. When the firing stopped, only she and another girl remained. A consultation took place; it was decided that she, on account of her youth, should be spared. The soldiers pleaded for her. But the other girl————.
The other girl had had a sister who now lay dead across her feet, killed by the first volley. When she understood that she also had to die, she commenced to weep bitterly. Wanda Marchzcloska placed her arms about her, whispering, “Remember, you are Polish.” The tears were dried. Standing up bravely, her hair loose about her shoulders, she met death with a smile. And so Wanda, aged fourteen, was left.
Throughout the summer her life was a living hell. She was made the drudge of the prison. She was worked to a shadow. She was given little to eat and scarcely any rest. She received many blows; her companions were brutalised men and women who had lost every instinct of mercy. It was hot within those walls, she told me—like a furnace. Very often she wished that the soldiers had not pleaded for her; she wanted to be dead. But the phrase she had uttered to the girl who was to be shot, lingered in her memory, “Remember, you are Polish.” She repeated it beneath her breath when the blows were hard to bear, “Remember, you are Polish.” Among all the foulness of people and surroundings, she kept her soul clean by remembering that she was different: she was Polish.
By August she had served her punishment and was released. Her one thought was to get back to her parents. She set out for Kiev. More than a thousand miles lay between herself and her goal. How she accomplished the journey even she cannot tell. The nights were very dark, she says; they caused her to fear greatly. She hid in woods. She slept on the bare ground. She lived on roots. Sometimes she thought that those dead children who had been shot in the square, accompanied her. By luck and cunning she made the last part of her journey to Kiev by rail. When she got there it was to find that the city was still in Bolshevist hands. She had no passports; if she had had them, they would not have served her. But how to get across the frontier into Poland?
She took to the woods again, this fourteen year old girl, with her body that was a bag of hones, tattooed with scars and bruises. Growing feebler and feebler she struggled on. The last hundred miles were the hardest. But she urged herself forward by repeating, “Remember, you are Polish.”
She does not know at what point she crossed the frontier, or how, or when. There are gaps in her memory and visions of blank fields across which moves a scarecrow figure; it must have been her own, she supposes. After that she forgets everything, till her father's arms were about her, and she was realising that he was as woe-begone as herself.
That is one child's story. It could be multiplied by thousands. Her life was saved by the random generosity of some chance giver in America. I wish he could have seen her today, grateful and demure as she stood before me. I think he would have slipped his hand again into his pocket and before he counted his loose bills would have whispered, “Remember, you are American.”
Why does Poland starve? The question needs answering. In our secret hearts we people who have plenty, are inclined to suspect that the nations who suffer are purchasing their hunger with idleness. I do not pretend that the situation at Marki answers all the question, But certainly the reasons for the hunger there apply to very many towns which once were hives of industry.
Marki lies six miles to the east of Warsaw in the direct path of a Russian advance. The country through which one approaches it is still marred by defenses and barbed wire entanglements, hastily prepared last summer to hold up the Bolshevist attack. Before the war it was a Polish Boumeville or Port Sunlight—a successful experiment in housing workmen in healthy surroundings. The village centred about a woollen mill, which supported three thousand employees. The employees had homes in model dwellings, rented to them at a moderate figure. They were provided with an up-to-date school, a hospital, bath-houses, etc., and were in an exceptional state of contentment. When the great strike occurred in 1905 and 1906, they refused to leave their work and only joined at length under threats and at the revolver's point. The owners of the mill were originally British, though circumstances have made it wise for them to become Polish citizens. They were residents of Marki and one of them, with whom I spoke today, still retains his Lancashire dialect. Since 1884 the mill had been manufacturing yarn, until in 1914 it had attained a weekly output of one hundred thousand pounds. It traded under the name of E. Briggs Brothers and Company. Then came the war, the general dislocation and the end of prosperity.
Marki was in Russian Poland. In 1916 it was captured by the Germans. The mill became a prison-camp for interned Russian soldiers and industry was at a standstill. Obviously, when there was a crying need for woollens, it was bad economy to allow this intricate mass of valuable machinery to stand idle. A German manufacturer was sent down, with a view to setting it going. His plans were almost completed, when the Roh Stoff Abteilung got wind of what was happening. The Roh Stoff Abteilung was a company organized for the systematic looting of captured territories. It paid the German Government a lump sum for its privileges and an additional percentage on its profits. It dispatched an agent to Marki to make a report on the opportunities, with the result that the compatriot manufacturer was ousted and the wrecking of the machinery commenced.
Today one of the partners, Mr. Charles Whitehead, took me over what was left after the Roh Stoff Abteilung had completed its work. All the boilers, motors, piping, belting, brass and copper parts have been torn out. Even the cork that insulated the roofs has been removed. The bulk of the machinery still stands, but until the stolen parts have been put back the whole is rendered useless. To replace these parts is no easy task when six hundred Polish marks are only worth a dollar and most of civilized Europe is in disrepair. The damage done was so senseless. The rewards gained from the sale of the jumbled loot were so disproportionately small as compared with the expense of its replacement. And so the model village of Marki is a model no longer. The houses are bare of furniture; the furniture has been sold for food. The inhabitants are in rags; they shiver and clutch themselves in a desperate endeavour to withstand the wintry chill. They have neither shoes nor stockings. They die like flies in their model dwellings. Because of one ruthless act, three thousand willing workers are idle and all the women and children who are dependent on them starve. I do not quote this instance to make the Germans appear sinners above all men. Ruthlessness goes hand in hand with war. You may find the same wilfulness of destruction on all the five fronts on which Poland has been attacked. Cattle, which could not be carried off, have been butchered. Houses have been burned. Pictures, art-treasures and things irreplaceable have been smashed to atoms.
But to get back to Marki, how have these three thousand ex-employees and their dependents managed to survive until now? All of them have not survived; the youngest, oldest and weakest have perished. Of the remainder some are in the army. Some have moved away. Others go to work in Warsaw; they have to leave Marki at five in the morning to tramp the six miles to the city and do not get back till nine at night. The women have discovered an illegal method of eking out a livelihood. Flour is Government controlled; it is forbidden to bake it and traffic in it as bread. But the regulated price of flour is so low that the farmer often prefers to feed the wheat to his cattle. By walking fifteen miles into the country, the women of Marki, are often able to strike a bargain with a peasant. They bring their treasure home, convert it into bread, walk another, six miles in the opposite direction and hawk it in Warsaw. The police are on the outlook for such petty criminals. Some of them get caught, their merchandise is confiscated and they are sent to prison. From being honest women they become gaol-birds.
As a model-village you could scarcely imagine any sight more hopeless than the Marki of today. The stillness of death is in the streets. The chimneys are breathless. The people are lean, famine-fevered shadows. There is no laughter. No stir. Funerals are too common to cause excitement. While the machinery rots in the mill, men's souls rot in their bodies. From a place which was once throbbing with energy the incentive to endeavour has seeped away. There is no possibility to work; and if there were, there is not the strength to undertake it.
And yet there is one building which shelters a gleam of hope—the school-house in which the American Relief has established its children's feeding station. It was Mr. Whitehead, part-owner of the pillaged mill, who led me to it. “If you have any ability,” he said, “to make conditions known, I wish you would tell the world what Marki owes to America. Six hundred children died of hunger in our village the year before the Americans came. Whatever happens to us older fellows, they have saved our rising generation. I am getting the money to patch up my machinery; if I live long enough, I shall have all of it running again. But shall I be able ito patch up the machinery of human bodies? My people are no more capable of working than my machinery is of running at present. Their strength has been looted. They must be repaired, just the same as the machinery in my mill.”
And what I saw on a small scale in Marki is true of the whole of Poland.
If you can imagine the House of Lords standing in the bread-line, you will be able to picture the sight that I saw today. I suppose nothing like it has been seen since the French Revolution—no reversal of social fortunes half so tragic and poignantly dramatic. It was an object lesson to anyone who believes that aristocracy is anything more than environment.
What I really saw was the Imperial Russian Court in miniature. The lady who introduced me was the wife of the Tsar's High Chamberlain, Madame Lubinoff. Her husband, at the commencement of the war, was Civil Governor of Warsaw. Her home was a palace, which is now occupied by Poland's peasant Prime Minister. Today her husband is her secretary at the soup-kitchen which she conducts for the Russian Red Cross; her home is as humble as an artisan's; the people to whom she ministers are princes and princesses in burst out boots and tatters.
I had been told of the wonderful work which Madame Lubinoff has done for her exiled compatriots. I had also been told that her work was soon to be abandoned; that she had sold almost the last of her jewels and that the funds with which the Russian Red Cross at Paris had provided her had given out.
We departed in search of her soup-kitchen at about twelve o'clock—the worst hour you can choose if you wish to get quickly from point to point in Warsaw, for midday is consecrated to funerals. There are so many of them that they form almost a continuous procession. They are of all kinds, from the two-horse hearse, attended by mourning-carriages, to the lonely man and woman, plodding hopelessly through the mud, carrying a little child's coffin between them. In spite of delays we arrived at last at a gateway, leading off a narrow street in one of the least prosperous quarters of the city. The squalid courtyard beyond the gateway was crowded with wolfish men and women. They were a strange collection, brow-beaten and famished. The women wore shawls over their heads; they looked typical slum-dwellers. Many of the men were in tattered uniforms; all of them were unshaven and cringing as pedlars. We had to force our way up the narrow stairs to Madame Lubinoff's office, into which we were ushered by a grave-faced servant who turned out to be her husband. The Bolshevists arrested him in Petrograd and imprisoned him for ten months in the dreaded fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul—which goes far to account for his crushed demeanour. It was his wife who rescued him, by risking her own life and bribing his gaolers, which has nothing to do with the present story.
Madame Lubinoff is a gay and beautiful woman, who hovers always between tears and laughter. The tears are real, but the laughter is forced. One marvels at the courage of her tremendous acting. It all started, this work that she is conducting, she told us, with the sale of a ring. When she discovered how many lives one ring could save, she sold more. She had been luckier than most of her Russian friends who, when the Bolshevist regime set in, had lost everything; whereas she, inasmuch as Warsaw was Polish, had managed to preserve many of her personal belongings, though of course her Russian estates were confiscated. The present building in which she has established her soup-kitchen had been a Russian Church. She gained permission from the priest to use it by means of flattery; she kissed his hand, which is an honour paid only to a bishop. She laughed. For the money with which to run it she sold her jewels and kept on selling them, till the Russian Red Cross in Paris got to hear about her. For a time they helped with contributions, but last October they notified her that they could help no longer. Then the American Relief had come to the rescue with a donation from the fund left by Mr. Harkness to be expended on the Intelligencia of Europe. And now that was exhausted. What was she going to do next? Ah, that was the question! If she did not do something the seven thousand men, women and children whom she was feeding would play leading rtles in the daily funerals. She laughed and blinked the tears out of her eyes. They did things better in the French Revolution; the guillotine was so very much quicker. Perhaps we would like her to show us round.
Outside the door, doing clerking at a ricketty table, a grubby yet distinguished man was sitting. She introduced him as Prince Ouhtomsky. He shook our hands with a manner of extreme courtliness; when we were out of earshot, she revealed his story. When Warsaw was a part of Russian Poland he had been one of the richest men in the country. He had belonged to the hereditary land-owning class, his grants having been made directly to his family by the Tsar. He was now working for his dinner and two dollars and a half a week. When she found him, he and his princess had been living in a room which they shared with other people. He had been trying to keep the wolf from the door by manufacturing cigarettes. They were not good cigarettes—cigarette making was not his profession. Besides, it was illegal in Poland; it was a Government monopoly. So she had rescued him and given him the job of sealing; envelopes. By allowing him to believe that he was earning his keep, she prevented him from being too unhappy.
As we passed out through the crowd of be-shawled women, various of them tried to attract Madame Lubinoff's attention. Some she embraced, addressing them as “My dear Princess,” “My dear Baroness,” “My dear Countess.” Despite their sodden appearance, their display of etiquette was magnificent and exacting. They drew themselves up with a flash of haughtiness as though their Cinderella appearance of poverty were no more than fancy-dress. One was reminded that they had once belonged to the most polished caste of Europe. The effect was pitiful and fantastic. Eight years ago it would have been madness to have proposed that they could ever have sunk to this depth. We no longer wondered that Madame Lubinoff wept while she laughed.
At the top of the stairs she pointed out a haggard fellow, attired in what was left of a uniform. He had been one of the smartest officers in the crack regiment of the Russian Guards. He had come to Warsaw a beggar. She had been puzzled by a familiar resemblance. Then she had remembered—she had been his partner, when things were in their heyday, at an Imperial Ball.
As we crossed the courtyard to the dining-room we were accosted—at every step we were accosted—by a bullet-headed old soldier who wore the highest military decoration that the Tsar could bestow. It was pinned against his greasy collar. He was General Rogovich. His request was humble. He was hungry; he would like to split kindling in exchange for food. “My General, it is very unfortunate,” our hostess told him, “but I have more than enough kindling split already.” He kissed her hand, submitting to her authority and yet, like an unwanted dog, he followed.
In a booth, at the entrance to the room where meals were served, the most brilliant comedy actor of the old Petrograd was collecting tickets. Inside wilted women of exalted nobility were pouring soup and piling dishes for a pittance as waitresses.
The curious point was that they no longer looked noble; they looked their part. The utensils were mostly make-shift; the cups were condensed-milk cans, with ragged metal edges which had been presented when empty by the American Relief Administration. At the tables sat a large part of what Mr. Gorlof, the Russian attachi, calls “the spiritual wealth of Russia.” They were professors, musicians, actors, writers, financiers, doctors, engineers—the kind of people whose brain value never figures in a budget, but who constitute the realest asset of any nation. These were the few who were left from the great mass who had been tortured and shot.
At this point an old white-bearded man came up to us; he was General Prigorowsky, who had been one of the most brilliant of strategists when Russia was fighting on the side of the Allies. His face was intensely sad and his eyes were deep with unfathomable melancholy. At sixty years of age he was alone in the world, unloved, unprotected and almost unloveable. He had no idea what had become of his wife or children. For a time he and one son had been imprisoned together. Every day they had been led out and told they would be shot. One day only his son had been taken; after that he had remained alone in his cell. Having escaped, here he was, penniless in a foreign land which would rather be without him.
From the eating-room we were conducted to the kitchen. Again we were invited to shake hands with students, army officers and princesses. I had never realized that there were so many princesses in the world. In a miserable outhouse four women, who were professors' wives and resembled rag-pickers, huddled on a bench peeling beets into a basket.
We had climbed a stair and were pausing on a landing, when I happened to look out of the window. Shambling aimlessly round a wood-pile in the yard below was a forlorn little figure. He wore a dingy velvet hat—a girl's—made like a tam-o'-shanter, a girl's coat which trailed about his ankles, and hoots which were a mere pretence. Upon enquiry I was informed that he was the Baron Hael Von Holdstein. His father had been a millionaire. His mother was the daughter of a Lord Mayor of Petrograd and was working in the soup-kitchen as a waitress. The little Baron, having nowhere else to go, came with her in the early morning and waited all day for her.
Beyond the door one heard the sound of sewing-machines revolving. We were admitted by a woman who had been the wife of the Tsar's coachman. Her husband had insisted on accompanying the Tsar into exile, so of course she was a widow. In closely packed rows, resembling a sweat-shop, women of all ages were stitching shirts. There were two princesses of the same family. One was the Princess Meschersky, who had been wife of the Consul General at Shanghai; the other was an orphan, a child of fifteen, who had recently escaped via Finland. Most of them have no homes and sleep beneath the machines where they work. In fact, Madame Lubinoff told me, the wretched building is as crowded by night as by day. Even the desk in her office is slept on.
“And now you have seen for yourselves,” she laughed, “how all these people are dependent on me. And they are not lazy. They have forgotten that they were princes and have learnt to be cobblers, and carpenters, and tailors. If I had the means to start workshops, I already have the contracts. But I have not even the means to feed them. I simply dare not tell them. I shall have to run away.”
“And shall you run away?” we asked.
Her eyes became defiant. “Never.”
“Then where are the funds to come from?”
She paused. “From God, perhaps. Yes, I think from God.”
This morning I had an interview with Witos, the Prime Minister of Poland. If anyone suspects Poland of Imperialistic aims, Witos is the answer and the direct negation. He is a Galician peasant, who had his little farm near Cracow. He first began to be heard from as a protesting voice against oppression, when Galicia was under Austrian domination. As oppression multiplied his voice grew, always protesting in defence of the under-dog. It was five years ago, after Russian Poland had been occupied by Germany, that he became representative of the Polish nation and leapt to the stature of a life-sized patriot. Today he is the Abraham Lincoln of Poland, a man of the people whose integrity is unpurchaseable. But his integrity without sanity would be worthless; it is his shrewd common sense that is saving the situation. He has his knife out for nobody except rogues and robbers. If he ever had class hatred, he has forgotten it.
He chooses princes, Jews and common men as his advisors—people who were formerly intolerant of each other. His democratic simplicity leavens the lump. He values neither race, nor birth; the demands that he makes are intrinsic merit and enthusiasm for humanity.
He resides in the magnificent palace which belonged to the Civil Governor of Warsaw, when Warsaw was a part of Russian Poland. It was formerly the home of Madame Lubinoff, whose sacrifices to save the Russian refugees I have already described. A palace as the residence of a peasant Premier seems to mar the picture of his altruism; the unfavorable impression is corrected the moment you have seen the palace.
I don't know what they were doing with the lower part of it; it looked as if they were ploughing up the tesselated pavements and getting ready to plant potatoes. One rubbed shoulders with labourers and stumbled over mounds of earth in an endeavour to find an entrance. There were no armed guards. There were no military challenges—no gorgeous uniforms and flashing bayonets. Of whatever Witos may be afraid—and every man is afraid of something—it was evident that he has no dread of assassination.
At last we pushed open a narrow door where a shabby porter relieved us of our hats. When we asked for directions, he jerked his thumb casually, indicating a marble staircase. Accepting his advice we found ourselves in a lofty chamber, stripped of all decoration and furniture. There we were met by a Government clerk, who ushered us into an empty ball-room and requested us to wait.
It was a palace, yes; but lacking in splendour. Nothing but the husk remained. In imagining the gay scenes that it had witnessed, the pomps and pageants, the triumphs and envies, the vanished glitter of bombastic lavishness, one experienced the kind of pity a faded beauty inspires when her coquetry has been made dreadful by old age.
Would we come? The Government clerk was beckoning. As we followed him across the naked expanse of dance-floor there was something intimidating about those echoing vacancies. One thought of the women who had queened it there—the flash of their eyes, luring adoration, the glide of their dainty feet and the quick in-take of their breath. Where were they? Waiting their turn at Madame Lubinoff's soup-kitchen, mouldering in Bolshevist prisons or dead, which was happier.
In the smaller room which we entered a man, quite unremarkable at first sight, was seated at a desk. He was the kind of man that you may see by the thousand anywhere from Ellis Island to San Francisco. His face was bony and lined from exposure. He was gone at the knees with overwork. His hands were disfigured with manual labour. He wore the high leather boots of a peasant. His suit was of a cheap shoddy material—tobacco coloured, the kind that shrinks and wrinkles in the rain and sun. In all outward aspects he was a common man—common in his voice, his gestures, his attire. His shirt was rough with a turn down collar; he wore no tie, so one saw the stud. He was the common man of Poland, guiding the nation's destinies. One remembered Lincoln's saying, that God must have loved the common people very much because He had made so many of them.
He left his desk and came towards us with a lagging step. With the exactness of simplicity and a curious glance of wonder, he shook our hands each in turn uncordially. Then he signed to us to seat ourselves at a round table.
The conversation which ensued, if it can be called a conversation, proceeded through an interpreter as Witos speaks only Polish. When he understood the nature of my errand, he requested that I would ask him questions, so I led off by asking him to assure me that Poland harboured no plans for territorial aggression. His eyes narrowed; then he hid them, looking down at the table and rapping with his knuckles. If I would submit that question to him in writing, by tomorrow he would write me back an answer. Then I asked him my next question. What was the most constructive assistance that nations friendly to Poland could render? Again he would like me to write my question and give him time to write an answer in return.
His reply was the same to everything I asked. He was still the peasant at heart, wise, kindly, fully conscious of his disadvantages and a little distrustful of anyone who approached him professing benevolent friendliness. He was clever enough to know the limitations of his cleverness. He was cautious almost to the point of being unenterprising. He was so natively shrewd, that he would rather appear stupid than run the risk of being trapped. He would answer any question, yes. But he refused to be jockeyed into answering in a moment. Interpreters are unreliable and so are interviewers. When he spoke, he always spoke the truth. A lie was a thing abhorrent to him. He had arrived at his present position of trust not through brilliance, which is a comparatively frequent talent; but through courageous honesty, which usually gets murdered before it has the chance to utter itself.
So I promised to write him my questions. But upon reflection I believe that that is unnecessary. What I wanted to obtain from him was an assurance that Poland wants peace within her borders and is not ambitious to grab territory. Witos answered me more emphatically by his truthfulness and his shrewdness than if he had swamped me with arguments and words. Such a man, so common; so honest, so representative of the workers who suffer, will be the last to lead his nation into rash, imperialistic adventures.
It was January the sixth, the eve of the Festival of the Three Kings, which is the day before the Russian Christmas, that we found ourselves automobiling across the devastated stretch of country which lies between Brest-Litovsk and the old Russo-German front-line. Our object in going was to see how the peasants were living in the destroyed areas and what was being done to save their starving children.
The mention of devastated areas conjures a picture of the kind of destruction that happened in France. But in Poland the problem of devastation is quite different. It is almost true to say that the whole of Poland is devastated. In France the destruction was intensely concentrated in a narrow belt of country where battles were fought. In Poland, with its tremendous distances, the depth of devastation is rarely less at any point than two hundred miles. If in the summer of 1920 a Polish soldier had started from Warsaw in the defence against the Bolshevist invasion, had fought his way to Kiev, had fallen back in the retreat to Warsaw and, after the Polish victory, had again advanced to the present Polish front-line, he would have marched over a thousand miles in the space of four months.
We set out on a misty morning to cover the hundred and fifty kilometres which lie between the ruined city of Brest-Litovsk and the nearest town of Kovel. The road runs straight as a pencilled line across the sullen landscape. In all that stretch of country there is scarcely a sign of cultivation. The fields have become a wilderness, the rivers have overflowed and the whole is a barren swamp. The desolation was begun in 1915 when the Russians retreated before the Germans, driving the civilian population behind them, seizing the cattle and harrying with fire and with dynamite. They destroyed all the post-houses, which made communications possible, and blew up all the bridges. Then came the German occupation and the establishment of the Russo-German trench-systems forty kilometres to the east of Kovel. Whatever had been overlooked by the retreating Russians was picked clean by the advancing German armies. Until the Armistice this occupation lasted. When the Poles regained their freedom, the peasants who had been refugees during all this period, began to come back. They Had no sooner settled than the Bolshevists' assaults commenced, sweeping clean across this same stretch of tillage to the very gates of Warsaw.
As you travel the bleak road between Brest-Litovsk and Kovel, every sight is eloquent of the misery that has been wrought. The route is marked by grave-yards and solitary crosses. Some are merely scratched on trees, the burial was so hurried. All surrounding is a brooding silence. One comes to clusters of houses, crouched beneath the weight of sky. Their roofs have collapsed; their walls are charred. Tenanting these ruins are gaunt human beings who hurry out of sight like pariahs. Sometimes we met them struggling along the road on purposeless journeys. They wore no shoes; their feet were swathed in sodden rags. They had a hunted look and gave us a wide berth as though they feared our cruelty. Many of the travellers were children, with gray faces and hunted eyes.
At Kovel we picked up our guide. She was one of the Gray Samaritans—an American citizen of Polish origin who hailed from Pittsburgh. Her name was Christine Zduleczna; she has been working in the most appalling parts of this unhappy country for nearly two years. The Gray Samaritans are Polish-American girls, recruited by the Y. W. C. A. and at present attached to the American Relief Administration. All of them can talk the Polish language and most of them were old enough to remember the land of their birth at the time when they emigrated. Because of their dual nationality they are invaluable as a liaison between the need of the country and the American authorities. Their self-effacement is a sight to make more comfortable people blush. They practise the sacrifice of saints and the fearlessness of soldiers.
Kovel is a wretched hovel of a town, unsanitary, permanently splashed with mud, inhabited by Jews and White Russians. Nothing that Gorki or Tolstoi has described is more accursed and Godforsaken. Dirty, starveling shops, whose entire contents could be purchased for a dollar, stare out on a street which is a continuous puddle full of hidden holes and bumps. Droschkies, drawn by feeble ponies, move weakly through the squalor. No one seems to have anything to do. Men in mangy fur-coats, with sweeping beards and unspeakably filthy faces shuffle aimlessly along the pavements. Soldiers step by more briskly, but with an expression in their eyes of people who are condemned. It was here, outside a dingy stable, facetiously named the Bellevue Hotel, that we met Christine Zduleczna. She looked trim and confident in her horizon-blue uniform—a triumph of courage over circumstance. Her spirit was as unbowed and eager as her appearance, as we were soon to discover. She was one of the girls who remained at their posts last summer, evacuating peasants till the Bolshevists were almost within hailing distance. There was one girl on the Lithuanian Front who outstayed discretion and was captured.
Having taken Christine Zduleczna aboard, we ploughed our way out of the mud of Kovel and travelled due east towards the Front The signs of war were becoming more recent and frequent. Freight-cars in the railroad yards flapped in ribbons, tom into shreds by shells. Engines lay on their sides, as full of holes as pepper boxes. Carcases of animals were strewn about. At one point there was a pile of bones, as high as a house, picked clean of flesh. Then the rusty red of barbed wire commenced and the dreary maze of abandoned trench-systems.
There was not a sign of human habitation, not a roof or a wall left standing; and yet people lived there. How? In the timbered dug-outs which the Germans had constructed; in old gun-emplacements; in shell-holes. They lived like foxes, anywhere and anyhow by burrowing underground. And what do they feed on? In many parts of the devastated areas they are eating grass as though they were cattle. They boil it into a kind of soup. Where they have no flour of any sort, they bake bread out of a mixture of bark and acorns. But our Gray Samaritan informed us that there was almost no ruined village that we had passed, where an American Children's Relief Station had not been established. She knew, for she had established them; that was her job. Whoever dies in Poland, the children will be saved as long as America recognises their necessity. But if America were to grow forgetful, most of them would be dead before another summer. The cruelty of the situation is that only the children can be fed; the parents, the grandparents and the boys and girls above the age of fourteen have to take their chance.
The melancholy of dusk was settling over this old battlefield, where for long years men had cursed and hated and butchered one another, when we drew up at our first point of call in the trench-dwellers' colony of Switniki.
Floundering in the mud and making a strong effort to keep our footing, we crossed a trench and approached a hut constructed out of the debris of the battlefield. Quarter sections of corrugated iron, 'which the Germans had used for their gun-emplacements, had been riveted together, and the sides and top had been covered with sod. The place was in darkness when we knocked at the door. It was still in darkness when we were allowed to enter. Then, very sparingly, the only candle was lighted. It would be blown out the moment we departed. By its illumination we saw an old man and woman—they looked old, but they may not have been more than fifty. The woman's gray hair hung loose about her face; she was kneeling in a praying position in her bed. Perhaps it was the Three Kings she was expecting. This was the night when they were supposed to come, riding out of the East to leave their presents at the doors of the needy, just as twenty centuries ago they had tapped on the door of a stable in Bethlehem and found the Christ-Child in his poverty, asleep upon his mother's breast.
We gazed round the little room. It was speckless. All the rooms which we visited in this colony were. The people might be dying of starvation, but they were determined to die cleanly. That is the difference between your peasant and your city-dweller. One missed the abominable smells which accompany destitution in Warsaw. These people had the native gentleness of a race which has always been self-respecting, inventing their own music and poetry, and owning their little plot of land. They were not going to become disrespecting now.
Our host was a Pole—an exception to the community, most of whom were White Russians. He told his story simply. Before the war he had owned three acres, two cows and a team of horses. He had had a son who had gone to America and had been in the habit of sending him money. When the Russian armies were driven out of Poland by the Germans, he had been forced to move back into Russia. His farm had been cut up into trenches, as we could see for ourselves. After the Armistice he had returned to find a rubbish-heap, full of foulness. He had set to work with the little money he had to buy a horse and implements; then last summer had come the Bolshevist invasion, eating up everything like a plague of locusts. Now he had nothing. One could not fill in trenches and level a land blown about by shells without implements, merely with one's naked hands. And worst of all, during his long exile, he had lost touch with his son in America. Probably the son thought him dead. If he could only discover his son's address, everything might yet be well. So perhaps it wasn't for the Three Kings that the old mother had been listening so intently, when she had heard our footsteps in the mud and our sudden tap. As I had expected, the moment we departed the candle was blown out.
We came to another hut. This time they were White Russians. Outside the door the Soltys, or head-man of the village, joined us. Inside we found a family of seven children and a mother who was a widow. Her husband had died of typhus, but it was more true to call it starvation, she said. Here they had no candles, so they lit shavings of wood. Again, in spite of the poverty, everything was proudly speckless. An oven of baked mud had been built in one corner and the top of it afforded two of the children with a bed. And what pretty children they were, from the baby to the eldest who was a girl of seventeen! The walls were decorated with branches of spruce in case the Three Kings should come.
The story was the same as the last. They had been prosperous, owning their little farm and earning extra in the summer by hiring themselves to the big estates. Then the German invasion had driven them into exile and on their return they had found the industry of centuries blotted out. How did they live, we asked. The American kitchen took care of the children. All the children in the village would have died the Soltys said, if the Americans had not come to their rescue. In this particular family the girl of seventeen and a son of fifteen were the main supports. The boy was not present; he slept with the pony—their only possession—to prevent its being stolen. The boy and girl travelled the country in the spring and summer, hiring themselves and taking flour in payment. Very often they were cheated by the farmers, who after weeks of work would turn them adrift with nothing. And then, of course, there was the trouble of bringing the flour back—a hundred miles sometimes, from far outside the devastated areas—carrying it. They spoke uncomplainingly, merely stating facts. The girl of seventeen, who took these risks and journeys, kept smiling and nodding her confirmation. The children peeped at us from behind the mud furnace like startled rabbits.
The last family that we visited had been rich by peasant standards. They had owned forty acres, three teams of horses, six cows, many pigs and geese and hens. All that they had found on their return from exile was forty acres of polluted mud. The household consisted of a grandfather, with a white beard and a shock of black curly hair. He had the eye of a hawk and the face of an intellectual. There was his wife, the grandmother, a lean woman with a humorous mouth and eyes which held you at bay with a veiled defiance. There was their daughter, a widow, very little and meek. And then there were her four children.
“You must not judge us as you see us now,” the old man said. “You should have seen us once with all our cattle. Should I live as I do, if I could help it?”
The furnace threw out a ruddy glow. On the hot stones four little cakes were baking, which the four little boys regarded with popping eyes. “They are the cakes of the Three Kings,” the grandmother explained; “they are filled with poppy-seeds. I travelled a long way to get the flour, and I worked and worked. And then I was afraid that I would be robbed on the lonely roads before ever I got it back.”
We asked them what they usually ate. Oh, anything and often nothing. Did they ever bake any of this acorn bread? They wished they could, but they hadn't any acorns.
And so through the night of the festival of the Three Kings we drove back across the desolate battlefields. At Kovel we said good-bye to Christine Zduleczna. We left her in her mouldy room, in the dingy den of the Bellevue, which looks more like a thieves' kitchen than a hotel. She parted with us with a cheery smile—she loved her people and her work. If she had her choice, while the need was so great, she wouldn't be anywhere else. But I, for one, felt a coward in leaving her alone to carry such a burden.
We struck the bleak, interminable road which leads through Brest-Litovsk to civilisation. Our lamps as we parted the wall of darkness, picked out the crosses of silver birch, the black and white verst poles, the graveyards and the humpy ruined houses. They revealed them to us one by one, beckoning them out of oblivion, making each tragedy seem separate and the more significant. It was bitterly cold. We huddled closer and shivered in our rugs and furs. Sometimes we dozed in a nodding fashion. But whenever we roused, like figures of grief on a frieze of blackness, we saw the straggling forms of outcast travellers, their feet swathed in rags, journeying in search of bread. Very often they were boys and girls, above the age of fourteen whom so far the American Relief has not had sufficient funds to rescue. They were journeying in quest of bread on the night, when according to tradition, the Three Kings should have been riding from the East to bring them help.