An acquaintance of the writer’s met her after six months had elapsed, in a northern prison, where she had been taken when she began to walk a little. This acquaintance gave his impression of her. At the first moment he thought that she was an elderly woman with an enormously large face of indefinitely outlined features. The face was pale except where covered with red and bluish spots.

But her eyes—her eyes spoke for themselves. Looking into them, he was dumbfounded—there was so much suffering, so much sadness in those eyes! He understood that this old woman must have lived through some great calamity in life, something enormous, some disaster that is beyond human endurance. He tried to engage her in conversation.

He learned then what this seemingly elderly woman had gone through. She was aged not by years, but by unbelievable tortures. She is not an elderly woman, but a young, beautiful girl who has been maimed and broken by suffering. She told with tears in her eyes that her brother was shot after being tortured, without having gone through any form of trial, solely upon the behest of Governor-general Scallon.

A few months after this Victor Green was assassinated. If there were any tribunal in Russia to whom appeal against an official of this stamp could be carried, the so-called terrorist would never have been called into existence. In America I frequently have it said to me: “The Russian revolutionists who are guilty of murder and assassination do more than anything else to injure the cause of liberty in their country. Their deeds are veritably the sowing of dragon’s teeth of hate and murder.”

But fairly—on the testimony—who sows the dragon’s teeth? Is it the man who checks the career of a monstrous creature like Green? Is it the murderous official himself? Or is it the government and the police and other officials of the Czar?

Pasha was taken one afternoon in July. Her family had persuaded her to go abroad for the summer, so with her mother she started for Switzerland. They traveled to St. Petersburg from Moscow and were to take the Berlin train late one afternoon. About two o’clock that afternoon Pasha ran over to the office of a certain newspaper to bid a friend good-by. Suddenly the police appeared, the office was surrounded, and every one who chanced to be there at the time was marched off to prison. The mother awaited the return of her daughter with impatience that soon became alarm. Train-time came and passed. About dusk a party of gendarmes appeared at the house where they had been stopping and informed madame of Pasha’s arrest. Then they ransacked the house. The only evidence found was a copy of my notes on my interview with Marie Spiradonova, which Pasha had borrowed. Incidentally, during the course of the search, Pasha’s gold watch and chain, which had been lying on the bureau, disappeared.

While there were really serious charges against Pasha, these were all registered against her conspirative name, consequently no definite charge of any kind was known against her at the time of this arrest. Merely on the strength of her having been in the newspaper office she was kept “on suspicion.” Later developments in her case are not germane to the moment. She was put into a cell with a number of other women to await trial. One Sunday afternoon an incident occurred in this cell which aroused wide interest, and Pasha, knowing that I would want an accurate account of the affair, managed to write and have smuggled out to me a graphic letter. The only necessary word of explanation concerns the time-worn custom observed in Russian prisons of allowing political prisoners to receive donations of food one day a week from their friends, which recipients share with their less fortunate comrades. In the particular prison where Pasha was incarcerated there was a group of men politicals in a room directly over the women. When the women were ready to divide their contributions with the men they generally rapped on the ceiling with a broom or mop-handle, and the men would drop a cord out of their window so that it would dangle in front of one of the windows of the women’s room. Pasha’s account of what is now known as the Semonova tragedy (Semonova being the name of one of the other women confined in the prison) is as follows [I give her own words]:

A considerable uproar followed this incident. St. Petersburg newspapers clamored for the court-martial of the soldier who had fired the shot. The man was eventually tried—and acquitted. Then the newspapers, echoing public sentiment, declared that the trial was a farce. The matter was not allowed to drop out of sight.

One day the regiment to which the soldier belonged was ordered out on parade and this man’s name was called. The letter was then read from the Czar, announcing that the soldier be rewarded with ten rubles, or five dollars, for having so nobly done his duty!

This closed the incident.

Governmental terrorism exists throughout the whole gamut of the Russian bureaucracy. Petty police and gendarme officers plan and execute massacres; soldiers are called upon to stand one side, or to assist in the slaughter. Knowledge of these massacres is often known in advance in St. Petersburg and sometimes they are actually arranged in the offices of the central administration.[15]

Premier Stolypin with his field courts-martial (described in detail in another chapter) has shown himself no more of a humanitarian than Trepoff, and in the Semonova incident the Czar revealed to the world his intimate familiarity with small incidents.

I have no sympathy whatever with the belief that the Czar does not know what his ministers and officials are doing. If there are details that do not reach him, he alone is at fault. The present Emperor is a traditional autocrat. It is my conviction that he acquiesces in, if he does not instigate, massacre and occasional assassination. However much one may deplore terrorism—white or red—one thing stands out clear and true to my mind, namely, the burden of responsibility lies not with the terrorists of the revolution—their acts are human if to be deplored—but rather with the infinitely more heinous assassins of the government—who are distinctly inhuman—and most of all upon him who is the ultimate head of the whole governmental terroristic organization, the arch assassin who, by a word, could end for all time massacre and murder in the Russian empire—Czar Nicholas II.

CHAPTER XIII

AMID WARSAW CONTRASTS

DURING the early summer I entered Poland twice; once from Russia, from Bielostok in Grodno; once from the Austrian frontier. Both occasions were memorable, because each in its own way was typical of the condition of Poland. Bielostok was still dripping with Jewish blood spilled by the treacherous authorities. Just outside of the town the railroad crosses a narrow stream. In a field bordering the stream a large contingent of soldiers were encamped, giving it the appearance of the outskirts of an army. The bridge was guarded not by sentinels merely, but by a guard of fighting strength. Near the railroad station on sidings were several military trains, freight vans converted into barracks. A company of one hundred men held the station—as if the remaining, panic-stricken Jews were in danger of rising up and storming the troops of the Emperor. But Russia needs to maintain this show of force. From this point clear across the strip of territory called Poland troops were ever in evidence.

My other entrée was from Austria, a little later, during a panic of the Warsaw Jews. A Russian religious holiday was approaching. Sundays and church days have long been notorious massacre days in Russia, and the Jews dread them as a plague. The celebration of the Day of Peter and Paul was to be signalized by a massacre of Warsaw Jews, current gossip said. The report spread, and gained in credence. The day before the holiday forty thousand Jews fled the city. I crossed the frontier at Granica at midnight—was tumbled from a train into a broad customs inspection-room, where every traveler’s baggage was closely overhauled and all arms, tobacco, and forbidden literature confiscated, then on to Warsaw where the spirit of unrest seemed to have possessed not only Jews but every human being. Not that life is any the less gay in the Polish capital, for here the music of song and dance is always in the air, but the nerves of the populace are on edge—quivering. I stepped out of a shop one day just as a stalwart soldier was passing by. He caught sight of a small camera under my arm and jumped, startled, as a woman by a mouse. Warsovians warned me not to go about the streets alone even in broad daylight, so many casualties were daily reported. The ever-present Cossack with his terrible nagaika—that barbarous lash-whip, tipped with lead—was on every hand. Hospitals were crowded with injured and “pogromed.” Prisons were crowded; fortresses were full, and the police were guarded by soldiers. There were daily cases of mob violence. On every hand evidence of military law—and on every hand evidence of internal chaos.

If the Caucasus offers the most intricate and difficult problem of administration in all the Russian empire, Poland presents a situation almost as troubled and quite as hopeless of immediate adjustment.

Poland from border to border seethes with unrest and bitter hatred; there more nearly than anywhere else in Europe is a situation approaching the chaotic. Russia appreciates how desperate is her hold on Poland and as a safety measure martial law is maintained universally and continuously.

“Martial law” is a means for legitimatizing utter lawlessness on the part of the military and police authorities, excusing the indiscriminate use of bayonets and bullets. The example thus ingloriously set by the officials is all too quickly followed by the people who have thrown to the four winds all respect for law and discipline and restraint and the battle is waged on “a fight as fight can” basis. Bloodshed, riot, assassination, robbery, and crimes unlisted are part of each day’s work. Ever since “bloody Sunday” in January, 1905, not one night of peace has visited this wretched country that for so many decades was the source of contention of half of Europe’s greatest powers. Just as the slaughter of Father Gapon’s working-men in St. Petersburg was the signal to all Russia to rise, so Poland also responded to that signal at that time. With firm, deliberate intention she then entered upon a period of sanguinary revolution which rages as fiercely to-day as it has at any time since that fatal Sunday. Russia, appreciating the universality of this aggressive attitude, put an army of nearly 300,000 men into the country. Approximately 200,000 of these were soldiers and 100,000 administrative officials—all Russians—bitterly hating the Poles, who in their turn hold dislike for official Russians, second only in keenness to their dislike for the Germans, whom they also fear. On the other hand, between the labor parties of each country is a strong friendship, for, in official Russia, the workingmen of Poland, as well as the rank and file of Russia itself, appreciate a common enemy.

Not only from hereditary wrongs does Poland suffer, but from present oppression. The iron yoke of Russia presses heavily, and every one in Poland is in desperate rebellion, including the children, who refuse to go to school until the Polish language is substituted for the Russian, and the university students, who are shut out of their university because of the tyranny and cowardice of a government that only sees revolution in education. Small wonder, then, that over half of the population of Poland can neither read nor write, and that the proportion of schools is decreasing rather than increasing. The attitude of Russia toward Poland is that of suppression—not of rational administration. Of what interest is it to Russia if Polish children do not go to school? The salaries of teachers are at least saved. Warsaw has 60,000 school-less children—growing up in darkness, nurtured only by a blind hatred of the people whose flag floats over their city. The amount of money spent on education in Poland amounts to twelve cents per child, as compared to $2.30 per child in Berlin.

Poland’s population is approximately 10,000,000. Nearly two thirds are agriculturists. More than one half of this number have either no land at all, of their own, or next to none, at best an insufficient amount to afford them a livelihood. Industry has been demoralized and disorganized to such an extent that wages have remained stationary for a decade while the cost of living has doubled—and this in the face of an increasing population. The Poles are so fiercely nationalistic. The people

of Finland have been submerged much as the people of Poland have been, but with a very different effect. The population of Finland is rapidly decreasing. All of her young men are going abroad—to England, to America. Not so in Poland. In spite of an emigration to America of nearly 50,000 in one year, Poland’s population is on the increase. Poland’s young men stay—to fight, to starve, to suffer inquisitorial tortures in Russian prisons.

One striking example of the warfare waged in Poland against the Russian administration was the campaign of extermination inaugurated against the police of Warsaw while I was in the city. Thirty-four officers and one hundred and forty policemen were killed within a few weeks—all in broad daylight on the public streets. Twenty-seven were shot within three days. In the proletariat suburb of Wola there were, originally, thirty-seven policemen. Twenty-seven of these were shot to death and ten seriously wounded. The most extraordinary part of this unusual campaign is that not one culprit was caught.

In America the police would long ago have taken shelter from such deadly attacks. It is only natural that panic should possess the remaining members of the police force in Poland’s olden capital. Some did escape, but most found themselves in a veritable trap, from which they could not escape. Without a passport no traveler may find a place to rest his head at night in Russia—much less a refugee policeman. Without a passport the frontier looms like a great, impassable Chinese wall. A single man might escape by stealth in the night, but even policemen sometimes have scruples about deserting their wives and families. And so these unwilling martyrs continued their nerve-racking but senseless patrol of Warsaw streets. Senseless because troops possessed each avenue and alley. According to the most reliable estimates there were at least 75,000 troops quartered in the city at that time. In justice to the military it should be said that they did their utmost for the long suffering police, for each and every policeman who was then left had a military guard of three infantrymen. One of the grim humors of the revolution was to see an ordinary policeman going to his post of duty with two soldiers following at ten paces to the rear with loaded rifles and fixed bayonets. Then, when he took up his position of duty in the center of the two intersecting streets, two soldiers remained at one corner and a third at an opposite corner. For this inglorious service the Russian government generously paid these luckless men six dollars a month!

This reign of terror directed against the police department was by no means the only evidence of turmoil and unrest in Warsaw. On every hand were indications of a terrible blight. Beggardom here was at its worst. Not beggardom as we know it, but infinitely worse. Public charities, private philanthropies, day nurseries, diet kitchens, and settlements are not known in Poland. The streets were literally lined with the lame, the halt, the blind, the sick, the starving. I was accosted by twenty odd during the course of a short walk from a boulevard café to my hotel one night. Once I came upon a woman who had sunk to the pavement from weariness—or hunger. She pressed a rude bundle under her shawl. A dwornik (janitor) was sternly though not unkindly bidding her rise up and move on. Her dress was in rags. Her feet were bare. The old gray shawl round her shoulders was the only trace of comfort. A passerby extended a hand and helped her to her feet. She staggered on and we saw that the bundle she held was a very young baby, and as the electric light fell upon her face we realized her youth. Seventeen, perhaps, or eighteen at most. This at past eleven o’clock. At that moment from the café on the corner came the lively strains of “The Belle of New York.” Up and down the boulevard as far as eye could reach were women—girls of thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, girls not beyond their teens yet old in features, mature women, oldish, faded women—women, women, women. An endless, ceaseless procession. It swells at twilight and diminishes toward dawn, but ends never. But these are not like the beggar-women—yet. Pure statistical tables arranged like a page from a census report of the sights and scenes of one night in Warsaw would appear absolutely incredible to unfamiliar eyes. It is almost melodramatic in its seeming unreality. For in spite of the squalor and the misery and the scenes, both revolting and pitiful, there is a fascination about Warsaw, a laughing, careless air that is ever present. Sunshine and shadow chase each other through Warsaw streets; and sunshine and shadow have entered into the temperament of the people. This duality is characteristic of both.

On first acquaintance Warsaw seems not unlike Paris. A smiling city of long avenues and pleasant streets and shaded boulevards brightened at night by brilliant cafés. The warm summer nights are none the less delightful because martial law prevails. Music is everywhere; these fiery, temperamental people, how they play! The very abandon and nonchalance of the Warsovians is in itself an added charm.

There is no repudiating the situation. The streets swarm with soldiers recently returned from an ignominious war, in which they never had an interest—released to starve upon the streets. War is not the root-evil, but the war was largely responsible for the situation here so far as the beggary is concerned. With so large a portion of the able-bodied men of the country called away on unproductive campaigns of destruction, the women and children were forced to fight the wolf themselves. Warsaw’s traffic in prostitutes is as extensive as it is world-wide. The total population of the city is 750,000. The number of professional prostitutes, carrying “yellow passports” (i.e., passports issued by the authorities to prostitutes), in the city is between fifty and sixty thousand. It is asserted on reliable authority that there are regularly organized companies dealing in young girls, who supply not only Europe, but distant places, like South American capitals. Piccadilly and Regent Street, in London, which so frequently horrify Americans, are as nothing compared to Warsaw’s boulevards.

More than this, business was at a standstill and industry disorganized and deteriorating. Strike following strike in the trades necessity supports. One week the bakers were trying to get enough of the bread of their own baking to fill the mouths of their children. Another week the men of some other trade, but ever and always somewhere the hopeless, heartbreaking struggle was on. Violence is an instinct with the Poles. A few of the bakers stuck to their ovens. The result was that the early nights of the week were characterized by riots, usually suppressed by a volley from Cossacks’ rifles. The day I arrived in Warsaw there were twenty-five reported clashes between the authorities and the people. The following day there were thirty. For weeks before the hospital ambulances had been called out on an average of thirty times a day for casualties resulting from lawlessness—either on the part of the people or of the authorities, for no one is guiltless here.

The wounded from a recent Jewish massacre were in a hospital on the outskirts of the city. Driving to visit the place I inquired at my hotel how much I should pay a cab-driver to take me there. “Must you go, sir?” said the hotel porter. “Do not go, sir, if it is possible to avoid doing so.”

“Why?” I asked in surprise.

“It is a dangerous road.”

“But at ten o’clock in the morning?”

“A man was killed there yesterday afternoon in daylight. Many have been shot there recently.”

The hospital was located three quarters of an hour’s drive from the center of the city, in a district which somewhat suggested the Bowery, but more closely resembling Commercial Road in Whitechapel.

On the way I met cavalry patrol after patrol—Cossacks and dragoons. All rode in “open order.” That is to say, two abreast in the center of the road, then one at either side of the road, and so on. This was the current precaution against bombs. Rifles were unslung and held in the right hand ready for instant action. The advance guard of an army scouting a battle-ground for the enemy would take no greater precautions. A few days before there had been a fusilade directly in front of the hospital. No one knew exactly what started it, but members of two political parties had begun dueling in the open street. The matter was reported to military headquarters and a special troop of Cossacks detailed to the scene. They arrived one hour after the incident, but having been sent out to do something and not knowing what else to do they fired several volleys at the hospital, breaking a few windows, but fortunately doing no other damage.

What with the injured from Warsaw riots and the wounded from the massacre, this hospital, except for the women and children who lay there, punctured by bullets and slashed by swords and bayonets, was not unlike an army hospital. I found a child of four years whose leg had been broken by a soldier’s rifle. According to a young girl who was very bright and intelligent, she and the youngster of four and a young boy were standing together on the doorstep of their home. A company of soldiers were coming up the street on their mission of murder and horrors unmentionable, when one of them deliberately fired at the trio. The bullet struck the boy first, killing him, then the child’s leg, breaking it, and glanced upward, lodging in the girl’s stomach.[16] To say that these were “dangerous” persons to the Russian government is the absolute extreme of absurdity.

Even the children have the spirit of revolt. One day every school in Warsaw was pupil-less. The children had struck. Being Polish children they objected to doing their lessons in Russian. But the Russian government forbade the use of any other tongue. So the children left the schools en masse. Parents were powerless to coerce attendance. The Russian government could not turn the military upon school-boys and girls, and so it compromised. Permission was granted for the use of Polish in private schools. Whereupon the children entered private schools. To-day, in Warsaw, the private schools are taxed to their utmost capacity, while empty benches and deserted playgrounds are found in the public schools.

When a general strike is declared in Russia Warsaw responds with a bound. So perfect is the organization that every railroad, postal or telegraph strike that is declared in Russia is most effectually carried out in Poland. When the Warsovians declare a program they carry it out. As witness, the destruction of the police force. They destroy the rank and file, and incidentally pick off the top as well. The chief of police was blown up as a matter of course.

The Poles are inherently violent. The same spirit which makes them capable of great artistic achievements makes them demoniacal when goaded beyond endurance.

To-day Warsaw prisons are full. Politicals even crowd the fortresses. And one hears awful stories on every hand and from every conceivable source of the torturing of prisoners. One method of extracting information said to be commonly resorted to is to suspend prisoners by their wrists and beat them alternately back and front until their stomachs turn. Another is pulling out their hair, and their teeth; starvation, giving them food but no drink; preventing their sleeping. All of these things I have heard of from reliable people. More terrible tortures I refrain from staining this page with by even mentioning.

Never morning wears to evening but blood is spilled in Warsaw. Never a lull between twilight and dawn but some hellish thought finds expression in deed. The clatter of cavalry patrols rings over the stony streets every hour of the twenty-four. The swish of the cruel nagaika in the hands of the relentless Cossacks attends each trifling disturbance. Sentinels finger their rifles at intervals only of yards—rifles, bayonet-pointed, always ready. And yet—Warsaw is fair to see, with its public buildings, small parks, dashes of fresh green here and there—even flowers, richly blooming beds that scent the warm air and seem to bring a breath of the open into the town. Flower-girls, too, children with daisies, and roses, and pinks; a boutonnière for m’sieur, a bright nosegay for milady. Quite a feature of the city indeed. And always the music. The violin, the ’cello, the piano. The weird and intense music of Poland alternating with the flippant, laughing melodies that America sends abroad. Typically Warsovian, all this. The beautiful, the careless, the jaunty ever to the fore. And underneath, the dire, the grim, the intense. Like an animal that fixes its teeth in a death-grip in the throat of its antagonist, so the Poles of Warsaw have set their teeth toward the heart of Russian despotism. There will be no letting go—no truce—one or the other will go under.

Without a single great leader (Russia watches too closely for one to rise), without definite ideals, wild, passionate, desperate, the Poles naturally do not all work through the same channels. They split into factions and parties, each striving for Russia’s overthrow, or Poland’s advancement, but each in its own way. Consequently party clashes engender bitterness and hatred within. The parties of Poland are as numerous as the tongues heard at Babel. Not all equally strong, but several there are of large influence—each pledged to one definite object, and if all were ultimately to succeed, the result would be the regeneration of Poland through extinction were it not for their saving policy of uniting in time of great crises, magnanimously putting aside party differences for the salvation of the whole people. Yet their methods for the time are party methods and the situation in all its strange phases is only explained through an analysis of the more important parties and influential political organization.

The Jewish Socialist Bund is the most widely known, and perhaps the most powerful of these organizations, though not numerically the largest. Nor is the Bund a