And then Poland. Down to the end of the first year of war the part
played by Poland has been that of absolute martyr. Like the water-mill
in Zola’s story she has first been disabled by the attack of her enemies
and then destroyed by the defence of her friends. Three times the armies
of the belligerents have rolled over her, and now that they are gone
she lies stricken afresh, even yet more fiercely, under the famine and
pestilence which have stalked in the wake of war.
No more pitiful and abject picture does the terrible conflict present.
Without part or lot in the European quarrel, with little to gain and
everything to lose by it, having no such right of choice as gave glory
to the martyrdom of Belgium, Poland has had nothing to do but to endure.
At the beginning of the war, when the battery of Gerrman hatred was
directed chiefly against Russia, the world was told that the measure of
her barbarity was to be seen in the condition to which the Polish people
had been reduced under Russian rule. But did the Harnacks, Hauptmanns,
Ballins and von Bülows who put forth this plea, count on our ignorance
of Galicia, in which the condition of the Poles is immeasurably more
wretched under the rule of their Ally, Austria?
In the fateful year 1892 I travelled much in Galicia, and saw something
of the effects of Austrian government. My impressions of both were
unfavorable. From points of natural wealth and beauty, Galicia is
perhaps, of all countries, the least favoured of God. Shut out from
the warm southern winds by the Carpathian mountains, and exposed to the
northern blasts that sweep down from the broad steppes of Russia, the
long and narrow stretch of Galician territory is probably the most
inhospitable region in the western world Flat and featureless; with
swampy and ague-stricken plains, unbroken by trees and hedges; with
roads like canals, dissecting dreary wastes, black in the south, where
the loam lies, light in the north where salt is found; with rivers
without banks fraying into pools and ponds and marshes; with soppy
fields in formal stripes like the patches of a patchwork quilt; with
villages of log-houses, each having its cemetery a little apart, and its
wooden crucifix like a gibbet at a space beyond--such is a great part of
Galicia, the Polish province of Austria.
But little as Nature has done to cheer the spirits of the Poles, who
live under Austrian rule, what man has done is less. It is nothing at
all, or worse than nothing.
Thickly-sown on the eastern frontier are many densely populated
manufacturing towns, ugly and squat, and giving the effect of standing
barefoot on the damp earth. As you walk through them they look like
interminable lines of featureless streets, full of those sweating,
screaming, squabbling masses of humanity that take away all your pride
in the dignity of man’s estate. The prevailing colour is yellow, the
dominant odour is noxious, the thoroughfares are narrow, and often
unpaved. In the busier quarters the shops are sometimes spacious, but
more frequently they are mere slits in the monotonous façades. When
closed, as on Sunday, these slits give the appearance of a row of prison
cells. When open they present crude pictures on the inner faces of
their doors--pictures of boots, caps, trousers, stockings or corsets, a
typology which seems to be more necessary than words to inhabitants who
have not, as a whole, been taught to read.
And then the people themselves! Perhaps there is not in all the world
a more hopeless-looking race, with their lagging lower lips, their dull
grey eyes, their dosy, helpless, exanimate expression, suggesting that
the body is half asleep and the spirit no more than half awake. To see
them slouching along the streets, or sitting in stupefied groups at the
doors of brandy-shops, passing a single bottle from mouth to mouth, is
to realize how low humanity may fall in its own esteem under the rule
of an alien government. To watch them at prayer in their little Catholic
churches is to feel that they have been made to think of themselves as
the least of God’s creatures, unworthy to come to His footstool--always
ready to kiss the earth, and never daring to lift their eyes to heaven,
having no right, and hardly any hope.
Such are the poorer and more degraded of the Poles in the Austrian
crownland of Galicia, which has lately been swept by war (along the
banks of the Vistula, the Dniester, and the Bug), and is now perishing
of hunger, and being devastated by disease. And when I ask myself what
has been the root-cause of a degradation so deep in a people who once
laboured for the humanities of the world and upheld the traditions of
Culture, I find only one answer--the suppression of nationality! In that
fact lies the moral of Galicia’s martyrdom. Let Belgium’s nationality
be suppressed as Germany is now trying to suppress it, and her condition
will soon be like that of Austrian Poland. You cannot expect to keep
the body of a nation alive while you are doing your best to destroy its
soul.