Polish Adventures

I

WE went into Kiev with Bolshevist and Polish artillery still booming, and fighting aeroplanes over the city. At noon of our first day a Bolshevist aeroplane dropped four bombs on a Polish aviation camp in the outskirts of Kiev, and the victims were given a state funeral at noon of the day following: hearse after hearse,eight, or ten of them, —gun-carriages, soldiers, schoolchildren, priests, the white eagle of Poland, the red and white flag of the Polish Republic. That same day there was a big withdrawal of the Bolshevist forces and the fighting-line shifted fifteen miles away from the city.

The Poles held Kiev, the great Russian city on the river Dnieper, the metropolis of the Ukraine, the steppingoff place for an expedition down to Odessa on the Black Sea, if Polish military strategy and other national considerations held wise such an extension of the supply-line, even farther beyond the boundaries of Poland than this Russian-Ukrainian city of Kiev. The train of President-Marshal Pilsudski—or, for this season of fighting, perhaps it should be Marshal-President Pilsudski — passed back and forth between Kiev and Warsaw — two days’ fast journey, through stations thick with the young spring green of birches and poplars, with the eagle and the new red-andwhite flag among them. The trooptrains passed, with young soldiers singing in the night. They sang in the dust of Russian roads out beyond Kiev, after they had detrained, had been marched through the city, and were getting to the thin line at the bridgehead, just at that time held by an average of thirty-six men to the kilometre, seventy men to the mile. Grim hospital trains of the Polish Red Cross waited; pontoon trains for handling the river passages were numerous; groups of dustcovered Bolshevist prisoners came into the city constantly.

It was odd to discover, then, that the Poles were not fighting the Bolsheviki. Doubtless a great many people had known that all along; but it was a new fact to me. I had supposed they were. They are fighting the Russians. Just outside of Kiev I walked for two hours along the railroad track, with a Pole nineteen years old on his way to a sugar factory. He could understand my French and I could understand his. Finally I said what had been in my mind. ‘ The thing that surprises me, my friend, is that you people here and in Warsaw and all along the line down here do not speak of the Bolsheviki with the same moral exasperation and horror that I am used to among my friends in Paris and in New York.'

He turned my remark over in his mind. Then he said, ‘I detest them with all my heart. Why should n’t I? They have taken everything away that my family had, except this one sugar factory. I know my father died because of the worries over our altered state of affairs. But a Bolshevik is only a Russian and a peasant. What can you expect of that combination? You can’t specialize in hatred of Russians.’

A lady I walked with one afternoon in Kiev unwittingly illustrated his remark. Her husband had been carried away by the Bolsheviki as one of the hostages, when they withdrew from Kiev five days before. She had lived through seven months of Bolshevist control there. She described their outrageous intrusions into homes, their constant demands, their thieving. But she added, ‘Denikin’s men were as bad when they were here, just before the Bolsheviki. The Russians!’

I took a droshky ride with an American who had been operating in South Russia for two or three years. He said he believed any government would forfeit its self-respect that entered into any relations with Soviet Russia, economic or diplomatic. He would prefer to see Europe and America unsettled for years, and populations suffer from lack of food or labor, rather than accept contact with that unclean thing. He told a host of things he knew at first-hand, or believed implicitly on the intelligence and good faith of his informants. I listened closely. I found him telling me of how the Ukrainian General Petlura had asked him personally, in the course of one of his missions between the lines, to protest to the commanding general of the Russian forces against shooting helpless prisoners that he captured.

‘But who did you say this general was who was doing the shooting of helpless prisoners?’ I asked, fearing that by listening too intently I had confused his narrative.

‘Why, I told you — Denikin. I saw him the next day.’

‘The anti-Bolshevist general,’ I said.

‘That’s so,’ was his surprised comment. ‘I had forgotten. It is the Bolsheviki you were inquiring about.’

Old Tsaristic days, Bolshevist and anti-Bolshevist armies and populations, the medley, the composite, is straight Russian in the Polish mind. I saw a poster in oils, The Storm out of the East, done by a Polish army officer: a great hulking figure, with dripping hands and a Mongolian face, coming up out of fire over a peaceful Polish landscape low on the horizon. I bought it for more than I could afford, because I felt that it was a picture good for more than my generation; good for a time when the Bolshevism of our day has long been an historic reminiscence; good for so long as there is dread of Russianism and Mongolism in Poland.

‘The Storm out of the East’ was not simply Bolshevism in the mind of that Polish soldier-painter, and it is not Bolshevism primarily in the Polish mind. They were fairly careless about Bolshevist economic and social theories, and very general in attributing atrocities. The Poles circulated a poster of Bolshevism as a red Semitic devil, sitting on a pile of skulls and holding a heavy revolver in a bloody hand; but their other most impressive poster depicted, from a photograph, a Polish soldier whose head had been gouged, his knuckles broken, the web between all his fingers slashed, and red-hot pins driven under the nails — all of which was attributed, not to the Bolshevist Russians, but to the Czecho-Slovakians on the other side of Poland, in connection with the plebiscite to be held in the summer of 1920 for control in Silesia.

A young Polish count whose family has holdings in the Ukraine told me of ingenious tortures by the Letts, in the republic to the north of Poland. Somebody else contributed the undoubted stories of the Semenoff Cossacks out in Siberia. Nobody questioned the facts, but nobody emphasized Bolshevism in connection with them; or, if they did, they attributed the blame to the Russian peasant, as the worst combination of cruelty and stupidity the world could produce. A young Polish Uhlan from Posen pointed out a group of Bolshevist prisoners and laughed. ‘They said they had been forced to fight by the Bolsheviki,’ he said, ‘and looked for better treatment because of that. But they fired into our men when we were almost upon them, only fifty metres away. We asked them, if they were forced to fight, why they kept it up when they had so good a chance to surrender. Trust no Russian.’

In Poland everywhere, so far as I could talk with different kinds of people, and so far as my reasonable supply of French and my twenty words of German could carry me, and so far as my interpreter in Polish and Russian was reliable, the term Bolshevik was interchangeable with the term Russian. The Bolsheviki were to them the Russians, at this time in the saddle. Racial antipathies, not moral horror; resentments and revenge for long generations of Tsaristic oppression and torment were their incitements to fighting. They did not fight as the defenders of an outraged world-civilization against a new system of physical torture and property perversion. Their high hopes for Poland swamped even their hate of any enemy whatever.

That is the glorious thing about Poland to-day. A great love is its dominating motive. But the great hate is Russia in general. Even a Bolshevik would resent their ignoring of Bolshevism. By the time a Pole has exhausted the possibilities of aversion in the nature of a Russian and the nature of a Jew, he would have to drain his being to find bile for a Bolshevik simply as a Bolshevik.

At Jitmoir there is the room where the fourteen-year-old girl who ruled the city for the Bolsheviki is said herself to have shot down more than a hundred citizens of the town. I do not disbelieve this. They picked up a Bolshevist soldier in the back-country and stationed a young Polish soldier to guard him. They sat in a gulley near the railroad track. After a while I passed that way again. The Polish soldier was fast asleep, one arm under him to keep his face out of the dirt. I might have thought him dead as he lay. The Bolshevist prisoner was sitting beside the gun and motioned me to approach carefully, not to wake him up. His occasional snores further reassured me. They were both about twenty years old. The Bolshevik could ponder the buttons on the army jacket of his guard. It was a United States army jacket, buttons and all. The United States eagle did very well as the Polish eagle emblem, and the ‘E Pluribus Unum’ on the scroll above it meant nothing in their young lives. Half the Polish soldiers along that stretch of track had United States army jackets and buttons. Large letters, ‘U.S.,’ were on the haversacks of the men streaming out of Kiev after the retreating Bolsheviki. I left these two philosophers to muddle over their own puzzle of a world, or just ignore it, and put up with it, as they seemed disposed to do. But no dread of a Bolshevist outrage seemed to pervade the dreamless sleep of this young Pole.

Confused as I found myself by this unexpected attitude of the Poles, which itself confused all kinds of Russians into one kind of Russian and was confused if you tried to allege any fundamental distinctions among the kinds, my aversions and likings, my antipathies and associations growing out of war feelings, were strangely confused among the Poles themselves. A Posen Pole of twenty-three sat on my cot-bed in a box-car and admitted that he had served at Verdun, at Ypres, at St. Mihiel — had been for three years a soldier in the German Army. An American Polish lad, who had served with Lord Strathcona’s Horse, enlisting in Canada but claiming Lexington Avenue, New York City, as his home, sat on the bed across and talked with the ex-German Uhlan, now a courier from the War Office in Warsaw down to the fighting front. To palliate the situation, which one could easily see both felt a little, the American told of another Polish-German soldier in the battle for Mt. Kimmel, who, with both legs shot off, begged him in English to stop a minute and give him water, and when he had got it, said, ‘I’m a Polish soldier. I’ve never fought with any vigor against you.’ ‘I’m a Pole, too — from America,’ the other replied. These two became very good friends. I saw them together at a little table a week later in Warsaw. Yet this Posen Pole broke into the goose-step with exultation when he heard good news of an advance of the Polish Army beyond Kiev against the Russians. We struck his leg and forced him to stop it. We liked him, but could not stomach that relic of his old military training. We felt that we could not bear him, in spite of liking everything else about him, if he could not avoid a reversion like that.

II

The great thing about the Poles is their sense of a vivid and noble tradition. Life must be a glory to them, or it is nothing. To be fed and housed hardly counts. The Polish mark had fallen to two hundred for a United States dollar; there was ominous news of a Bolshevist advance from the north, now that so many Polish troops and trains had been drawn far south to Kiev; Lord Robert Cecil over in London was moving for an appeal to the League of Nations against Poland, because of this campaign; but all that could be straightened out later. Ten women were in sight, working the fields, for every man; road-gangs of boys not more than twelve or thirteen years old were frequent. The army was a very young army, consisting of youths of sixteen and seventeen. I knew personally one boy of fifteen, with discharge papers from the Polish Army covering a year and a half of service. Poland was using her very first supply of manhood after the drain of the world-war for this new fighting, instead of having them in the fields, the mills, and the higher schools. The glory that had been Poland was still Poland, would always be Poland, was re-created, was sure. The future, the present, the past were all one, a live flame. There had been rain and warmth and the crops were very promising. Wheat had headed out a month earlier than usual. There was assurance of final abundance in the air, abundance of food, abundance of territory, abundance of glory. The world was young in springtime, the army was young, new Poland was young, the campaign was in its promising beginnings. The youth of the army and the very new nationalism and the uncertainties of the developing campaign had hints of possible tragedy in them that the rate of exchange reflected. But nothing else reflected it, except, perhaps, a few dubious groups in Warsaw, a little suspicious of Marshal Pilsudski as possibly too nearly ‘ Red ’ in his sympathies.

I had come from New York and Paris. I had exulted with my friends there when shiploads of ‘ parlor Bolsheviki, ’or ‘ alley Bolsheviki,’ were shipped out of the United States back to Russia. They had wished that all Bolshevist apologists might be shipped to Russia, too; and I had heartily agreed with them. It is right and pleasant to have people take practical part in the ideals they profess, participate in the actual physical struggle of the ideas for which they havesympathy. The fighting front, or the army hospitals, or the cities held by the Bolsheviki were the proper places for more than one comfortable person we knew, with over-liberal and over-careless ideas regarding the tenure of other people’s property. After Denikin collapsed in South Russia, the quiet word around New York and Paris was to wait for Poland in the spring. The waiting was rewarded. But as these troop-trains of Polish boys seventeen years old, and of Polish girls nineteen years old going along to nurse them, drew into Kiev, headed for sure privation, for possible death, for disease that might affect their whole long lives, I thought that those friends of mine who were leading no indispensable lives in the States and in Paris, if they would have license for t heir exasperated utterances and exhortations against the Bolsheviki as Bolsheviki, should be in these troop-trains and hospital-trains; and I longed within myself to see them there.

In Kovno, a Massachusetts American lay in a Polish army hospital, with his right arm splintered at the elbow and a septic condition developing— Lieutenant Noble, a flier, one of the Kosciuzko squadron. But I think he had come to such a pass because he was an inveterate flier, looking for his flying where it could still be found — not because he was inspired by any deep moral horror of Bolshevism. He had attacked alone and three times a Bolshevist armored train that was holding up the Polish advance into a town. At the third attack he made, the train started away; but a rifle-ball caught his elbow. He piloted his machine seventy-five kilometres back to camp, and saved the machine to the Polish air force; but his flying days are over. The Kosciuzko squadron has been building an enormous sentiment for the United States among the Polish troops, flying German aeroplanes in the Polish service, at a rate of pay that equals twelve dollars a month.

All along the route from Warsaw to Kiev, I met the Haller’s Army men, Polish-Americans, on their way back to the States at last; men who volunteered before the United States ever entered the war; who fought on the French front for the sake of what Poland might get out of the war if the Allies won ; who then resisted home longings and came on into Poland itself for the fighting that had to be faced when the worldwar with Germany was over. Czechoslovakians, Ukrainians, Bolsheviki — three little wars she had on hand a year ago, on practically all her frontiers. The best of Poland and the best of the United States was in these men, and neither country had been very mindful of them when their immediate usefulness had been accomplished. It made one just a little tired of excessive talk about speaking an inherited foreign language necessarily making a worse citizen of the United States. These Haller fellows had been in the United States five years, three years, — one of them whom I met, seventeen years, — before they volunteered to come back and fight. They had barely mastered English in the United States. For three years they had heard their old language and never any English. One spoke to them abruptly at Koval: ‘Do you know when your train for Dantzig pulls out?’ or something like that; and they fumbled in their brains to understand you. It was their first resumption of an old and nearly lost attempt at United States citizenship. They thought in Polish of their love for, their identification with, America. Their hearts as well as their keen sense of financial and social advantage were five or six thousand miles away, the width of the greater parts of two vast continents and a great ocean, in Brooklyn, Cleveland, Akron, Detroit, St. Paul.

They liked Poland, too, — loved is the right word to use, actually, for once, — indorsed your good words for the Polish people, were glad they had come, were glad you liked Poland, were hopeful about the soil, — a little thin in many places, they reminded you, — looked forward to increasing manufactures. ‘Give her five years,’ they would say. ‘Get the fighting done. Get the material in. Then see.’ But they would not stay any longer. And it was more than the money they would earn in the United States, more than war-weariness in a still-warring land, that was taking them back.

I would like to trade these men, with their deficiencies in our language, and with their fighting record and their mood of United States citizenship, for some voluble English-speaking United States citizens I know. They had had a raw deal, but had little to say about it. Their mood was sturdy and high. It did not blink the deal they had had, but it did not think of capitalizing the grievance in pathos or resentment. The United States, wet or dry, was what they wanted for themselves, and ‘God bless and preserve and prosper Poland!’ was in their hearts, as in the days of early 1917, when they left good jobs to come over and fight for her; and then to be forgotten, overlooked, neglected, unaccommodated for a long time anywhere by anybody, Polish or American, their rights forgotten as much as their comfort or well-being. A few cigarettes and some underclothing would reach them between Warsaw and Dantzig — the gift of the American people through the American Red Cross’; but it was little enough, though they did not say so; and they were still uncertain whether they would get passage to New York only and have to pay their own way from there to the towns in the United States that they had originally left.

I told them that I guessed they would be seen clear through, now. But the word ‘guess’ was careful English, not the United States vernacular, and their eyes, after all their experiences, seemed inclined to treat it that way, too.

III

Kiev was intact. Its population of more than a million was underfed, but by no means starving. The metropolis had had six governments in three years, old Russian, German, Ukrainian, new reactionary Russian, Bolshevist, and now Polish. One business building was razed to its foundations, near the Opera, and five others had been gutted, apparently with hand-grenades, at one time or another during the three years. The façades stood. Much window-glass was gone, and had been replaced with veneers of board, and there were frequent bullet-chips in the brick.

Breakfast the first morning in the town was fresh milk, ice-cream, sugar, and radishes. You started up into the town that had endured so much, and ran into ice-cream freezers full of their good stuff on every other street corner. The freezers stood two together in most places, with two flavors of ice-cream for your choice. The district had a good deal of fresh milk, and it had an oversupply of sugar. They served it with a shovel, or by the handful. In a restaurant where no bread could be bought, the great sugar-urn stood level-full always, and open to anybody who cared to help himself. A Polish colonel told of one town nearby where the owners of the sugar warehouse had placed seals on the doors when the Bolsheviki occupied the town. The Bolsheviki never bothered to break the seals; though just what good the owners expected the seal to be is a matter of puzzlement. At that time, according to an officer of the Polish Red Cross, the sugar ration in the Bolshevist army was half a pound per man per day, to a quarter pound of bread. There was talk of sending some of it to suffering America. You could get a ton of it for a few pounds of salt or some flour. All the way down from Warsaw, for several hundred miles, white bread excellently baked had been plentiful in the little shops; eggs too, and excellent sausages. Near Kiev, bread died out and sugar became the staple.

Women at the stations offered great plates of butter for a little salt. Salt had been supplied to this part of Russia from Poland, and the supply had been cut off during the fighting with the Ukrainians a year ago. In the public market I bought two large potatoes, boiled first and then fried a rich brown all over, piping hot, for five marks. The ice-cream between wafers was eight marks. Eggs were five marks apiece, and rather scarce. Pork and rabbit and some beef, a fewr geese, and a few chickens were on sale at possible prices. Fresh radishes sold at three marks for a big bunch — the large variety, made as God made Hampshire strawberries, with enough flavor for the size. Young onions were three marks a bundle. Fresh milk was not expensive. Sauerkraut, beets, Dill pickles were in good supply. These things were all on sale in a cheap market, where only very ordinary people gathered. For twenty Polish marks I could make a meal there. The United States dollar was worth two hundred marks. But I do not see how a workingman in Kiev earning forty marks a day or a hundred marks— estimates varied, but never reached the hundred — could feed and house and clothe himself and his family. That is the right basis of consideration. I did not see enough in the markets to make me believe that, if everybody had unlimited money, there was stuff to satisfy all the population. Moreover, Kiev was then in the lushness of spring, with fresh green stuff just ready for market and the cows of the district coming into milk. Spring had arrived, and hoarders were loosening up on last year’s stuff carried through the winter. The stores were empty. The Bolsheviki had stripped the town; and what they had not taken had been hidden. But the people were not emaciated. They did not look as the Viennese look; their reserve fat, their marrow, was not all gone. This was true of the Kiev residents, the refugees about there and on up into Poland proper, and the prisoners from the Bolshevist armies. There was both color and substance to their bodies.

But just as careless deductions from one full market and one full pocketbook might utterly mislead the visitor in such a city, so merely walking about the streets gathering a general impression gives no clue to the orphanages, with only a day’s supply of food, the bins empty, and no clear prospect or much hope of finding even another day’s supply when the one on hand should be gone; nor any clue to the reticent suffering of proud people. A family of standing, who desired to give their utmost hospitality to an American, furnished a meal of soup made from some long-leaved plant, a second small course of potatoes, and a dessert, apparently made of seeds and toothsome roots that one would ordinarily not regard as edible. They stuck in my throat, not because they were not good, — they seemed right enough for once, — but because I felt that somebody was being robbed in the family for my unnecessary table entertainment, and because meals day after day like that (and I knew it was an extraordinary achievement) must leave pangs of hunger and a sense of under-nourishment even at the moment of repletion. Similarly, at Lwow (Lemberg), on Sunday, about half-past eleven in the morning, just when church was out, I think I saw more silk dresses in half an hour than I had seen before in all my life, certainly more than I ever had seen anywhere at one time in any street before. A man long resident in the city called my attention to them. It seemed to indicate, not comfort only, but luxury. I am sure that seven out of every ten women and girls who passed in that after-church promenade wore silk. But it was reasonably apparent, also, that the dresses were years old, had been worn this one precious hour of the week, and on a few other fête-days, even before the war, had been remodeled by the skillful fingers of those I saw wearing them, and had been unsalable, because nobody was buying silk dresses after the war was on, although the careless impression might have been that everybody had been buying them.

IV

There were many refugees. But they were not tragic figures. They were not acutely miserable. More than anything else I knew at first-hand, they resembled a group in Michigan after a forest-fire has wiped out a town. There were destitution, discomfort, hunger now and then and here and there. But there was a reasonably well nourished immediate past to go ahead on for a little while, and a fair prospect of pulling through to as good a condition as known before, though with a longer time to hold out than would be the case in the United States forest-fire, and with systematic relief not so sure to come. But refugeeing in the early summer in Russia is not so bad a business — just a little worse than gypsying, if you have not the instinct for it. In the winter, and at night in rainy weather with restless babies, it is a different proposition. Weeks of it drag the life out of men and women, and even boys and girls; and the horrible uncertainty of the future, the waiting for the fighting to stop, cause a fearful mental tension in those who have any feeling of responsibility.

These refugees are the one-time residents of Poland — Poles, Little Russians, Russians, Lithuanians — who, in the autumn and winter of 1915—16, fled into Great Russia ahead of the retreating Russian armies. They are headed back at last, to accept such changes as four years have brought about, and to reëstablish life as it was, so far as possible, in the old accustomed places.

The Polish authorities in Kiev gathered the Bolshevist civilian sympathizers together, and kept the railroad yard clear of all refuse by their labors. Most of them were Jews and of middle age — a greater proportion of Jews than one saw anywhere among the prisoners from the Bolshevist army. A number of them swept up or picked up offal, dressed in frock coats. Some of them were young. I remember one who stood stark upright always when he was not forced to bend to his work by a watchful guard, and whose face blazed with hate and defiance of his keepers. I wondered why he had not left the city with the Bolsheviki.

The youthful soldiers of the Polish army stood over these men with guns, and satirically, but half good-humoredly, lectured them on the beauties of Bolshevism. It was a race mocking a race, a soldier getting even with civilians, youth enjoying its chance for unpunished impudence to old age. It struck me that some of the more intelligent and prosperous older Jews bending their backs to unaccustomed toil felt this, and were a little amused and, within themselves, a little tolerant, with a humorous appreciation of the situation in their glances at one another. But they kept at work. There was no other way out. Perhaps they set themselves to reading with new sympathy the only United States book to be seen in the shop-windows of Kiev — Uncle Tom’s Cabin, in a German translation. It was in the windows of Warsaw, also, along with Emerson’s essays.

The attitude that the United States Jews in the region assumed toward these fellows of theirs in race (though not their fellow countrymen) was usually one of frank dismay. I talked in Kovno with a New York Jew who had been living in this district for seven years, having returned just before the Great War. ‘What my people need here,’ said he, with a wry movement of the mouth, ‘is a regiment of ten thousand barbers as shock troops, several gangs of American college hazers to tear the long, greasy black coats, or nightgowns, or whatever you call them, off their backs and the little round caps off their heads, and a whole army of plumbers to build baths for them.’

A younger United States Jew from Vilna said to me: ‘Twenty-five thousand American Jews, real Americans, who would live over here and force the change by their example and influence, would go a long way toward solving the hatreds and alienations that threaten the stability of Poland and the little new republics to the north.’

Meanwhile the American Jewish Distribution Committee is doing good work in that direction, as well as with its supplies of clothing and medicine. The little old red schoolhouse of the little old United States, the country schoolhouse, and the schoolhouse of the polyglot tenement districts, would apparently do for both Poland and Russia the biggest job that they need. It would take five generations, but that would break down the ridiculous and yet almost insurmountable barriers to national unity and the individual’s sense of his own freedom. And Poles and Jews and Russians will have to live alongside each other long after Bolshevism, as Bolshevism, has become nothing more than a military, political, economic, social, and moral reminiscence.

Poland is hurrying the work of restoration. Everywhere in Warsaw and Lwow new paint was being put on store-fronts, old cornices were being repaired, factory chimneys were being built, and outside, in the country, new peasant houses and barns were going up. Hospitals that the American Red Cross had established or largely developed were being taken over and maintained by the Poles, in accordance with the best modern standards. The presses are turning out an abundant supply of ancient and modern Polish literature, and technical books. Excellent lithographs of Polish historical events or of Polish scenery fill the shops. There are interesting new paintings by Polish artists. A young nation with a dangerous war in progress, which, none the less, has forty boys in an architectural school and many more in other technical schools; whose medical men, albeit all too few in number, have an established reputation; and whose engineers and mechanics are increasing steadily — a nation which believes so much in the wine of life, but takes care to have the stable bread of life assured; which realizes better than ever before that spirit needs flesh really to make itself manifest — is a nation pretty sure to work its way through to full and safe nationality.

V

Poland’s concern with things maritime, her reaching out to the sea, is another unexpected indication of the scope of her national imagination. I am always under suspicion of reading seasignificance unduly into national situations; and what I saw in Poland may be chargeable in some degree to that obsession; but certainly, along with the map of old imperial Poland, dated 1772, which was found in unsuspected corners of western Russia, and was hung on the walls in Poland, as an incitement to further and further penetration by a victorious army, there was perfectly apparent a tremendous interest in the sea. Polish sailors, following the Russian custom of wearing long ribbons hanging from the back of their caps, walked the streets of Warsaw. They told me that, when the Peace Conference gave Poland her ancient access to the Baltic, the Polish government held a very impressive service, wedding anew the Polish nation to life on the water.

Poland had seemed like Shakespeare’s Bohemia, or like Switzerland, so far as seafaring possibilities were concerned.

I remembered that Joseph Conrad had to leave his home in Poland as a boy and make his way to England, in order to become a sailor. ‘We don’t often meet a man of your nationality in ships,’ he records that the old examiner said to him when he got his license. Marine paintings and lithographs and postcards were in a great many shop-windows. Down in the old quarter of Warsaw, near the market, there is a very ancient doorway, and over it, in colored stucco, a great frigate under full sail — a huge thing, very vigorously expressed.

But at Lwow, which has not even a navigable river, there stands an image of the Virgin in the seclusion of a count’s garden, back among the trees. A veil of cobwebs is over her face, though pious hands keep them cleared from her arms and her robe. The image rests upon a pillar, and standing out upon this pillar there is an anchor, with a dragging piece of rope and a date in July, 1810, below it. The Virgin of the Anchor, in her remoteness from all matters maritime, seemed to me a persistent embodiment of that new-old dream, which Poland seems to have, of an expanding life on the water for her citizens. One of the posters most widely circulated in the city, and all over Poland, showed the first Polish merchant-ship swinging away from her moorings in the harbor of Dantzig for a voyage to America. The Polish admiral, a man, I am told, with no ship to speak of, but with dreams for his country, maintains his headquarters at Dantzig. I suppose that Poland sent representatives to the second International Labor Congress at Genoa in June, 1920, which devoted itself exclusively to problems of merchantshipping. If she did, how I wish that Joseph Conrad might have been called back from his long, enforced residence in England, to go as one of the delegates!

And after I had written all this, I found, when I got back to Paris, in a French magazine, an article ten pages long, by General Boucabeille, on ‘The Maritime Future of Poland.’

I looked carefully at many faces of Bolshevist troops and Bolshevist civilians, in snapshots taken by Red Cross men, in prison camps, and in prisoner groups as they came along the roads before they reached the camps; at full sprawl in the afternoon sunlight before Polish general staff headquarters in the city of Kiev; in numerous hospitals. I sized up their faces and their bodies. They seemed to me much like the general run of men: about the same proportion of obvious louts, of fairly intelligent and of quite intelligent young men, that one would see anywhere in central Europe. Their bodies seemed, in about equal proportions, of the draughthorse and the race-horse types. They were warier in war than the young Poles, older by a few years as a general thing, and had been longer in the ordeal of campaigns. But my belief in the Russian, which has to run hand in hand with my belief in the enormous slapdash efficacy of the American publicschool system as it might be applied to run him through the hopper, was not affected, or, rather, disaffected, by anything I saw of Bolshevist Russians, or by any reasoned contrast I drew between them and the Poles who were fighting them, much as I have always liked and respected the Pole.

In the United States district I come from there are a good many Poles, and the young Pole, man or woman, is singularly apt to be finely and yet strongly moulded. I did not see any such large proportion of Poles like that as I had expected, judging from those I knew in my home across the Atlantic. Many, very many, more of these in the homeland seemed to be the victims of heavy manual labor by their fathers and mothers, of generations whose education was nil or very limited and speedily forgotten, of many results from Tsaristic tyrannies and class domination of upper Poles and Russians alike. I looked at Bolshevist Russians, and a couple of weeks later, when I had the chance, read some of Mr. Stephen Graham’s confident and delicate enjoyment of all Russians over many years in all parts of their vast domain, with no sense of hopeless incongruity.

The condition for the world to consider is Polish-Russian antipathy, not Polish-Bolshevist antipathy. The disappearance of tyranny may mean, more readily than now seems apparent, the disappearance of racial hatreds. But in a Polish school out near Brest-Litovsk in the year 1920 the children have to learn a song of hate of all Russians. Its words are very vigorous and the music stirring. Russians are human beings. They are loved and believed in for both their future and their past, and even for their present. Jews are human beings. We have Shakespeare’s assurance of the latter fact. For the Russians, the more popular notion in Poland is Kipling’s idea of a bear that walks like a man. Kipling may have outgrown the notion, probably has, but it is part of the fate of influence to find one’s outworn ideas still living realities in somebody else.

There is the problem that will have to be settled before Poland or the world can settle down to stable peace.