IV
A DEAD CITY IN POLAND
Lodz is a city which boasts that it is the Polish Manchester. In its present plight it brings back memories of a big northern town in England during its holiday week. The sky is clear and of a faint wintry blue. The air is surprisingly clean. The factories, one and all, lift their great chimney-stacks skywards, but no smoke issues from any of them. The gates are shut; the machines are silent, and when dark falls the vast masses of brick are solid bulks of gloom. But it is not fair-week in Lodz. For four years this city has been idle. In the midst of this featureless Polish plain, it had none the less lived by the sea. Its fate was sealed when cotton ceased to enter Bremen harbor, and life will return to it only when cotton can reach it through Danzig. It is a monument to the efficacy of the blockade, which dealt impartially with friend and foe, with Pole and German. The enemy occupation was not in this town wantonly destructive or exceptionally harsh. Metal of all kinds was requisitioned as it was in Germany itself. Brass plates were stripped from the doors. Copper wire was taken from the electric tramways, and a heavy substitute supplied. Some parts were taken from machines, especially from finishing machines. The fact remains, however, that to the extent of about 75 per cent, the factories are intact. They need only raw cotton and wool, with a stock of tools and driving belts, to start again. The stories of wholesale devastation which are current no further away than Warsaw are a war-time legend. Lodz has suffered, but the suffering fell and falls to-day far more heavily on the workers than on their masters. Capital has survived the war. The great buildings, the ingenious machines, the valuable sites—they are all more or less intact. It is the workers whose children have died, whose garrets are empty of gear, whose starved bodies and slack nerves will be incapable, for many a month to come, of reaching their old standard of skilful and enduring labor.
How does a population of 500,000 contrive to exist for four years without work? I asked myself that question continually during my stay in Lodz, but I could get no satisfactory answer. It was not for fully a year that want began. Poland was full of food in those early months: the usual export, especially of potatoes, was stopped, and prices fell to almost nominal figures. The period of requisitions for German needs came later. Lodz solved its problem partly by taking to smuggling, and partly by reducing its population. Three-quarters of a century ago it was an unpretending village. Saxon weavers established its textile industries, and even now German is the home-language of nearly a third of the population. The Polish workers were peasants who rarely lost touch completely with the country. They came to town for some years to earn the savings which would enable them to buy an acre or two of land. When the mills stopped, some of these people drifted back to their villages. Others went freely to work in German munition factories, or on German farms. Some thousands, on the plea that they were without means of subsistence, were deported to Germany by force, or more usually by the threat of force. Even now, though the Polish soldiers from the Russian Army and the German migrants have for the most part returned, the population of Lodz is under 350,000. The mortality from the chief diseases of privation, typhus and tuberculosis, has been appallingly high. On the other hand, the Germans put an end to the usual plagues of this dirty and insanitary town. For its water Lodz relies on wells, and the pump stands amid the filth of the back courts in all the older quarters of the town. For sole drainage there are the deep gutters in the streets, and one notes as one walks through them when it is washing day, for then the open sewers run blue. The Russians would never allow improvement; what was good enough for Moscow, they said, would do for Lodz. The Germans cleaned out the wells and the disappearance of typhoid stands to their credit.1 1Much the worst thing that the Germans did in Poland was the deportation of the unemployed to forced labor in Germany. Apart from this measure, which was not very extensively applied, their rule was perhaps no harsher than military administration commonly is. They did not adopt in Poland their Belgian tactics of intimidation. They requisitioned heavily, but paid for what they took, or (as in the case of the copper) gave receipts. They did some useful constructive work by laying light railways and the like. They forced the mine-owners of the Dombrover basin for the first time to pay a living wage. They sold rationed flour at a very low price, and they helped the people of the devastated area to rebuild. Every one agreed that the conduct of the garrisons in the towns was good, and even people on whom they had been quartered had few complaints to make, though no one seemed to like them. I heard, always accidentally, of some good deeds: thus an officer quartered in Warsaw opened an asylum for Polish orphans at his own cost, and another started a home for lost dogs. Why the Poles, on the whole, disliked Germans more bitterly than their Russian oppressors is still for me something of a mystery. An able Polish literary man gave me an explanation which seems plausible. Under the Russian censorship no Polish newspaper could mention any Russian iniquity, however gross. On the other hand, all Polish newspapers were allowed, and even encouraged, to make the most of every Polish grievance against German rule in Posen. This unconscious selection over a long term of years had its effect. Propaganda in the modern world weaves the mind of the mass, much as a mill weaves cotton. Let no one imagine, however, that a hunger-cure of four years is salutary. The children have suffered the most pitiably. I watched some children in a model kindergarten singing their "action" songs. The voices were a very thin pipe. The movements were listless and perfunctory. One could see that even the children had learned to economize energy. There was just one pair of rosy cheeks in the whole school, and it belonged to a boy who had come that week from the country. The real shock came when I began to ask the older children their ages. Where one expected the answer "nine or ten," it came "thirteen or fourteen." These years will leave their mark on Poland. Even the recruits of twenty who have just been conscripted look like English lads four or five years younger. The medical officer of Lodz told me that among the poor, births have almost ceased, and the reason, he maintained, is simply the physical exhaustion of the women.
Under German rule Lodz suffered silently with that deplorable patience which seems to be the chief characteristic of the Polish worker. The new life began in those magical days of November, when the army of occupation melted suddenly away. The Secret Socialist military organization which looked up to the imprisoned General Pilsudski as its leader disarmed the unresisting garrison. Unarmed lads went up to the sentries and officers in the streets, and walked away with rifles and swords as their trophies. The incredible thing was possible only because the German private was ready for his release and welcomed any excuse to throw off the yoke. Some tore off their iron crosses and trampled on them, and all were unfeignedly glad. In these days under Communist (i.e. Bolshevik) leadership, a Council of Workmen (Soviet) was formed, with its office in the handsome flat where the German Commandant had lived. I doubt if it does or ever really did represent the starving, apathetic masses of Lodz. The elections were carried out on the Russian model in each of the idle factories, and each fifty of the former workmen were supposed to elect a delegate. It was a very thin muster that attended these meetings; the elections went by a rough-and-ready show of hands, and profane persons say that more delegates than voters were present. None the less for some weeks the Lodz Soviet exercised a little power. The Socialist and Peasant Government of Moraczewski was in office at Warsaw, and most of the rich men in town and country believed that a social revolution was at hand. It was a period of concessions and promises. Everywhere, in town and country, the policy of the Polish Badas (Soviets) was to demand from the employers what they called a "war-indemnity" for the workers. We should call it a "bonus." The usual claim was for 600 marks in a lump sum, for each man (£15 in exchange value, about £5 in purchasing power). With the cheapest kind of workman's shirt at 40 marks, and a pair of shoes with wooden soles at 70 or 80 marks, this "bonus" chiefly represented the means of buying a few clothes for the winter, or taking a blanket out of pawn. The manufacturers offered to meet this claim by lending ten million marks to the Government, but before the money could be raised the Socialist Peasant Cabinet, boycotted by the Entente, had fallen,1 1>It fell because Paris would not "recognize" it. At the subsequent elections the Conservative but demagogic "National Democrats" carried the day, because in every pulpit the priests declared that only to this party would the Entente grant money, food, and arms. and with M. Paderewski's coming, the propertied class recovered from its panic. There were tumultuous gatherings in Lodz—"riots" is not the word, for no one was hurt. One manufacturer was shut for twenty-four hours in his house. Others disappeared to Warsaw or Switzerland. In the end a few of them compromised the claim for fifty or a hundred marks. When I visited Lodz one felt that the Soviet existed on sufferance: the masters trusted to the firm hand of the police. All day long a squadron of mounted gendarmes, armed with carbine and lance, pranced up and down the principal streets. It was a conspicuous display of force, and the Polish police have rough hands, which readily used their weapons.1 1The police in Warsaw always carried rifles, and sometimes paraded the streets with fixed bayonets. During a strike, in a working-class street, I watched them searching casual passers-by, and breaking up little groups of even two or three gossiping neighbors by administering vicious blows with the butt of their rifles on the men's backs. A lad was audacious enough to laugh, and he got a lunge from a bayonet to teach him manners. The police seemed to he feeling their way. On one of the days of my visit a plenary sitting of the Bada had been "proclaimed," as they say in Ireland. The men with the long lances paraded outside the theater where it should have met, and the crowd of workmen melted sheepishly away.
The real success of the Soviet's work was, however, that the Government, represented locally by Socialist or semi-Socialist officials, began the systematic distribution of relief to the unemployed. The intention of the Lodz Soviet was to start public works. Drains, roads, railways—here was the chance to do all that the Russians had neglected. Two difficulties stood in the way, the Polish winter and an empty treasury. The Soviet, with scientific help, estimated with a table of food values in calories what the cost at present prices of a bare subsistence would be. Omitting new clothes and allowing only a little for repairs, it came for a family of two adults and two children to 15 marks a day. A few hundreds are now working at this wage. There are, however, in Lodz and the neighboring textile villages, no less than 253,900 human beings who belong to unemployed families. They are living now on a maximum dole of 5 marks for each family daily. I went over the big orderly department which manages the clerical work of this starving industrial army, and watched the queues at the pay desk. I got into talk with a group of German-speaking women who were waiting. How does one live on 35 marks a week in Lodz? From three of them I collected an average family budget: 20 marks for potatoes, with beet-root as a variation, 10 marks for bread (often uneatable), 15 marks for coal and wood (usually damp). "How much do you allow for meat or butter or milk?" The question raised a far from merry laugh. "We never see such things." "But," said I, "you are 10 marks out of the reckoning?" "We generally are," was the answer, and "then we have to sell something." It was no exaggeration. I went over some workmen's dwellings, old and new, good and bad. The nearly invariable rule was one room to a family. In one ten people slept on the floor. There was no bed, no bedding, no blanket. In another a table and a small bed remained in an otherwise absolutely empty flat. On the table were three books, a treatise on Logic, another on the higher Mathematics, and a History of Modern Thought. The young man who had pawned everything but his books was, needless to say, a Socialist. One old man still kept his violin, but his wife, he said, had no boots. In all but the most miserable rooms there were lithographs of the Madonna or the Saints upon the walls.
Why does Lodz endure in patience? For me those lithographs of the Saints supply the answer. With all its sky-scrapers and its machines that vie with Lancashire, with its half German civilization, and its memories of roaring trade, Lodz lives in two worlds. Its Jews in their black caps and gowns are straitly bound to the Law. Even its Lutherans tend to pietism. Its Catholic faith is sufficiently alive to be original. It has one church which has broken with Rome and set up a sort of Hussite organization, with married priests and the Eucharist in both kinds. It has a numerous Order of men and women vowed to obedience, chastity, and poverty, who live in common but work at their ordinary trades in shop and mill, without distinctive dress. That expedient was adopted by the ardent piety of the Poles, when the Russians forbade the entry of any fresh novices into the recognized monastic Orders. These lay monks and nuns, who spin and weave and build, with horny hands, in workmen's clothes, are probably the most effective propagandist force which the Church possesses in Poland. Whenever I entered a church it seemed to be crowded, and crowded with men who would stand unwearied through long sermons and services which had little musical attraction. One could not mistake the deep feeling of the rapt faces or the fervor of the voices that joined in the singing. Religion pervades everything in Poland. There are Catholic Trade Unions, Jewish Trade Unions, and Socialist, which means secular, Trade Unions, each sharply separated from the rest. There is a Clerical Labor Party, a Socialist Labor Party, and no less than three Jewish parties. Of the eight seats in the Diet, the Lodz Socialists won only two, while three went to the Clericalist Labor Group. The obtrusive machinery of repression struck me as superfluous. It is not the lancers that keep starving Lodz in order. Its protector is that Madonna on the garret walls. She can stifle the promptings of unrest, and teach the proletarian to hug his chains. The wonder-worker has performed every moral miracle save one: she has never yet touched the heart of a mill-owner in Lodz.
Warsaw, March, 1919.