V
ON THE MARGIN OF RUSSIA
I remember the satisfaction of our more correct newspapers, when the Russians retired in 1915, beyond the River Bug, devastating the country as they went. Our military writers recalled the tactics of 1812, and predicted for the enemy the fate of Napoleon. One reasons otherwise, when one has seen the devastation. It was carried out in Cossack style, with more feeling than plan. At Brest-Litovsk, the town of the ill-omened peace, the greater part of the Jewish quarter lies in ruins. That work was done with comparative thoroughness, and with some zest in the task. The great railway station, however, was only singed. The immense barracks, a small town in itself, was left intact. Even the citadel with its stores was only partly damaged. When the Germans marched in, they found rails and stores for all their needs, and the barracks opened their comfortable doors. They stand to-day as the Russians left them, save only that the Germans have painted moral proverbs and edifying rhymes upon the whitewash. Out in the countryside the same scene of desolation confronts the traveler. Jewish and Catholic villages have been burned with moderate care. Ruin is all that remains to record the Russian memory. The Germans, to do them justice, have left behind them some traces of constructive work—a bridge here, a road there, an engine-house in a wayside station—and they gave facilities for the rebuilding from the State forests of the peasants' houses of wood.
From all this border belt the population was ruthlessly driven as the Russians retired. Most of it went Far East, to Orenburg on the remotest verge of Europe, and to-day, fleeing from one scene of misery, it returns to another. They are streaming back from starving Russia to starving Poland, and when they reach their villages it is to find the ashes of their homes amid untilled fields. On the way from Warsaw to Brest, at a junction named Lukow, we had met a score of these peasants, women and men, conspicuous in their sheepskin coats and their gay costumes embroidered in red and yellow. They had come that morning to Lukow from a village two hundred miles away, and they were going back by the next train. The purpose of their visit? They point to their sacks of flour. In their own village there is none to buy, nor is there any nearer than Lukow. "Is not the journey very costly?" we ask. They have money, they say. They were driven into Russia by the Cossacks in 1915, and they have only just come back. A man draws out of his belt a wallet full of Russian roubles. They were well paid under the Bolsheviks, they say. And now? "Our houses are burned, and we have no bread." The train came in, and they scurried off to their military truck labeled "40 men 6 horses." An old woman falls under her sack. A young girl bursts into tears as she tries to lift her burden. Shouting, pushing, thumping, the guard at last has packed them in.
Of the inhabitants who escaped the Cossacks, not all remained at home. Some went freely to work in Germany, but thousands were deported by force. In the great empty barracks at Brest you may see specimens of both these migrations, with detachments of war-prisoners in addition. The families camp in the big rooms, and an overworked superintendent attempts to sort out the sick for a hospital which lacks every necessity save human kindness. There is no white bread, no sugar, no milk to be had, even for the hospital, and of drugs there are next to none. The refugees return with typhus among them, but disinfectants are almost wholly lacking, and of sulphur there is none. The few doctors are busy all day among the refugees and in the fever hospital of the town. Out in the villages there is neither doctor nor nurse, nor any one to aid. Typhus is a winter disease, and the day of its power is nearly over now, but it will be followed by influenza, dysentery, and cholera as the summer draws on.
Brest, of the cruel peace, is no happy place to-day. It is still largely a Jewish town. An old. long-bearded Jew, dressed, as all Orthodox Jews are dressed in the East, in a long black gown and a little black cap, led me to the Rabbi, praising him as we walked. In the Rabbi's study a woman, wearing some red and white ritual stole over her dress, was reading what I took to be prayers, as I entered. It was the eve of Purim. She went on undisturbed, and spoke to me only when she had reached a stopping-place. The room was lined with a big library which contained no books in any profane language. In this little cell the Word was in Hebrew. The Rabbi himself was a gentle old man, with a worn and spiritual face, which recalled to me Spinoza's, save for the long gray beard. He talked a rapid and very peculiar German which was apt to verge into Yiddish, but we contrived to understand each other. He first told me the tale, which I was to hear from every Jew in a sort of crescendo, until I reached Pinsk. The town lived in daily fear under the Polish military occupation. It must be explained that the Polish officers are firmly convinced that every Jew is a Bolshevik, and even that every Jewish house (as the General put it) harbors a Jewish spy or a Red Guard in hiding. It is true that some of the Jewish Socialist youth of this district have joined the Bolsheviks, but an honest man who believes that these old long-bearded Orthodox Jews feel anything but horror at the thought of a social revolution must have parted with his wits. The result of this belief is that the Jews live in a state of minor terror—the technical name is "minor siege." It is a crime to be out after seven at night, and one hears in the dark the frequent crack of the sentries' rifles. All Hebrew or Yiddish inscriptions have been removed from shops, schools, and Jewish hospitals. I was told in some detail of local Jews who had been shot as Bolsheviks by field court-martial. The Jewish community vouched for their innocence, but it could only plead, after the event, that they should not be buried as criminals. Every day, it seems, the soldiers sally out into the street, catch the first Jew they meet, and drag him with insults, or even with blows, into the barracks, to perform menial duties unpaid. Several of the Jews of Brest recounted to me their personal experience of this treatment, and they declared that as many as twenty cases of the kind occur in a day. At Pinsk I heard the same thing, and even at Warsaw this system went on in the first month after the Germans left. The Rabbi took me to visit the crowded families who once had lived in the burned quarter of Brest. They were living, camped in little family groups in a big barnlike upper room, sick and whole, young and old, closely packed together. Some were ill, and there was no doctor. The Jewish doctor, it seems, had died some days before. "Why not call a Polish doctor?" I asked. The answer was a bitter smile and a gesture that denoted the impossible. All were hungry, but I saw the accounts of the incredible sums which the local community had expended to buy them bread. These Jewish refugees, let me add, were very much cleaner, and more careful of decency and sanitation, than most of the Christians in the same case.
Pinsk lies a weary journey of eight hours by train from Brest. Ours was a military train—there are no others—and the trucks were filled partly with young soldiers going to the front, and partly with peasants who had made a distant excursion to buy bread. A fierce east wind was blowing, and icicles hung from the station pumps. Our engine leaked, and it had to be watered by hand with buckets, a process that took at each station on an average an hour. The Polish soldiers were mostly youths. None of them had greatcoats, and not all of them had uniforms. In this state, by full moon, I watched them marching out to face the Bolshevik, who are skirmishing twelve miles beyond the town. In the town itself there marched slowly, at the goose-step, a patrol of Russian "White Guards." All of them were officers. They were well dressed, and physically splendid men. They sang as they moved slowly onward, a haunting melancholy Russian chorus. For them too in this town of misery one tried to spare pity. They have lost everything save the hope of vengeance.
Poland proper has not enough to eat, and what it has is fabulously dear. But Poland proper is not literally starving. East of the River Bug begins the zone of famine. At Pinsk one enters a sample of Russia. It has changed hands thrice in six months. The Germans were followed by the Ukrainians (Petliura's men): they were driven out by the Bolsheviki: the Poles took over the starving town (only a madman would defend it) three weeks ago. East of the Bug, it must be explained, the Polish population is a small minority, consisting of the landlords and a small part of the townsmen. The towns and larger villages are overwhelmingly Jewish. The peasants are in the south, Ukrainian, and in the north, White Russians. Their distinguishing characteristics are land-hunger and Orthodoxy. Some, indeed, had already sacked the Polish manor-houses, as a preliminary to the division of the land. The Bolsheviki sacrificed no lives. Their pillaging in any nor any constructive monument behind them, but while they certainly pillaged to some extent, it must also be recorded that in the town the Bolsheviki sacrificed no lives. Their pillaging in any event was much less than that which the Polish troops carried out in the first hours of their arrival. The Jews maintain that their community lost no less than three million roubles. That sounds like an exaggeration, but I heard details from individual Jews (of course, without proof), who were respected in their own circles, of robberies ranging from 5,000 to 100 roubles. So far, the Polish occupation is by far the harshest which Pinsk has experienced, from Tsarist days downwards. The military know that they are unwelcome, and they seek, because their forces are wholly inadequate, to secure themselves by severity. The leaders of the Ukrainian (Orthodox) population are mostly in prison and their newspapers have been suppressed. "We know," said the young officer who acted as commandant of the town, "that the villages are hostile. It has been decided to burn some of them, and decimate the inhabitants." That young man was in a responsible position of command, and he appeared to mean what he said.1 1 This threat was spoken with so much brutality, and accorded so well with all that I observed of the treatment of the Jews in Pinsk by the Polish officers, that I determined to report it. The context of the Commandant's speech showed that he meant that it had been literally decided to make an example by shooting one in ten. On my return to Warsaw I went straight to the President, General Pilsudski, who listened with attention but without surprise to what I told him, and promised to take prompt action. Ten days later, as the Jews of Pinsk were holding a meeting of their Community to discuss measures for the relief of the poor, the troops surrounded the building and arrested those present to the number of seventy. Without even the pretense of a trial and without any definite charge one in two were shot on the spot. For this Jewish-Orthodox land under Polish rule I can see no happy future. Military severities will cease sooner or later. Flour and medicines from America arrived on the day after I left. But the agrarian and political problems remain. The Polish plan is to colonize this country with Polish settlers, which is much what the Germans did in Posen.
Nearly every shop in the broad streets of wooden houses is closed. There is literally nothing to sell. The four Jewish Co-operative Stores are all closed. I found the Catholic Co-operative Store open, however, in a Franciscan Monastery on whose walls a late seventeenth-century fresco showed the saint preaching in a powdered wig and peach-colored coat to the birds. I examined its whole stock with care. Its stock consisted of salt, and of literally nothing else. Up till the departure of the Germans there was food in Pinsk. The ration was small, and the quality was bad, but it was very cheap and it was fairly distributed. Since they left, the town has come each week a little nearer to complete starvation. The price of a loaf of nearly uneatable "black" bread is now from five to nine "Tsar's roubles," and even so it is hard to find. On the day of my visit, the Jewish Orphanage and the Almshouse were entirely without either bread or fuel. I went round a number of homes in working-class streets. A few families still had a stock of potatoes (there are none to buy), and the rest were living chiefly on chestnuts or carrots or beet-root. The police told me that men and women frequently faint from hunger in the streets, and I actually saw two corpses of men skeletons, half-clothed in rags. The people are now almost too weak to help themselves, and though there are woods not far away, it is hard to find a man, and harder still to find a horse, fit to fetch fuel. The birth-rate had fallen last year (1918) from a normal thirty-one per thousand to seven. The death-rate had risen from fifteen to twenty-nine. The figures to-day must be very much worse. Old women came crying round me like gibbering Homeric ghosts, so light they seemed, murmuring that they were cold, and children with white lips, pinched faces, and transparent hands. This day was, I hope, the worst for Pinsk. Five trucks of American flour were expected in the evening. That is a very small store, and when the next will come no one knows. For the villages no help is yet in sight. Most of them lie far from the railway, and even on the railway the few trucks and engines are all required for the war against the Bolsheviks. Poland (always responsive to Parisian opinion) has rejected repeated overtures of peace from Moscow. For an indefinite time to come this hungry country must take its chance among military needs.
Another vivid memory stands out from this journey to the edge of Russia. It is of a night spent halfway between Brest and Pinsk in the lonely country-house of a Polish landlord. A courteous scholarly man, with a tall ancestral tree, he spent his life in a library well stocked with ancient books. He had some beautifully printed sixteenth-century classics, but I think he read the Fathers more often than his Elzevir Horace. I looked at the names and dates in these books, which showed how this race, living amid the Russian darkness of this Borderland, had handed down its Latin and Catholic culture from father to son through three centuries. This old stock had descended at last to the simplicity of barbarism. Out beyond the little wood, with its friendly crows, amid which the house stood, the land was desert. The village had been burned, and the peasants had followed the Cossacks somewhere over the gleaming Pripet marshes into the depths of Russia. The fields had gone out of cultivation, and this lonely civilized man camped amid the ruin like some Crusoe on his island. His son indeed lived with him, a spirited young man of nineteen or twenty; I had taken him at first for a retainer of the house, for he wore the roughest peasant clothes, and I could hardly believe my ears when he addressed me unexpectedly in French. The war had ended his schooling, and now he drove the plow and planted the potatoes on which he and his father subsisted. The house was all but empty of furniture. Twice a Bolshevik band had sacked it from cellar to garret, once the Bolsheviks had threatened his life, and the Polish troops as they advanced had taken the little that the Bolsheviks had left. Money and clothes, horses and cattle, and the family heirlooms of many generations—all were gone. The old man none the less was serene. A cousin who shared our dinner of potatoes was in still worse case: his peasants had burned his house down, and driven him out into the wilderness. Our host looked back on the goings and comings of Cossacks and Germans1 1 So far from robbing him, the Germans during their stay had improved his property for him. and Bolsheviks, and still he survived, and his home stood foursquare. He pointed to an image of the Virgin over the doorway: "Who knows," he murmured, "perhaps it was She who saved me." His most cherished treasures too had tempted none of the robbers. We sat in his library talking and handling the books through half the night. He talked of Carlyle, for whom he had a peculiar veneration, and then digressed to Mary Stuart, whose history, romantic Pole that he was, he had studied with minute care. He talked with much eloquence of Cicero, and the frailties of that eminent stylist moved him to a contempt more vivid and passionate than he felt for any living statesman. He talked of the storks and the crows, and other happy creatures whom he loves in the wood around his home. He talked of his forefathers who had played a man's part in Polish history, and as he said good-night, he recited for me the musical prayer in Latin verse that tradition ascribes to Mary Stuart. I bade him and his empty house a regretful good-by, for it seemed to me that the ruined culture to which it belonged is a thing more gracious and dignified by far than the monstrous births of our age. Another decade of wars and blockades and revolutions, and every relic of learning and humanity may be swept away from the Rhine to the Volga. There must have been, when the barbarians surged over the Roman provinces in the twilight centuries, lonely villas, left standing amid the ruins of the Empire, in which old men survived, conning Greek manuscripts in pillaged rooms, while the Goths enjoyed their wealth. Not all at once, nor without the flicker of a false dawn, did the darkness compass them around.
As the months of desolation lengthened into years, these old men hoped for the return of civilization, and dying prayed that their sons would live to see it. Their sons lived like barbarians, dimly remembering the interrupted studies of their youth. Their sons' sons were barbarians born.
Warsaw, March 28, 1919.