VII
POLAND AS BARRIER
As I write, the Polish Constituent Assembly is engaged in discussing two resolutions which express the will of the Polish nation to conclude an alliance and a military convention with the Powers of the Entente. London seems incredibly far away, and New York as distant as the next century. It is not easy to bring this resolution into any relation with the projects of disarmament and a League of Nations which still, one gathers, occupy public opinion at home.1 1I wrote this under the belief that Alliances and the League are incompatible, or as Mr. Wilson put it, that there must be "no league, alliance, or special covenants or understandings within the general and common family of the League of Nations." I even supposed that he meant what he said, when he declared that he would join "no combination of power which is not a combination of all of us." Clearly an alliance of France with Poland, Bohemia, and Roumania is no worse than an alliance of Britain and America with France. For the average educated Pole the League of Nations is at best a doubtful dream. The reality is that Poland contrived in the first months of her existence to involve herself in war with all her neighbors on all four fronts at once. Talk to a Pole of the League of Nations, and he will answer that the idea is alluring, but will it guard his four frontiers? The idea of an impartial League may possess a certain sublimity, but he prefers a sure friend to a just judge.
On public occasions it is of the Entente that the Poles are accustomed to speak. In private they talk only of France. Indeed, when one travels in Central Europe, in Vienna as in Warsaw, one perceives that of all the Allies, it is France alone that counts. Hers is the dominant army, hers is the coveted alliance. It is not too much to say that she is in process of establishing a military hegemony over Europe. The Poles propose to place themselves under the supreme command of Marshal Foch, and expect the early arrival of a French staff to instruct, and in effect to control, the Polish army. The idea of a military convention is universally accepted. Poland has accepted the róle which Allied oratory and the Allied Press assign to her. She is to be the "barrier" of "civilization" against Germany on the one hand and Russia on the other. Whether the actual military convention with France, will specifically pledge her to act against Russia, as well as against Germany, is not yet known. In any event she receives her place in the ring of little States, which are to receive their marching orders from Paris. Germany will once again adjust herself to the old prospect of a war on both fronts, and the Poles proudly prepare themselves for the róle of "barrier" that has been assigned to them. In the French military system Poland occupies the place which Russia has vacated. She is the Eastern
half of the mechanism of encirclement, That old saying of Napoleon's, that Poland is "the keystone of the European arch," is current once more. The magic of the old Napoleonic tradition still works, and Polish families count with immense satisfaction the ancestors who were loyal even at Leipzig. The youth of Poland is not fatigued by years of war as the rest of Europe is. Its romantic impulse is unsatisfied, and Poland aspires to play her part in Europe—even the part of a barrier.
One cannot live for a month among this gentle and hospitable people without acquiring a keen sympathy for them. In me it works critically. This róle which the Allies propose—or the only Ally with whom men seem to reckon here—may seem to the Poles an honor. To me it rings like a doom. Five and twenty millions of Poles amply provided with the causes, if not with the means, of strife are to face sixty million Germans in the West and a hundred million Russians in the East. The last intention which Nature was aware of, when Poland emerged from the glaciers, was to make of it a barrier. From Germany, across the whole land inhabited by Poles, stretches an almost featureless plain. A more dreary and monotonous landscape in winter I have never seen. The Russians in their barbaric way were right. The only way to make an effective barrier of Poland is to devastate it, as in 1812 and again in 1915 they devastated its eastern region. If the Poles realize their economic plans, that pitiable defense is gone. The legendary Polish mud will be traversed by causeways. Railways will lead to every lonely village. Canals will drain the waterlogged soil, and even the famous marshes of the Pripet will be dry. Such a Poland would be no barrier, but rather a broad highway. Then, of course, it is the manhood of Poland which will be the wall. The French are good instructors. If one assumes that a partly ruined France can afford to create a modern army in Poland, with all the necessary fortifications and war-industries, the thing can in time be done—always provided that Poland receives her naval port at Danzig, and, on either side of the roads that lead to it, controls no mere "corridor" but a broad defensible territory.
Let no one suppose, however, that the creation of this Polish army will be morally or materially an easy task. To-day this army lacks everything save spirit. One may see the young recruits in Warsaw marching through the streets with the "Wacs," and those fantastic Polish bluejackets who constitute a navy without ships. They sing as they march old songs and new, sad songs and gay, for this race is gifted in its emotional life. It sings itself into its four wars, ready to win again the laurels of prowess which history, a niggard in all else, has never denied to the Poles. I saw two companies at Pinsk march out against the Bolsheviki. It was night; a bitter east wind was blowing, and the tread of the men rang on ground frozen by many degrees of frost. They had no greatcoats and no blankets. Some had no uniforms, forms, and some had no shirts. Their rifles were of three patterns. Their rations were one tin of soup, a little bread, and a little substitute-coffee daily. Morally, the army, for all its superb patriotism, is somewhat divided. One school, the young democratic element, trained in General Pilsudski's Legion, fought on the side of the Central Powers, because for them Tsarist Russia was the enemy of enemies. The senior officers, however, for the most part are Poles from beyond the borders, sons of landowning families, who made a military career in the Russian army. They are steeped in Russian traditions of discipline, imbued with the Russian aristocrat's attitude towards the peasant and the private, disposed to intervene in strikes with the knout. They have, in a word, the mind of the "White Guards." Two years ago these Legionaries and these Russo-Polish officers were facing each other in the trenches at Pinsk. To-day they are creating a Polish army. One school or the other will dominate.
What, next, is the economic plight of this people which is invited to make of itself a rampart? Its industry stands still. The cotton mills of Lodz have been idle for four years.1 1In March the British Economic Mission to Poland recommended the instant supply of adequate raw materials to restart the textile industry ruined by the blockade. By the end of June some cotton had arrived, supplied by the Americans. The British Wool Control, though admittedly we had ample and indeed excessive stocks, refused to supply any for Poland. The difficulty was credit. On the books of the labor exchanges there are already of unemployed urban workers and their dependents a quarter or even a third of the population of the towns. Food prices have risen from ten to twelve times. Wages have risen from four to five times. The most careful calculation which sociologists and doctors can make, goes to show that, for a family of five, food alone ought to cost, for bare subsistence, 17 to 20 marks daily. That calculation includes neither meat nor butter, neither tea nor coffee. Add a matter of 5 marks for other needs (heat, light, clothes, rent) and one reaches a total of 25 marks for daily needs. The unskilled laborer in the towns earns at most 15 marks. It is only the most highly paid individuals in the most skilled trades who ever reach this subsistence minimum of 25 marks. The unemployed may buy bread, potatoes, and fuel with their daily dole of 5 marks for a maximum family but that is all that they can buy. A temporary condition, you will say? But some of the factories are destroyed, as much by Russians as by Germans. Week by week returning prisoners, deportees, and seasonal workers pour back from Russia and from Germany. They crowd together in any available shelter, dirty, unclad, half-fed, and typhus takes its toll. Their numbers will add hundreds of thousands yet to the total of the unemployed.
There is in "Congress" Poland itself nearly enough food to go round, if the administration were strong enough to deal with the hoarder and the profiteer. Across the River Bug the starving country begins and stretches eastwards till it melts into the misery of Russia. There the barrier reels with hunger. This eastern zone, which is the barrier against Russia, is not even Polish. The Polish minority is a fraction. The town populalation is chiefly Jewish, the peasants Ukrainians, or "White" Russians. The Polish garrison has no illusions about the attitude of these races. To secure itself against a hostile population, it has no expedient but force.
The real Poland, the true Pole will tell you, is neither in the Borderland nor yet in the towns. The peasants are the Polish nation. I have been in the villages, and though they have a bare sufficiency of coarse food, their discontent is even more active than that of the townsmen. Nowhere in many wanderings, not even in Turkey or the West of Ireland, have I seen farm laborers living in such misery. By unspeakable roads, mere tracks of mud or sand, one approaches the manor-house, in which the whole civilization of the country-side is concentrated. Here alone is there comfort and wealth. One finds in the stables blood horses and pedigree cattle housed with every attention to hygiene. It has not occurred as yet to the Polish aristocrat to reckon his laborers' cottages among the amenities of his estate. These cottages, in the relatively prosperous district which I visited (Vloclawek), were all built upon the same plan, on estate after estate. A low and often dilapidated square cottage is divided into four rooms. In each of these rooms an entire family, which may number from four to nine persons, is housed. The rooms are squalid, the furniture scanty, the bedding thin and dirty. The floor is usually of beaten clay. The ground round the houses is something between a morass and a dung heap, and the pig sleeps with the family at night, for fear of robbers. Sanitation there is none. The money wages may reach the magnificent sum of 80 marks a year—which in these days would buy two shirts.
There is, of course, in addition some payment in kind—grain, potatoes, and pasturage for a cow—but there is also the obligation to find or to hire a youth as assistant laborer.1 1In this primitive system of labor definitely servile conditions survive. The landlord considers, when he hires and houses a laborer, that he has a right to the services of his whole family. If the laborer has no child of working age, he is expected to hire a youth, boy or girl, as assistant (posylka). He must himself feed and house this posylka, and this youth must sleep with the married couple in their one room. The rate at which the laborer hires the posylka is much higher than the wage which the landlord pays on his account. I reckoned, after full inquiry, that the laborer has often a deficit of 100 marks a year on account of the wages of the posylka, without reckoning his keep. He balances this loss only by selling all the produce of his cow. It rarely happens in these days that the milk or butter from that cow can be spared for the laborer's children. The case of the peasant who owns a small but insufficient holding is in some ways rather worse. He goes out as a day-laborer at 1½ marks a day, and there is no extra payment in kind for him. The peasant with a dwarf-holding is even more easily exploited than his landless brother, for he is tied to his plot of ground.
The explanation of these conditions is simple. Poland is over-populated, and in spite of the immense seasonal migration in normal times to Germany, and the permanent emigration to both Americas, the landlord has always had a teeming labor-market at his command. In the last year of peace no less than 358,000 migratory laborers went to Germany for the agricultural season, and 52,000 to other countries. Exclusive of the Jews, 174,000 Poles emigrated in the same year to the United States. One must also reckon the miners, who worked in the Westphalian and Belgian coal-pits, and the emigrants who went to South America. In the near future most of these outlets will be closed, for the Polish State has forbidden the migration of contract laborers to Germany, while the United States proposes to stop emigration for four years. The exodus to France will be encouraged, but it will not balance the closing of other fields for this immense export of labor. A considerable development of industry would absorb some of this surplus labor, but neither the capital nor the technical skill for any great extension of manufacture exists in Poland: this solution, if it is available, will be gradual and slow. An improvement in the methods of agriculture would go far to employ this floating population. Cultivation in Poland is still very primitive: it is reckoned that whereas in Silesia sixty days of labor in the year are required to cultivate an acre, in Galicia the average is only forty days. Better farming, on that showing, might employ three men, where two suffice to-day. But, undoubtedly, the tendency will be to seek a solution in the colonization of the non-Polish Eastern Borderland with Polish settlers. It is commonly said that this country is sparsely peopled, but on the other hand the soil is sandy and there is much marsh and forest. From this area also laborers used to migrate and emigrate. A considerable portion of the population fled into Russia during the war, and its rights deserve prior consideration. Assuredly the native population will not welcome Polish settlers. On the other hand, the Polish landed class has every interest in diverting the land-hunger of their own peasants to this region, for they hope in this way to weaken the demand for the partition of their own estates by satisfying it at the expense of proprietors in the East. The Imperialism of the Poles, who claim all these non-Polish lands, which once were subject to their historic Kingdom, is more than an antiquarian sentimentalism. It has its real root in the pressure of population in overcrowded Poland. Its satisfaction would delay agrarian reform in Poland, and make in the Borderland itself a bitter racial war. The countryside has been in ferment since the Germans marched away last November. Organized by the Peasants' Party (Populists), a vigorous radical class-organization, the rural workers, small-holders and landless laborers alike, have acted boldly and acted together. At first they concentrated on a demand for a "war bonus"—a lump sum usually fixed at 300 marks (£6 at the present exchange) which would bring them some small share of the landowner's wartime prosperity, and enable them to buy a few clothes or boots. Many of them received a fraction of what they asked. Then came a whole series of more constructive demands, for a 600 mark yearly money wage, for two-room cottages, for the abolition of the hired assistant system, for free schools and free medical attendance. Strikes have been continuous all over the country, but since the strikers could rarely bring themselves to neglect the landlord's cattle, a strike in winter meant little. The real struggle will begin next month (April). That is only the foreground of the agrarian question in Poland. Behind these urgent demands there is the far more formidable agitation for the partition of big estates. Everywhere in eastern Europe the feudal system is crumbling. The Polish peasants are no more Bolsheviki than were the Land Leaguers who followed Davitt and Parnell, but they are no less in earnest. They are intensely Catholic. Their tradition of loyalty, not to say servility, to masters seemed unshakable. But this winter the laborer who on Monday bowed almost to the ground as he doffed his cap to his master, was on some estates capable on Tuesday of lodging his master up, until he accepted the new charter of rights. The two Peasant groups in the Diet propose, with the support of the Socialists, to break up all estates for subdivision among the landless laborers and the owners of uneconomic holdings. They would leave to the landlord no more than 200 or 150 morgen (100 or 75 acres), which they regard as the maximum which any one owner should be allowed to possess. Beside this main demand they ask also for the division of Church and State lands and of the confiscated Russian estates. The various landowners' parties are ready for one degree of compromise or another, but none of them will concede what is likely to satisfy the peasants. The struggle will be acute, but the peasants will win.
In this rapid inventory of the human contents of the Polish barrier, space fails me for details, but I cannot omit the Jews. It is, I am afraid, no exaggeration to say that the whole of Polish society in all classes is now deeply impregnated with anti-Semitism. More serious by far than the pogroms, is the daily round of insult and violence and the denial of economic opportunity which the Jews must endure. The Jews are 14 per cent, of the population of "Congress" Poland, and outside it, if "historical" Poland is to form the new State, the proportion is much higher. The forcible assimilation of this immense alien mass is grotesquely impossible. The liberalism which will recognize its reasonable claim for its own self-governing schools, and translate the present legal equality into a real equality, finds but a feeble expression in the political world.
The unique feature of Polish politics is, indeed, that in all its many groups there is none which calls itself, and none which deserves to be called, liberal. The little middle-class group failed to return a single member, and plainly it has no future. The "National Democrats," subsidized by the landowners, thrive by anti-Semitism and Chauvinism. The Socialists are of the right wing, opportunist, inclined to nationalism, and withal few in numbers. The Peasants J Party (Populists) is a class agrarian organization. The few "intellectuals" who belong to it are idealists, but their influence is limited. This party, by far the most interesting and characteristic group in Polish politics, has to its credit a great work for education, even in the days of Russian rule. Its propagandists dike those of the Socialist Party) struggled, with the Tsar's secret police ever on their track, to keep alive the flame of nationality, to teach something of Polish history, to educate the illiterate peasantry, and to promote the agrarian Co-operative Movement. Generous and romantic, these patriots had often to face Siberia, and none of them would have risked this life of devotion, unless they had had something of the knight errant in their blood. One of these ladies, now a deputy, used to teach Polish history in the girls' schools of Warsaw, but the subject was forbidden, and the lesson was given under the disguise of a course in dressmaking. These pioneers, most of them at one time Socialists, are now engaged in educating the party, which is represented in the Diet by genuine horny-handed peasants, who wear their national dress. Five days a week these peasant deputies attend lectures on history, literature, and economics in their club. All that is good and much that is evil in Poland seems to have its root in romance. Yesterday this secret conspirators' struggle with Stardom: to-day the four wars for the historic frontier.
I will conclude my inventory with the Bolsheviki, or Communists, as they are called here. They manage to elect about one-third of the delegates of the Workers' Councils. In spite of the preventive arrest of most of their leaders, and the suppression of their newspapers, their numbers certainly grow among the unemployed. In Warsaw, where certain Trade Unions are definitely Communist, and others Socialist, Catholic, or Jewish, the unemployed belonging to the Communist group were in February one in five in relation to the total number. As yet, however, their efforts are shattered on the solid patriotism of the Polish workers. Their attempt to organize a two days' demonstration strike a fortnight ago, at a moment of grave military danger, was a failure, save in two advanced districts. None the less they have their crucial importance. They serve the Polish reaction as an invaluable bogey. Every day the State is in dire peril. Every day the clamor for fresh measures of repression grows louder. Every day the Diet listens to detailed stories of the excesses of the armed gendarmerie (formed on the Russian tradition), and after listening, it votes for further restrictions and severities. The reaction is striking behind the Communists at the whole working-class movement.
When I walk about in the slums of Warsaw and Lodz, watch the bread queues, glance at the crowded one-room dwellings from which all but the last sticks of furniture are gone, when I see the pinched and listless children, or study statistics of the almost vanished birth-rate, and the death-rate swollen by typhus, I marvel that Poland is not revolutionary. There are several reasons. It is intensely Catholic. Again, it has not learned by active war how easy it is to kill.1 1 In a Polish country town, shortly after the departure of the Germans, the local militia caught a group of smugglers with a rich booty. Shortly after, it allowed them to escape. "But you had rifles," their superiors objected; "Why did you not shoot?" "Would you have us kill men for a bale of smuggled goods?" was the answer. In Frankfurt this spring, the authorities tried to arrest a woman in the market-place for selling illicit lottery tickets. Her clients resisted, and presently began to shoot. The shooting spread all over the town, and lasted for two or three days until it came at length to machine guns. The Germans have acquired the habit of killing. Even the Poles are learning it now. Bolshevism to the average Pole appears only as a new phase of the familiar Russian peril. Three years ago the Russians quitted Poland, as Poles intend, for ever. Once more they threaten her borders, and simple Poles think of Trotsky and his Red Army only as the successors of the Tsar and his Cossacks. Bolshevism is not merely a foreign doctrine, it is a Russian doctrine, and it comes with arms in its hands. Amid its manifold perils the tribal instinct that unites the Polish race is stronger by far than the class instinct that divides. But, above all, Poland hopes. Russia, Germany, Hungary were gripped by despair. Poland has risen from the tomb, and beyond the trials of to-day it sees a glorious resurrection. But the resurrection of what? If the barrier is put to an early test, with its defenseless frontiers, its unclad army, its hunger zone beyond the Bug, its half-starved unemployed, its wronged peasants wakening from the drugged sleep of centuries, its Jews the one hopeless element in these millions, is there a chance that the dikes will hold? If the perilous moment goes by, is the prospect better if Poland, ruling it may be, her three million annexed Germans, her five million unassimilated Jews, her hostile Lithuanian and Ukrainian subjects, consolidates herself under French instruction as a military power? How long, even with iron discipline, could such a state stand as a barrier, when at length the delayed wave broke from east or west?
Danzig is the symbol of the choice. If Danzig is annexed, it will be because the Allies have assigned to Poland this perilous military róle. If Danzig remains a German city, and Poland secures only "those indisputably Polish populations" promised her in the Fourteen Points, her military róle indeed is over, but her hope of peaceful evolution begins. Let the Allies pour in their food and their raw materials. Let them meet this scourge of hunger and unemployment by ample grants and loans of money. They cannot do too much for this stricken and infinitely patient people. To Poland they can give only one fatal gift—the means of embarking on an imperialist career. Let them bid her live on good terms with her neighbors, and seek her future rather as a link than as a barrier.1 1Barrier, unhappily, it is to be. The Entente decided that in order to obtain access to the sea, Poland must annex a broad "corridor" leading to Danzig. That city, though it secures autonomy, comes also under Polish sovereignty. In order to make a broad, strategic corridor, some purely German towns and some predominantly German districts are included. A German minority (between two and three millions) will be subject to Polish conscription. East Prussia is left as an isolated German island. Plebiscites are to decide the future of Upper Silesia and of parts of East Prussia. That is well, but they are apt to be under Allied, not neutral supervision, and a strange provision requires the dissolution of the Workers' Councils in these areas. In any event, under present conditions, a vote for German citizenship is a vote to share in ruin. Even more indefensible is the decision to annex to Poland Eastern Galicia, with its Ukrainian population, and its desirable oil-wells. The barrier, if Allied strategists rely upon it, will crumble away at the first serious shock.
Warsaw, March 30th.