The White Eagle of Poland

by E. F. Benson

“With friendly feelings and cordially-outstretched hands the Great Russian Empire steps forward to meet you. The sword that conquered the enemy at Grünwald[13] has not grown rusty. From the shores of the Pacific Ocean to the Arctic Seas the Russian armies are marching. The dawn of a new life is breaking for you. May the sign of the Cross illuminate this dawn, symbol of the Passion and the resurrection of the nations.”

Now the meaning which it is natural to attach to this proclamation about which there is a vague and sumptuous magnificence, is that Russia intended (i) to grant independence to Poland; (ii) to restore to it (as it indeed states) freedom in religion, in language, and in self-government, thereby acknowledging that Poland, in spite of the promises made it, had not hitherto enjoyed these benefits; and (iii) to unite to it, “by the annihilation of the frontiers which divide it,” the territories which at the three partitions in 1772, 1793 and 1795, were assigned to Germany and Austria. Poland was henceforth to be free and united under the suzerainty of the Tsar. Owing to the defeat of the Russian armies by those of the Central Powers, the Government was never in a position to effect this reunion, for a year afterwards Galicia and the Kingdom of Poland were in the hands of the enemy.

But during that year no practical steps of any serious or sincere sort were taken to give the smallest effect to this proclamation, and, without cynicism, it seems more reasonable to suppose that the motive behind it was in the main a defensive one on the part of Russia with “disarming intent.” Russia was proposing to advance victoriously on Berlin and Vienna in the crushing manner of the steam-roller about which our Press was once so irresponsibly resonant, and she knew very well that to have in the rear of her armies a race that for a hundred years had seethed with discontent at the withholding of the freedom that had been promised it, was to court disaster. It would have been necessary for her security to leave at least 20 per cent. of her forces to guard the lines of communication, and ensure quiet and order; moreover, in the Russian armies were enrolled some 800,000 Poles, who were being led against the armies of the Central Empires, which contained nearly the same number of men of their own race, drawn from the districts of Posen, Silesia, West Prussia and Galicia, and love of Russia, founded on detestation of Germany, had to rise superior in the breasts of her Polish soldiers, to love of race. The mention, moreover, of Grünwald, and the Grand Duke’s confidence that the Polish sword had not grown rusty, indicate that Russia asked for Poland’s loyal and unstinted military support. The Poles, soldiers and civilians alike, were for the moment capable of being a grave menace to the Russian arms, and this proclamation, endorsed as it soon was by the Governments of the Entente, was the surest way of commanding their loyalty and co-operation. In fact, the Grand Duke Nicholas did precisely what Alexander I had done a hundred years before, when in the Napoleonic wars Poland was able to constitute a menace to Russia, and had proclaimed the independence of Poland, in order to kindle Polish enthusiasm on Russia’s behalf. On that occasion, Poland, as we have seen, did not respond to this invitation, but joined the cause of Napoleon, with the result that in place of the fulfilment of the fine words, there followed for her the Congress of Vienna, which, instead of giving her independence, but confirmed the partitions and ushered in a century of oppression.

A further point to be noted about this proclamation is that it contains no hint that the provinces of the ancient republic now part of the Russian Empire, such as Lithuania, should be included in the reunited Poland to which the Grand Duke alluded, or that Russia contemplated in the faintest degree placing within the frontiers of the new autonomous state those territories which for the last hundred years she had incorporated into herself, and which were in fact ethnographically non-Polish, since the bulk of their inhabitants were White Russians or Little Russians. The National Democrats, and their allied groups also, who for years had worked for the unity and independence of Poland, at that date made no such claim, though their policy to-day includes the reunion with Poland of these provinces, but they accepted the Grand Duke’s manifesto as meaning that Russia intended to reunite with the Kingdom of Poland, Prussian Poland and Austrian Poland, and to place the whole with self-government, under the sceptre of the Tsar. Had Russia advanced into Germany and Austria, and made good her advance, so that in conjunction with France and England she could have dictated a peace, it is pretty clear that this was what she meant to do, and she probably would have been obliged to do it, since the Grand Duke’s proclamation as regards Poland was presently endorsed by all the Allies.

Now Russia never had the opportunity of fully vindicating her good faith with regard to the proclamation, for while she was in a state of war, and must needs strain every nerve to the vigorous prosecution of that, it would have been unreasonable to expect her to devote energies to the accomplishment of her promise, and within a year her armies, as we have noticed, had retreated from the Kingdom of Poland and Galicia altogether, leaving the enemy in possession. But during that year the Russian Government, distrusting perhaps the effect of the Grand Duke’s proclamation, did not endorse it by any practical measure, but on the other hand preserved and pursued a policy which was distinctly anti-Polish. Notices on the railways and in other public places written in Polish were suppressed, and the Russian advance through Galicia was followed by the importation of civil servants from Russia to replace Poles. As a guarantee of good faith, the Government might at least have begun placing Poles in official positions hitherto held by Russians, but nothing of the sort was done. Up till August, 1915, when the Germans were at the gates of Warsaw, the Russian Government made no official announcement about Polish independence, nor did they take any practical steps to warrant sincerity. All that the Russian Government did with regard to the fulfilment of the Grand Duke’s proclamation during that period was to nominate a Russo-Polish Commission in May, 1915, with the object of elaborating a project of Polish autonomy. There were six Poles on this commission, including M. Dmowski and Count Wielopolski, and six Russian representatives under the Presidency of the Prime Minister Goremykin. They could not come to any agreement, and the Polish members thereupon drew up and presented to the Government their own proposals. These dealt with two points: (i) immediate changes in the administration of the Kingdom of Poland, (ii) a constitution for Poland which recognised her as a separate state, under the Russian sceptre. This project was never even considered by the Russian Government, and, as was only natural, the sincerity of the Grand Duke’s proclamation came to be seriously questioned. But it is most significant that at the moment of Germany’s advance into Poland, Goremykin, then Minister of the Interior in Russia, announced to the Duma the granting of autonomy to Poland. The object of this was perfectly clear: now, when the enemy was in possession, the Government at last confirmed the Grand Duke’s promises in order to prevent the Poles from embracing the cause of the Central Empires and furnishing recruits for their armies. The confirmation, in fact, of the original proclamation, unrealisable, since the German armies were in occupation, was made in the same spirit as the proclamation itself. We may then, I think, take it for granted that no independent Polish state, to include all the territories of ancient Poland, was ever for a moment contemplated by Russia, nor demanded by Polish Nationalists, and that, as far as practical steps can supply a criterion of motive, the proclamation of the Grand Duke was little more than a defensive measure against Polish disloyalty in the face of the enemy.

Had there been any seriousness of purpose in the Russian Government of granting Poland the national rights so long promised her and so long withheld, some earnest of that purpose would have been given during the year when Russia was in a position to do so. Nothing of the sort was done, and it was not till Germany was in occupation that the independence of Poland was announced to the Duma, and then again no hint of any reality behind this can be ever so faintly detected, for when the Tsar summoned a conference in February, 1917, to discuss the constitution of Poland, it got no further than to debate whether the Polish National prayer might in special circumstances be recited in church! This weighty question was left, as far as I can ascertain, undecided.

In their retreat the Russian armies did their utmost, in obedience to the necessity of the military situation, to render the country a desert in front of the advance of the Central Powers. According to the report of a Dutch Relief Committee, 5,000 villages were destroyed, two million head of cattle and a million horses were requisitioned or died from want of fodder, and 400,000 workmen were out of work. The Russians cut down trees and dragged them across the fields where the crops stood high, thus helping to create the famine from which Poland still suffers; they dismantled industrial establishments, smashing up the machinery and carrying away such as they could transport into Russia, and in the midst of the desert they had made there were left more than a million Polish peasants homeless and absolutely destitute. Others, the more able-bodied, fled in front of the retreating army, and the country was stricken with the sufferings and the horrors that resulted from the débâcle of the Russian armies. These acts of devastation were, no doubt, dictated by the military necessity, but it was no wonder that they produced the greatest bitterness in the minds of an indigent and starving population, to whom, less than a year before, independence had been promised and the dawn of the fulfilment of their national aspirations proclaimed. Those weeks of the retreat from Galicia and the Kingdom of Poland did more to embitter Polish feeling against Russia than decades of neglect and misrule. Instead of freedom, this military disaster gave them famine, and made a desert of the territory that had been promised liberty.

The native Polish population took the German entry into Warsaw in silent composure. They ignored, they disregarded it, except that in some of the streets blinds were drawn down, as if in protest or in mourning, when the troops passed. Hostile demonstrations were out of the question, but assuredly among the mass of the population there was no enthusiasm. After the manner in which the Russians had treated this unhappy country, both during the hundred years of their possession and at this crisis, it is no wonder that there possibly were, if the German accounts can be trusted, certain local exhibitions of thanksgiving over the removal of the Russian yoke, or that on the anniversary of the German entry in August, 1916, there was a demonstration, organised by the pro-German Club of the Polish state at the memorial set up at Warsaw to commemorate the death of Polish insurrectionists who had been shot by the Russians in 1864. Otherwise only the Jews, who constitute 35 per cent. of the inhabitants of Warsaw, hailed the Germans as deliverers, and on the same day on which the pro-German Club of the Polish state held their commemoration, we find recorded in the Warschauer Tageblatt, a Jewish organ, an enthusiastic celebration of the German entry, which proclaims that this day should be inscribed in golden letters in the records of Polish Jews. “The spirit of Europe,” it remarks, “entered in contrast to Asiatic tyranny,” and it speaks of the Sporting Clubs, the Scout Societies instituted by Germans, in which orders are given in Yiddish for the sake of the Jews now at length allowed to become members of them. For German administration proclaimed full equality for Jews, gave their children religious education, and admitted them to hold office in various state departments hitherto not open to them. This treatment of the Jews was part of German policy to accentuate the acute bad feeling already existing between them and the Poles, for anything, according to German views, which sows discord in the non-German population of her empire is to be encouraged, since it relatively increases her own ascendancy. But we cannot possibly take these demonstrations as illustrative of the Polish national spirit, for they were not of Polish but of Jewish origin. Beyond doubt the Poles, by now, bitterly detested the Russians, who had cajoled them with empty promises of which the fulfilment was famine, but they were not a whit the more friendly to the invaders.

Apart from the defeat of the Russian armies, Germany and Austria hoped that the acquisition of Poland would supply the Central Empires with man-power and with foodstuff. In both these respects they suffered a considerable disappointment, for neither came within leagues of their expectations. But they used the dearth of supplies caused by the destruction in the Russian retreat and augmented by the needs of their own armies as an instrument whereby they might encourage emigration of Poles into Germany for industrial work, while to accentuate the sharpness of this instrument both they and the Austrians laid hands on such foodstuffs as were available. Before the war the production of grain in Russian Poland completely covered the country’s own consumption, and a certain amount was exported; now, owing in part to the Russian destruction of crops, and in part to this commandeering of supplies, there was an acute bread famine. Train-loads of potatoes and wild geese left for Vienna, while Germany during the ensuing months managed to secure 253,000 wagons of provisions, chiefly corn and meat, from the districts of Lomza, Plock and Kalisch, where the Russian retreat seems to have been too hurried to allow systematic destruction, and setting her tabulating statisticians to work she calculated that Poland should be able to send annually into Germany sixty million eggs and a million wild geese. It was also ordained that Poland should support the army of occupation, and permission was given to soldiers to send parcels of food to their relatives in Germany, the contents of which should not be deducted from the rations of the recipients. Similarly all copper, tin, lead and pewter were requisitioned for the needs of the army. At the same time large quantities of seed-corn were brought into the country from Denmark, making a provision for the army and possibly for the Poles in future years.