The White Eagle of Poland

by E. F. Benson

The argument is now broad awake. It finds that on ethnological grounds Germany has a right to claim territory in the Dobrudscha, because among the 300,000 inhabitants of that district there are at least 10,000 German colonists. Germany therefore is entitled (on the principle she has always advocated of no annexation but the national right to national territory) to one-thirtieth of the acreage of the Dobrudscha. That will perfectly content her, and she claims a fraction of her one-thirtieth at the mouth of the Danube. On similar grounds she claims a similar footing in Bessarabia (otherwise Rumania) and takes her acres exactly opposite, on the other bank of the Danube. She is still below the estimate of her proper percentage of territory, and so our article alludes to a convenient island in the Black Sea called Schlangeisel, which is 50 kilometres from the mouth of the Danube, and that she likewise earmarks. There is a poetic suitableness in her getting this little island, for the article naively observes that Schlangeisel at the mouth of the Danube quaintly corresponds to Heligoland at the mouth of the Elbe.

Now the foregoing is a typical example of German reasoning, and it is allowable to wonder whether it even cares to deceive or is not rather a deliberate irony. In virtue of her German colonists, Germany is entitled to one-thirtieth of the Dobrudscha, and claims some paltry acres of this at the mouth of the Danube. A similar claim is advanced with regard to the other bank, and thus by judicious selection of her acreage Germany obtains precisely all she wants, i.e., control of the Danube, because she has a certain number of German colonists in the Dobrudscha; and to complete the acreage due to her she adds this convenient Schlangeisel. By a similar reasoning she might claim a few square miles of Great Britain in virtue of German residents there, and select for those few miles the city of London, or perhaps the harbours of Dover, Liverpool and Southampton.... It is faintly possible that this soberly-propounded German scheme may induce a more public comprehension of what Mittel-Europa stands for.

But the people who had never heard of Poland in the year 1914 must four years later be surprised at the frequency with which they have since then heard of it in the pronouncements of the Governments of the Entente. Again and again official statements about the objects for which the Allies are fighting, since the famous and unfortunately still-born proclamation of the Grand Duke Nicholas during the first fortnight of the war, have alluded to the Independence of a united Poland as one of the conditions on which the treaty of peace shall be based. Not unreasonably the public has asked “What has the war got to do with Poland?” But that a peace which postulates an independent and united existence for Poland is one of the irreducible minima of the Allies cannot escape the notice of the most careless reader. For beginning with the first pronouncement of the Grand Duke Nicholas, France by the mouths of MM. Clemenceau, Pichon and Ribot,[2] Italy by the mouth of Sig. Orlando, America by the mouth of Mr. Wilson, and England by the mouth of Sir Edward Grey, Mr. Asquith, Mr. Bonar Law, Mr. Lloyd George, and above all Mr. Balfour, have unanimously insisted on the independence of Poland and the reconstruction of the Polish State as an essential part of the aims of the Allies. To emphasize and unify these separate pronouncements, the Prime Ministers of Great Britain, France and Italy jointly declared, on June 3, 1918, that “The creation of a united and independent Polish State, with free access to the sea, constitutes one of the conditions of a solid and just peace, and of the rule of right in Europe.”

England and France, and subsequently Italy and America, have all reiterated the same demand with a firmness that has never varied, although Poland had not been an independent country wantonly overrun by the armies of the Central Empires. For over a hundred years Poland had been a dismembered kingdom, part of which belonged to the Tsar, part to the German, part to the Austrian Empire, and yet the course of the war has caused all the allied countries in turn to demand and to reiterate their demand for the independence of Poland. That Poland had many friends in these countries who still regarded the partition she suffered in the 18th century, when her territory was divided between Prussia, Austria and Russia was a monstrous injustice, that there were many who regarded the confirmation of those partitions at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 as a crime of international import, is perfectly true, but it could not be (nor was it) merely the reparation of an ancient wrong on which the Allies so strenuously and repeatedly insisted. They demanded this, one and all, not primarily as a belated act of justice, nor, perhaps, primarily as the right of nations to a national existence, but as a measure of future defence against Germany, for Poland is a vitally essential part of the breakwater which they must erect against the hammerings of the Mittel-Europa billows. Without such a breakwater, without such a wall against the encroachments of the hungriest sea that ever beat upon a coast, the world will undoubtedly be battered into wreckage, and eventually be submerged. Even as at the end of the Gotterdämmerung the Rhine rises in flood, and Walhalla is consumed with fire, even so will the tide of German domination spread over the world, and the free nations and the palaces of civilisation will be burned in the hell-fire of Prussian militarism.

CHAPTER II
Poland under the Partitions

The claims of the Poles themselves to be reunited into an independent kingdom rest on historical and ethnographical grounds which it is necessary to state briefly in order that these claims may be appreciated and understood. Little as they or the basis on which they rest are known in England, it is the duty of the Allies, so the champions of Polish union and independence assert, to recognise and act on them, since they have repeatedly insisted on the rights of all nations to their national territory. The Allies for instance demand the retrocession of Alsace and Lorraine to France, although the present possession of those provinces by Germany is a matter altogether outside the present war. But those provinces, plucked from France in 1870 are rightfully French, and must be re-united to France just as certainly as Belgium must be given back to the Belgians. In the same way, they contend, there are certain provinces in Germany, Austria and Russia, which for historical and ethnographical reasons must be united and restored to form an independent Kingdom of Poland. They are inhabited by a Polish population, which is quite distinct from the various nations who have partitioned its territories among themselves, and the fact that Poland has suffered so long under this wrongful appropriation which was finally confirmed more than a century ago does not abrogate or dilute the justice of the claim. A national injustice does not lapse with the mere passage of time, if present conditions still render it unjust. It cannot, like a right of way, be established and legalized by mere usage. And this particular injustice has not lapsed, because the territories of ancient Poland, now for more than a hundred years divided among the ambient powers, are for the most part still Polish in blood, in language, in sentiment, and in religion. The Polish race has neither died out, nor has it been merged in the blood of the nations who have appropriated its territory. It exists to-day more numerous and more conscious of its national existence than ever before. Among other symptoms of this we may note the fact that apart from what is known as the Golden age of Polish literature in the 16th Century; the whole of Poland’s artistic and literary achievements have blossomed after the partition.

Briefly then the historical grounds on which these claims rest are as follows; they are matters of fact, not of theory or political expediency, and as far as they go are indisputable. Up to the year 1772 when the first partition of Poland occurred it was a state of great extent with a sea-board on the Baltic, and a united realm, embracing not only what is now known as the Kingdom of Poland in Russia, but stretching eastwards as far as the Dnieper, and including the north-west and south-west provinces of Russia, i.e., the governments of Kovno, Vilna, Grodno, Minsk, Mohileff, Vitebsk, Volhynia, Podolia, Kieff.[3] In Austria-Hungary it included Galicia and originally Austrian Silesia (Teschen); in Germany, so-called Royal Prussia (West Prussia and Ermland) and Posen. The whole course of the Vistula lay within its frontiers from its rise in the Carpathians to its debouchment at Dantzig, which was a Polish port. East Prussia also had been originally a fief of Poland, and the Hohenzollerns of Brandenburg vassals of its king. Early in the 17th century, however (1611), when Sigismund III was on the Polish throne, East Prussia ceased to pay its tribute-money and Poland was in too weak a state to enforce it. From that date therefore, until the partitions Eastern Prussia was an island, so to speak, in Poland, severed by the Polish territory on the Vistula from Brandenburg.

For some century and a half before the first partition of Poland in 1772, the country had been weakly governed, and, as to-day, was split up by many internal antagonisms, sedulously nourished and fostered by Germany. This no doubt contributed to her incapacity for a vigorous national existence, but what really decided her fate, was the international condition of Europe at the epoch when the partitions were made. England and France to whose interests it was then to prevent the partitions, which as we can see now, were the germ which has since developed into the Mittel-Europa policy, were strongly antagonistic, and Frederick the Great, who was the prime mover in the partition of 1772 was England’s ally. Thus the possible interference of the Western Powers in this partition was removed. On the other side of Poland was Russia, who for the time being made common cause with Prussia, and secured her own share. The two following partitions were contemporaneous with the disorganization caused by the French Revolution, and by them Poland, as a nation, completely disappeared from the map of Europe. Then followed the Napoleonic wars, in which for a time Russia was in extreme peril, and it is highly interesting to note that even as in 1914 when Russia was in peril from German arms, Polish reunion was promised by the Grand Duke Nicholas, so, when the French peril threatened Russia, a hundred years before, Prince Michael Oginski in 1802 issued a proclamation to Poland signed by Alexander I. strangely similar to that of the Grand Duke Nicholas speaking with the authority of Nicholas II. Yet perhaps there is little strangeness about it, for similar circumstances evoked it. It ran as follows:

“Poles! I, as at the head of a nation which, like yourselves is descended from the valiant Slavs, as one who has sworn to fight to the last drop of blood for the integrity of my country, for its honour and independence, and as chief of the Army ... as a monarch full of desire that Poland should form a sure bulwark for Russia, I hereby declare before heaven and earth that I will rebuild and restore the Kingdom of Poland, and calling forth the aid of Almighty God, I put on my head the Polish crown, a separate crown, but through my person connected with the Russian empire ... and on that basis I will rule, govern and cooperate with you to secure and establish your happiness.”

These were fair promises, but Poland, hereby completing her ruin, allied herself to Napoleon, and when in 1815 the Congress of Vienna met, it confirmed the partition. Prussia was formally granted such part of the Ancient state of Poland as is still hers, Austria obtained Galicia, and Russia the rest, and from that year till to-day Poland has been a nation without one yard of territory of its own, but has preserved its national language, its national sentiment, and its national religion, which is Roman Catholic. Thus it remained until, immediately after the outbreak of the present war, the Grand Duke Nicholas proclaimed once more that the territories of Poland, split up between the warring nations should be reunited. But for the one remaining year in which Poland was in possession of Russia, the Government took no single step to redeem the promise then made, nor exerted themselves to convince the Poles of their sincerity. Subsequently we shall see in more detail what purpose lay behind that promise, and estimate its real value.