Poland’s lot during these years of war has been a particularly sad one. Her plight has at times been terrible. Her fields have been trampled by three armies: the Russian Imperial, the Russian Bolshevik and the German. Whole villages have been razed to the ground. People have died by the roadside in tens of thousands, of hunger, cold and fever. Flights of refugees and cruel evacuations have cost the country untold lives. I was told by a British General, concerned himself with the evacuation of one Polish city, a frightful story which he knew to be true, and one of many equally horrible and equally true.
The weather was intensely cold with the unimaginable cold of Poland in winter. Food was difficult to get and clothing almost impossible. The evacuation was conducted on foot, in open carts without springs or in slow railway trains without any heat. A young mother and father with three small children were amongst the travellers in one of these trains. The cold snow and bitter wind blew in through the broken windows. The children sobbed with cold and hunger. As the train crawled miserably on the sobs became pitiful moans for water. Soon the moans of two of them stopped altogether. They were frozen dead to the seats! The train stopped at a tiny station. To save the last child the frantic mother leapt out of the train for water and, returning, had the agony of seeing husband and child and corpses carried away from her by the rapidly vanishing train. She shrieked aloud. They arrested her for being without a passport. She was conveyed to the police station, raving. Some days later she died, quite mad.
The soil of Poland is very rich. If her armies could be disbanded and set to work upon the fields, Poland could very speedily feed not only her own starving children but millions of other children also. When one of the organizations for relief heard from the beautiful Princess Sapieha the story of the appalling suffering of Poland’s children, the wholly sympathetic committee, whilst promising help, felt bound to point out that it was like pouring money into a sieve to send it to a country for ever challenging the fortunes of war. It is, alas! French policy which is responsible for the militarist spirit and the military adventures of Poland. French officers train the regiments. French soldiers fill the cafés and theatres. French promises keep the people happy. It is the fashion now in Poland to worship the French and to imitate them. But the day will come when Poland, along with the rest of Europe, will discover to its infinite cost that the evil of militarism is just as menacing and corroding to civilization when dressed in the uniform of a French General as in that of a Prussian Guard.
Russia and Poland are popularly conceived to be the pivot and centre of what is called the Jewish problem in Europe. The outrageous anti-Jewish propaganda which is being conducted all over the world is a disgrace to our modern civilization. There is a certain reasonable explanation of it, so far as the people of Central Europe are concerned, in the paralysing fear of Bolshevism which possesses them, invariably associated with the Jews. It is astounding how many otherwise perfectly intelligent human beings believe Bolshevism to be an emanation from the Jewish brain. Trotsky is a Jew, Radek is a Jew, Zinoviev is a Jew, Balabanova is a Jew, Bela Kun is a Jew, therefore all Jews are Bolshevik and all Bolsheviks are Jews; which is absurd! As a matter of fact, only two out of the seventeen or eighteen members of the Bolshevik Cabinet at the time of the British Labour delegation’s visit to Russia were Jews. The most commanding personality in Russia at this hour is not a Jew. He is, if anything distinctive, a Tartar.
“I like your book ‘Through Bolshevik Russia’ very much indeed,” has been said to me over and over again, “but you are too kind to the Bolsheviks. Surely you are aware that the whole Russian business is part of a Jewish conspiracy hatched in New York with the idea of getting possession of the whole world, in order that the Jews may be revenged upon mankind for the things they have suffered in every country since the beginning of the Christian era?”
“Rubbish,” I have said with more force than politeness. “Surely you know that nursery-maids since the beginning of time have frightened little children with bogey stories of just this sort. Don’t be a child”; this to a pale and agitated young man who accompanied me home from one of my meetings, and scarcely knew how to contain himself for horror of the thing he believed.
“But,” he continued excitedly, “there’s Trotsky in Russia, Bela Kun in Hungary, Adler in Austria, Shinwell on the Clyde; there was Liebknecht in Germany, Holst——”
“Stop, for Heaven’s sake!” I interrupted. “Before you go any farther I want to tell you that I know personally both Shinwell and Adler. Shinwell is no more a Bolshevik than you are. The biggest Bolshevik in this country comes from South Wales, and he is made of lath and plaster. A lion on the platform, he roars as gently as a sucking dove when negotiating with the employers. You need have no fear of him. I hear he has been found wanting by his fellow-Bolsheviks and his resignation has been called for. As for Adler, he is one of the most courageous of living men, and has saved Austria from the Bolshevism that for a time captured Hungary. Liebknecht is not a Jew.”
“Well, you can’t deny that there are a million and a quarter Jews in New York and that the East End of London is full of them.”