Even the children have the spirit of revolt. One day every school in Warsaw was pupil-less. The children had struck. Being Polish children they objected to doing their lessons in Russian. But the Russian government forbade the use of any other tongue. So the children left the schools en masse. Parents were powerless to coerce attendance. The Russian government could not turn the military upon school-boys and girls, and so it compromised. Permission was granted for the use of Polish in private schools. Whereupon the children entered private schools. To-day, in Warsaw, the private schools are taxed to their utmost capacity, while empty benches and deserted playgrounds are found in the public schools.
When a general strike is declared in Russia Warsaw responds with a bound. So perfect is the organization that every railroad, postal or telegraph strike that is declared in Russia is most effectually carried out in Poland. When the Warsovians declare a program they carry it out. As witness, the destruction of the police force. They destroy the rank and file, and incidentally pick off the top as well. The chief of police was blown up as a matter of course.
The Poles are inherently violent. The same spirit which makes them capable of great artistic achievements makes them demoniacal when goaded beyond endurance.
To-day Warsaw prisons are full. Politicals even crowd the fortresses. And one hears awful stories on every hand and from every conceivable source of the torturing of prisoners. One method of extracting information said to be commonly resorted to is to suspend prisoners by their wrists and beat them alternately back and front until their stomachs turn. Another is pulling out their hair, and their teeth; starvation, giving them food but no drink; preventing their sleeping. All of these things I have heard of from reliable people. More terrible tortures I refrain from staining this page with by even mentioning.
Never morning wears to evening but blood is spilled in Warsaw. Never a lull between twilight and dawn but some hellish thought finds expression in deed. The clatter of cavalry patrols rings over the stony streets every hour of the twenty-four. The swish of the cruel nagaika in the hands of the relentless Cossacks attends each trifling disturbance. Sentinels finger their rifles at intervals only of yards—rifles, bayonet-pointed, always ready. And yet—Warsaw is fair to see, with its public buildings, small parks, dashes of fresh green here and there—even flowers, richly blooming beds that scent the warm air and seem to bring a breath of the open into the town. Flower-girls, too, children with daisies, and roses, and pinks; a boutonnière for m’sieur, a bright nosegay for milady. Quite a feature of the city indeed. And always the music. The violin, the ’cello, the piano. The weird and intense music of Poland alternating with the flippant, laughing melodies that America sends abroad. Typically Warsovian, all this. The beautiful, the careless, the jaunty ever to the fore. And underneath, the dire, the grim, the intense. Like an animal that fixes its teeth in a death-grip in the throat of its antagonist, so the Poles of Warsaw have set their teeth toward the heart of Russian despotism. There will be no letting go—no truce—one or the other will go under.
Without a single great leader (Russia watches too closely for one to rise), without definite ideals, wild, passionate, desperate, the Poles naturally do not all work through the same channels. They split into factions and parties, each striving for Russia’s overthrow, or Poland’s advancement, but each in its own way. Consequently party clashes engender bitterness and hatred within. The parties of Poland are as numerous as the tongues heard at Babel. Not all equally strong, but several there are of large influence—each pledged to one definite object, and if all were ultimately to succeed, the result would be the regeneration of Poland through extinction were it not for their saving policy of uniting in time of great crises, magnanimously putting aside party differences for the salvation of the whole people. Yet their methods for the time are party methods and the situation in all its strange phases is only explained through an analysis of the more important parties and influential political organization.
The Jewish Socialist Bund is the most widely known, and perhaps the most powerful of these organizations, though not numerically the largest. Nor is the Bund a
“Bomb order”