Lloyd George and Churchill sent a British expeditionary force to Archangel to assist the "White" Russians but when the Bolsheviks invaded Poland she was not supported. Nor did the Allies send her the raw material they had promised, to rebuild her commercial life. Again and again our papers reported pogroms in Poland. Yet close investigation by writers for the New Witness failed to discover any pogroms in the cities in which they were reported as occurring.
Powerful are the words in which, in April 1919, Chesterton foretells the future that will result if power and her historic port are refused to Poland.
. . . We know that a flood threatens the West from the meeting of two streams, the revenge of Germany and the anarchy of Russia; and we know that the West has only one possible dyke against such a flood, which is not the mere existence, but the might and majesty of Poland. We know that without some such Christian and chivalric shield on that side, we shall have half Europe and perhaps half Asia on our backs.
We know exactly what the Germans think about our nationalities in the West, and exactly what the Bolshevists think about any nationalities anywhere. We know that if the Poles have a port and a powerful line of communication with the West, they will be eager to help the West. We know that if they have no port they will have no reason to help the West and no power to help anybody. We know that if they lose their port it will not be by any act of English public opinion or any public opinion, but by the most secret of all secret diplomacy; that it will not even be given up by the English to the Germans, but by German Jews to other German Jews. We know that such international adventurers would still find themselves floating on the top of any tide that drowned the nations, and that they do not care what nations they drown. We know that out of the whole world the Polish port is the one place that should have been held, and the one place that is being surrendered.
In short, we know what everybody knows and scarcely anybody says.
There is one word to be added for those detached persons who see no particular objection to England ceasing to be English, who do not care about the national names of the West, which have been the greatest words in the poetry of the world. So far as we know there is only one ideal they do care about, and they will not get it. Whatever else this betrayal means it does not mean peace. The Poles have raised revolution after revolution, when three colossal Empires prevented them from being a nation at all. It is not in the realm of sanity to suppose that, if we make them half a nation, they will not some day attempt to be a whole nation. But we shall come back to the place where we started, after another cycle of terror and torment and abominable butchery—and to a place where we might, in peace and perfect safety, stand firm today.
"Not by any act of English public opinion" would Poland be weakened, not by any act of English opinion Prussia strengthened or Ireland oppressed. It was the horror of the situation that no act of English public opinion seemed possible, for the organs of action were stultified. When they could act by fighting and by dying Englishmen had done it grandly. Not all that they had done had, Chesterton believed, been lost. Because of them the Cross once more had replaced the crescent over the Holy City of Jerusalem, because of them Alsace and Lorraine were French once more and Poland lived again. But their sufferings and their death had not availed yet to save England.
And what is theirs, though banners blow on Warsaw risen again, Or ancient laughter walks in gold through the vineyards of Lorraine, Their dead are marked on English stones, their loves on English trees, How little is the prize they win, how mean a coin for these— How small a shrivelled laurel-leaf lies crumpled here and curled; They died to save their country and they only saved the world.*
[* Collected Poems, pp. 79-80, "The English Graves.">[
In the New Witness he wrote (July 25, 1919):