Читать книгу The White Eagle of Poland - E F Benson - Страница 5

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At the beginning of the war it is probable that few people of average education had any very accurate idea even of the place which the Kingdom of Poland occupies on the map of Europe, and to the English mind it but belonged to that nebulous system of geographical expressions such as Bohemia, Galicia or Serbia, indefinite, shadowy states towards the East of Europe, concerning which it was necessary to consult an atlas. Fewer still knew anything about its past history or its present condition, beyond, perhaps, that it was connected with Russia, since they mildly remembered that the Tsar of all the Russias was also King of Poland, much as the German Emperor was also King of Prussia. And fewest of all even among the skilled and well-informed augurs of political omens saw or guessed that before the war was over Poland would have acquired so huge a significance as it, and the problems connected with it, imply to-day. For to-day the majority of far-seeing and large-minded statesmen, both in England and the Allied countries, are perfectly well aware that the eventual solution of the question of Poland, which at present is in joint German and Austrian occupation, will supply a fair and adequate criterion as to which group of belligerents may be considered to have won the European war. Germany knows that no less well than we, and though her armies might be beaten in the field, and though she might be compelled to accept a peace without other annexations, coupled with the retrocession of Alsace and Lorraine to France, with the restoration of Belgium and the re-establishment of Serbia, if she could make an arrangement about Poland and the problems of her eastward expansion which are bound up with it satisfactory to her own statesmen, she would be entitled to consider herself at any rate undefeated. For the economic and political victory she would have won would fully compensate for a disaster to her arms, and in ten years or less she could be the aggressor in another war which would in all probability leave her mistress of the world. This may sound an exaggerated menace, but it is in truth a sober and considered statement of fact, for the policy known as the Mittel-Europa policy would have achieved a signal victory of supreme importance which would be certain to lead to further success and the ultimate realization of its complete aims. Intimately bound up with the destiny of Poland is that of Bohemia: this does not, however, except marginally, fall within the scope of this book.

Broadly speaking, there are two parties in Germany which by different methods seek the attainment of world-power. They are in harmony with each other in that each cordially approves of the other’s policy as an auxiliary of its own. The Pan-German party seek the expansion of the German Empire and the overthrow of the British primarily by conquest and annexation westward, while the Mittel-Europa party (with Hindenburg to help) seek the same expansion and the same overthrow by an easterly progression. Thus the Pan-Germans proclaim as a sine-qua-non of peace-terms the retention of Antwerp and of Alsace and Lorraine by the Central Powers (in other words, Germany), and the reduction of Belgium, under the guise of a German-protected autonomy, to the position of a German province. The Mittel-Europa party, on the other hand, aim at the expansion and extension of German “spheres of interest” (or whatever meiosis they care to adopt as synonymous with the simpler word “conquest”) eastward, hoping to bring about the realisation of the same “far-off event” by the direct menace to Egypt and India. Already they have achieved much, and not only is it necessary for the prosperity and even the existence of the British Empire that their work in this direction should be checked, but much that they have done must certainly be undone again before security against universal German domination can return to the world. As Mr. L. B. Namier has admirably said: “The old continental dream of Napoleon—an overland route into Asia—has become the cardinal issue of the war.”[1]

This expansion of Germany eastwards by means of “peaceful penetration” had made great strides before the outbreak of the European war, as the events of the war soon discovered for us. The chaos and annihilation of Russia as a Power, for instance, has not been due solely to the socialistic upheaval which finally produced its impotence, and indeed that upheaval itself was largely brought about by the peaceful penetration of German gold. But apart from that, German intrigue and the disintegrating acid of German influence had already eaten the sap out of the Empire of the Tsars, and the fall of the Imperial family, the fall of Kerensky, and the complete anarchy produced by the Bolsheviks were all as much due to German machinations as to the inherent instability of that ricketty colossus, the Russian Empire. In Russia, Germany’s programme, in accordance with the policy of Mittel-Europa, has been to sow the seeds of self-destruction in foreign fields, and when that crop was reaped to fertilize them afresh with vigorous Teutonic grain. A strong efficient Russia would always have been a barrier to her progress; for Russia, mistress of herself and her millions, and competent to develop her inexhaustible riches of men and material, would have been fatal to Germany’s unlimited expansion eastwards. Whether or no she has made a huge miscalculation, and in helping to create the anarchy of Bolshevism has raised a Frankenstein monster which she is unable to control, and which may penetrate to the heart of Germany herself, whither the Russian legions were unable to force a way, is a question that is now troubling the shrewdest brains in Berlin, and is likely to trouble them more before they have framed a reassuring answer.

A strong Russia, then, was the last thing that Germany desired, for she could not possibly hope to use the strength and stability of Russia for her own ends, and therefore Russia’s strength was a barrier to her advance. But (still tracing the policy of the Mittel-Europa party) her method with regard to Turkey was precisely the opposite to her Russian programme. The sick man (to adopt Lord Aberdeen’s obsolete and misleading phrase) could never seriously threaten the advance of her plans, and while the rest of the European powers were propping up the throne of Abdul-Hamid and, subsequently, the Camorra of the Young Turks, for fear of the confusion and quarrelling that would follow on the disintegration of the Turkish Empire, Germany, with a livelier foresight and an experter medical skill, was, as it were, transfusing her own blood into the veins of the patient. What she wanted was not a weak Turkey, but a strong Turkey who should be hers, and from the earliest days of the reign of the present Emperor, Wilhelm II, until to-day, she has been strengthening the hands of the Turk, knowing that the strength with which she supplied him was being converted back into her own. Like, it is true, seeks like, and the psychical affinity of Turk and German was very clearly shewn in their respective treatments of Armenians and Belgians, but there was more than brotherly sympathy in the hand-clasp of Berlin and Constantinople. To-day the Sultan writhes in the famous iron grip of the hand that sought his so cordially.

It is worth while, with the object of understanding the policy of Mittel-Europa, to survey quite briefly its dealings with Turkey, dictated with the view of turning Turkey, as Germany has now completely done, into a German province, not less dependent on her and her armies than is the kingdom of Hanover or Bavaria. The merchant of Bremen knows very well that his prosperity is bound up with the military efficiency of the Fatherland, and in exactly the same way Talaat and Enver and the Sultan (who once was the shadow of God, and is now the shadow of Wilhelm II) know that unless the victory in the present war rests with the German arms, the ill-knit Ottoman Empire, in which the majority of the populations consists not of Turks but of alien races, will be in large measure taken from them by the dispositions of the Allies, who have pledged themselves to free those peoples from the unspeakable tyranny of the Turk. The Sultan by now understands, too, that his empire has already become a vassal state of Germany, who permits him to manage its internal affairs only in so far as they concern massacres and reforms of that description. In other respects, all Turkish matters, military, naval, economical, educational and financial, are in German hands. And this result is the work of the Mittel-Europa policy, part of the projected scheme.

The Emperor Wilhelm II paid a memorable visit to Abdul-Hamid not long after the Armenian massacres of 1895, and on that occasion ineffectually tried to gain his consent to a scheme for German colonisation of the lands depopulated by the massacres. This time he plucked at a fruit that was out of reach, and it was not till after the deposition of Abdul-Hamid by the Young Turk party that the loaded bough began to droop into accessibility. Germany wanted a strong Turkey, and while her peaceful penetration prospered and she got Turkish concessions, and proceeded apace with the Bagdad railway, her officers were busy introducing Prussian thoroughness into the ramshackle organisation of the Turkish army. Though the Young Turk movement momentarily upset her plans, she soon saw the wisdom of allying herself, heart and soul, with it, and continued her support when it was merged in the Nationalist movement, penetrating all the time, and within a few days of the outbreak of war in 1914, Enver Pasha returned to Constantinople from Berlin with a Germano-Turkish treaty in his pocket. By the end of October the mobilization of the Turkish armies was complete, and our diplomatic relations with Turkey were severed. From that day to this, Germany has never halted for a moment in her exploitation of Turkey for her own ends, ends concerned not only with the military conduct of the war, but with the ultimate objective of the Mittel-Europa policy. While she has immensely increased Turkey’s resources, she has also reduced the Ottoman Empire to a state of complete bankruptcy by the simple expedient of advancing paper money, and bargaining for its repayment after the end of the war in gold. And not one penny of that paper money has benefited Turkey in any way, for it has all been spent in the raising of troops to fight for Germany, and in industrial schemes of which the produce is used for the internal and the military needs of Germany. There are irrigation works at Adana which greatly increase the cereals that supply the Central Empires: there are thousands of acres under beet-cultivation at Konia, the sugar from which goes to Germany. There are training schools and boyscout establishments all over the empire which raise men for the armies that Germany employs, there are wireless stations that send her messages, and submarine bases that harbour her pirate-boats. The Taurus tunnel on the Berlin-Bagdad railway has been finished, hundreds of miles of other railways have been opened up, others, under German efficiency, have been made to pay substantial dividends, while the labour and materials necessary for these exploitations have been discharged by German paper lent to Turkey and to be repaid in gold. And though such part of the native populations as is not of use to Germany may be starving, Turkey’s value as a military, an industrial, and an economic asset is vastly greater to-day than it ever has been, for Germany has set the Ottoman house in order since it is an annexe in the plans of her own world-wide palace, and Anatolian soldiers are a wheel in the great German war-machine, which shall Juggernaut its way over the entire globe.

It may reasonably be asked what induced Turkey to give over into German hands all that constitutes a nation’s independence, and the answer is the “attractive proposition” which Germany laid before her. This bait which she has so temptingly dangled before the rulers of the Ottoman Empire in order to persuade them to let her raise men and materials to fight her battles for her is the vision of an immensely expanded Ottoman Empire which shall have its capital at Constantinople. The book written by Tekin Alp, under which pseudonym nestles a Salonica Jew (I believe called Cohen), admirably sets this forth. His work, entitled “Turks and the Pan-Turkish Ideal,” published in 1915, and distributed broadcast over the Ottoman Empire as German propaganda, shews us into what dreamings have the Turks been hypnotised. All Moslem peoples are to be comprised in this re-united Turkey, which will include the whole of Egypt as far as Victoria Nyanza, Arabia, Persia, the greater part of India, the littoral of the Black Sea, the Caspian Sea, the Aral Sea. All this will be Turkey’s, if Turkey will prosecute Germany’s war to its victorious close. But should she detach herself or should the Allies be victorious, she knows what to expect; Arabia, Syria, Palestine, Armenia, Mesopotamia, will be plucked from her, and until lately (January, 1918) the Allies had proclaimed that they would expel her from Europe altogether. It was “up to her” to choose, and she chose. But, if she only knew it, not only will she never get, in the event of Germany’s victory, one yard of all those territories that are so succulently dangled in front of her, but under German penetration she has already lost the last remnants of her Empire. Should Germany be victorious, Turkey will no longer exist: there will be but a new Germany in Europe and a new Germany in Asia, where Turkey once was. Germany will not technically have annexed it, since no doubt there will still be a Sultan in Constantinople. But none the less it will be hers, and its acquisition will be a stout volume, bound like a prize, in the records of the Mittel-Europa policy. For Turkey will, in other words, form part of the great high-road which Germany is constructing (with paper money to be repaid in gold) to lead from Berlin to Bombay. As for the value of German promises with regard to the augmented Empire, Turkey is already beginning to learn something, for though the littoral of the Black Sea was promised her, she has lately been very smartly snubbed for venturing to intrude herself in affairs concerning the Crimea.

Now, far-distant as Turkey is from mid-Europe, Germany’s policy with regard to her is an integral and essential part of the Mittel-Europa scheme. It is precisely that which some of our Western politicians have completely missed. Because Turkey is not the immediate link in the chain that is designed to connect Berlin with Egypt and India, they think that it has nothing to do with that chain, and will find out to the infinite cost of the country whose eyes and intelligence they are supposed to be, that once given that Germany succeeds in obtaining a peace based on the apparent reasonableness of the formula “no annexations,” she will by her “spheres of influence” in Bulgaria, Roumania, the Ukraine, and Turkey, have pushed her frontiers to the edge of the Persian Gulf. There is nothing that Mittel-Europa politicians would like better than to conclude a peace to-day on the basis of no annexations, for, technically, she has not annexed the Ottoman Empire (any more than she has annexed Poland, to whom she has several times granted “independence”). But the effect would be that while we should have to clear out of Mesopotamia and Palestine, we should leave her in literal no less than in virtual possession of the lands between the Sea of Marmora and the Persian Gulf. That is what “no annexation” means to Germany, and on such a basis that is what she has already acquired, and if the unfathomable ignorance of certain sections of the English press gives any indication of the ignorance of the nation with regard to Turkey, its ignorance in the event of a peace at all in agreement with German ideas would be very speedily instructed. Those who maintain that Turkey is a nation of peaceful and gentlemanly agriculturists, harassed in the past by the unwarrantable aggression of Russia, and now desirous only of being left to live a calm and Arcadian existence, are merely not aware that Turkey at the present time has no existence except as a military province of Germany, an acquisition of the very astute politicians of the Mittel-Europa school, who have hoodwinked them as completely as they have hoodwinked Turkey itself. Without for a moment suggesting that these blunt arrows for Turkey’s defence have been supplied by Germany, it is at least reasonable to be amazed at the confidence with which a guileless Grub-street bowman faces the triumphant advance of the Central Empires.

Turkey, then, at the present moment, so far from being a bar to the advance of Mittel-Europeanism, is but a forged link in its chain, if the doctrine of “no annexation” is accepted. Russia has ceased to be able to resist the explosions of internal trouble, far less to oppose a front to attack from without (indeed, she is more like a squib that lies smouldering and may explode anywhere, than a light that shines), and the question immediately confronts the Statesmen of the West as to how any dam can be erected which shall check the otherwise inevitable inundation of the German waters eastwards. No nonsense was so refined and distilled as that which saw in Turkey even the foetus of a nation that could resist the German advance, for it is on Germany that its misplaced hopes of future existence depend. That these hopes will never be realised if once the doctrine of “no annexations” is accepted, is of course obvious to any one who looks at all steadily at the situation or has “heard tell” of Mittel-Europa. But then some people have not. They at least escape the danger of a little knowledge, since that little has not been granted to them.

Meantime the Eastward expansion of Mittel-Europa has scored a huge success in the Ukrainian peace, for the Ukraine will as surely be put away in the great German pocket (that receptacle that aims at pouching the whole world) as Turkey has been, if Germany emerges from the war in a position to consolidate her easterly acquisitions, and weld them into the Mittel-Europa chain. The Black Sea, according to her programme, must become a German lake, and already she sees in her victory over Roumania a further important link in the fetters which if one attached to Eastern Europe can never be unshackled. In the Hamburger Nachrichten of Feb. 27, 1918, she jingles a fresh handful of these which ought to make any one capable of thought pause and consider. It is a typical piece of Mittel-Europa propaganda, the sort of thing which appears constantly in the press of the Central Empires, and it is good for English readers to know what they are talking about over there.

The article in question, clearly inspired, begins as the statement of German schemes usually begins, benignly enough, and dreamily proposes that the Dobrudscha might possibly be given to Bulgaria as a reward for her military exertions, and that Rumania might be compensated (pace the Ukraine) with the south of Bessarabia. These two territories, of course, embrace the mouth of the Danube. Then, less dreamily, it awakes to the fact that German interests are owed a Germano-protected region at the mouth of the Danube, for the Danube rises in German soil, and Germany has a further claim on territory at its mouth, since the conquest of the Dobrudscha was largely due to German arms, and “in political life it is always a mistake to exercise liberality without seeing that you get something for it.” Germany must therefore reconsider her first plan of giving the Dobrudscha in its entirety to Bulgaria.

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.