Читать книгу Slavs of the War Zone - William Frederick Bailey - Страница 9

There are few places in Europe less known to the ordinary traveller than Eastern Galicia—where the great plains of Russia meet, across the Dneister, the Carpathian wall that semicircles Hungary. Here it may be said that Austria ends. Galicia is the largest province, and has the severest climate, in that most conglomerate of empires. It has long and bitter winters, short and wet springs, burning summers, and tranquil autumns. Its inhabitants are nearly one-half Poles and the remainder mostly Ruthenians, these latter predominating as you go eastward to the Russian frontier.

The train, as has been pointed out, from Husiatyn to Lemberg (Lwów) is unquestionably primitive and exceedingly deliberate in action. The Konduktor blows his whistle, the engine shrieks hysterically, the Konduktor blows a louder blast, the engine emits a series of weird noises and gives various signs of an intention to start, while intending passengers, not to be hurried by any number of whistles and shrieks, pick their way slowly towards the carriages over the sleeping prostrate forms of scores of peasants reposing at full length on the platform and in the waiting rooms. These people have a talent for sleep, and one of the most arduous tasks of a Russian policeman is to protect somnolent wayfarers, to awaken them if the fierce heat of summer or the low temperature of winter (sometimes 30º below zero) threatens them with death, and to see that those who have drunk themselves into a comatose condition come to no harm. The Slavs have great belief in the efficacy of sleep. They hate to interrupt slumber, and the roughest isvoschik will drive his droshky most tenderly in and out amongst the hundreds of dozing workpeople who fling themselves down during the hour following their midday meal, in the gutters, and even in the very centre of the busiest thoroughfares.[7]

Huge are the bundles carried by Slavonic travellers. Even the upper classes, when obliged to break a journey at any of the smaller towns, bring an inordinate amount of baggage, for they have a rooted objection to strange bed linen, pillows, and towels—not without reason—and in consequence are forced to carry these articles wherever they go, along with any number of bulky cushions and rugs, for use during the long drives over vile roads which they may have to undertake. And probably this is the reason why provincial hotel keepers do not generally include bedding and toilet linen with their beds!

It is one thing, however, to travel with a house at one’s back when the journey is done by carriage or rail, but quite another when—as with the poor folk in the Station of Husiatyn—hundreds of miles had to be traversed on foot. Beside each recumbent form several large bundles are stacked, each bundle secured in a brilliantly coloured wrapper. In one is food; black bread, and a horrible kind of paste composed of pounded meat, lard, garlic and onions, and a few battered piroghi (pies). In another a samovar, teapot, tumbler, spoons, a flask of vodka, and various other odds and ends. In a third, clothing of sorts. Under every sleeper’s head is a large pillow, which comprises the owner’s entire bedding, and on these pillows they take their rest whenever the opportunity offers. Poor souls! They were fourth-class passengers, and were waiting for a slow train. Not for them the Schnellzug, with its lightning speed of twenty miles per hour! So they slept while their infant offspring sprawled and quarrelled, wailed and sucked, around them, profoundly oblivious of the fact that the platform, waiting rooms, and entrance doors were becoming congested by a wondering, gaping, group of newly arrived peasants like themselves, who, clumsy in their sheepskins, and heavily laden with baggage, stood wedged together, dumb, ox-eyed, like cattle waiting for the driver’s whip.

At last the Schnellzug starts, but it moves with aggravating slowness—the engine consuming wood only—across the monotonous, sloping plains which intervene between Husiatyn and Trembówla.

Trembówla possesses only one interesting feature, an old castle round which hovers a dim romance connected with Sobieski and a certain fair and brave lady who, tradition says, made a gallant defence of the fortress until the Polish hero arrived with reinforcements.

On approaching Tarnopol the spires of its ancient Ruthenian church, which history declares to have been three times, in the long ago, captured by the Moslems, and three times recaptured by the soldiers of the Cross, rise gracefully against the sky.

But the west has never really conquered Tarnopol. The fierce sons of the Prophet, with all their darkness and horror, have gone generations ago, but, before they retreated, they left their blood behind them. They kissed the pale Christian women’s faces, so that to-day olive skins, obliquely set black eyes, and an Oriental manner of thought and action, are characteristic of the people who inhabit this part of Galicia. And these characteristics, along with the minarets and still crescent-crowned domes of the churches, leave Tarnopol, in spite of its “Place Sobieski,” and its varied Christianity, a distinctly Asiatic town.

At all the intervening small stations between the frontier and Tarnopol are the same dreary crowds of waiting peasants. It seems to be their doom to wait upon wind-swept, grey-walled platforms, huddled and hulking beside their heaped up belongings in filthy, stinking sheepskins. Patience, the patience of brute beasts, is written on their dull worn faces. Life seems to present no interest beyond that of watching whether the ever-hissing public samovar was fulfilling its duty, whilst they spat and chewed garlic. Slothfully, blinkingly they survey the passing of their more fortunate fellow creatures, apparently with no resentment, or any desire to arrive either at their ultimate destination or a more comfortable social status.

Crossing the country by such a deliberate train gives ample time to view the scenery. Many miserable villages are passed, one almost identical with the other, and none of them differ much from those of Western Russia. Both there and in Poland they consist of two rows of one-storied huts, built, in Russia, of wood logs or wattles, in Poland often of stone, plastered with mud. And between these rows of huts, which generally turn their gables to the village thoroughfare, runs the one street, if, indeed, a wide muddy space can be so designated! Each hut leans against the next, and each thatched roof overlaps its neighbour so that, in case of fire, all may surely burn together. In the larger villages stands a church, and before it is the common village pond where geese, ducks, pigs, and uncleanly babies wallow in supreme bliss, and where, also, the village washing is done, even in mid-winter, when the ice has to be broken and salted to enable the pinched, purple-fingered women to carry on their task.

Round this big duck pond grow high willows and poplars, and near by is the well, a towering Biblical, pictorial kind of erection, worked by buckets on chains and a lever. And beyond every village is a dreadful spot which might be called a place of a skull. Krasinski, perhaps the greatest of her poets, has entitled Poland “The land of graves and crosses,” and assuredly, among the most striking and depressing features of this part of the country, are its sad little earth-bank encircled cemeteries,[8] with their forlorn broken crosses that stand up gaunt and lofty against the sky line, proclaiming by their multitude the awful toll of life taken by the almost yearly cholera epidemics, when the peasants die like flies, victims of ignorance, poverty, and misgovernment. The crosses in these cemeteries are limited in number, and when one falls down from decay or storm the authorities do not permit its re-erection.

The huts of Russian villages are generally bedaubed a violent green, yellow, or blue. The Polish villages display more taste. The houses are sometimes whitewashed, and, when painted, display less barbaric colouring. Yet a drab appearance characterizes all country towns, in both lands, be the paint on the huts ever so gaudy.

If possible the byroads in Galicia leading to the country towns, and even the great highways, are worse than those in Russia. Extremely wide, they sink much below the level of the fields through which they pass. From these fields rivulets of water descend, and in spring and autumn, after torrential rains, the track ceases altogether to be a road and becomes a water-course or a quagmire deep in black, oily mud. Then, during winter, snow raises these roads up to an apparent level with the steppe, and over-venturesome wayfarers sometimes sink in breast deep, and not infrequently lose their lives. There are tales told of how people and animals have been engulfed in the black mire or snow, and their dead bodies have only been found months afterwards when the sun had caked the mud into solidity, and through the cracks the corpses became visible. And the baked ruts in summer, too, tend to render a Galician-Russian drive dangerous and painful, for they are apt to wrench the wheels off the vehicles and break the horses’ legs. Road sickness, also, often overtakes strangers when they first travel on these highways, owing to the lurching and concussion.

An untidy litter of straw, hay and rubbish, and a great heap of manure are stacked close up to each hut. And this manure is, during summer, kneaded with earth into blocks, and baked hard in the sun, and constitutes the chief fuel of the villagers, who do not object to the rank and abominably smelling smoke which rises from it. This smoke, when carried on the wind, is sufficient to notify travellers that they are approaching a village, even if the yelping of the dogs, which are of the wolf tribe, and dangerously savage, did not loudly proclaim the fact. Seas of dark mire or clouds of dust are everywhere.

Within a village hut are two rooms, the “hot room” and the “cold room.” In the first the entire family, generally several generations of them, eat, sleep and work; and in the other the family live stock is accommodated. At sunrise there emerges from the “cold” room a procession of, say, a pony, a couple of cows, several dogs—there are about two dogs for every person in Galicia—some curly-haired pigs, and much poultry.

In a typical “hot room,” measuring about twelve feet wide by sixteen feet long, there are two pieces of furniture: a table and a narrow wooden bench. The peasants of Western and more prosperous Galicia sleep often on feather beds, but not so those in the eastern districts of the country, or in Western Russia, where this bench and the stove do duty as resting-places. The average stove is an enormous brick affair, reaching almost to the ceiling. From this stretches a shelf some seven feet broad, which forms the favourite and most commodious bed, whereon the important members of the household repose, leaving the bench which extends along the back and side walls to their less fortunate and less important relatives. The door of the stove is about a foot from the ground and opens into an enormous cave, into which the logs of wood and manure briquettes are pushed, lit, and left to burn while the stove door stands open. It is only when the fuel has been reduced to hot embers that the stove door and chimney are securely closed, so that the heat may be retained; and retained it undoubtedly is, red hot, for something like ten hours, and at a bearable warmth for another fourteen. It would be interesting to know how many peasants die yearly from stove suffocation; the number must be very great, as much carelessness is shown about shutting the stove doors before the fuel is consumed, even though this may mean dreadful nausea and death to those who drop off to sleep without first ascertaining that only smouldering embers are behind the iron door.

An ikon, or a crucifix, according to whether we are in Russia or in Poland, hangs near the entrance door of all village houses, and on passing it each crosses himself. A quaint picturesqueness redeems the interior of even the most squalid Russian or Eastern Polish huts. The glaring and thick oil colours with which the walls, tables, and benches are plastered soon become mellow from smoke. Neither windows nor doors are ever allowed to lie open, fresh air is anathema to these peasants, and, during winter, when the stove is kept at red heat, no description could possibly do justice to the atmosphere. Dirt is everywhere in Eastern Galicia and certain insects, which would drive a Western European distracted, are treated with silent Slavonic contempt, mixed with fatalism, which does not tend to diminish their numbers or aggressiveness. Over the indescribable atmosphere there always hovers the odour of schee, or of garlic-flavoured barszez, broth made of beetroot. The former, a delicacy which is partaken of three times a day, is made of rotten cabbage, and on fast days it is cooked with oil! So penetrating is the smell of this delectable compound that it exudes from the breath, clothing, and even skin of its consumers.

The costumes of the peasants of these frontier provinces vary with nearly every village. The Slavs of the Russian-Galician borderland have fiercely contested their droit de vivre against many foes, and every foe has left some mark upon the faces, costumes, and customs of the present inhabitants. Here we find extraordinarily vivid and varied colours, especially scarlet with white, for scarlet and white are the national colours of the Poles.

In the districts round Trembówla and Tarnopol, physical beauty, the birthright of the Poles, is rather rare. In fact, the peasants are often ugly, having broad, flat, high cheek-boned Kalmuk faces, somewhat lowering in expression. They are taller and more heavily built than their compatriots in other districts, and their dress, though lacking nothing in brilliancy, is less gracefully worn, and displays less exquisite handiwork. Very unattractive, too, is the fashion they adopt with their hair, which is cut across their foreheads, and sticks out in a ragged shock round their heads, which, in the case of the women, are encircled by clumsy wooden rings covered with linen cloths. But this is the only district of really plain faces. It is a kind of No Man’s Land, this far east of Galician Poland, and perhaps the breed has been “crossed” too often for beauty.

Galicia is mainly an agricultural country. And there is nothing to hinder it from becoming a rich country, for the soil is excellent. Nature has intended it to be a grain-producing land. But nothing more hopelessly primitive than its farming can be conceived in these days of practical and advanced agricultural methods. Though scientific agriculture is at last being taught in Russia, in Galicia such instruction appears to be neglected, or else, if such instruction be given the people do not apparently make use of it. Perhaps their poverty has something to say to this lack of progression, and it is said that the Jews have gradually brought into bondage about two-thirds of the population through debts and mortgages.

The last century put an end to the Polish Corvée, or task work, and now the peasants, who are not possessed of small holdings of their own, but work on large estates, are paid by contract. Very little bad feeling exists between employer and labourer, unless the employer be an aggressive German (Austrian) or a Jew. Nevertheless, the spirit of democracy is creeping in even amongst the poor and ignorant toilers of Eastern Galicia and Western Russia, and their mode of speech and their behaviour—if not their methods of agriculture—are rapidly altering.

Every one, man, woman, and child, takes a share in the outdoor labour. And, speaking of Galician, indeed, of Slav women generally, it must be owned that their life is a terrible struggle from the day they first toddle from the village well with a bucket of water till the day they close their tired eyes in the crowded, comfortless, living room, and are dressed for their last and best sleep in the shroud which their toil-worn old fingers had commenced to weave when the great peace was felt to be approaching, and their weary bodies shrank from any more arduous employment than moving the loom shuttle slowly and gently to and fro.

Before marriage they have some of the pleasures of life, and they enjoy their little vanities like other women. But, after marriage, no more pretty compliments or small attentions come their way, and their days become one long grind.

The Slavs, however, as a race, respect women for their womanhood, and are never guilty of treating them as do the Germans in East Prussia and Silesia, where it is not uncommon to see them yoked with oxen or dogs to ploughs and carts. At the same time, it is thought fit that women should take an exactly equal share of outdoor labour, and, also see to the affairs of the household, whilst producing as many children as Nature chooses to send, and Nature, by the way, is remarkably generous in this respect where the Slavs are concerned. Sometimes a man will beat his wife, but the beating is seldom brutal, and he never hurls missiles at her or kicks her, for, if he did, the neighbours would make life decidedly disagreeable both for him and his relations, and his wife’s family would assemble en bloc to horse-whip him. There are, indeed, few mean qualities about the Slav, for meanness his primitive generous nature abhors. So long as the wife’s whipping is not too severe it would almost seem that she likes it, looks upon it as a sign of attention and of strength in her husband, whom she is unmodern enough to regard as part of her own being. The following verse, given in rough translation, is often quoted by Polish women:—

“Love me true, and love me quick; Pull my hair, and use the stick!”

But man’s superiority is never lost sight of, and the Slav woman never disputes it. As a Polish proverb runs: “A man of straw is worth more than a woman of gold.”

Boundless hospitality is one of the chief traits of the Slavonic disposition in every land, and the poorest hut on these plains will open its door to strangers for as long a time as they care to stay, and everything the owner possesses will be placed at their disposal. Thanks only embarrass these kindly folk, with whom to ask is to receive. And the last bite of their scanty fare will be placed before a guest with a courteous and dignified bow, and the wish that he “may enjoy a good appetite, and God’s eternal assistance.”

The lowest son of the soil, on passing a foreigner, or one of their own class, always raises his hat and says: Nech bendic pochwalony Jezus Chrystus (Blessed be the Lord Jesus Christ!), to which he expects the reply: Na wiek i wieków! (For ages and ages.)

The Poles are generally regarded as the Irish of the Slav race. And, like the Irish, to quote Gogol, the Slav humorist, they are “laughing a laugh under which are bitter tears.” They never forget their national humiliation. On their faces is written a perpetual agony, and from their conversation, which is, as a rule, superficial when a stranger is present, one gathers the impression that there is something behind what is said which cannot openly be spoken, something which, for obvious reasons, it is best to ignore or hide. These Poles do not, however, forget; they are waiting and watching for the sunrise.

Gradually the train makes slow progress out of barbarism—this particular frontier line is commonly regarded as the “back of beyond” by both Russians and Austrians—and winds its way into civilization. The villages become less wretched, the inhabitants look more prosperous. Neat little flower and vegetable gardens make their appearance between each of the village huts, which cease to be dependent upon one another for support, and stand up honestly minus the manure heaps, in coatings of nice clean whitewash; though, to be sure, the doors and windows are still bedaubed with paint, and with grotesque, though gay, geometrical designs and line borders. Brown woods fringe the horizon and cover some of the hills, and the extreme desolation noticeable on the steppes near the frontier is absent. It becomes easier, also, to smile; life does not seem to weigh so heavily, and the costumes seen on the station platforms grow more and more wonderful. With the scenery and the villages the people also alter. Indeed, another class, hitherto unseen, make their appearance, namely, the gorai, or mountain folk. The highlanders and the lowlanders have little in common, except it be a native love of splendid colour. The steppe folk profess to despise their kindred who hail from the northern side of the Carpathian slopes. They will tell how mountaineers “must be fools, else, of a surety, they would not live in districts where they have to toil three times harder than the lowlanders for a most miserable living.” The dwellers on the plains are utterly unable to find any loveliness in granite boulders, pine forests, and small, stony fields. Their taste is in vastness and a limitless horizon. And the Carpathian-born are, in their turn, equally assured of the idiocy of the natives of the steppes, who know nothing of the glory of snow-crowned mountain peaks, or the symphonies of dashing cataracts, of the rushing roar of avalanches, and the perfumes of larch and pine.

À chacun son goût!—and eyes that appreciate the beautiful will certainly not take long to perceive that the peasants grow handsomer the higher the altitude they dwell in, excepting, of course, the townspeople and aristocrats of Warsaw, Cracow, and Lwów, whose perfection of face and form cannot easily be rivalled.

Lower set and broader in stature, coarser of feature, the lowlanders seen en route between Tarnopol and Lemberg cannot compete physically with the tall, straight, lithe mountaineers, with their equally dark, but clearer skins, sleek, ebony hair, and haughty bearing. One young hill-man especially attracted attention by his great height, bodily strength, and energy. He was waiting amongst the tulip-tinted crowd at one of the little country stations. Clad in breeches of whitish buff woollen material, so tight as to show every line of his splendid, supple body, wearing a full, spotless, linen shirt, over which, in huzzar fashion, was slung a jaunty short coat decorated with scarlet and blue ribbons, and secured round the shoulders by a heavy brass clasp, on his shapely head a small, round, black felt hat adorned by a chain of blue and gold beads and a bunch of greenery, his feet encased in scarlet-laced moccasins, he presented a subject fit for a Meissonier’s brush, and so proudly cold and stern was the expression of his young countenance that, involuntarily, he brought to memory Sienkiewiez’s description of Sobieski’s famous red dragoons as they stood to attention round the open coffin of “The Little Knight,” Pan Michael, when “yellow gleams from the tapers shone on the stern suffering faces of warriors, and were reflected in glittering points in the tears dropping down from their eyelids.”

By the side of young Poland stood his sweetheart, wrapped round in a flaming rose and yellow shawl, underneath which a glimpse could be caught of her full and pretty figure firmly bodiced in embroidered green velvet. Under her wide, plaited, white linen skirt, which reached barely to the knee, her trim legs and feet emerged, shod in beautiful Hessian high-heeled boots of crimson leather stitched with yellow thread. Beads of every hue, long silver ear-rings, and a pink and orange kerchief head-dress lent additional glory to her costume and brought out the transparent ivory-tinted pallor of her small oval face from which glowed a pair of long-lashed eyes, as darkly bright and mysterious as the waters of one of her Carpathian lakes.

They pile colour upon colour, contrast against contrast, these peasant artists. They understand well how to mix the colours on their palettes, for they have studied under Mother Nature, and realize that no colour really jars with another.

Hours might be spent and volumes written on the thousand and one costumes of the Slav races, but Lemberg (Lwów), the Galician commercial capital, has still to be described.

Lwów—to spell the name rightly—has come through many vicissitudes, and endured them in a more cheerful, more practical spirit than have the sister cities of the disrupted kingdom. Cracow has grown old, grey, sad and broken under humiliation, Warsaw has developed a kind of hysteria, but Lwów, which feels as deeply as either of them, set its teeth defiantly, and considered how best it could avenge itself on its bullies. The Poles are not commercial, they hate standing at the receipt of custom, they loathe bargaining. But Lwów knew that Austria had a similar aversion from haggling in the market places, and Lwów conquered its aristocratic Slavic pride and set steadily to work to fight for its interests in the only way possible—commercially.

So it comes about that, in spite of its ancient history, Lwów strikes visitors as a new city. It buzzes with life, it is wealthy, not apparently, but really. Its citizens have schooled themselves to be business-like. Lwów will lead in commerce the new Poland.

And yet, below all this brave demeanour there burns in the heart of the Galician city a furious hatred of Poland’s oppressors. Go into the Ossolinski National Institute, in the Ossolinskigasse, and notice how every relic, every portrait, every manuscript which has to do with Polish history and Poland’s heroes is cherished. Watch the faces of the citizens as they view these things, speak with them discreetly, and know that nothing is forgotten or forgiven in Lwów any more than in Cracow, though, in Warsaw, forgiveness is going out towards Russia, the Slav Motherland.

There are three Archbishops and three cathedrals in Lwów—a Roman Catholic, an Armenian, and a United Greek Church, all differing in style. The first has a Gothic interior, the second is a good specimen of fifteenth-century Armenian, and the third, built on a height in the basilica form, is, perhaps, the finest of the three.

There are good hotels and well-appointed cafés. The Rathhaus boasts a tower two hundred and six feet in height. In the opera and theatre the best Polish and Italian music and the cleverest Polish plays can be heard. The shops are first class; but, after seeing and hearing all these prosperous, modern, laudable things, involuntarily, and no doubt unprofitably, steps and thoughts turn towards the ancient places of Lwów, towards the monuments of a rude past, when life offered more excitement than the driving of a bargain. To a time when they travelled fastest who could seize the swiftest steed. To the day when the Ruthenians built Lwów as a fortress against the Tartars, who soon made short work of it, leaving it in ruins, to be rebuilt by Casimir the Great, the instructor of its citizens in the art of commerce. Under this ruler its merchants did business with the East. To the times when, again and again, through the centuries which followed, the brave townspeople were defeated and fell under the heel of cruel conquerors. Charles XII. raised his standard on its battered walls, so did the Magyar hordes, so did the Turks, so did the Cossacks, so did the Russians.

It was evening when the slow droshky was piled with luggage labelled “Cracow,” when the last tip was laid on the last obsequious and, of course, German palm at the door of the Hôtel de France. The lights were lit in the shops and cafés, the billiard balls were beginning to click in the Restaurant Stadtmuller, and pale Polish faces were bent over the journals in the Theatre Café, the one spot in the city where the thick-skinned German-Austrian residents have been made to feel themselves intruders. The citizens were about to take their customary evening airing. Well-equipped carriages drove by towards the opera. Blue-coated Austrian officers were “doing promenade” in the streets, staring vacantly into the shop windows, and ogling the ladies, who, when they chanced to be good Poles, dropped their eyelids scornfully and coldly returned the white-gloved salutes. For though Austria has proved less ruthless towards the Polish nation than Russia or Germany, this very kindness is at heart just as much resented as actual brutality; for the Poles suspect—and rightly—that, by apparent kindness, Austria seeks to undermine their national spirit.

In one big house—one of the many Lwów mansions built in the sixteenth century, whose splendidly carved doorways and windows were set closely together in order to comply with the old law which forbade a building to occupy more than a certain frontage upon the street—the windows were open and music came floating upon the evening air. It was the home of a Polish aristocrat, and he was giving a party.

Even at the risk of missing the train—but that would have been really an achievement—the driver was bidden to halt. It was the national dance of a nation which has been robbed of everything national except this. Though out in the cold street, and shut off from the gay scene within, it was possible, through the magic of the music, to imagine everything—the wonderful figures of the mazur, the leaps into the air, the sidelong movements, the click of the heels, the flashing, defiant eyes of the dancers. The music grew quicker and quicker, more and more passionate, till it ended in a crash. There was a sudden buzz of excited voices, laughter, and the merry clinking of glasses. They were drinking cherie Koblére, a concoction made of sherry-brandy and spices, glasses of which are always circulated after the termination of each dance. And very intoxicating are both cherie Koblére and the mazur!

There was a short pause. Then the violins wailed out one of those weirdly sad, yet mocking, Polish melodies, the like of which can be heard nowhere beyond the Slavonic frontiers. Fiercely gay, restless, melancholy, mystic, rebellious, sensuous, sweet, it was full to overflowing with what Poles term the Zal. And for the word Zal there is no translation. So bewildering, so fascinating, was that melody that even the cries of the irate driver to hurry on were for a time unheeded.

But it was not possible to delay any longer. The whip curled and whistled. The horses threw up their heads, shook their bells and scarlet tassels, the driver, with an indignant bellow and one prolonged howl, bent his padded body, in its queer, brown cape, and his head in its astrakhan, beribboned cap, over the reins. The wheels jolted on the cobbles, the luggage lurched dangerously, and the music grew fainter and fainter till it was lost in the sounds of the city.

The moon shone brilliantly, and millions of stars made night clear as day on the high Galician terrace-land which rises, ledge upon ledge, until the highest terrace merges into the lowest slopes of the Carpathians.

Between Lwów and Cracow there is leisure for thought and speculation. Time to remember the splendid past of this country, her unhappy present, a present which was to be followed by one more awful than could then be conceived—her hopeless revolutions, her struggles, her tragedies. Where is the land which can present more riddles, more paradoxes, more diversity of national character than Poland? With every turn of the wheels came another question. Why, for example, has Poland been the most liberal, and, at the same time, the most despotic of nations? How is it that, when England tortured Jews and heretics, Poland gave them shelter and protection? How is it that, with this free national spirit, she still has some of her people slaves? How is it that the Polish aristocrats are among the most cultured and polished class in Europe, while the Polish peasants, generally speaking, are illiterates? How is it that thousands upon thousands of Poland’s sons have gladly gone to death for their motherland, when many others have sordidly sold their birthright? Has it been a lack of balance on the part of the Polish character that has brought Poland low? And how long will this land of sorrows, mistakes, and gallantry take to learn the great lessons which have come down to her through ages of torture and humiliation?

Just before this world’s war there was absolutely nothing to show that Poland’s fate was so soon to be decided. Nothing to show that the Great Black Eagle of Russia was so soon to strive for the defence and liberation of the poor White Eagle whose eyrie it had ruthlessly helped to desolate. Nothing to show that the sun which had sunk peacefully in the West would rise to-morrow in the East blood red.

In the little villages the windows were dark and the peasants were sleeping. From afar came the barking of dogs. Overhead there was nothing—nothing but the stars. And to-day even the stars are hidden from sight by the cloud of battle—of warfare more ghastly than the world has yet known. On these unhappy plains every village has been razed to the ground, and there is not wood enough to make another cross in this “The Land of Graves and Crosses.” The wail of Ujejski’s hymn seems to come up with the moaning steppe wind:—

“Our lamentations mount up to Thee, O Lord, with the smoke of fire and the stream of our brothers’ blood!”