Complete Works

situation was too poignant and too involved for either hot scorn or a coldly rational discussion.  For the Poles it was like being in a burning house of which all the issues were locked.  There was nothing but sheer anguish under the strange, as if stony, calmness which in the utter absence of all hope falls on minds that are not constitutionally prone to despair.  Yet in this time of dismay the irrepressible vitality of the nation would not accept a neutral attitude.  I was told that even if there were no issue it was absolutely necessary for the Poles to affirm their national existence.  Passivity, which could be regarded as a craven acceptance of all the material and moral horrors ready to fall upon the nation, was not to be thought of for a moment.  Therefore, it was explained to me, the Poles must act.  Whether this was a counsel of wisdom or not it is very difficult to say, but there are crises of the soul which are beyond the reach of wisdom.  When there is apparently no issue visible to the eyes of reason, sentiment may yet find a way out, either towards salvation or to utter perdition, no one can tell — and the sentiment does not even ask the question.  Being there as a stranger in that tense atmosphere, which was yet not unfamiliar to me, I was not very anxious to parade my wisdom, especially after it had been pointed out in answer to my cautious arguments that, if life has its values worth fighting for, death, too, has that in it which can make it worthy or unworthy.
    Out of the mental and moral trouble into which the grouping of the Powers at the beginning of war had thrown the counsels of Poland there emerged at last the decision that the Polish Legions, a peace organisation in Galicia directed by Pilsudski (afterwards given the rank of General, and now apparently the Chief of the Government in Warsaw), should take the field against the Russians.  In reality it did not matter against which partner in the “Crime” Polish resentment should be directed.  There was little to choose between the methods of Russian barbarism, which were both crude and rotten, and the cultivated brutality tinged with contempt of Germany’s superficial, grinding civilisation.  There was nothing to choose between them.  Both were hateful, and the direction of the Polish effort was naturally governed by Austria’s tolerant attitude, which had connived for years at the semi-secret organisation of the Polish Legions.  Besides, the material possibility pointed out the way.  That Poland should have turned at first against the ally of Western Powers, to whose moral support she had been looking for so many years, is not a greater monstrosity than that alliance with Russia which had been entered into by England and France with rather less excuse and with a view to eventualities which could perhaps have been avoided by a firmer policy and by a greater resolution in the face of what plainly appeared unavoidable.
    For let the truth be spoken.  The action of Germany, however cruel, sanguinary, and faithless, was nothing in the nature of a stab in the dark.  The Germanic Tribes had told the whole world in all possible tones carrying conviction, the gently persuasive, the coldly logical; in tones Hegelian, Nietzschean, warlike, pious, cynical, inspired, what they were going to do to the inferior races of the earth, so full of sin and all unworthiness.  But with a strange similarity to the prophets of old (who were also great moralists and invokers of might) they seemed to be crying in a desert.  Whatever might have been the secret searching of hearts, the Worthless Ones would not take heed.  It must also be admitted that the conduct of the menaced Governments carried with it no suggestion of resistance.  It was no doubt, the effect of neither courage nor fear, but of that prudence which causes the average man to stand very still in the presence of a savage dog.  It was not a very politic attitude, and the more reprehensible in so far that it seemed to arise from the mistrust of their own people’s fortitude.  On simple matters of life and death a people is always better than its leaders, because a people cannot argue itself as a whole into a sophisticated state of mind out of deference for a mere doctrine or from an exaggerated sense of its own cleverness.  I am speaking now of democracies whose chiefs resemble the tyrant of Syracuse in this, that their power is unlimited (for who can limit the will of a voting