Chapter I: SEEK FOR MY FRIEND, a free-thinking Jewess, elegant woman in the (4)

The half-dozen Teuton residents with whom I talked seemed rather apathetic toward the sudden change in their fortunes. The shopkeepers, with one exception, announced their intention of continuing business in Bromberg, even if it became necessary to adopt Polish citizenship. The exception was of the impression that they would be driven out, and was not yet making any plans for the future. A station guard, on the other hand, denounced the decision of Paris with a genuine Prussian wrath. “Every railway employee is armed,” he asserted, “and _die Polacken_ will not get anything that belongs to the Fatherland without a struggle. It is absurd,” he vociferated, “to expect that we will surrender a genuine German city like Bromberg to a lot of improvident wastrels. Let them keep the part about Posen and south of it; there the Poles are in the majority. But here”—as usual, it seemed, the section to which they were entitled was somewhere else.

A lawyer whom I found sunning himself on a park bench before the fantastic bronze fountain discussed the problem more quietly, but with no less heat.

“You Americans,” he perorated, “the whole Allied group, do not understand the problem in its full significance. We look upon the Poles very much as you do upon your negroes. They have much the same shiftlessness, much the same tendency to revert to the semi-savagery out of which we Germans have lifted them. Now just imagine, for the moment, that you had been starved to submission in a war with, say, Mexico, Japan, and England. Suppose a so-called ‘peace conference’ made up entirely of your enemies, and sitting, say, in Canada, decreed that Mississippi, Florida, Alabama—that half a dozen of your most fertile Southern states must be turned over to the negroes, to form part of a new negro nation. It is possible that your people in the North, whom the problem did not directly touch, might consent to the arrangement. But do you for a moment think that your hot-blooded Southerners, the white men who would have to live in that negro nation or escape with what they could carry with them, would accept the decision without springing to arms even though it was signed by a dozen Northerners? That is exactly our case here, and whether or not this alleged Peace Treaty is accepted by the government in Berlin, the Germans of the East will not see themselves despoiled without a struggle.”

That evening I attended an excellent performance of Südermann’s _Die Ehre_ in the subsidized municipal theater. Tickets were even cheaper than in Coblenz, none of them as high as four marks, even with war tax, poor tax, and “wardrobe.” The house was crowded with the serious-minded of all classes, Poles as well as Germans; the actors were of higher histrionic ability than the average American town of the size of Bromberg sees once a year. Yet equally splendid performances were offered here at these slight prices all the year round. As I strolled hotelward with that pleasant sensation of satisfaction that comes from an evening of genuine entertainment, I could not but wonder whether this, and those other undeniable advantages of German _Kultur_, whatever sins might justly be charged against it, would be kept up after the Poles had taken Bromberg into their own keeping.

As to the walking trip through these eastern provinces which I had planned, fate was once more against me. I might, to be sure, have set out on foot toward the region already amputated from the Empire, but in the course of an hour I should have had the privilege of walking back again. The German-Polish front was just six kilometers from Bromberg, and a wandering stranger would have had exactly the same chance of crossing its succession of trenches as of entering Germany from France a year before. The one and only way of reaching the province of Posen was by train from the village of Kreuz, back along the railway by which I had come.

The place had all the appearance of an international frontier, a frontier hastily erected and not yet in efficient running order. Arrangements for examining travelers and baggage consisted only of an improvised fence along the station platform, strewn pellmell with a heterogeneous throng bound in both directions, and their multifarious coffers and bundles. The soldiers who patrolled the line of demarkation with fixed bayonets were callow, thin-faced youths, or men past middle age who had plainly reached the stage of uselessness as combat troops. All wore on their collars the silver oak-leaves of the recently formed “frontier guard.” Their manner toward the harassed travelers was either brutal or cringingly friendly. The Germans in civilian garb who examined passports and baggage were cantankerous and gruff, as if they resented the existence of a frontier where the Fatherland had never admitted that a frontier existed. They vented their wrath especially against men of military age who wished to enter Polish territory—and their interpretation of their duties in that respect was by no means charitable. Among others, a wretched little dwarf past fifty, whom a glance sufficed to recognize as useless from a military point of view, even had his papers not been stamped with the official _Untauglich_, was wantonly turned back. Many a family was left only the choice of abandoning the attempt to reach its home or of leaving its adult male members behind.

The churls allowed me to pass readily enough, but rescinded their action a moment later. Once beyond the barrier, I had paused to photograph the pandemonium that reigned about it. A lieutenant bellowed and a group of soldiers and officials quickly swarmed about me. Did I not know that photography was forbidden at the front? I protested that the station scenes of Kreuz could scarcely be called military information. What of that? I knew that it was within the zone of the armies, did I not? Rules were rules; it was not the privilege of every Tom, Dick, and Harry to interpret them to his own liking. A lean, hawk-faced civilian, who seemed to be in command, ordered me to open my kodak and confiscated the film it contained. If I set great store by the pictures on it, he would have it developed by the military authorities and let me have those that proved harmless, upon my return. I thanked him for his leniency and strolled toward the compartment I had chosen. Before I had reached it he called me back.

“Let me see your papers again,” he demanded, in a far gruffer tone.

He glanced casually at them, thrust them into a pocket of his coat, and snapped angrily: “Get your baggage off the train! I am not going to let you through.”

It was plain that he was acting from personal rather than official motives. Probably he considered my failure to raise my hat and to smile the sycophant smile with which my fellow-passengers addressed him as an affront to his high Prussian caste. Fortunately he was not alone in command. A more even-tempered official without his dyspeptic leanness beckoned him aside and whispered in his ear. Perhaps he called his attention to the importance of my credentials from Wilhelmstrasse. At any rate, he surrendered my papers after some argument, with an angry shrug of the shoulders, and his less hungry-looking companion brought them back to me.

“It has all been arranged,” he smirked. “You may take the train.”

This was still manned by a German crew. For every car that left their territory, however, the Poles required that one of the same class and condition be delivered to them in exchange. Several long freight-trains, loaded from end to end with potatoes, rumbled past us on the parallel track. Two hundred thousand tons of tubers were sent to Germany each month in exchange for coal. It was at that date the only commercial intercourse between the two countries, and explained why potatoes were the one foodstuff of comparative abundance even in Berlin. At Biala the station guards were Polish, but there was little indeed to distinguish them from those of Kreuz and Bromberg. Their uniforms, their rifles, every detail of their equipment, were German, except that some of them wore the square and rather clumsy-looking Polish cap or had decorated their round, red-banded fatigue bonnets with the silver double-eagle of the resurrected empire. Many were without even this insignia of their new allegiance, and only the absence of oak-leaves on their collars showed that they were no longer soldiers of the Fatherland.

We halted at Wronki for two hours, which made our departure three hours later, for clocks and watches were turned ahead to correspond with Polish time. Frontier formalities were even more leisurely and disorganized than they had been in Kreuz. The Poles seemed to have something of the amiable but headless temperament of the French. Their officers, too, in their impressive new uniforms with broad red or yellow bands, and their rattling sabers, bore a certain resemblance to children on Christmas morning that did not help to expedite matters under their jurisdiction. They were a bit less “snappy” than the more experienced Germans, somewhat inclined to strut and to flirt, and there were suggestions in their manner that they might not have been horrified at the offer of a tip. When at length my turn had come they found my credentials unsatisfactory. Why had they not been viséed by the Polish consul in Berlin, as well as by the Germans at Frankfurt? I had never dreamed that Berlin boasted a Polish consul. Indeed! Who, then, did I suppose handled the interests of their nation there? However, it was all right. As an American and a fellow-Ally they would let me pass. But I must promise to report at a certain office in Posen within twenty-four hours of my arrival.

Barefoot boys were selling huge slabs of bread and generous lengths of sausage through the car windows. All things are relative, and to the travelers from Germany these “ticket-free” viands of doubtful origin seemed a kingly repast. With every mile forward now it was easier to understand why the loss of the province of Posen had been so serious a blow to the hungry Empire. Here were no arid, sandy stretches, but an endless expanse of rich black loam, capable of feeding many times its rather sparse population. If it had been “pumped dry” by the former oppressors, it was already well on the road to recovery. Wheat, corn, and potatoes covered the flat plains to the horizons on either hand. Cattle and sheep were by no means rare; pigs, goats, ducks, and chickens flocked about every village and farm-house, evidently living in democratic equality with the human inhabitants. There were other suggestions that we were approaching the easy-going East. Men in high Russian boots sauntered behind their draft animals with the leisureliness of those who know the world was not built in a day, nor yet in a year. Churches of Oriental aspect, with steep roofs that were still not Gothic, broke the sameness of the prevailing German architecture. There was something softly un-Occidental in the atmosphere of the great city into which we rumbled at sunset, a city which huge new sign-boards on the station platform stridently announced was no longer Posen, but “Poznan.”

XI
AN AMPUTATED MEMBER

(_Posen under the Poles_)

The same spirit that had led the Poles to impress so forcibly upon the traveler the fact that the city in which he had just arrived was now called Poznan (pronounced Poznánya) had manifested itself in a thousand other changes. In so far as time had permitted, every official signboard had already been rendered into Polish and the detested German ones cast into outer darkness. Only those familiar with the Slavic tongue of the new rulers could have guessed what all those glitteringly new enameled placards that adorned the still Boche-featured station were commanding them to do or not to do. Every street in town had been baptized into the new faith and gaily boasted that fact on every corner. For a time the names had been announced in both languages, as in Metz; but a month or so before my arrival the radicals had prevailed and the older placards had been abolished. True, in most cases the new ones were merely translations of the old. But what did it help the German resident who had neglected to learn Polish to know that the “Alte Markt” was still the “Old Market” so long as he could not recognize it under the new designation of “Stary Rynek”? Imagine, if you can, the sensation of waking up some morning to find that Main Street has become Ulica Glòwna, or to discover that the street-car you had always taken no longer runs to Forest Park but to Ogrott Lass.

Nothing but the few things that defied quick change, such as post-boxes or names deeply cut into stone façades, had escaped the all-embracing renovation. Indeed, many of these had been deliberately defaced. The cast-iron “Haltestelle der Strassenbahn” high up on the trolley-supports had been daubed with red paint, though they were still recognizable to motormen and would-be passengers. Many business houses had followed the official lead, and private signs were more apt than not to have the German words that had once called attention to the excellence of the wares within crudely effaced or changed to the new tongue. Sometimes it was not merely the language that had been altered, but the whole tenor of the proprietor’s allegiance. A popular underground beer-hall in the heart of town was no longer the “Bismarck Tunnel,” but the “Tunel Wilsona.” German trucks thundering by on their iron tires bore the white eagle of Poland instead of the black Prussian bird of prey. German newspapers were still published, but as the streets they mentioned were nowhere to be found in all Poznan, their advertisements and much of their news were rather pointless. It gave me a curiously helpless feeling to find myself for the first time in years unable to guess a word of the language about me. Fortunately all Poznan still spoke German. Only once during my stay there did I find myself hampered by my ignorance of Polish—when a theater-ticket office proved to be in charge of a pair recently arrived from Warsaw. On more than one occasion my advances were received coldly, sometimes with scowls. But a reply was always forthcoming, and whenever I announced myself an American, who spoke the less welcome of the two tongues by necessity rather than by choice, apology and friendly overtures immediately followed.

Having effaced the lingual reminders of their late oppressors, the Poznanians had proceeded to pay their respects to the bronze heroes they had left behind. The Germans, as is their custom, had littered the public squares with statues of their chief sword-brandishers, in gigantic size—tender reminders to the conquered people of the blessings that had been forced upon them. The downfall of these had been sudden and unceremonious. Some had descended so hastily that the allegorical figures at their feet had suffered the fate so often overtaking faithful henchmen of the fallen mighty. The stone image of an old woman representing “Sorrow” looked doubly sorrowful with broken nose, legs, and fingers. Kaiser Friedrich, Doctor Bismarck with his panacea of “blood and iron,” the world-famed Wilhelm, had all left behind them imposing pedestals, like university chairs awaiting exponents of newer and more lasting doctrines. Here and there a statue had remained, because it was Polish, but these were few and small and tucked away into the more obscure corners.

Next to its change of tongue the most striking feature of the new Poznan was its military aspect. The streets swarmed with soldiers even during the day; in the evening the chief gathering-places became pulsating seas of field gray. For it was still the garb of their former servitude that clothed the vast majority of these warriors of the reborn nation. The silver double-eagle on his service-faded cap was all that was needed to turn a wearer of the German uniform into a soldier of Poland. Many still wore their “_Gott mit uns_” belt-buckles and their Prussian buttons. A scattering minority, officers for the most part, were conspicuous in the full new Polish uniform—double-breasted, with a forest-green tinge. The high, square cap, distinctive only of the province of Poznan, was more widely in evidence; the less cumbersome headgear of military visitors from Warsaw or Galizia now and then broke the red-banded monotony. But the only universal sign of new fealty was the silver double-eagle. This gleamed everywhere. Men in civilian garb wore it on their hats or in their coat lapels; women adorned their bodices with it; boys and girls proudly displayed it in some conspicuous position. It fluttered on a thousand banners; it bedecked every Polish shop-front; it stared from the covers of newly appeared books, pamphlets, music-sheets in the popular tongue; the very church spires had replaced their crosses with it. One could buy the resurrected insignia, of any size or material, in almost any shop—providing one could produce “legitimation papers” or other proof that it would not be used to disguise a German as a Pole.

An over-abundance of swords tended to give the new army a comic-opera aspect, but this detail was offset by the genuine military bearing of all but a few of the multitude in uniform. The great majority, of course, had had German training. Now, however, they put the “pep” of a new game into the old forms of soldierly etiquette. Their two-finger salute was rendered with the precision of ambitious recruits and at the same time with the exactitude of “old-timers.” They sprang unfailingly to attention at sight of a superior officer and stood like automatons until he turned away. Yet there seemed to be an un-German comradeship between the rank and file and the commissioned personnel, a democracy of endeavor, a feeling that they were all embarked together on the same big new adventure. There were, to be sure, some officers and a few men whose sidewalk manners suggested that they had learned Prussian ways a bit too thoroughly, but they were lost in a mass that had something of the easy-going temperament of the East or the South.

All classes of the Polish population were represented in the new army from the bulking countryman who ran after me to say that the photograph I had just taken of him would not be a success because he had not been looking at the lens during the operation to the major who granted me special permission to use my kodak in spite of military rules. This officer had been late in reaching his office, and I passed the time in his anteroom in conversation with his sergeant-major. When he entered at last the entire office force sprang to its feet with what in an older army would have been an exaggeration of discipline. The sergeant-major, his middle finger glued to the seams of his trousers, explained my presence and request. The major asked several questions in Polish, which the sergeant repeated to me in German, relaying my replies back to the major in his native tongue. When the latter had nodded his approval and disappeared, and the office force had relaxed into mere human beings, I expressed my surprise that an officer of such high rank knew no German.

“Knows no German!” cried the sergeant-major, bursting into laughter. “The major was for nine years a captain in the German army. He is a graduate of the War College in Berlin and was a member of Hindenburg’s staff. But he never lets a word of the accursed tongue pass his lips if he can possibly avoid it.”

The new Polish government had established a conscription act as drastic as if it had been taken bodily from the old German statute-books. All males between the ages of seventeen and forty-five were liable to service. Those between eighteen and thirty had already been called to the colors, though thus far German residents had been tacitly exempted. Every afternoon of my stay in Poznan a hundred or two of recruits, flower-bedecked and carrying each his carton of travel rations, marched in column of squads from the railway station to what had once been the Kaiser’s barracks, singing as they went some rousing Polish song of the olden days. At least half of them wore more or less complete German uniforms. Some were so under-sized that a rifle in their hands would have resembled a machine-gun. But with few exceptions their military bearing testified to previous training under the exacting drill-sergeants of their former rulers. Watching this new addition each day to the hordes in uniform that already crowded the city, one could not but wonder whether the new Poland was not giving refuge, perhaps unconsciously, to the discredited spirit of militarism that had so recently been expelled from its German Fatherland.

The “revolution,” or “_Putsch_,” as the Poles call it, that brought about all this new state of affairs had been brief and to the point. Paderewski, relying, perhaps, on Germany’s promise to help re-establish the ancient Polish Kingdom, had come to Posen for the Christmas holidays. The hotel he occupied had been decorated with the flags of the Allies. It is scarcely surprising that the Germans proceeded to tear them down in spite of the armistice that had recently been concluded. According to several observers, they might even have “got away with” this had they not persisted in their Prussian aggressiveness. On December 27th a Polish youth paused to ask another for a light from his cigarette. Matches had long been precious things in Posen. A German officer pounced upon the pair and demanded to know what conspiracy they were hatching together. The Polish youths quite properly knocked him down. Their companions joined in the fracas. The Polish turnvereins had long had everything prepared for just such an eventuality. Word swept like prairie fire through the city. French and Italian prisoners of war sprang to such arms as they could lay hands on and added their assistance. The soldiers of the garrison, being chiefly Poles or of Polish sympathies, walked out almost in a body and joined the revolt. It raged for twenty-four hours. In the words of the sergeant-major already introduced: “It was a busy day from four in the morning until the following dawn. At least sixty ribs were broken—mostly German ones.” There have been bloodier revolutions, however, for the number killed is set at ten. The Polish leaders were soon masters of the situation. In three days they had established order. Their search for arms was thorough and included Polish as well as German houses. The government they had already established in secret soon tautened the reins that had been struck from the hands of the Germans, and by New Year’s Day Poznan had already settled down to peace and to a contentment it had not known in more than a century.

As far, at least, as outward appearances go, there was nothing particularly oppressive about the new rule. Civilians were not permitted on the streets after midnight, but those with any legitimate excuse for night-hawking were granted special passes. The Poles showed a tendency to meet half-way their next-door neighbor and late oppressor. With the exception of a few “_Polen-fresser_,” German residents were not driven out, as in Metz and Strassburg. Boche merchants continued to do business at the old stand. Newspapers published in Germany were refused admittance, but that was a fair retaliation for similar action by the new authorities of the late Empire. Even the detested statues were not overthrown until March, when the Germans declined to give the Poles port facilities at Danzig. The language of the schools, as well as of government offices, was changed to Polish; but as soon as Berlin consented to a reciprocal arrangement, German was restored to the curriculum, though it was taught only a few hours a week, as a foreign tongue. In short, the conditions of Bromberg had been nicely reversed in Poznan. It must, to be sure, have been rather a tough life for the town braggart who had always espoused the German cause; but there was apparently nothing to be feared by those who know how to hold their tongues and confine their attention to their own affairs—and the German is a past-master at lying low when it is to his interest to do so. His native tongue was almost never heard on the streets, such arrogance as existed was confined now to the Poles, and the just-let-us-alone-and-we’ll-be-good rôle had been assumed by the Teutons.

There were suggestions, however, that the Poles were not yet adepts at governing, nor likely soon to establish a modern Utopia. Already they had succeeded in encumbering themselves with fully as much red-tape as the French. A musician as national leader and rallying-point seemed to be in keeping with the Polish temperament. There was a lack of practical directness in their methods, a tendency toward the erratic, at the expense of orderly progress. One of their foremost business men turned high official, to whom I applied for a signature and the imprint of a government stamp, received me with a protest that he was “too busy to breathe”—and spent two hours reciting Polish poetry to me and demonstrating how he had succeeded in photographing every secret document that had reached Posen during the war without being once suspected by the Germans. “I am not experienced in this business of government,” he apologized, when I succeeded at last in taking my leave, “but I am ready to sacrifice myself and all I have to the new Poland.”

The statement rang true in his case, but there were others whose repetition of it would have raised grave suspicions that they were putting the cart before the horse. The rush for government jobs under the new régime had in it something of the attitude of the faithful henchmen toward the periodical return to power of their beloved Tammany. There were tender reminiscences of the A. E. F. in the flocks of incompetent pretty girls who encumbered government offices, dipping their charming noses into everything except that which concerned them, as there was in the tendency on the part of both sexes to consider government transportation synonymous with opportunity for “joy-riding.” It will be strange if the Polish servant-girls and factory hands who come to us in the future bring with them the accept-anything spirit of the past, at least after the period of orientation to their new environment is over. They are “feeling their oats” at home now and will be apt to set their worth and their rights to full equality correspondingly higher.

The Poles, evidently, are not by nature a frolicsome people, but they seemed to have thrown away the “lid” in Poznan and given free play to all the joy within them. Pianos were more in evidence than they had been during all the twenty months I had spent in war-torn Europe. Children appeared to have taken on a new gaiety. Night life was almost Parisian, except in the more reprehensible features of the “City of Light.” It may have been due only to a temporary difference of mood in the two races, but Polish Poznan struck me as a far more _livable_ place than German Berlin. Evidently the people of the provinces were not letting this new attractiveness of the restored city escape them; the newspapers bristled with offers of reward for any one giving information of apartments or houses for rent. Underneath their merriness, however, the religious current of the race still ran strong and swift. The churches discharged multitudes daily at the end of morning mass; no male, be he coachman, policeman, soldier, or newsboy, ever passed the crucifix at the end of the principal bridge without reverently raising his hat. There are Protestant Poles, but they apparently do not live in Poznan. Now and again, too, there were episodes quite the opposite of gay to give the city pause in the midst of its revelry—the drunken sots in uniform, for instance, who canvassed the shops demanding alms and prophesying the firing-squad for those who declined to contribute. Were they not perhaps the outposts of Bolshevism? But all this was immersed in the general gaiety, tinged with a mild Orientalism that showed itself not only in the architecture, but in such leisurely customs as closing shops and offices from one to three, in defiance of nearly a century and a half of the sterner German influence.

It is quite possible that the increased liveliness of the Poznanians was as much due to the fact that they had plenty to eat as to their release from Teutonic bondage. The two things had come together. Being perhaps the richest agricultural district of the late Empire, the province of Posen was quick to recover its alimentary footing, once its frontiers had been closed against the all-devouring German. With the exception of potatoes, of which the supply was well in excess of local needs, the exportation of foodstuffs toward the hungry West had absolutely ceased. The result was more than noticeable in Poznan; it was conspicuous, all but overpowering, particularly to those arriving from famished Germany. Street after street was lined with a constant tantalization to the new-comer from the West, arousing his resentment at the appetite that was so easily satisfied after its constant vociferations in days gone by—and still to come. Butcher shops displayed an abundance of everything from frankfurters to sides of beef. Cheese, butter, eggs by the bushel, candy, sugar, sweetmeats were heaped high behind glass fronts that would have been slight protection for them in Berlin. In what were now known as “_restauracya_” one might order a breakfast of eggs, bacon, milk, butter, and all the other things the mere mention of which would have turned a German _Wirt_ livid with rage, without so much as exciting a ripple on the waiter’s brow. At the rathskeller of Poznan’s artistic old city hall a “steak and everything,” such a steak as not even a war-profiteer could command anywhere in Germany, cost a mere seven marks, including the inevitable mug of beer and the “10 per cent. for service” that was exacted here also by the _Kellners_’ union. With the low rate of exchange—for Poznan was still using German money—the price was considerably less than it would have been in New York at the same date. Far from being short of fats, the Poles were overgenerous with their grease and gravies. Bacon could be had in any quantity at six marks a pound; eggs at thirty pfennigs each. Bread, brown but excellent, was unlimited. Food-tickets, unknown in hotels and restaurants, were theoretically required for a few of the principal articles in the shops, but there was little difficulty in purchasing without them, at least with the payment of a slight “premium.” On market-days the immense square allotted to them was densely crowded from corner to corner by curiously garbed female hawkers and countrymen offering every conceivable product of their farms and gardens. Poznan still consumed a few things that do not appear on the American bill of fare, such as doves, gull eggs, and various species of weeds and grasses; but the fact remains that the well-to-do could get anything their appetites craved, and the poor were immensely better off than in any city of Germany. There was only one shortage that irked the popular soul. Expression of it rang incessantly in my ears—“Please tell America to send us tobacco!” The queues before tobacconists’ shops were as long and as persistent as in Germany. Ragged men of the street eagerly parted with a precious fifty-pfennig “shin-plaster” for a miserable “cigarette” filled for only half its length with an unsuccessful imitation of tobacco. The principal café, having husbanded its supply of the genuine article, placed a thousand of them on sale each evening at eight, “as a special favor to our clients.” By that hour entrance was quite impossible, and though only two were allowed each purchaser, there was nothing but the empty box left five minutes later.

Unselfishness is not one of mankind’s chief virtues, particularly in that chaos of conflicting interests known to the world as central Europe. In view of all they had won in so short a time, and amid the German shrieks of protest, it was disconcerting to find that the Poles were far from satisfied with what had been granted them by the Peace Conference. From high government officials to the man in the street they deluged me with their complaints, often naïvely implying that I had personally had some hand in framing the terms of the proposed treaty, or at least the power to have them altered before it was too late. They were dissatisfied with the western frontier that had been set for them, especially in West Prussia; they were particularly disgruntled because they had not been given Danzig outright. A nation of thirty million people should have a harbor of its own. Danzig was essentially Polish in its sympathies, in spite of the deliberate Germanization that had been practised upon it. Strangely enough they accused America of having blocked their aspirations in that particular. They blamed Wilson personally for having shut them out of Danzig, as well as for the annoying delay in drawing up the treaty. The Germans had “got at him” through the Jews. The latter had far too much power in the American government, as well as in American finances. The impression was wide-spread in Poznan that Mrs. Wilson is Jewish. The Germans and the Jews had always stuck together. Poland had always been far too lenient with the Jews. She had let them in too easily; had granted them citizenship too readily. As they spoke either Yiddish, an offshoot of German, or Russian, they had always lined up with the enemies of Poland. Half the German spies, every one of the Russian spies with whom Polish territory had been flooded during the war, had been Jews. The Poles in America had gathered money for the alleviation of suffering in their home-land, and had given it to Jews, Germans, and Poles, irrespective of race. The Jews in America had collected similar funds and had expended them only among the Jews. From whatever point of view one approached him, the resident of Poznan had nothing good to say of the Chosen People.

The story of Posen’s existence under German rule, now happily ended, was largely a repetition of what had already been told me in Bromberg. In some ways this region had been even more harshly treated, if my informants were trustworthy. Polish skilled workmen “clear down to button-makers” had been driven out of the province. Great numbers had been more or less forcibly compelled to migrate into Germany. There were at least four hundred thousand Poles in the mines and factories of Westphalia. Saxony was half Polish; the district between Hamburg and Bremen was almost entirely Slavish in population. The _Ansiedler_—the German settlers whom the government had brought to Posen—had acquired all the best land. On the other hand, German Catholics were not allowed to establish themselves in the province of Posen, lest they join their coreligionists against the Protestant oppressors. Perhaps the thing that rankled most was the banishment of the Polish language from the schools. One could scarcely speak it with one’s children at home, for fear of their using it before the teacher. Many of the youngsters had never more than half learned it. In twenty years more no one would have dared speak Polish in public. Men had been given three, and even four, months in prison for privately teaching their children Polish history. The schools were hopelessly Prussianized; the German teachers received a special premium of one thousand marks or more a year over the regular salaries. All railway jobs went to Germans, except those of section men at two marks a day. There had been Polish newspapers and theaters, but they had never been allowed any freedom of thought or action.

“The trouble with the German, or at least the Prussian,” one new official put in, “is that it is his nature to get things by force. He was born that way. Why, the Prussians stole even their name; it was originally Barrusen, as the little corner of Russia was called where the robbers first banded together. They marauded their way westward and southward, treading first little people and then little nations under their iron heels. The very word the German uses for “get” or “obtain” tells his history. It is _kriegen_, to win by war—_krieg_. You seldom hear him use the gentler _bekommen_. Everything he possesses he has _gekriegt_. Then he is such a hypocrite! In 1916, when we Poles first began to suffer seriously from hunger, some German officers came with baskets of fruit and sandwiches, gathered a group of Polish urchins, filled their hands with the food, and had themselves photographed with them, to show the world how generous and kind-hearted they were. But they did not tell the world that the moment the photographs had been taken the food was snatched away from the hungry children again, some of the officers boxing their ears, and sent back to the German barracks. How do you think the Poles who have been crippled for life fighting for the ‘Fatherland’ feel as they hobble about our streets? What would you say to serving five years in the German army only to be interned as a dangerous enemy alien at the end of it, as is the case with thousands of our sons who were not able to get across the frontier in time? No, the Germans in Poznan are not oppressed as our people were under their rule. We are altogether _too_ soft-hearted with them.”

The German residents themselves, as was to be expected, took a different view of the situation. When the Polish authorities had decorated my passport with permission to return to Berlin, I took no chances of being held up by the cantankerous dyspeptic at Kreuz and applied for a new visé by the German _Volksrat_ of Posen. It occupied a modest little dwelling-house on the wide, curving avenue no longer recognizable under its former title of “Kaiser Wilhelm Ring.” Barely had I established my identity when the gloomy Germans took me to their bosom. Had I been fully informed of _their_ side of the situation? Would I not do them the kindness to return at eleven, when they would see to it that men of high standing were there to give me the real facts of the case? My impressions of Posen would be wholly false if I left it after having consorted only with Poles.

As a matter of fact I had already “consorted” with no small number of German residents, chiefly of the small-merchant class. Those I had found somewhat mixed in their minds. A few still prophesied a “peasants’ war” in the territory allotted to Poland; a number of them shivered with apprehension of a “general Bolshevist uprising.” But fully as many pooh-poohed both those cheerful bogies. One thing only was certain—that without exception they were doing business as usual and would continue to do so as long as the Poles permitted it. The feeling for the “Fatherland” did not seem strong enough among the overwhelming majority of them to stand the strain of personal sacrifice.

When I returned at eleven the _Volksrat_ had been convoked in unofficial special session. A half-dozen of the men who had formerly held high places in the Municipal Council rose ostentatiously to their feet as I was ushered into the chief sanctum, and did not sit down again until I had been comfortably seated. The chief spokesman had long been something corresponding to chairman of the Board of Aldermen. His close-cropped head glistened in the sunshine that entered through the window at his elbow, and his little ferret-like eyes alternately sought to bore their way into my mental processes and to light up with a winsome naïveté which he did not really possess. Most of the words I set down here are his, though some of them were now and then thrown in by his subservient but approving companions.

“With us Germans,” he began, “it has become a case of ‘_Vogel friss oder starb_’—eat crow or die. We are forced, for the time at least, to accept what the Poles see fit to allow us. The German residents of Posen are not exactly oppressed, but our lives are hemmed in by a thousand petty annoyances, some of them highly discouraging. Take, for instance, this matter of the street names. Granted that the Poles had the right to put them up in their own language. It was certainly a sign of fanaticism to tear down the German names. More than a fourth of the residents of Posen cannot read the new street placards. There is not a Polish map of the city in existence. When the province of Posen came back to us the Polish street names were allowed to remain until 1879—for more than a hundred years. It is a sign of childishness, of retarded mentality, to daub with red paint all the German signs they cannot remove! It isn’t much more than that to have forbidden the use of our tongue in governmental affairs. We Germans used both languages officially clear up to 1876. We even had the old Prussian laws translated into Polish. It is only during the last ten years that nothing but German was permitted in the public schools; and there have always been plenty of Polish private schools. I am still technically a member of the Municipal Council, but I cannot understand a word of the proceedings, because they are in Polish. Our lawyers cannot practise unless they use that language, although the judges, who pretend not to know German, speak it as readily as you or I. Yet these same lawyers cannot get back into Germany. At least give us time to learn Polish before abolishing German! Many a man born here cannot speak it. There are German children of eighteen or twenty, who have never been outside the province, who are now learning Polish—that is, to write and speak it correctly.

“Oh yes, to be sure, we can most of us get permission in three or four weeks to leave the province, but only by abandoning most of our possessions and taking an oath never to return. No wonder so many Germans become Poles overnight. You can hardly expect otherwise, when they have lived here all their lives and have all their property and friends and interests here. No, military service is not required of Germans, even if they were born here; but many of our youths have voluntarily become Polish soldiers, for the same reason that their parents have suddenly turned Poles. Naturally, there is fighting along the boundary of the province. The Poles _want_ to fight, so they can have an excuse to keep their men under arms, and what can Germany do but protect herself? Poland is planning to become an aggressive, militaristic nation, as was falsely charged against the Fatherland by her enemies.

“The complaints of the Poles at our rule were ridiculous. We paid German teachers a premium because they had harder work in teaching German to Polish children and in seeing that they did not speak the language that was unwisely used at home. Railroad jobs, except common labor, were given to Germans because they were more efficient and trustworthy. Besides, does not Germany own the railroads? They complain that the best land was taken by German settlers; but the Poles were only too glad to sell to our _Ansiedler_—at high prices. Now they are attacking us with a fanaticism of the Middle Ages. Eighteen hundred German teachers, men who have been educating the Poles for twenty or twenty-five years, have suddenly been discharged and ordered to vacate government property within four weeks—yet they are not allowed to go back to Germany. The Pole is still part barbarian; he is more heartless than his cousin the Russian.

“Seventy per cent. of the taxes in the province of Posen are paid by Germans. Yet no German who was not born here can vote, though Poles who were not can. I know a village where there are seventy Germans and five Poles—and the five Poles run things to suit themselves. Husbands, wives, and sons often have different rights of suffrage. The family of Baron X has lived here for a hundred and fifty years. The baron himself happens to have been born in Berlin, because his mother went there to see a doctor. So _he_ cannot vote, though his Polish coachman, who has not been here ten years, has all the rights of citizenship. The result is that government affairs are getting into a hopeless muddle. An ignorant fellow by the name of Korfanti—a Polish ‘German-eater’—has now the chief voice in the Municipal Council. The Poles boycott German merchants. They deluge the city with placards and appeals not to buy of Germans. For a long time they refused to trade even a miserable little Polish theater for our splendid big _Stadttheater_. When the director of that finally got permission to take over the wholly inadequate little playhouse for next season he had to advertise in order to find out how many Germans intend to stay in Posen—as you have seen in our German paper. What can the Poles do with our magnificent _Stadttheater_? _They_ have no classics to give in it, nor people of sufficient culture to make up an audience. We are still allowed to give German opera, because they know they cannot run that themselves, and a few of the more educated Poles like it. But our splendid spoken classics seem to be doomed.

“Then there is their ridiculous hatred of the Jews. The race may have its faults, but the five or six thousand Jews of Posen province play a most important business and financial rôle. They have always understood the advantages of German _Kultur_ far better than the Poles. There is a Jewish _Volksrat_ here that tries to keep independent of both the other elements of the population; but the great majority of the Jews stand with the Germans. They have no use for this new Zionism—except for the other fellow—unless you take seriously the aspirations of a few impractical young idealists”—a statement, by the way, which I heard from Jews of all classes in various parts of Germany.

“We Germans lifted the Poles out of their semi-savagery. We brought them _Kultur_. Do not be deceived by what you see in Posen. It is a magnificent city, is it not?—finer, perhaps, than you Americans found Coblenz? Yet everything that gives it magnificence was built by the Germans—the well-paved streets, the big, wide boulevards, the splendid parks, all the government buildings and the best of the private ones, the street-cars, the electric lights, even the higher state of civilization you find among the masses. There is not a Pole in the province of Posen who cannot read and write. Do not make the mistake of thinking all these things are Polish because the Poles have stolen them. Before you leave, go and compare Posen with the Polish cities _outside_ Germany. That will tell the story. In non-German Poland you will be struck by the appalling lack of schools, roads, doctors, hospitals, education, culture, by the sad condition of the workmen and the peasants—all those things that are included in the German word _Kultur_. In Galizia, where Austria virtually allowed the Poles to run themselves, the houses are only six feet high, and you could walk all day without finding a man who can read and write, or who can even speak German. Their cities are sunk in a degradation of the Middle Ages. Posen will fall into the same state, if the present Municipal Council continues in power. There are already frontier troubles between German and Russian Poland, and quarrels between the different sections that confirm what we Germans have always known—that the Poles cannot govern themselves. Warsaw does not wish to keep up our splendid system of workmen and old-age insurance because there is none in Russian Poland. Galizia complains that farm land is several times higher in price in the province of Posen, without admitting that it is German railroads and German settlers that have made it so. That advantage will soon disappear. The Poles will make a mess of the whole province and will have it sunk into the degradation in which we found it by the time a real ruling nation takes charge of it again.”

Just how much truth there was mixed in with the considerable amount of patent nonsense in the ex-chairman’s declamation only a long stay in Poznan, or time itself, would show. The fact that the Poles allowed many of these statements, particularly the protests against the sudden change of language, to be published in the local German newspaper speaks at least for their spirit of tolerance. Though the new government was visibly making mistakes, and had not yet settled down to the orderliness that should come from experience, no one but a prejudiced critic could have discovered immediate evidence that it was making any such complete “mess” of matters as the German _Volksrat_ testified. Even if it had been, at least the mass of the population showed itself happy and contented with the change, and contentment, after all, may in time result in more genuine and lasting progress than that which comes from the forcible feeding of German _Kultur_.

I dropped in at the Teatro Apollo one evening, chiefly to find out how it feels to see a play without understanding a word of it. An immense barnlike building, that looked as if it had once been a skating-rink or a dancing-pavilion, was crowded to suffocation with Poles of every class and variety, from servant-girls in their curious leg-of-mutton sleeves to colonels in the latest cut of Polish uniform. The actors—if they could have been dignified with that title—had recently been imported from Warsaw, and the alleged play they perpetrated could scarcely have been equaled by our silliest rough-and-tumble “comedians.” The herd-like roar with which their inane sallies were unfailingly greeted testified that the audience found them entertaining. But it may be that Poznan was in a particularly simple-minded mood during its first months of relief from a century of bitter oppression. I hope so, for I should regret to find that the startling contrast between this Polish audience and the German one at the artistic _Stadttheater_ the following evening fairly represented the difference between the two races. I believe I am not prejudiced by the fact that the _Volksrat_ presented me with a free ticket when I say that the latter performance was one of which any manager might have been justly proud. The audience, too, resembled the other about as a gathering of college professors resembles a collection of factory hands. There was a well-bred solemnity about it that could not, in this case, have been due merely to hunger, for there was no munching whatever between the acts, none even under cover of the darkened house, except here and there of candy, a luxury so long since forgotten in Berlin that the happy possessor would never have dreamed of giving his attention at the same time to the merely esthetic appeal of the theater. There may have been Poles in the house, but at least the new army was conspicuous by its absence. Not a uniform was to be seen, with the exception of three scattered through the “peanut gallery.” Two crown boxes, destined only for Hohenzollern royalty or its representatives, sat empty, with something of the solemn demeanor of the vacant chair at the head of the table the day after the funeral. Who would occupy them when the Poles had taken over the playhouse? What, moreover, would they do toward maintaining the high standards of the stage before us? For the most indefatigable enemy of the Germans must have admitted that here was something that could ill be spared. If only they had been contented with bringing the masses these genuine benefits, without militarism, with more open competition, without so much appeal to the doctrine of force—but it has ever been Germany’s contention that only by force can the mass of mankind be lifted to higher levels; that only an army can protect the self-appointed missionaries of a loftier civilization.

Armed with what those who read Polish assured me was permission to do so, I set out on foot one morning to the eastward. Beyond the last group of guards wearing the silver double-eagle on their threadbare German uniforms, I fell in with three barefooted Polish peasant women. They were barely thirty, yet all three were already well-nigh toothless, and their hardy forms and faces were plainly marked with the signs that testify to grueling labor and the constant bearing of children. The German they spoke was far superior to the dialects of many regions of purely Teutonic population. Their demeanor was cheerful, yet behind it one caught frequent glimpses of that background of patient, unquestioning acceptance of life as it is which distinguishes the country people of Europe.