Welsh Journals

Search over 450 titles and 1.2 million pages

SOME POLISH QUESTIONS Notes from literature issued by the Polish Information Committee EUROPE is scarred from the south-east to the west by mountain arcs, which in the main separate the northern plains from basin-seas con- stituting the Mediterranean on the south. These mountain arcs, with all their glory, are but the last, and in some senses the least, of a mighty Asiatic series, and it is but natural that as they die down westward, their relations to one another, and to the blocks of land among which they curve, should become very involved. Still, the tripartite division of Europe into Mediterranean basins, mountain zone and northern plains holds good in the main and is of vital consequence as regards mankind. For, in the first, have lived from far off times the short dark long-heads who spread up into Britain in the Stone Age. In the temperate forest of the northern plain likewise have lived for ages tall fair long- headed men with bony frames, whom we call Nordics or Teutons, albeit they form but a moderate pro- portion of the people of modern Germany. The mountain-zone everywhere has its lower slopes occupied by rather dark broad-headed people to whom, on the eastern side, the general name of Slav has been applied, and. it is with them that we are concerned in Poland. The land sloping down from the mountains of east central Europe to the Baltic was heavily forested of old, covered with trees that shed their leaves in winter, except where gleams of swamp variegated the almost featureless plain. The forest, it is true, had once occupied much of Europe, right away to Britain, but its influence on mankind in Britain and France had diminished long before it began to wane in Poland. Under the dominance of the temperate forest, man has typically been forced into village communities, uniting for pro- tection against forest dangers, and finding in that union a mainspring of life, which made the little group often careless of what was happening in the big world outside. That phase of life passed away so long ago with us and our French cousins, that its surviving fragments are mainly of purely archaeo- logical interest, though not a few wish one might recover communal ownership of some at least of the land. In Poland and Russia, on the other hand, the forest's power is a vivid memory, even if it has now almost disappeared from Poland. We must think of the Slavonic peoples as penetrating the forest, making clearings, and settlements in the clearings. In the forest they met the Nordic hunters and mixed with them, so that some Poles and Lithuanians are big, fair, blue-eyed men; peoples do mix where they meet in small numbers. The Nordic hunters have ever furnished warriors and they have done so in special numbers since some of them, the founders of the Celtic power of antiquity, developed sharp iron weapons, thanks to the ores of Alpine flanks and the wood of the forest slopes. The pressure of tall fair hunter-warrior people teutonized a good many of the westernmost Slavs and has made the great Slavonic expansion in the European plain an eastward one in the main, a spread of peasant-villagers in the great forest. From the Carpathians eastwards the Slav people and their civilization spread across the great plain and, in their spread, met that great barrier of Pripet marshland that stretches between Pinsk on the north and Rovno on the south, names famous in con- nection with the arrest of the 1916 German offensive by those same marshes. The way northwards leads to Vilno and beyond that to many marshlands but, on the south side of the Pripet marshes, the spread of the Slavs brought them to the Dnieper, and once across this, they were on drier ground in the forests of Muscovy, grading southward through parklands to the rolling steppe with its limitless ex- panses towards Asia. It thus came to pass that the Slavs west of the barriers formed by the Dnieper and the Pripet marshes grew more and more distinct from those to the east. In the west they spread especially over the Vistula basin and found many links with western Europe of which the chief gave origin to their sacred city of Cracow, while Danzig or Gdansk was their sea- ward outlet. Linked with the west, the Poles were naturally influenced from Rome in religion, but were far enough off to feel strongly the revolt against Rome in the xvi. century. The Slavs of Muscovy on the other hand looked through Kiev southward to Constantinople, and became deeply tinged with eastern feeling, especially as they learned to utilise for defence the Cossacks of the steppe, with their Asiatic patriarchal ideal. Thus arose the contrast between Poland, which is the eastward buttress of western Europe, and Russia, which is impregnated with the ideas of the steppe, and so is an outpost of the east, as it were, over against the west. The contrast is very clearly marked when, after reading the Polish Committee s pamphlets, one turns to the work of Kropotkin or even to some speeches in the present Russian crisis. The Polish work is akin to us, it is impregnated with our ambitions, and has our qualities doubtless