"The scene of operations in Poland is seven times larger than that of
Belgium, and she has had to endure seven times the torture. Remember,
the battle of Europe is being fought in the east, not in the west, and
while the tide of battle has reached a sort of ebb along the trenches
about the frontiers of Alsace and Flanders, the great waves roll
backward and forward from Germany to Russia and break always on Poland.
"Our country, in fact, is just as Belgium was called--the cockpit of
Europe, and it may now be called the battlefield of the world, if not of
civilization.
"It is only perhaps we Poles who have known to its utmost depths what
this war has really meant. It is not only that there are 10,000,
human beings on the verge of starvation, nay, actually perishing; there
is worse than that.
"Remember that both Belgium and Poland are still under the yoke. The
Russians, it is true, occupy some fifteen thousand miles of our country,
but this is really nothing, for the Germans occupy five-sixths of it,
and the desolation passes all comprehension.
CALLS IT COMPULSORY SUICIDE
"As to actual battles, I can hardly speak of them. It is torture even to
think of them. Only consider! Our one nation is divided as it were into
three sections, which were thrust each against the others to work out
their destruction. It is parricide! It is fratricide, nay suicide!
Compulsory suicide! That is what it is!
"Listen to what it means to us all. I was told by a man from Austria
that an army doctor, a Pole by birth, who was deputed to go over the
Austrian battlefields and verify identification marks on the bodies,
found among the 14,000 dead hardly any but Polish names. He looked in
vain for any others, and in the end went mad with horror at the thought
of it. Another story that came to me the other day told of another case
of the tragedy of Poland which is almost too terrible for the human mind
to contain. The incident took place during a charge. Both armies had
been ordered to attack, and the Poles, as usual, were in the front
lines. As they met in the shock they recognized each other.
"One poor fellow, as he was struck through by a bayonet, cried out in
his death agony, 'Jesu Maria! I have five children! Jesu Maria!' The
words went as straight to the brain of his conqueror as a dagger to the
heart, and killed his reason. Somewhere among the madhouses of Europe
there is a lunatic. He is not violent, but he never laughs. He only
wanders about with the words of his dying victim, 'Ah, Jesu Maria! I
have five children. Jesu Maria!'
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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