Europe—whither bound? (Quo vadis Europa?) : $b being letters of travel from the capitals of Europe in the year 1921Graham, Stephen
History
Europe—whither bound? (Quo vadis Europa?) : $b being letters of travel from the capitals of Europe in the year 1921
Graham, Stephen
Europe -- Description and travel
I went out to an orchestral "bar" near by and supped. When I came back
the porter asked quietly for the thousand, and gave me the key of
"Number Five." "At your service," said he, demurely.
Warsaw has greatly changed during the time I have known it, from the
days of panic and police-assassinations in 1906, when the miserable
green waggons of open horse-trams woggled along the main ways, and it
seemed a city of endless cobbled stones. Warsaw was being governed by
Russia much as we govern Ireland now, and murders of constabulary
alternated with reprisals in which the innocent suffered more than the
guilty. Strangely enough, the relentless methods of official Russia
succeeded in subduing the revolutionaries, and in a few years was seen
a calm and prosperous condition of affairs which lasted until the
outbreak of the late war. A handsome service of electric trams and a
great new bridge over the Vistula raised Warsaw's level from an
external point of view, and made it something like a modern city. Then
came the war, the German aeroplanes and their bombs, the violent
attacks and the panics, shell-fire, the blowing-up of bridges, wild
exodus of Warsaw people and entry of the Germans. Of the people who
fled into Russia in 1915 few seem to have returned. Their places have
been filled by Poles from German and Austrian Poland. The
German-speaking Pole has displaced the Pole who knew Russian.
The Germans, of course, held the city from the summer of 1915 until the
armistice, and they repaired the bridges and instituted German order in
the city. The miracle of the armistice raised Poland from death, and
now we have Warsaw as capital of a large new State. The maps of Poland
in the streets, Poland as she is plus Poland as she believes she will
be, show a country considerably larger than Germany.
It used to seem rather amusing in the drinking scene in "The Brothers
Karamazof," when the Pole Vrublevsky, in proposing the health of
Russia, inserted the proviso: "To Russia, with the boundaries she had
before 1772." But it is serious matter to-day. For Poland has not
only reached most of the boundaries of 1772 but some of them she has
even transgressed, and still she asks more.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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