I drifted into conversation with an intelligent young mechanic taking his Sunday ease in a _Bierhalle_. He turned out to be a Pole. As soon as he was convinced of my identity he shed his mask of commonplace remarks and fell to talking frankly and sincerely. I do not speak Polish, hence the rulers of Bromberg might have been startled to hear the statements that were poured into my ear in their own tongue. Yet my companion discussed their shortcomings and the war they had waged, quite openly, with far less circumspection than a similar criticism of the powers that be would have required in France or the United States at the same date. “You don’t hear much Polish on the streets, do you?” he began. “But if I could take you into the homes you would find that the street-door is the dividing line between the two tongues. In the family circle we all stick to the old language, and the memory of the ancient nation that is just being resurrected has never been obscured. We are not exactly _forbidden_ to speak Polish in public, but if we do we are quite likely to be thumped on the head, or kicked in the back, or called “dirty Polacks.” Besides, it is never to our advantage to admit that we are Poles. You never know, when you meet a man, whether he is one or not. I feel sure the waiter there is one, for instance, yet you see he carefully pretends to understand nothing but German. We are treated with unfair discrimination from the cradle to the grave. When I first went to public school I could not speak German, and there was hardly a day that a gang of little _Deutschen_ did not beat me to tears. I used to go home regularly with lumps as big as walnuts on my head. Even the teacher whipped us for speaking Polish. When it came time to go to work we could only get the hardest and most poorly paid jobs. The railways, the government offices, all the better trades were closed to us. If we applied for work at a German factory, the first thing they asked was whether we were Catholics and Poles. In the courts a “ski” on the end of a name means a double sentence. Our taxes were figured far more strictly than those of the Germans. In the army we are given the dirtiest jobs and most of the punishments. At the front we were thrown into the most dangerous positions.