Part 20

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.

The most energetic of the trio showed a willingness to enter into conversation; the others confined themselves to an occasional nod of approval, as if the exertion of keeping pace with us left them no strength to expend in mere words. It was plain from the beginning that they were not enthusiastic on the subject then uppermost in the city behind us. They greeted my first reference to it with expressions that might have been called indifferent, had they not been tinged with evidence of a mild resentment.

“What does it matter to us people of the fields,” retorted the less taciturn of the group, “whether Poles or Germans sit in the comfort of government offices, so long as they let us alone? Things were all right as they were, before the war came. Why trouble us with all these changes? Now they are breaking our backs with new burdens, as if we had not had enough of them for five years. First they take our men and leave us to do their work. I have not a male relative left, except my husband, and he is so sickly that he is no longer a man. He is paid twelve marks for eight hours’ work; fifteen for ten. But what help is that when he cannot work ten hours, or even eight? They offered him the iron cross. He told them he would rather have something to feed his family with at home. They asked him if he was not already getting forty marks a month for the support of his family. How could I feed four children, even after the other two had died, with forty marks a month? For three winters I had nothing but dried potatoes and salt. I could not have bread for myself because the flour for the children took all the tickets. Now the war is over, yet they are still taking away what we have left. The same soldiers come and drive off our horses—for the silver eagle on their caps has not changed their natures. Pay for them? _Ach_, what is eight hundred marks for a horse that is worth six thousand? And how can we cultivate our fields without them? Who started the war? _Ach_, they are all arguing. What does it matter, so long as they stop it? Will the Germans sign? They should, and have done with it. If they don’t, all the men over fifty, including the Germans and even the Jews”—there was a sneer in this last word, even in the country—“will be at it again. We have had enough of it. Yet if the soldiers come and tell my husband to go he must go, sick though he is.”

The basket each of the trio carried contained the midday lunch of her husband in the fields. I turned aside to the grassy slope on which two of the couples assembled. The men insisted that I share their meal with them. It was more nourishing than a ten-mark repast in a Berlin restaurant, but the absence of bread was significant. When I gave the men each a pinch of tobacco crumbs they announced themselves delighted at the exchange, and mumbled halting words about the well-known generosity of Americans. As I turned my kodak upon them they greeted it with a laughing “Oh, là là!” There was no need to ask where they had picked up that expression. It oriented their war experiences as definitely as it will distinguish for years to come the Americans, in whatever garb one finds them, who were members of the A. E. F. in France.

The men were less indifferent to the recent change of government than their wives, but even they could not have been called enthusiastic. What struck one most was the wider outlook on life the Germans had been forced to give them in spite of themselves. Had they been left to till their farms, these plodding peasants would probably still have swallowed whole the specious propaganda of their erstwhile rulers. Now, after four years of military service that had carried them through all central Europe, they had developed the habit of forming their own opinions on all questions; they took any unverified statement, from whatever source, with more than a grain of salt. It would be a mistake nowadays to think of the European peasant as the prejudiced conservative, the plaything of deliberate misinformation, which he was five years ago. In the light of his new experiences he is in many cases doing more individual thinking than the average city resident.

Yet, I must admit, the conclusions of this well-traveled pair did not boil down into anything very different from the consensus of opinion, even though they reached them by their own peculiar trains of thought. Germany, they were convinced, had the full guilt of the war; not the Kaiser particularly—they call him “Wilhelm” in Posen province now, and even there one detects now and again a tendency toward the old idolatry he seems personally to have enjoyed throughout the whole Empire—but the military crowd, “and the capitalists.” They disclaimed any hatred of the Germans, “until they wanted to rule the earth” and sought to make the peasants the instruments of their ambition. They, too, charged Wilson personally with delaying the conclusion of peace—on the fate of Danzig they seemed to be supremely indifferent.

“It’s all politics, anyway,” concluded one of them. “They are all playing politics. If the Germans don’t sign they will be divided up as Poland was a hundred and forty years ago. But this new government in Posen is no better than the old. What we need is something entirely new—a government of the peasants and of the working-classes.”

The women had from the beginning tried to lead their husbands away from “arguing politics,” chiefly with ludicrously heavy attempts at coquetry, and at length they succeeded. I regained the highway. On either hand lay slightly rolling fields of fertile black soil, well cultivated as far as the eye could see, with only a scattering of trees. Miles away an abandoned Zeppelin hangar bulked into the sky. There were more women laborers than men; several gangs of them were working with picks and shovels; another group was slowly but patiently loading bricks. Horses were to be seen here and there, but oxen were in the majority. Farm-houses showed a rough comfort and a tolerable cleanliness, villages a passable neatness that may or may not have been due to German influence. Certainly the architecture, the farming methods, the communal customs, were little different from those of Prussia or the Rhineland.

The dinner served me in the chief tavern of a village of some two thousand inhabitants was nothing to complain of, either in variety or price. A general-shop keeper stated that “with the exception of a few semi-luxuries, such as cocoa and toilet soap,” his grocery department could still meet the decreased demands made upon it. In the clothing lines everything was scarce or wholly lacking. Worst of all, there was nothing fit to drink or smoke. The strong spirits that had once been his chief trade had become so weak no one but boys would drink them. If only America would send concentrated alcohol they could doctor the stock of liquor they had on hand so that no one would know the difference. Then if they could only get some American tobacco! Life was not what it used to be, without a real cigarette from one month’s end to the other. The German rule, on the whole, had not been so bad as many of the Allies seemed to believe. They got along, though it was rather pleasant to be relieved of the arrogant fellows, or see them crawl into their shells. No German resident in the village had given any sign of intending to move away. The communal school was still teaching the German language—two or three hours a week now. No one had noticed any other change of any importance. The French prisoners confined in the province during the war had been brutally treated. There was no doubt about that; he had seen it himself. But on the whole the German authorities had not been much harder on the Polish population than upon their own people, in Prussia and elsewhere. It was all part of the war, and every one in the Empire had to bear his share of the burdens. Happily, it was over now, if only the new Polish government did not grow ambitious for military conquests also, with the millions of soldiers, some of them patriotic to the point of self-sacrifice, under its command.

My hope of walking out of Posen province suffered the same fate as my plan of tramping into it from Germany. In the end I was forced to return to Poznan and make my exit by train over the same route by which I had entered. In the third-class compartment I occupied there were five German residents who had renounced forever their right to return, for the privilege of leaving now with the more portable of their possessions. Two of them had been born in the amputated province; the others had lived there most of their lives. All spoke Polish as readily as German. One masterly, yet scholarly youth, who had served through the war as a lieutenant, was a school-teacher by profession, as was the uncle who accompanied him. They had taught six and twenty-six years, respectively, but had been dispossessed of their positions and of their government dwellings by the new rulers. Up to the time we reached the frontier all five of my companions laid careful emphasis on the statement that they were going to seek re-establishment in their civilian professions in what was left of the Fatherland.