The End

POLAND The End

Night. A railway station at Cernauti, Rumania, onetime outpost of German culture in the East, now a hurtling trade centre at the base of the Carpathian Mountains. Rolling hills in the background, overshadowed by the black mass of a 3,000-ft. peak; the Prut River flowing nearby. Enter Colonel Josef Beck, Foreign Minister of Poland. No longer the same man as in Act I and II, the Colonel is haggard, sleepless; the sardonic elegance that marked his appearance has vanished. With him is Marshal Smigly-Rydz, Commander in Chief of the Polish Armies, equally haggard, desperate. The two men approach, talking angrily. Beck suddenly stops, faces the General, Smigly-Rydz draws back; onlookers crowd nearer. Beck speaks. . . .

Last week as the curtain came down on the Republic of Poland, the quarrel of Colonel Beck and Marshal Smigly-Rydz on a railway platform in Rumania might well have opened its final scene. Three weeks before, they had been the responsible rulers of one of Europe's major powers-- its sixth in population and area. Proud men, independent and successful, they had reason to be proud. Philosophical Smigly-Rydz, shy and softspoken, had built Poland's Army until it included 1,500,000 trained reserves; deft Josef Beck, untroubled by accusations of lack of scruples, had maneuvered Poland successfully for years despite her precarious international position; had seen Poland grow from a small Baltic State to a power that had to be reckoned with in every ministry in Europe. Then one dawn over the Polish village of Puck a German aviator pulled his bomb release, and slanting downward through the greying light went the first missile of the war that meant the end of Poland.

Eighteen days, 432 hours later, the General and the Foreign Minister stood on the railway station of a provincial city in a foreign country, quarreling so bitterly that newspaper correspondents watching feared blows might bring their tragedy to an ignoble climax. Abruptly Smigly-Rydz turned, walked away. The Foreign Minister stood irresolute for a moment, walked to the other end of the platform, to be interned a few days later, like Smigly-Rydz, by the Rumanian Government. Despairingly Warsaw fought on; the ghost of Poland would haunt Europe for many a season; but their Poland was dead.

Record. Austria and Czecho-Slovakia did not fight and received no mercy; Poland fought. The third European republic to end within the last year and a half, it had much to fight for. Finicky Westerners complained that Poland's democracy was superficial, Leftists bedazzled by propaganda about collective farms sympathized with its poor peasantry. But Poland had a record of social progress which, in terms of her initial difficulties, seemed as imposing as those of Europe's totalitarian States. Its Sejm, or Parliament, looked feeble compared to London or Washington. But it was Jeffersonian compared to the drilled and subservient Parliaments of Moscow, Rome and Berlin. Its foreign policy looked a little shifty, but it was clear as a brook compared with the secret diplomacy of Communist and Fascist States. Its finances looked troubled--but not in comparison with Germany's blocked marks and Russia's financial somersaults. Poland subsidized no agents to pose as friends of the workingman in foreign countries; except for its desperate seizure of Teschen when Germany dismembered Czecho-Slovakia, it grabbed no neighbor's property. Although vague stones in left-wing and Fascist papers long spoke of Poland's aggressive aims, Poland's history was peaceful. It was denounced as "semi-Fascist" by Russia, as barbarous by Germany, who joined forces barbarously to destroy it.

Fascist Germany had the rebuilding of 15 years of Republican Germany to take advantage of when Fascists seized power; Poland's rulers inherited ruins. Communist Russia had immeasurably vaster resources to begin with, and her rulers had the total confiscated wealth of the nation. But when Poland was set up at the end of World War I the area it took over had lost:

> 1,800,000 buildings, 2,000,000 cattle, 1.000,000 horses, 1,500,000 sheep and goats. Half of all its bridges--7,500--were destroyed, as well as 940 railway stations. All of the rolling stock of the railways in Russian Poland had been stolen, as well as 4,259 electric motors and 3,844 tooling machines.

> More completely devastated than any country except Belgium, Poland had 11,000,000 acres of farm land put out of use, lost 6,000,000 acres of forest. Her textile industry was smashed, foundries and steel works shut down. War with Bolshevik Russia lasted two years after the general peace.

Not until 1920 did Pilsudski insure Polish independence by smashing Russia's invasion; not until 1926 was Poland's political regime stable and its budget balanced. Thus Poland had only 13 years of reconstruction. Ten of them were years of bitter, world-wide depression. In these years:

> Poland reduced illiteracy from 33% to 15%. In the regions formerly held by Russia, where 80% were illiterate, all but 18% had been taught to read, Poland had 15 times as many schools as before the war, had 30,000 elementary schools that enrolled 5,000,000 students, 2,000 high schools, 27 universities.

> Besides an Army, she had built a Navy of 18 warships; built a merchant marine from nothing to 112,600 tons; built the port of Gdynia on the Baltic from a town of 400 in 1923 to one of 150,000 in 1939; purchased 6,000,000 acres from large landowners to create 700,000 new farms in a broad and progressive program of land distribution.

> Her population had increased more rapidly than any in Europe; by 1929 her wheat and rye production surpassed her pre-war average. Poland was Europe's third largest producer of crude oil, the world's third largest producer of zinc. She had rebuilt her steel industry to eighth largest in Europe, had laid 823 miles of railroads, built 6,750 hydroelectric plants. And although her impoverished peasantry constituted a problem that no intelligent Pole denied, farm wealth had steadily increased: Poland ranked fifth among the world's powers in horses, eighth in cattle, fifth in pigs.

> Rate of increase in her productive capacity was more remarkable than its quantitive increase; between 1936 and 1938 coal production jumped 25%; steel production 25%; zinc production 15%; cement production 50%.

Heartbroken and embittered, Poland's leaders faced more than the loss of their country at the railway stations in Rumania. No trains ran to the destination that they had to face. The Republic was dead. In its 20 years of life it had grown despite the fact that it had only a period between 1926 and 1929, some 30 months at most, of prosperity. The men who divided it talked of the injustice of the treaty of Versailles.

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