Return to the Baltic

by Hilaire Belloc

  Prussia at the moment (having been re-established by English policy and the use of English Bank credits, now, I am told, ‘frozen ’) dominates the Baltic to-day.

  Those who think that history is a Straight line (the common opinion of fools, and fools make the judgment of their day), those who do not perceive a curve and a most capricious curve, are taking it for granted that Prussia will dominate the Baltic for ever—but then, not thirty years ago, they would give you the same impression of the Russia of the Czars.

  §

  So far so good. But the interest of Poland to a man who is considering the Baltic of the past, and the Story of Scandinavia, is the varying fortunes of the two cultures into which Europe split after the Reformation, their Struggle to have the Baltic in their hands: to leave the Baltic a ProteStant or a Catholic lake. Poland made its effort towards the close of the Middle Ages. It was on the way to achievement when the Storm of the Reformation burst and it was under that Storm, and its later effects, that Poland loSt the Baltic shore.

  All energy polarises. The intense energies of the turmoil which shattered the unity of Christendom polarised as a matter of course, and the Baltic swung between the two poles. Anti-Catholicism centred in Sweden, the revival ofCatholicism centred in Poland.

  Because the thing happened our academic historians will have it that the thing was fated. They always say that! They always mouth wisdom after the event do the professors. How often have I not heard some pedant assuring his readers that the Slav by his nature was unsuited to the sea—even to such a sea as the Baltic. The same sort of man would have told you (if Poland had gone anti-Catholic (as it nearly did)), that there was something in the Polish nature or skull or skin that made Poland go Protestant of necessity. The same academic man would have told you that Poland had established her empire through ‘a process’ and that a CalviniSt Poland had been inevitable. The same man, or his pupil, will be telling you in the near future, if, as is probable, the political power of Poland increases, that Poland (being Catholic) must fail.

  Dantzig

  §

  The test of the business is Dantzig. After the Great War the future of Poland and of the Baltic turned upon whether Dantzig should be restored to its old Polish connection or no. The wiser men advised that it should be so returned. The men who think in terms of print, notably the politicians, voted the other way. They set up Dantzig as an anomalous ‘Free City’ (that indeed could not last!) and left the problem in this matter as they left nearly every other problem after the Great War, settled the wrong way, or, rather, unsettled.

  A new Polish Dantzig would have fitted in perfectly well with the new Poland. Dantzig has been for centuries the natural port of Poland. Its name was Polish; its origin half Polish. It had become a Prussian city, but that was a recent thing as history goes. That recent thing appeared very late in Baltic history.

  Well, they made their error and it has gone on fermenting, festering with all the other errors which were made in those days. The worst of all was the Bankers reviving Prussia and putting all Germans under Berlin.

  Dantzig is a town, as the West should know, that is now doomed to die. But most of the towns that have had a great past and are doomed to die are the more wonderful for their doom. Old Dantzig as she was within the walls is only not a jewel because it is too majestic to be a jewel. Its architecture is that triumph of gilded stone which you find in commercial city after commercial city along the flat shore in the Netherlands, in Frisia and here in the Baltic.

  You find that gilded Stone at its greatest perhaps in the market place of Brussels. You find it here in Dantzig all those hundreds of miles away; the same spirit and the same achievement. One thing is lacking which Brussels has retained, the religion which had made the town in its origin. Therefore the great church of Dantzig is dead as the great church of Utrecht is dead, but enough remains alive all round it to perpetuate the marvel of the old builders.

  Why does one say that Dantzig is doomed? Because Gdynia sucks it dry. Dantzig arose as a port of exchange and reception for the whole great Vistula basin which is Poland. It Stood at one of the mouths of the Vistula on the edge of the delta of the great Stream where it falls into the shallow land-locked bay, the ‘Hof’: shallow for the great craft of nowadays but manageable for the older ships.

  The narrow winding channel of that tideless runnel brought the boats with their merchandise to the hard wharf within the muddy flats of the coast to Dantzig and there you have remaining—and very Striking it is—the huge crane-hood which marked the centre of the harbour. I have seen more than one of these old crane-hoods up and down the harbours, though in the greater part of the ports they have disappeared. There is a sort of projecting wooden pent house protecting the main pulley from the weather, and within this worked the rope which hauled the cargoes out of the holds.

  Meanwhile the rival that cannot but kill Dantzig grows apace. Gdynia was made at once by man’s art out of nothingness through the great increase of power which modern machines have given to man. It is a port scooped out of the sand on the western edge of the great Hof, fitted with every appliance and advantage—and has deep water, at least, water as deep as the Hof will allow. Gdynia is served also by first-rate organisation of warehouse and shed, railway lines and all the rest of it. And through Gdynia, in spite of the blunder which left Dantzig German, Poland traffics with the sea. But can Gdynia remain Polish?

  There is an arrangement, I am told, by which Gdynia has promised (so far) not to be too hard on Dantzig, but there can be no real competition between the two when modern political conditions change. For who to-day will risk a narrow winding shallow Stream inland when he has on the very shore, but land-locked and protected from the outer waters, all the appurtenances and advantages of Gdynia?

  Gdynia has one disadvantage however. It is a disadvantage attaching to many another Polish thing—it is the disadvantage of a name which the West cannot pronounce: the old language difficulty again. It would be of service indeed to Polish relations if the Poles would consent to transliterate for the purpose of those relations and to spell their place names and the rest so that we of the West—especially those of us who are the friends of Poland—could read the names and pronounce them. I know that one is here up against a point of honour. There is the same trouble with the Welsh. There is no great harm done to Europe by the bristling difficulties of Welsh but great harm is done to Europe by anything which makes Poland the bastion of our civilisation seem outlandish.

  Yes, Poland is the bastion. It saved us in the Battle of Warsaw as it saved us more than 200 years earlier in the Battle of Vienna. It is of high moment to Europe that Poland should be in full communion with the rest of Europe, and the Polish place-names—and personal names. for that matter—are the difficulty.

  §

  It was with the Poles as with the French. They lay balanced between two forces which made a battlefield of all Christendom from 1530 to 1600. Among the scholars there was Strong attraction to the new movement for establishing a national liturgy. With others the love of familiar usage in an ancient worship which was also universal to Christendom prevailed.

  In the populace there was hope that any change might benefit them, but on the other hand a mistrust of ‘German Heresy.’

  With the rich the problem was simpler: on the one hand loyalty to their fathers and traditions; on the other, as in Sweden and England, the chance of vast new fortunes by the loot of education, hospitals, monasteries, shrines, endowments of all kinds.

  Poland more than any other province of Christendom was in doubt between the flood of the Reformation and the attachment to older things.

  More than once Polish Assemblies demanded the vernacular Mass, change of Liturgy, the Cup for the laity (of no meaning save as a symbol, but a most powerful symbol). With the Poles as with the French much of the best life after the height of the Renaissance was on the side of the revolt against unity. In Poland also a king quarrelled with a Pope (and quarrelled, oddly enough, o
n divorce), and you have the name of Laski, not the forged name of a Jew, but a true Pole famous among the reformers, famous even in distant England. The see-saw and hesitation did not end till well after the middle of the century. Even so the doubtful field had to be re-occupied.

  The recovery of Poland was a chief triumph of the Jesuits. The Society re-established Poland, though here, as in France, it was the wealthiest men who most inclined to the new doctrines. Happily for Poland and for Europe there had not been here so much loot available as in England and Sweden. The lesser gentry were not so much tempted, but perhaps what did most good was that irrational force of a nickname and the mere association of ideas. The Reformation began to be talked of as ‘that German thing,’ and the Poles, like the Danes, though a very different nation, dreaded the power of the empire.

  Yet remember that Poland, had she received the full effect of the Reformation, might well have benefited on the material side. The breakdown of European civilisation let usury loose and the letting loose of usury created that credit system which has so vastly increased the wealth of the nations which adopted it and which is only now beginning to appear as a poison. Also in Sweden as in England the Reformation depressed the peasantry to the advantage of the wealthy, favoured adventure, and therefore enhanced leadership, judgment in commercial adventure, a readiness to accept novel instruments and new methods.

  The Reformation killed the Guild. It gave us in the long run industrial capitalism, but its first fruits were only triumphs among the towns, where it meant new energies, new adaptations. In these the Poles, like all communities which had preferred the sacred things and the traditions, lagged behind the rest.

  But probably what hurt the strength of Poland most was the loss of monarchy. The best of the later kings said, when his first Assembly gathered, that the whole task of government was to govern. Zamoyski, his chancellor, who had also made him king, knew that.

  But how should kingship govern without continuity? This new Polish crown was elective at the hands of an aristocracy. Permanent kingship there was not. Sigismund the IIIrd, the champion of the old Faith, he who made Warsaw the capital, would have done it if any man could, but the forces of rebellion were too Strong. It is a true symbolism which puts him on that pillar in Warsaw, holding in the one hand the cross and in the other the sword. Yet the Cross of Christ is also the symbol of that which lost the Baltic to Poland. He saved the Faith of Poland, he saved the soil of Poland, too, triumphing to the east by land—but he lost the sea.

  He was a Vasa, the legitimate heir of Sweden and indeed accepted as king, but his religion was too much for the new millionaires. That religion endangered their great fortunes based on the loot of the church lands and revenues. He was driven out and, though he triumphed in the great flats of the east, the sea was not recovered. From his time onward Sweden is the conquering power, barring the Poles from the ways that led to the open seas, and to the ocean.

  §

  It was in the second lifetime after the full effect of the Reformation that Catholic Poland, like Catholic Ireland, was submerged. In the late seventeenth century the effects of the Reformation were clinched.

  The Polish fortunes were at their lowest. In the eighteenth century Poland fell a prey to the growing power of Protestant Prussia. It is a very good example of how the thing that is both prophesied and dreaded does not usually come off. Another unexpected evil takes its place. Sweden had barred Poland from the sea. After that the Swedes continued to invade and at the worst moment reached the very heart of the country at Czenstohowa. Yet it was not they that benefited by the collapse of the restricted, harassed and undermined Polish monarchy. The beneficiary was Prussia.

  It was Frederick of Prussia who was the real author of the partition. His active and willing accomplice was the Empress of Russia, but the main responsibility lies with that great soldier, the Hohenzollern, whose sword after his death went on its travels: first taken by Napoleon into France as a trophy (for Napoleon vastly admired Frederick’s genius): then, after the defeat of Napoleon, returned.

  There was more than one partition of Poland, but throughout the bad business—the launching of our modern moral anarchy in international affairs—it is Prussia that presides over the murder.

  England being morally an ally of Prussia for nearly two centuries, the part Prussia played has naturally been under-emphasised in our official histories, the new Oxford and Cambridge historical school of the nineteenth century. The generation of English which was then growing up held Russian Czardom to be the chief and most dangerous enemy of England, especially after the defeat of the French in 1870. All English policy turned upon the idea that an invasion of India from the Russian Empire was to be most dreaded and most guarded against—yet another of those expected things which did not happen.

  On account of our attitude towards Russia, the movements of Russian Cossacks on the Polish soil were underlined; while we heard much less of the corresponding Prussian action. Both robbers, both marauders, combined in a violent hatred of the Polish religion, and therefore of the Polish people; but there is this much at least to be said for the old Russia that it did not work towards the dispossession of the Poles on their own soil. The Prussian Government had that for an object.

  Cracow

  §

  We used to hear in the old days that the only reason Russia did not do as much harm as Prussia to the Poles was that the Russians were less efficient. But it was more than that; it was a certain similarity of origins, and perhaps (though this idea may be extravagant) a certain affinity of blood between all Slavs.

  The really tragic thing was that the Austrian crown did not sufficiently oppose the wickedness of the Partition. Maria Theresa was heartbroken about it. She uttered a prophecy which has proved lamentably true, when she said that her children and her children’s children would rue the day in which the deed was done. Yet she took her share of the spoils.

  It was only a corner of Poland that ultimately fell to Austria. It was given more political freedom than the rest. There were sympathies of religion at work which is a force superior to that of nationality and far superior to that of race, but then came at last a complete annexation of what may be called ‘Carpathian Poland,’ the sources of the Vistula and the upper waters of that river and, more important than anything else, the ancient capital, Cracow.

  Though Sigismund had made of Warsaw the political centre of Poland (which it has remained from his time onwards) yet Cracow will always be the real heart of the people, the sacred place. And one feels in Cracow the reality and the presence of the Polish soul as one feels it nowhere else. That is but the judgment of a chance foreign traveller, and as like as not romantically out of perspective, for after all Cracow is a frontier town not central to the Polish realm. Yet never have I trodden the Streets of Cracow when I have visited and re-visited the town without a feeling of being in the immediate presence of that holy something which inhabits Poland like a secret flame.

  The Church of Our Lady from within, when you enter it from the market place, Strikes you suddenly like a vision: something hardly of this world. It is of a supernatural beauty. That secret influence of which I speak was at work to make it so. It is though one were transported within a casket of jewels all aflame with a silent but ubiquitous light of every colour, and as though that silence were a music from beyond the skies. I know of nothing to compare with it in Europe. Although there are many things of its kind, none of them achieve this intensity.

  The Polish realm while it was a sovereign power preserved Cracow from too much change. The Habsburgs did well to carry on that tradition. The old gate is Still fully of its own old time. I heard when I was last in the place some rumour that on some bad and false temporary excuse it might be interfered with. Any modification which should mar its character would be a grave error. It is more than a relic and more than a symbol. . It has in it no mark of an unearthly beauty which is centred in the Lady Church; it is but part of an ancient defensive; but it is alive a
ll the same and carries on the past: a task which is the noblest assignable to any material thing.

  The other main element in the old defensive system of Cracow is, of course, the castle on the rocky hill which rises from the very bank of the Vistula; here a shallow, not very broad, Stream, beginning its long journey to the Baltic, in the course of which it builds up, as round a spinal column, the whole business of Poland.

  The infamy of the Partition is nowhere better exemplified than the way in which it arbitrarily divided the course of the Vistula; the new frontiers cut three times across that river, the course of which is the integrity of Poland itself.

  This castle of Cracow above the Vistula, the Wavel, is not only very Striking in its site, but has been, like most ancient sites of its kind, well used. It is full of the memory of Kosciusko, whose tomb lies within it.

  It has about it in its outline and dimensions a challenge such as no other point in the country offers, for Poland is almost wholly a country of great plains, and when one has left the foothills of the Carpathians, as one goes northwards, one finds oneself on that ill-defined sea of land which continues the flats of North Germany on the one side and Stretches into Asia on the other, with only the interruption of the Urals between. The absence of natural strongholds in that vast indefinite level, and perhaps also the absence of an insufficient supply of Stone, most of all the absence of natural frontiers, has affected the whole Story. That is why it is so astonishing that this individual Polish nation, which is also a bastion of Christendom against Asia, should have arisen and consolidated itself between Cracow and the Baltic Sea.

  Of that nation I have called the Lady Church of Cracow and the Wavel Castle the origins from which it springs. But there is another nucleus, the famous shrine of Czenstohowa.

  It is characteristic of our ignorance, here, in the West, of all things Polish that the monastery, the spire, the altar of Czenstohowa should be hardly known to us. It was the turning point of the invasions. It was here that the last of the Swedish effort turned back. That was symbolic, and symbolic also was the advent by Foch after the Great War had been fought out and Poland had risen from the dead. He knew all that was meant by Czenstohowa. He came there all the way after the peace to pay homage: to give thanks. But already his victory was being sapped and ruined.