The Drama of Three Hundred and Sixty Five Days/A Province Without a Soul
A PROVINCE WITHOUT A SOUL
But little as Nature has done to cheer the
spirits of the Poles, who live under Austrian rule,
what man has done is less. It is nothing at all,
or worse than nothing. Thickly sown on the
eastern frontier are many densely populated
manufacturing towns, ugly and squat, and giving
the effect of standing barefoot on the damp earth.
As you walk through them they look like interminable
lines of featureless streets, full of those
sweating, screaming, squabbling masses of
humanity that take away all your pride in the
dignity of man's estate. The prevailing colour
is yellow, the dominant odour is noxious, the
thoroughfares are narrow, and often unpaved.
In the busier quarters the shops are sometimes
spacious, but more frequently they are mere
slits in the monotonous facades. When closed,
as on Sunday, these slits give the appearance
of a row of prison cells. When open they present
crude pictures on the inner faces of their
doors—pictures of boots, caps, trousers, stockings
or corsets, a typology which seems to be
more necessary than words to inhabitants who
have not, as a whole, been taught to read.
And then the people themselves! Perhaps there is not in all the world a more hopeless-looking race, with their lagging lower lips, their dull grey eyes, their dosy, helpless, exanimate expression, suggesting that the body is half-asleep and the spirit no more than half-awake. To see them slouching along the streets, or sitting in stupefied groups at the doors of brandy-shops, passing a single bottle from mouth to mouth, is to realize how low humanity may fall in its own esteem under the rule of an alien government. To watch them at prayer in their little Catholic churches is to feel that they have been made to think of themselves as the least of God's creatures, unworthy to come to His footstool—always ready to kiss the earth, and never daring to lift their eyes to heaven, having no right, and hardly any hope.
Such are the poorer and more degraded of the Poles in the Austrian crownland of Galicia, which has lately been swept by war (along the banks of the Vistula, the Dniester, and the Bug), and is now perishing of hunger, and being devastated by disease. And when I ask myself what has been the root-cause of a degradation so deep in a people who once laboured for the humanities of the world and upheld the traditions of Culture, I find only one answer—the suppression of nationality! In that fact lies the moral of Galicia's martyrdom. Let Belgium's nationality be suppressed as Germany is now trying to suppress it, and her condition will soon be like that of Austrian Poland. You cannot expect to keep the body of a nation alive while you are doing your best to destroy its soul.