THE SLAV BORDERLANDS.
THE fanatics at Petrograd who have sought peace by throwing away their arms and speaking with the enemy in the gate have had a rude surprise. Germany, after declaring that, if M. Trotsky would not make peace, he should have war, announced that the armistice would end at noon on Monday. At the appointed hour the enemy troops were set in motion. One army crossed the Dvina without resistance and occupied Dvinsk. Another, further south, advanced from Kovel, "called by the Ukraine to help in their heavy struggle against the Great Russians." For M. Trotsky is only a Pacificist where the enemy is concerned. He will fight with all the weapons of civilized and uncivilized man against his fellow-countrymen in the Ukraine or the Don Valley, or against the Poles, the Finns, or the Rumanians, but he will not, he says, lift a finger against the German invaders, the representa ives of military auto- cracy. The duty of staying the German armies devolves, he says, on the German proletariat ; for his own part, he is fully occupied in spreading anarchy through what was Russia. M. Trotsky, in face of an invasion that he evidently did not expect, has first blustered and then collapsed. On Monday evening, as soon as he heard of the German advance, he in- formed the world by wireless that he was ready to sign a German peace on the terms dictated at Brest-Litovsk. The Anarchists, whose watchword, borrowed from German Socialism, was "Peace without annexations or indemnities," professed themselves ready to let the German War Lord annex the Baltic Provinces ani Poland and to pay him £300,000,000 for his trouble. What they will do if the Germans decline to stop we shall not try to predict, for it is unprofitable to speculate on the ways of lunatics temporarily possessed of power. The immediate sufferers will be the Slav borderlands, the fringe of Slav peoples inter- vening between Germany and Russia proper, of whom the greatest is the Polish race. The ruling military faction in Germany has always cast a covetous eye on these great territories, and it sees in the collapse of Russia the long- awaited opportunity for annexations in the East. The amiable visionaries who see peace where there is no peace hailed the German and Austrian declarations at Brest-Litovsk in favour of the right of self-determination of peoples as a beneficent formula which was obstructed in its application only by the middle-class scepticism of the Allied Governments. But the Pacificists had barely ceased applauding when the Central Powers announced that " self-determination " had already been exercised by Courland, Lithuania, and Poland, which had decided to join themselves to Germany, or, in other words, must be considered to have been annexed by her. After a few weeks more of talk, the Russian delegates were informed that the Ukraine must be regarded as inde- pendent, and that a Peace Treaty binding her to Germany and Austria had been signed and would be upheld. The Anarchists protested in vigorous terms, and declared that, so far as they were concerned, the war was finished and the Russian Army would be disbanded. This put a new and irresistible temptation before the German military clique. They saw the other border provinces of Russia lying helpless at their feet, and could not refrain from seizing them. A pretext was easily found in the preposterous brutality of the Anarchists, whose hand was against every man, and who were laying waste the whole country in the name of the Social Revolution. The Germans, as self-styled apostles of order, are on their way to occupy Livonia and Esthonia, and perhaps Petrograd. Germany would not utter a word of protest when her Turkish ally was slaughtering Armenians by the hundred thousand. But her heart bleeds for the oppressed Ukrainians, whom she is to assist in the defence of their country by occupying it for herself. The Slav border- lands from the Baltic to the Black Sea will thus become a vast German dependency.
Before this programme is realized, we may be sure that the Poles will have something to say in the matter. Poland was for ages the bulwark both of European civilization against the Tartar barbarism of the East and of Slav institutions against the German advance from the West. She was forcibly broken up and divided among her neighbours in the eighteenth century, but she still lives and cannot be ignored. Western Europe hears little about Poland and pays too scanty regard to her, partly because Russian Poland is in enemy hands, and partly, we fear, because the Poles are too busy in con- tending with one another to present a clear-cut case to the world. If the existence of many political parties is a sign of national vigour, Poland should have unbounded potentialities, for no nation is more plagued with faction. Whenever one Polish party sets forth a programme for the consideration of the Allies, two or three other Polish parties denounce the programme as unrepresentative and unauthor- ized, and it has thus become difficult for the outer world to find out the true wishes of the Polish people. We can, how- ever, safely affirm that the Poles are agreed in desiring inde- pendence, though they differ widely as to the form of their future government. The Austrian Poles have been dazzled by a scheme for uniting Russian Poland and Austrian Galicia under the Austrian Emperor or an Archduke, which would at any rate keep the hated Prussian at arm's-length. The Russian Poles have shown a preference for a separate Kingdom or a Republic, unconnected either with Austria or with Prussia. As for the Prussian Poles, in Posen and West Prussia, they have not been allowed to express their senti- ments since the war began ; but as they had for many years been engaged in resisting the efforts of Prussia to Germanize them, they need not be suspected of cherishing any deep regard for their rulers. While the Tsardom endured, the Germans could always appeal to the intense anti-Russian feeling of the Poles, and could suggest with some plausibility that the arbitrary misgovernment of the Tsar was on the whole worse than the methodical tyranny of the German Emperor. But now that Russia no longer blocks the way to Polish freedom, for the Bolshevik attempt to dragoon the Poles cannot succeed, the German Poles are freed from their dilemma, and can look without misgiving towards a reunion with their kinsmen across the old border. For a time, while Russia was still an enemy to be feared, the Central Powers trifled with the idea of Polish independence. They set up a Regency in the late autumn of 1916, and gave nominal powers to a shadowy Polish Government while allseal authority remained with the German Military Governor. The Regency was of course restricted to Russian Poland. Neither Germany nor Austria showed any willingness to surrender her Polish provinces, so that the Polish race might be reunited. The Russian Revolution changed the situation. Russia, once the persecutor, had now become the ardent advocate of nationality. The Allies, free from the embarrassment of their connexion with the Tsar, were able to express their sympathy with Polish aspirations. Mr. Boner Law in the House of Commons on April 25th last welcomed the Polish Proclamation of the Russian Provisional Government, and promised British help to the Poles in striving for unity in a strong and independent State. The latest statements of Allied war aims have all included declarations in favour of Polish freedom, for, as the Russian Proclamation said, "the creation of an independent Polish State would be a sure guarantee of durable peace in Europe." But it remained for the Poles themselves to show their determination to achieve unity. The occasion seems to have come with the Ukraine Peace Treaty, in which a portion of Russian Poland is ceded to the new Republic. This malevolent bargain, to be followed, it is reported, by the annexation of Western Poland as far as the factory district of Lodz to Prussia, has roused the Polish national spirit from its apparent torpor. The favourite German policy of sowing mistrust between neighbours has of course been followed in the Ukraine Treaty, and the Poles, if they are wise, will concentrate their jndig. nation on the real culprits and not on the inexpert Ukrainians whom the enemy entrapped. The resignation of the Polish Government and of the Austrian Military Governer, himself a Pole, showed at once how deeply the Polish nobility resented this new partition of their country. We hear further of general strikes at Warsaw, and also at Cracow and Lemberg, to demonstrate the strength of popular hostility among the Poles to this cynical bartering away of Polish soil. It is announced that the Ukraine Treaty has actually been revised, and that the Ukraine's claim to a slice of Poland will be reconsidered. But the Poles will not forget the contempt displayed for their national rights. The German Press exhibits its fear of the consequences by re- suming the violent attacks on the Poles, which used to fill its columns daily before the war, and we may be sure that its illwill is reciprocated. But we have yet to see whether the Poles will attempt to revolt against their masters. Great numbers of the Russian Poles have been drafted into Germany to work in the mines and munition factories, and the old Polish Legions that for long occupied a neutral position as between the Germans and the Russians have, it is believed, been wholly or partly disbanded. But the Polish Legions formerly in the Russian service, who have been fighting with the Anarchists near Mohileff, might form a nucleus for an insurrectionary movement which would cause the enemy some uneasiness. If a revolt were Once begun, it might *read to Galicia, where the Poles are notoriously disaffected, and in that mite the position of the Austrian Government would 'be distinctly uncomfortable, because they do not sympathize with the anti-Polish policy now clearly adopted by their masterful ally. At any rate, even if the Poles do not try to win their freedom in the only possible way, it is something to the good that they will now be more closely united, against the Germans than they have been since the war began. The Polish question, the future of twenty-five million people, remains to perplex the enemy.
For the world at large Germany's dealings with the Slav peoples on her borders afford a new and final proof of the true nature of her designs. Her statesmen are profuse in pious assurances that she is only waging a war of self-defence, and they deceive a few among us who are honestly ignorant or who are willing to be deceived. But her Generals, who really control German policy, are out for conquest, and they will not surrender an inch of their gains until they are forced to do so by overwhelming defeat in the field. If we were to make peace to-day with Germany, flushed with pride over her diplomatic and military triumphs, we should have to accept her control of the vast Slav lands stretching across Eastern Europe to the Black Sea. To say nothing of Turkey, a Germany that commanded the Russian wheat-lands and the Black Sea trade would be in an extremely strong position, and many millions of Slays, instead of exercising the right of self-determination, would have to toil for their German overlords. This prospect may not alarm the self-sufficient Pacificist, but it must fill all serious people with the gravest concern. For if Germany after a century and a quarter has failed to content her Polish subjects in Posen, it is im- probable that she would be able to give an acceptable govern- ment to the vastly greater Slav populations over whom she is now, acquiring dominion. She will have to hold them down by force, increasing her Army for the purpose. But Germany is prepared to face these risks, in return for the privilege of recruiting vast numbers of Slays to swell her forces for the next war that the German General Staff is confidently antici- pating. When Russia recovers her sanity, she will naturally endeavour to regain her lost provinces, a new Alsace-Lorraine on a far greater scale in Eastern Europe. In short, if Germany succeeds in her designs on the Slav borderlands, we can see nothing before Europe but a vista of lasting war. A "righteous peace," in the Pacificist jargon, concluded on this basis, would mean a repetition at an early date of the struggle which we all fervently hope may be the last of its kind. It is useless to blind ourselves to the facts. Unless the Slav peoples gain their freedom and independence, whether in what was Russia or in modern Austria-Hungary, we can have no lasting peace, and a peace that will not endure would be worse than futile. The one road to a real peace lies through victory. We can only help Poland and her Slav neighbours by continuing the war. The future of the Polish race and every other great question at issue will be settled on the battlefields of France and Flanders.
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