It is a bad thing that the Polish-Lithuanian frontier, closed
for almost eighteen years, should have been forced open, but a good thing that it should be open. I suppose I am one 0: comparatively few people who have been across that frontier —and I didn't get very far across it. I had driven out from Vilna to spend a day with a Polish advocate who had (he is dead now) a large estate which was actually bisected by the frontier. He and his employees could move about as they chose within the limits of the estate, and when he took me over the little 'wooden bridge which spanned a stream that marked the frontier the Lithuanian sentry posted there made no difficulty. But we had not gone fifty yards before he reflected that such laxity might get him into trouble, and I was haled back. My friend pointed out a little village about a mile away. " There," he said, " is what Used to be the parish church of all my people. Of course not one of them can go there now. My cook's family lives just over the frontier. When she wants to write to her mother I send the letter under cover to a friend in Danzig, because letters for Lithuania posted in Poland aren't delivered." As for me, I got from Vilna to Kovno, the capital of Lithuania, via Riga, which is rather like going from 'London to Oxford via York. But Kovno had, at any rate, a much better hotel than Vilna could boast. It also had, as British Minister, a third of Sir Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen, the late Ambassador to China. The other two-thirds of him were shared by Riga and Tallinn.
Previous page
