The Polish delegates appointed to conclude an armistice met the
Bolsheviks at Baranovitchi on Friday week. The Bolsheviks informed them on Sunday that they must negotiate for a peace as well as for an armistice. The Poles, having no instructions with regard to peace terms, were constrained to return to Warsaw. The Bolsheviks proposed that peace negotiations should begin at Minsk on Wednesday. The object of these delays, if they were calculated was, of course, to give time to the Bolshevik forces to advance nearer to Warsaw. The proposal to negotiate peace at Minsk ignores the demand of the Allies that peace terms should be arranged at a conference in London. Meanwhile the Bolsheviks have reached the Prussian frontier near Suwalki, to the mingled joy and alarm of Berlin. They have captured Brest-Litovsk, a hundred miles east of Warsaw. To the south, they have entered Eastern' Galicia and are threatening Lemberg. The German dock-labourers at Danzig struck in order to impede the despatch of munitions to the Poles, but the High Commissioner, Sir Reginald Tower, called upon the British troops in garrison to unload the trans- ports. The Bolsheviks have disclosed their real aims by announcing the formation of a "Provisional Revolutionary Soviet" in occupied Poland, with one of the chief Russian Terrorists as a member. There is to be no " self-determination " for the Poles if the Bolsheviks are allowed to overrun the country.
