While the frightful state of Belgium commanded the sympathy of the civilized world in the winter of 1914-15, the conditions in Poland were even worse.  At the end of March the great Polish pianist, Ignace Paderewski, paid a visit to London on behalf of the suffering Poles and his efforts resulted in the formation of an influential relief committee.  Among the members were such men as Premier Asquith, ex-Premier Balfour, Chancellor of the Exchequer Lloyd-George, Cardinal Bourne, archbishop of Westminster; Admiral Lord Charles Beresford and the Russian and French ambassadors.  An American woman, Lady Randolph Churchill, also took an active part in the work of the committee, which soon succeeded in raising a large sum for the relief of the most urgent distress in Poland.  While in London on his mission of mercy, Mr. Paderewski said: 

“Is it the death agony or only the birth pangs?  That is the question which every Pole throughout the world is asking himself as tragedy follows tragedy in the long martyrdom of our beloved nation.  You have only heard the details of Belgium, but I tell you they are as nothing with what has happened in Poland.

“The scene of operations in Poland is seven times larger than that of Belgium, and she has had to endure seven times the torture.  Remember, the battle of Europe is being fought in the east, not in the west, and while the tide of battle has reached a sort of ebb along the trenches about the frontiers of Alsace and Flanders, the great waves roll backward and forward from Germany to Russia and break always on Poland.

“Our country, in fact, is just as Belgium was called—­the cockpit of Europe, and it may now be called the battlefield of the world, if not of civilization.

“It is only perhaps we Poles who have known to its utmost depths what this war has really meant.  It is not only that there are 10,000, human beings on the verge of starvation, nay, actually perishing; there is worse than that.

“Remember that both Belgium and Poland are still under the yoke.  The Russians, it is true, occupy some fifteen thousand miles of our country, but this is really nothing, for the Germans occupy five-sixths of it, and the desolation passes all comprehension.

CALLS IT COMPULSORY SUICIDE

“As to actual battles, I can hardly speak of them.  It is torture even to think of them.  Only consider!  Our one nation is divided as it were into three sections, which were thrust each against the others to work out their destruction.  It is parricide!  It is fratricide, nay suicide!  Compulsory suicide!  That is what it is!

“Listen to what it means to us all.  I was told by a man from Austria that an army doctor, a Pole by birth, who was deputed to go over the Austrian battlefields and verify identification marks on the bodies, found among the 14,000 dead hardly any but Polish names.  He looked in vain for any others, and in the end went mad with horror at the thought of it.  Another story that came to me the other day told of another case of the tragedy of Poland which is almost too terrible for the human mind to contain.  The incident took place during a charge.  Both armies had been ordered to attack, and the Poles, as usual, were in the front lines.  As they met in the shock they recognized each other.