FIRST NEWS—­1918

Four years ago, on the first day of August, in the town of Cracow, Austrian Poland, nobody would believe that the war was coming.  My apprehensions were met by the words:  “We have had these scares before.”  This incredulity was so universal amongst people of intelligence and information, that even I, who had accustomed myself to look at the inevitable for years past, felt my conviction shaken.  At that time, it must be noted, the Austrian army was already partly mobilised, and as we came through Austrian Silesia we had noticed all the bridges being guarded by soldiers.

“Austria will back down,” was the opinion of all the well-informed men with whom I talked on the first of August.  The session of the University was ended and the students were either all gone or going home to different parts of Poland, but the professors had not all departed yet on their respective holidays, and amongst them the tone of scepticism prevailed generally.  Upon the whole there was very little inclination to talk about the possibility of a war.  Nationally, the Poles felt that from their point of view there was nothing to hope from it.  “Whatever happens,” said a very distinguished man to me, “we may be certain that it’s our skins which will pay for it as usual.”  A well-known literary critic and writer on economical subjects said to me:  “War seems a material impossibility, precisely because it would mean the complete ruin of all material interests.”

He was wrong, as we know; but those who said that Austria as usual would back down were, as a matter of fact perfectly right.  Austria did back down.  What these men did not foresee was the interference of Germany.  And one cannot blame them very well; for who could guess that, when the balance stood even, the German sword would be thrown into the scale with nothing in the open political situation to justify that act, or rather that crime—­if crime can ever be justified?  For, as the same intelligent man said to me:  “As it is, those people” (meaning Germans) “have very nearly the whole world in their economic grip.  Their prestige is even greater than their actual strength.  It can get for them practically everything they want.  Then why risk it?” And there was no apparent answer to the question put in that way.  I must also say that the Poles had no illusions about the strength of Russia.  Those illusions were the monopoly of the Western world.

Next day the librarian of the University invited me to come and have a look at the library which I had not seen since I was fourteen years old.  It was from him that I learned that the greater part of my father’s MSS. was preserved there.  He confessed that he had not looked them through thoroughly yet, but he told me that there was a lot of very important letters bearing on the epoch from ’60 to ’63, to and from many prominent Poles of that time: