Poland is commencing the New Year with her face towards peace and the hope in her heart that she may never have to fight again. For her the war has lasted two years longer than for any other country. During the past six years she has had to fight on five separate fronts. Her devastated area is greater than that of France. She has cities which have been captured and occupied seven separate times since 1914 by the armies of seven separate nations. She is sick of war. She has elected a peasant for her prime minister—a man who belongs to the class which gains nothing but sorrow from bloodshed. All that Poland asks from the New Year is the quiet in which to convalesce from her wounds, so that she may gather strength to construct her nationhood along the lines of states-manly righteousness. As the clocks above Warsaw struck the hour of midnight, the prayer in every heart was, “God give us peace with the New Year.”

How badly she requires peace and how bitterly she stands in need of the world's mercy, no one can conceive who has not been here. She is a land of widows, cripples and orphans. She has two millions of under-nourished children, of whom only one million are being cared for. She has a million refugees within her borders. Her mark, which was originally worth twenty-five cents, has sunk to an exchange value of one-sixth of a cent. The barbed wire entanglements come up to the very gates of Warsaw. The threat of a Bolshevist invasion in the spring is like a brutal hand, clapped against her lips, silencing laughter. It compels her, against her will, to keep her army mobilised; if she disbanded, she would make invasion certain. Every man she keeps under arms loses her a little of the world's sympathy. She knows that, but she does not dare to be unprotected. She is a nation in rags. Until the American Relief Administration came, she was a nation of funerals.

And yet none of her misfortunes have quenched her unconquerable valor. In Cracow stands the famous church of St. Mary's. Centuries ago it was a watch-tower against the invading Tartar; a soldier was kept constantly stationed there to give warning on a trumpet of the first approach of danger. In the fourteenth century, while rousing the city to its peril, the trumpeter was struck in the throat by an enemy's arrow. His call faltered, rallied and sank. Then, with his dying breath, he sounded a last blast, which broke off short. The broken call saved the city. Ever since, to commemorate his faithfulness, there has never been an hour, day or night, when his broken trumpet-call, ending abruptly in an abyss of silence, has not been sounded from the tower. The man symbolises the soul of Poland—the soul of a dying trumpeter who blows a last blast of warning above the sleeping roofs of civilization.

Poland will surely die in her watch-tower unless the sleeping world whom she protects, awakes and comes to her rescue. She is dying gamely, with her back to the wall. She does not whine—she does not slacken in her effort. The smallest children make themselves sharers in her sacrifice. If you go to the American soup-kitchens you will find tiny mites of six and seven shivering in queues to secure the rations. They are there because they are the only members of the family young enough to be spared. If you question them, you will find that they have left still younger babies locked up in the squalid rooms that they call home. To prove their assertion they show you the key that they carry round their necks. From dawn to dark the elder children and parents are out at work.

A little girl of eight came to the officials of the Relief Administration the other day with a pathetic request. She came by herself and explained that the idea was entirely her own. She wanted to be sent to America. But had she relations in America? No. Then had she no one whom she loved in Poland? Yes—her father and mother. But would she want to leave them? At that question she began to cry. It would hurt her very much to leave them; but she was so young. There was no other way to help; she could only eat and there was so little food. If she went away, there would be more for someone else.

This magnanimity of devotion, touches every class—especially the women. There is an order in Poland known as the Gray Samaritans. They are Y. W. C. A. girls of Polish blood, recruited in America, and are among the most gallant helpers that the American Relief Administration possesses. Their business is to go into the most remote villages, many of which lie far away from railroads. The story of the privations of their travels would fill volumes. In these villages they establish feeding-stations, train the peasants in their management and then pass on to the next point where the need is greatest.

Another order of purely Polish origin is The Women's Battalion of Death. They started in Lemberg, in a crisis of invasion, when not a single man was left. The last man, if he may be so called, had been a hoy of fourteen, who had been shot by the enemy as he was searching for protection for the women. In their dilemma the women armed themselves. The movement spread; and so the Battalion of Death became a permanency.

On New Year's Eve I went to visit them; they were housed in a damp building across the Vistula, which had formerly been used as a prison for captured Russian soldiers. Its passages had a mildewed smell; they were stone-paved and dark as a dungeon. A door opened. We felt our way across a vaulted cellar crowded with gray-blanketed, unlovely beds. Another door opened. The sound of fresh, young voices rushed to meet us and the tinkling of a worn piano. In a bare, chill room the girl-soldiers of Poland were gathered. It was their New Year's festival. I think the first thing we noticed was the merriment of their eyes and the roundness of their close cropped heads. It would have been easy to have mistaken them for boys in their dingy khaki. A Christmas tree stood in the corner robbed of all its presents. They had been dancing as we entered and were halted, still in couples, gazing towards us shyly. They looked children. In a land less sorely pressed, they would have had their hair in pigtails and have been romping in school. Certainly they were not a sight to inspire terror. The youngest was fifteen—the average age eighteen to twenty. You would never have imagined that they were a Battalion of Death. Then you talked with them and understood.

There was one girl who was a sample of the rest. She was pretty, despite her shaven head; her complexion was high and her eyes frank. She was the kind of a girl who ought to have had her suitors. Yes, she had seen fighting; it was in the trenches at Vilna. They had held on too long after the retreat had commenced. The first thing they knew, the Bolos were upon them. They came firing as they advanced and her companions were falling. At the last moment, to save herself, she had shammed death and hidden herself beneath the corpses. Then followed the story of her escape, told casually, as though it were the sort of thing that might happen to any girl. She was just nineteen and of gentle birth. When the fighting was at its height, there had been girls of title in her battalion; it had been recruited from all ranks, the same as the men's. Now that the ordeal was over for the moment, the girls who remained were mostly peasants. Why did she remain? I asked many of them that question before the evening was ended. The answer which they gave me was always the same, though phrased in different words, “To help Poland.”

They didn't mind how they were employed, so long as they helped. They didn't care how much they suffered, so long as they helped. They were guarding stores of food at present because they were more honest than the men. But they would work in soup-kitchens, anywhere, at anything. If the war sprang up again, they would fight.

They were mere kiddies, most of them, laughing and irrepressible. They wanted to be free to live, to possess lovers, to be mothers, to have children. But, like the trumpeter of Cracow, they would not desert their post while their warning might save the sleeping world.

At the State Reception at the Winter Palace, I gained a further glimpse into the heart of Polish heroism. I was speaking to Prince Sapieha, the Minister of Foreign Affairs. He pointed to the fireplace of the Reception Room. “It was standing there,” he said, “that Tsar Alexander II gave the death blow to our hopes. We had heard that he was generous and we had believed that he would free us and give us justice. There in front of the fireplace he met our patriots who had come to plead with him. Before they commenced, 'Point de reveries'—no dreams, he said. That has been our answer through all the ages, whenever we have complained to our oppressors. They have told us, 'No dreams;' but we have gone on dreaming till at last our dreams have come true. We dreamed the seemingly impossible; and we have dreamt ourselves into freedom.”