The Illustrated London News, July 2, 1927.

"The Polish Ideal"

There are certain things in this world that are at once
intensely loved and intensely hated.  They are naturally things
of a strong character, and either very good or very bad.
They generally give a great deal of trouble to everybody,
and a special sort of trouble to those who try to destroy them.
But they give most trouble of all to those who try to ignore them.
Some hate them so insanely as to deny their very existence;
but the void made by that negation continues to exasperate those
who have made it till they are like men choked with a vacuum.
They declare that it shall be nameless, and then never cease to curse
its name.  This curious case is perhaps best illustrated by example.
One example of it is Ireland.  Another example is Poland.

Within ten minutes of my stepping from the train on to Polish territory
I had heard two phrases--phrases which struck the precise note which
thus inspires one-half of the world and infuriates the other half.
We were received by a sort of escort of Polish cavalry, and one
of the officers made a speech in French--a very fine speech in very
good French.  In the course of it he used the first of these two
typical expressions:  "I will not say the chief friend of Poland.
God is the chief friend of Poland."  And he afterwards said,
in a more playful and conversational moment:  "After all, there are
only two trades for a man--a poet and a soldier of cavalry."
He said it humorously, and with the delicate implication,
"You are a poet and I am a soldier of cavalry.  So there we are!"
I said that, allowing for the difficulty of anybody having anything
to eat if this were literally true, I entirely accepted the sentiment,
and heartily agreed with it.  But I know there are some people
who would not understand it even enough to disagree with it.
I know that some people would furiously refuse even to see
the joke of it.  There is something in that particular sort
of romance, or (if you will) in that particular sort of swagger,
which moves them quite genuinely to a violent irritation.
It is an irritation common among rationalists, among the drier sort
of dons, and among the duller sort of public servants.

Now, if all those Polish officers had been Prussian officers,
if their swagger had consisted of silently pushing people off
the kerbstone, if their ceremony had consisted not in making good
speeches but in standing in a row quite speechless, if their faces
had been like painted wood and their heads and bodies puffed
up with nothing but an east wind of pride, they would not have
irritated this sort of critic in this sort of way.  They would have
soothed him, with a vague sense that this is what soldiers must be.
I do not say he would approve of everything they did, but he would accept
what they were.  It would not anger him or even seem to him absurd,
as it does to me, who belong to the other half of mankind.
But what does anger him, what does seem to him absurd,
is the idea of a soldier civilized; the man who is no more ashamed
of the military art than of any other art, but who is interested
in other arts--and interested in them all like an artist.
That the man in uniform should make a speech, and, worst of all,
a good speech, seems comic--like a policeman composing a sonnet.
That he should connect a horse-soldier with a poet appears meaningless,
like connecting a butcher with a Buddhist monk.  In one historic word,
these people hate and have always hated the Cavalier.
They hate the Cavalier especially when he writes Cavalier songs.
They hate the knight when he is also a troubadour.  They can understand
Ironsides[1] solemnly killing people in the fear of the Lord,
as they can understand Prussian soldiers solemnly killing people
in the fear of the War-Lord. But they cannot tolerate the combination
of wit and culture and courtesy with this business of killing.
It seems especially preposterous when the Cavalier adds to all his other
dazzling inconsistencies by being quite as religious as the Ironside.
The last touch is put to their angry bewilderment when the man
who has talked gaily as if nobody mattered except lancers and lyric
poets says, with the same simplicity and gaiety, "the only friend
of our country is God."

These critics commonly say that they are irritated with this
romantic type because it always fails; so they are naturally
even more irritated when it very frequently succeeds.
People who are ready to shed tears of sympathy when the windmills
overthrow Don Quixote are very angry indeed when Don Quixote really
overthrows the windmills.  People who are prepared to give a vain
blessing to a forlorn hope are not unnaturally annoyed to find that
the forlorn hope is comparatively hopeful and not entirely forlorn.
Even the most genial of these realists, Mr. Bernard Shaw,
would be a little vexed if he had to reverse the whole moral
of "Arms and the Man" and admit that the Arms counted for a little
less and the Man for a little more.  He would be slightly put out,
perhaps, if the celebrated artillery duel really took place,
and the sentimental Sergius blew the realistic Bluntzschli to pieces.
But that is almost exactly what has really happened in modern Europe
to-day. That is what happened, for instance, when the practical
Mr. Broadbent[2] went bankrupt in his Other Island.

When the Poles defeated the Bolshevists in the field of battle,
it was precisely that.  It was the old chivalric tradition defeating
everything that is modern, everything that is necessitarian,
everything that is mechanical in method and materialistic in philosophy.
It was the Marxian notion that everything is inevitable defeated
by the Christian notion that nothing is inevitable--no, not even
what has already happened.  Mr. Belloc has put the Polish ideal
into lines dedicated to a great Polish shrine--

  Hope of the Half-Defeated; house of gold;
  Shrine of the sword and tower of ivory.[3]

Before I leave these Polish cavaliers I may remark that I had
another chance of seeing them at the jumping competitions in the
Concours Hippique, and I will only mention one incident and leave it,
for it is something of a parable.  The course consisted of the usual
high obstacle, but there was one which was apparently of a novel
pattern and practically insuperable.  Anyhow, one after another in
that long procession of admirable riders, French, Polish, and Italian,
failed at this final test till failure came to be treated as a matter
of course; even experts on such occasions differ about the degrees
of merits and misfortunes, and I am not an expert at a horse show.
One of the Lancers playfully asked me if I was going to compete.
I made the obvious answer that, mounted on my favorite elephant,
I would undertake to step over many of the fences, though certainly
no the last fence of all, which I doubt if a giraffe could bestride.
But the general feeling seemed to be that I should be more useful
as an obstacle than a surmounter of obstacles, and that, if I lay
down on the course, it might be even worse than the worst obstacle.

There was some amusement and some pity for one young Pole--who was,
I believe, a novice or relatively untried person--whose mount in some
fashion stumble so that the rider was shot over the horse's head.
At least, I thought he was shot over the horse's head,
and then discovered, amid some amazing and jerky gyrations,
that he was what can only be called clinging to the horse's ears.
While the horse danced about the course in a dégagé[4] manner,
the rider seemed to crawl down his neck in some incredible way and
rolled back into the saddle.  He found one stirrup and tired in vain
to find the other.  Then he gave it up--the stirrup, not the race.
He cleared a fairly low obstacle before him, and then, seeming to
gather a wild impetus from nowhere, with one stirrup flying loose
and swaying in the saddle, he charged the last impossible barrier,
and, first of all that company, went over it like a bird.
And someone said at my elbow with a sharp exclamation,
in English:  "That's just like the Poles!"

Hope of the Half-Defeated; house of gold...


1.  Ironsides were the Puritan soldiers who fought under Cromwell
in the English Civil Wars.

2.  Tom Broadbent is a character in George Bernard Shaw's play
John Bull's Other Island (1904).

3.  See Belloc's "Ballade to Our Lady of Czestochowa".

4.  Dégagé means casual, relaxed.