The Red Reign by Kellogg Durland

Author:Kellogg Durland [Durland, Kellogg]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, Reference & Language, Reference, Fiction & Literature, Classics
ISBN: 4066338074003
Google: Mnp8zQEACAAJ
Publisher: Good Press
Published: 2021-11-05T04:00:00+00:00

[Image unavailable.] Three soldiers to guard each policeman. Warsaw

of Finland have been submerged much as the people of Poland have been, but with a very different effect. The population of Finland is rapidly decreasing. All of her young men are going abroad—to England, to America. Not so in Poland. In spite of an emigration to America of nearly 50,000 in one year, Poland’s population is on the increase. Poland’s young men stay—to fight, to starve, to suffer inquisitorial tortures in Russian prisons.

One striking example of the warfare waged in Poland against the Russian administration was the campaign of extermination inaugurated against the police of Warsaw while I was in the city. Thirty-four officers and one hundred and forty policemen were killed within a few weeks—all in broad daylight on the public streets. Twenty-seven were shot within three days. In the proletariat suburb of Wola there were, originally, thirty-seven policemen. Twenty-seven of these were shot to death and ten seriously wounded. The most extraordinary part of this unusual campaign is that not one culprit was caught.

In America the police would long ago have taken shelter from such deadly attacks. It is only natural that panic should possess the remaining members of the police force in Poland’s olden capital. Some did escape, but most found themselves in a veritable trap, from which they could not escape. Without a passport no traveler may find a place to rest his head at night in Russia—much less a refugee policeman. Without a passport the frontier looms like a great, impassable Chinese wall. A single man might escape by stealth in the night, but even policemen sometimes have scruples about deserting their wives and families. And so these unwilling martyrs continued their nerve-racking but senseless patrol of Warsaw streets. Senseless because troops possessed each avenue and alley. According to the most reliable estimates there were at least 75,000 troops quartered in the city at that time. In justice to the military it should be said that they did their utmost for the long suffering police, for each and every policeman who was then left had a military guard of three infantrymen. One of the grim humors of the revolution was to see an ordinary policeman going to his post of duty with two soldiers following at ten paces to the rear with loaded rifles and fixed bayonets. Then, when he took up his position of duty in the center of the two intersecting streets, two soldiers remained at one corner and a third at an opposite corner. For this inglorious service the Russian government generously paid these luckless men six dollars a month!

This reign of terror directed against the police department was by no means the only evidence of turmoil and unrest in Warsaw. On every hand were indications of a terrible blight. Beggardom here was at its worst. Not beggardom as we know it, but infinitely worse. Public charities, private philanthropies, day nurseries, diet kitchens, and settlements are not known in Poland. The streets were literally lined with the lame, the halt, the blind, the sick, the starving.

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