The Home of Mankind by Hendrik Willem van Loon

Author:Hendrik Willem van Loon [van Loon, Hendrik Willem]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Geography
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter XXIII

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POLAND, THE COUNTRY THAT HAD LONG SUFFERED FROM BEING A CORRIDOR AND THEREFORE NOW HAS A CORRIDOR OF HER OWN

Poland suffers from two great natural disadvantages. Its geographic position is most unfortunate, and its nearest neighbours are its fellow-Slavs of Russia. A real feeling of brotherhood is said to be a wonderful thing, but rarely as practised between nations of a similar race.

We do not know where the Poles originally came horn. Like the Irish, whom they resemble in so many ways, the Poles are intensely patriotic, ever ready to die for their country but rarely willing to live and work for it. The record of the valorous deeds of their ancestors, as compiled by their own leading historians, makes the earliest Polish heroes stowaways on Noah’s Ark. But when the Poles are first mentioned in any reliable historical document, Charlemagne and his braves had been in their graves for almost two entire centuries. Some fifty years after the battle ol Hastings, however, the word ‘Poland’ began to mean something more than the name of a vague territory that was supposed to lie somewhere in the wilderness of the Far East.

To the best of our present knowledge the Poles lived originally near the mouth of the Danube, were set upon by invaders from the east, were forced to pull up stakes, and moved eastward until they reached the Carpathian Mountains, They thereupon passed through the regions just evacuated by the other great branch ol the Slavic race, the Russians, and finally found a safe place ol refuge among the primeval forests and the marshes of that part ol the great European plain which is situated between the Oder and the Vistula.

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