POLAND: Not Since Napoleon

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"Not since Napoleon," the Warsaw radio assured the nation, "has Britain committed herself so strongly in Continental politics." Polish spirits soared with the news that 3,222,000 balky Ukrainians, shorn by the Soviet-Nazi Pact of any hope of a Nazi fostered Ukraine nation, had declared their loyalty to Poland. "The Ukrainian nation," exulted the patriotic Krakoiver Kuryer, "has extended a fraternal hand to the Poles to fight together in defense of European civilization."

This fight, if it came, Poles felt, would be a "holy war," a war for the ideal of liberty, "for your freedom and ours." They talked, as 600,000 reservists gathered to join the 1,500,000 already under arms, of the strategy that might be used, of a shuttle service of air attacks—British and French planes, starting from France, bombing German munitions plants and industrial centres, landing in Poland to refuel and bomb their way back. Levelly, the semi-official Kurjer Czerwony summed up the Polish state of mind: "Poland, calm and watchful, awaits Berlin's choice of peace or war."

What Poland had to watch calmly last week (with not nearly enough gas masks to go around, due to the Government's all-for-the-Army emergency economy) was a succession of border intrusions, in which many observers saw true Nazi rhythm. From Germany, from East Prussia, even by air from Free Danzig, came Nazi "gangs" to provoke the alert Polish guards into brief scuffles from which four deaths resulted—extreme casualties of the war of nerves. At week's end the Polish radio, protesting that "the limit of Polish patience is very near," turned from straightforward reporting of developments to a satiric debunking of the provocative propaganda its people were hearing from over the border. One German radio report had it that a certain retired Polish Army captain had been leading forays against Germans in Poland. Polish officials investigated, found that the captain had been dead for two years. Commented the radio: "Such incidents could only, therefore, have been perpetrated by a ghost, for which the Polish authorities can hardly be held responsible."