Night Must Fall

In Britain Premier Tomasz Arciszewski and the Polish Government in Exile waited for sentence of political death to be passed upon them. Last week it came--the U.S. and Britain recognized the Warsaw Government as the legal government of Poland. Thereby they withdrew recognition from the legal heir of the Polish government for which Britain had gone to war with Germany in 1939.

Wherein had the doomed men failed? If no better, they were not visibly worse than their Warsaw rivals. Nor were they merely reactionaries, as their enemies often charged--blind upholders of the old ways, the old traditions, the old foundations of Europe's civilization. Through their underground in Poland and their army (about 250,000) in Italy and elsewhere in Europe, through their intrepid air force, they had waged war against Germany until the end. But history was against them. Their country lay in the onward path of Poland's traditional enemy, Russia, which now embodied the new revolutionary social forces that were changing old Europe. And in weight and density of power they were no match for Russia. Besides, the world was weary of war and wanted to get back to peaceful living. If the Polish Government in Exile stood in the way, it would have to go.

Where would the London Poles go to? Some might go to Canada, some to Brazil. Never, perhaps, would they go home again. For return to Poland would probably mean death or imprisonment for most of them.

No doubt the defeated faction should have slipped quietly away. For, like people, governments wish that former friends, whom for one reason or another they have injured, would drop away tactfully. But the London Poles had always been stiff-necked. Perhaps it was political despair, perhaps it was the habit of authority, perhaps it was old-fashioned love of country, which new-fashioned love of class was subtly supplanting through Europe, but the defeated government refused to fold up quietly. It denied that the free elections promised soon by the Warsaw Government would be free in a country governed behind a curtain of secrecy. It denied that the Warsaw Government represented a majority of the Poles in Poland. It called upon all Poles in the armed forces outside Poland to remain loyal to the Government in Exile.

This action probably meant that Britain would cut off the Polish exiles' financial support except in the case of the Polish armed forces and a few people who would liquidate the affairs of the exiled government. But when everything else was lost, did a stipend matter?

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