February 21, 19 18 
Land & Water 
The Meaning of Ukraine: By Hilaire Belloc 
THE enemy is doing in Eastern Europe exactly 
what the argument we have so repeatedly set 
forth in this journal would presuppose. 
He is defining point by point the portions of 
that Central European Empire which he has 
already called into being, and the survival of which, if we 
leave Prussia standing, is as surely our downfall as its division 
into really free nations is the test of our victory. 
His first two actions in the matter are, the one accomplished, 
the other in negotiation ; for he has signed his treaty with a 
new weak republic of his called " The Ukraine," and he is 
actively arranging — principally through ecclesiastics — for the 
erection of another to be called " Lithuania." Each is designed 
to reduce, the one by the south, the other by the north, the 
limits and therefore the strength of a diminished Poland, 
and so to make certain his full grip over the East.' 
Just as it is the test of Allied victory and the necessary 
goal of Allied effort to restore a strong Poland with access to 
the sea, so the enemy's whole effort in his present negotiations 
with the self-app)ointcd mob leaders of what was once the 
Russian Empire is in the main directed to the further disrup- 
tion, belittling and weakening of the Polish people. His 
reason for doing that is as clear as should be our reason for 
attempting, as one of the great objects of our victory, the 
e.xact contrary. He knows that a strong Poland is the only 
possible counter-weight to his power upon that side, and he 
knows that it would be the only possible barrier to his economic 
and political expansion and domination. 
Those who have had any doubt that it was sound policy 
for the Allies to restore Poland — sound policy quite apart 
from common loyalty to their pledges — may learn from what is 
proceeding before their eyes. 
The Polish nation alone represents, along all that great 
belt between the Baltic and the Black Sea which will be either 
the check or the prey of Germany, the strength of Western 
culture. The superiority of that culture gave to the Poles, 
during long centuries before the Partition, the mastery over 
borderlands where they were in places only a majority, in 
other places not even that. That culture with its chivalry', 
with its intense devotion to national principle, its Latin tradi- 
-tion, its military genius, was the opposite pole to Prussia. 
Frederick the Great's act of riiurder, when he divided that 
ancient State as with a knife and compelled the reluctant 
Maria Theresa to her famous prophecy of what (even as she 
proceeded to it) this crime would breed, was insufficient to 
achieve its end. It was not a true murder ; for Poland 
survived in fact, though it had disappeared from the map. 
The present plot follows a more careful, a more subtle and 
a more dangerous plan. It contains the following elements : 
First, the erection of a mutilated Polish Kingdom under 
some foreign dynasty. This is necessary, because the pretence 
thit other autonomies, other make-weights, which are to be 
set up all around as a supply for German capitalism, would 
not stand unless some Poland or other were to be admitted as 
a member of the subject herd. Those provinces of Poland 
already subject for a century to the Prussian torture — the 
original seat of the Kingdom m Posnania and its access to the 
sea by the lower Vistula — are not so much as to be mentioned 
in the settlement. Prussian they are, and Prussian they are 
to remain. The Austrian Kingdom is to act as a lure ; the 
superior Polish intelligence already dominated it ; into its 
councils the new diminished Poland is to be admitted. The 
• industrial districts of what were the Polish Russian provinces, 
probably Lodz itself, are to be cut off, but above all, every 
influence that a free and strong Poland might have over the 
less developed Borderland to the East is to be subjected and 
wherever there was debatable land, wherever the population 
was not homogeneouslj' Polish, the doubt is to be decided in 
favour of the less Western, the less civilised, the less powerful, 
the inferior race. A Lithuania, flattered in its Catholicism 
(which it received from the Poles), is to be played off against 
Poland politically and to be set up as a small rival against 
Poland to the north. Tlie Ukraine, this new republic, a 
mere colony for German enterprise, is made the active opponent 
of Poland, for it is given Cholm, and this not only to reduce 
Poland upon the south and east, but to offend the most sensitive 
Polish claim and to breed religious as well as racial trouble. 
For Cholm was always Polish and is Polish to-day. It is a 
test. There was to remain a Poland even further diminished 
and making but one among these subject States of the Border- 
land. Beyond, the anarchy of Nortli Russia is to be fostered ; 
supreme above all these divisions, the mastery of Prussia is 
to be secure. 
That is the plan, and it is significant of the extreme peril 
through which Europe is passing, of the divided councils 
which may yet ruin the Allied cause, that these things are 
here and there in this country (not yet elsewhere in the West) 
half accepted. Everywhere, whether they are accepted or 
not, they are treated as things distant and half-indifferent. 
They are no more distant in space than was that Eastern 
Mediterranean which was rightly the core of English foreign 
policy a generation ago. They are as acutely — more acutely 
— our business now as- was the Levant and the integrity of 
Turkey in those past days. But men still fail to see the new 
thing, and the change is proceeding with terrible rapidity. 
I know how unfamiliar the whole problem is, how strange 
its presentation may appear at this moment when all immediate 
attention is riveted upon the West and with an audience to 
whom all these names are still vague and, as it were, un- 
discovered. 
The more do I emphasise it. It is vital. , 
There is in this matter a close parallel to that other matter 
of accepting the precedents of atrocity in war which Prussia 
desires to set up. It has often been argued here that these 
precedents, the bombarding of open civilian centres from the 
air, particularly of London ; the indiscriminate murder by 
sea in the use of the submarine; the massacre of civilians by 
land ; the enslavement of occupied populations ; the killing 
of innocent hostages ; the unlimited loot of private property — 
all those things to which we have .become unhappily accus- 
tomed during the last three years — were not of their nature 
permanent. Even the use of poisonous gases in war, let 
alone the deliberate destruction of monuments and the burning 
of towns, had not necessarily come to stay. They would 
only become precedents, we have said over and over again, 
if the Allies by a negotiated peace allowed them to become 
precedents. Our victory could be used to prevent their 
becoming precedents. The allowing of them to go unpunished 
would be our defeat. 
Effect of Habit 
But Prussia has relied upon the effect of time and habit, 
nor has she wholly relied in vain. She has produced in a 
considerable number of publicists and politicians a state of 
mind which accepts these things as somehow necessarily 
concomitant to modem war. It is strange indeed that such 
a state of mind is chiefly to be found in this island — as yet 
only among a small number it is true, but still an influential 
group — although this island is the direct necessary and obvious 
victim of such methods, and will suffer from them or the 
threat of them in the future as no other province of Europe 
can suffer. Their admission in future warfare is plainly death 
to Britain with her supplies dependent upon the sea, her capital 
the largest and the most vulnerable of targets. 
Well, there is a corresponding danger that the enemy's 
policy, as it is now presented in the east of Europe, will in the 
same way be taken for granted as an accomplished fact, as 
something which we cannot change, as something which has 
come to stay. If we so accept it we have signed our own death 
'warrant. If we allow this new Empire of Central Europe, 
which is a Prussian Empire, to be set up and to remain with 
its satellites of small and nominally independent communities 
upon the Eastern border, the mass of economic and political 
power passes to Prussia for good, and that power will be used 
principally against ourselves. 
It has been well said that the most straightforward and 
obvious conclusions on the largest lines of military policy are 
those of which it is most difficult to convince a general 
audience, and we find in this matter a singular miscalculation 
running through the attitude of many Western publicists. 
They speak as though, whatever might happen in the West, 
the Alliance which is fighting for European civilisation, the 
Western Allies and the United States, could not now affect 
the destinies of Eastern Europe. They even speak as though 
these destinies were something remote from us, which we could 
afford to neglect, and as though the great German victory over 
Russia, which so far has proved decisive and final (for it has 
destroyed the fighting force opposed to it, though that destruc- 
tion did not take place in the field), was now a part of history 
and could not now be undone. 
Such an attitude is, upon the simplest principles of military 
science, a grotesque error. The enemy's armies will be defeated 
if we are victorious ; his military machine, if we are vic- 
torious, will be dissolved, while ours will remain intact. If 
both rerhain intact we are not victorious ; we are defeated. 
If we arc victorious (and the confident prophecy of victory 
may be left to those who enjoy such exercises) the destruction 
