CORRIDOR OF COMEDIES

King Country Chronicle, Volume XXVI, Issue 3448, 22 November 1932, Page 2

CORRIDOR OF COMEDIES

POLISH ACCESS TO THE SEA. FRONTIER THROUGH DUCKPOND. The incongruities of the “corridor” driven through East Prussia for Polish access to the sea, and their reaction on the ancient German port of Danzig, are described by Mi 1 . 11. J. Greenwall, in the Daily Express. Writing from Danzig, he says:— I have been motoring around the countryside looking at the strange things that have happened all because of those gentlemen of Paris who were in a hurry to get rid of the Polish frontier question. Strange things have I seen, too. I have heard of Danzig cows straying across the frontier —they never heard of President Wilson, poor things—and eating Polish grass. Please do not laugh. They impounded the cows, and you can guess what that leads to in the way of trouble. Then quite often a Polish hen will lay eggs in Danzig territory—the hens, poor things, never heard of M. Cleme'nceau —and the Poles claim the eggs, but do not get them. Frontier Line Through A Cottage. I followed the line of the frontier in a hamlet called Grossdeide, where it actually runs through a duckpond in a back garden; there are wooden stakes in the water, linked with barbed wire. Part of the pond is therefore Polish and part Danzig. I have seen the frontier demarcated through the kitchen of a peasant’s cottage, and I have watched the selfsame frontier reeling about like a late returning reveller, so that it was impossible to be sure whether my right foot was in Poland or Danzig. This state of things cannot possibly continue, because neither the Poles nor the Danzigers are satisfied with things as they are. Both sides bombarded the High Commissioner with long Notes; the life of the High Commissioner is no bed of roses. There have been two British High Commissioners, who must have been thankful when their time was up. The present one is an Italian, Count Gravina, and the Poles hate him. Their comic journals lampoon him, and the press attacks him and accuses him of wanting to further Mussolini’s policy for a revision of the Treaty of Versailles. The Treaty gave the Germans “free access” to the River Vistula. The Poles have interpreted this by putting a tur'npike of their own across a 13-foot road at Weichsel, and this

is the only access to the Vistula the East Prussian’s possess. In order to rub it in, the Poles have put up a notice board —in Polish only, although the notice is entirely for the benefit of German-speaking people—which says that access may be obtained between 6 a.m. and 8 p.m. on production of a properly-made-out pass, obtainable in Dirchau, which happens to be more than 40 miles away. I have seen big grievances and small grievances, but for many people the small grievance are the worst, such as making a peasant woman get her pass stamped in order to go to church on Sundays, because her cottage happens to be in Poland and the church in Danzig territory. And I have seen all that is left of a splendid railway and footbridge at Munsterwolder, built by the German in pre-war days at a cost of 9,000,000 gold marks. It was one of the biggest in Europe, and the Poles destroyed it just as they destroyed every statue of a German they came across in the Polish Corridor. This nationalism gone berserk is something unbelievable. Until recently one had to ask for a railway ticket in Polish in a Danzig station! Both parties are in many cases to blame for the present situation, but the time must come when an end is put to that dreadful work the late President Wilson, the late M. Clemenceau, and the present Mr. Lloyd George carried out in Paris on that fateful afternoon when they drew a circle in red ink around the new cockpit of Europe.