Warsaw [antikvár]

IntroductionAbout eight years ago Julien Bryan, then a Princeton graduate without a settled profession, joined me on a lengthy journey through Russian villages. We traveled by train, by boat, by peasant cart, on foot, and most of the time we lived the harsh, strenuous life of muzhiks. We ate their food; we drank water from open shallow wells which after a rain oozed with the debris of the streets; we bathed rarely; we slept in haystacks, in barns, in peasant huts, usually on the floor, or on dew-drenched grass.The experience was novel and exciting to the young Princeton graduate, but the primitive discomfort proved too much of a strain on his untoughened body. Much of the time he was ill. He couldn't hold his food, couldn't sleep, and was consumed with fever. Yet he wouldn't allow me to send him back to Moscow or to break up our plans by staying in a village long enough for him to recuperate. In the Don Cossack country the sun was so hot that it scorched the earth. Yet Bryan wouldn't rest in the shade or lie in cool comfort on the bank of the mighty Don River. He insisted on going along to homes, fields, dancing parties, songfests; and whenever he could, he gathered crowds of Cossack children and took their pictures, even when his hand could barely hold the camera.I thought of his cool-headed foolhardiness when, on my arrival in Stockholm about a month after the war had started, I learned from Mrs. Richard Mowrer, of the Chicago Daily News, that he had been in Warsaw during the worst days of the siege and taken pictures. I had left Warsaw the day before the German army started its march on Poland. The moment it began to converge around the Polish capital, other foreign journalists and photographers began to flee by any available conveyance to any country that promised safety. But that was just the time Julien Bryan went there. On his arrival he found the city deserted not only by the Polish national government but by all foreign reporters. Destruction hovered over it, buildings crashed on all sides, human beings were felled in their steps, Bryan himself was so uncertain of survival that he wrote a farewell letter to his family and deposited It in the vaults of the American embassy. But he went on with his work unmindful of consequences, and the result is an extraordinary story and unforgettable photographs of a city In war, a modern city in a modern war.It happened that the city was Warsaw. But that was an accident. Yesterday it was Warsaw. It was also Madrid, Guernica, Shanghai, Nanking. Tomorrow it may be London, Paris, Berlin, Moscow, Stockholm Oslo, Copenhagen, and in spite of the promise of immunity which military journalists are holding out to us, perhaps New York or San Francisco. No one knows when or whence the blow will fall, but when and wherever it does It will wreak its unreasoned and purposeless vengeance on those least responsible for international savageries and least capable of defending themselves. The captains and the kings may depart and may issue eloquent appeals to their soldiers to fight on until death, but the people, like the earth under them, must remain and endure the havoc and the agony. They must live the life of hunted animals with none of the protective coloration which nature so often provides for its wild creatures, and yet be human enough to want to think and feel, to talk and work, to pray and hope, and even to laugh.The chief merit of this book is that it gives a picture not of the front or even of the rear lines of the battlefield, but of the civilian population, of the men, women, children, animals, left at home to preserve the civilization for which the sturdiest youth of the land was dying.8? On September 1, 1939, the day that the German armies launched their attack on Poland, In a speech in Berlin Herr Hitler said, "I will not war against women and children. I have ordered my air force to restrict itself to attacks on military objectives." On November 7, in the course of the official reception at the Soviet Embassy in Berlin, In reply to questions of foreign Journalists Herr Goering assured them that Germany was fighting "a humane war." One can only hope that Julien Bryan's book will find its way into the hands of the two foremost Nazi leaders, or better still into the hands of the German people who so trustfully follow them. Is an old wooden church in a workingmen's section a military objective? Is a Catholic hospital a military objective? Are tenement houses in the poor quarters of a city military objectives? Are the tombs of the dead military objectives? The human eye may deceive an observer. The human tongue may hide the truth. But the camera lens is as ruthless in the depiction of actuality as totalitarian rulers are In11