Page:Ossendowski - From President to Prison.djvu/35

Rh forbade under pain of imprisonment the use of the mother tongue, persecuted Polish writers, scholars, the Press and educated people generally and sent whole crowds of Poles under that fatal escort to banishment in Siberia.

When the news of this Revolution of 1905 reached Warsaw, many Poles immediately joined in the demand for a constitution, adding to it a petition for the autonomy of Poland. Terror was the Russian answer—arrest, imprisonment, banishment to Siberia and the death sentence for thousands of the Polish nation. When three Poles assembled, the police called it "a crowd of revolutionists" and shot at them. Loud talk or a peal of laughter was considered a revolutionary symptom and sufficient grounds for punishment.

On my arrival in Warsaw I went to stay in the Hotel Bristol in Krakowskie Przedmiescie Street I went out about eleven o'clock the first morning and found that the usually gay and animated city wore a strange appearance. Shops, restaurants and cafés were closed; no street cars were moving, but the thoroughfares were thronged with people. It was as if the whole population were out of doors, moving up and down in silence and seemingly peaceable.

Suddenly from the direction of the Zamek, the old Palace of the Polish Kings, resounded cries and the thud of horses' hoofs. I turned and caught the stirring, foreboding sight of a detachment of hussars in battle formation, coming at full gallop down the street. The curved sabres glistened in the cold air, while the breath of the horses and men seemed to frame the group in a cloud of steam. The horsemen galloped along the sidewalks, crushing some and riding others off into the street. Above it all the sharp blows with the flat of the sabres and the awful curses of the soldiers were heard. When