Page:The Destruction of Poland - Toynbee - 1916.djvu/11

 the beginning of August, 1914, and, during the German advance in November, there was another untovsrard incident at the Dombrova mines. The German military authorities condemned these Polish seams as superfluous, in view of the fine Silesian coalfields across the Prussian frontier, and proceeded, on this ground, to wreck the machinery and destroy the shafts. They would actually have destroyed them all, but for the intervention of their Austrian allies. However, these events were officially ignored and might have been treated by a well-disposed critic of German behaviour as the uncurbed discharge of a racial and economic rancour too long pent up. Those responsible for German policy knew better than to work on these lines. The experience of Belgium had taught them that open and indiscriminate atrocities are incapable in themselves of breaking the strength and spirit of a conquered nation, besides being ruinously costly in the good opinion of the rest of the world. Organisation is far better—organisation is the German's talisman, whatever end he has in view.

They organised Poland with a will. Hundreds of thousands of Polish workers—factory hands of Lodz and miners of Dombrova—had been hemmed in between the hostile lines, and with roads blocked, railways cut and bridges blown up, were isolated for the, time being from their markets and their sources of supply. »A million people were idle and on the verge of starvation—a desperate, unparalleled situation, and a magnificant [sic] opportunity for the