The Polish Connection 29

December 1917

Our Christmas was uneventful this year. Getting the required ingredients for Christmas cake and our usual treats was difficult with all the shortages, but we did the best we could. And I must admit that our cellar is quite a place of hoarding, as I suspected that it would be worth my while to buy in large quantities several years ago, and have now got quite a stock of most things we use. We should be okay as long as this war doesn’t go on for too much longer. And always the war looms over us. This story was in the paper about how we must not forget what is happening.

"I thought it was going to be quite decent on Xmas Day, but unfortunately a sad thing occurred: about 1 am Captain Brownsword came round visiting. He bent down to drop in on my post. I said, ‘Hurry up, get down quick!’ but unfortunately he was not quick enough; there was a crack & I knew he was hit in the back, & he just toppled down and I caught him with my arms.

Then the difficulty, imagine it, of looking after a man 6 foot 3, in a bit of trench half the width of your kitchen, and no longer; partly filled too with a fire step. I had to sit on the step, and hold him across my knees, while the stretcher bearer dressed him. Our stretcher was broken, & with difficulty we got another, one bearer being shot through the head bringing it...”

We had presents from Peter again. This time he sent us, carefully wrapped, some of his handmade pottery, a named cup and saucer for each of us including John. He says that he enjoys this as much as he has ever enjoyed any activity and thinks he might make it his profession when he finally is released. He also sent Beth a ship in a bottle. John again asked me to raid the piggy bank and buy suitable presents for all. It is much harder to find anything really interesting to buy, so I did my usual favourite thing and spent it all at the bookshop.

I had a note from Jo.

“Wednesday 5th December: Letter from Cyril. He is now in a siege battery on the Western Front. The shelling was bad and Cyril was nearly hit. He is living in semi-ruined cottages and has been sleeping on stone floors. An orderly with three horses was standing about 15 yards away. A shell came along killed all the horses and so badly wounded the orderly that he died the same night. Poor old C. has had no letters since he left England. I will write to him tonight and hope he will get it.”

We read in the paper that Tchijevsky’s merely noting that the 1917 Russian Revolution occurred during the height of the sunspot cycle earned him a 30 years sentence in a Soviet prison because his theory challenged Marxist dialectics. Thank goodness we can discuss our theories without fear of that happening here. John of course is more convinced than ever that the “miracle” was a typical sighting of sun spots. He told me where to find one of his physics textbooks which gave a definition of how they would look. I'll quote a bit from it.

The sun’s energy has a great effect on earth. Its light provides energy for photosynthesis in plants and algae, the basis for the food chain, which ultimately feeds almost all life on earth. Sunspots also have an indirect but significant impact on life here on earth. As early as the nineteenth century, scientists noticed that high levels of activity on the sun, like flares and sunspots, were followed shortly by strong fluctuations in magnetic instruments on earth. They wondered what caused these changes.

The sunspot itself, the dark region on the sun, doesn’t by itself affect the earth. However, it is produced by a magnetic field, and that magnetic field doesn’t just stop, it comes to the surface and expands out above the surface. Hot material called plasma near a sunspot interacts with magnetic fields, and the plasma can burst up and out from the sun, in what is called a solar flare. Energetic particles and magnetic fields from these solar flares bombard the earth in what are called geomagnetic storms. When these storms reach earth, they affect us in many ways. Ordinarily, the earth’s own magnetic field protects the earth from most of the sun’s emissions. But during periods of intense sunspot activity, which coincide with solar flares and coronal mass ejections, the geomagnetic flow from the sun is much stronger. These magnetic storms produce heightened, spectacular displays of the Aurora Borealis and the Aurora Australis, otherwise known as the Northern and Southern Lights.

The earth has a protective cocoon of magnetic field called the magnetosphere, and it normally protects us from the magnetic particles of the solar wind, and the other energetic particles in the solar wind. But during a coronal mass ejection we actually have a chunk of the sun that breaks away and hits the earth’s magnetosphere, and disturbs it, and this disturbance shows up as aurorae.

Even though sunspots are darker, cooler regions on the face of the sun, periods of high sunspot activity are associated with a very slight increase in the total energy output of the sun. Dark sunspot areas are surrounded by areas of increased brightness, known as plages. Some parts of the solar spectrum, especially ultraviolet, increase a great deal during sunspot activity. Even though ultraviolet radiation makes very little contribution to the total energy that comes from the sun, changes in this type of radiation can have a large effect on the earth’s atmosphere, especially the energy balance and chemistry of the outer atmosphere.

All very interesting of course, but how would the children have been able to predict when a sunspot would occur, and the miracle had been forecast for months ahead to happen on a specific day? I still think that it was a miracle. But what worries me more is the promise of the end to the war if people say the rosary. Wars all end sometime. If it was a real promise, then perhaps it should have happened the next week or the next month, but if it happens in the next year or two, would that really be considered to be due to prayer? I think not. I think it will be more likely due to the Americans coming into the war and adding their strength to ours to overpower the Germans. I also don’t like the idea of some people being cured with miracles and some not – no matter how holy they or how often they pray their rosary. It goes against the notion of cause and effect.

I got a hold of the magazine that is sent out to the troops, because Beth had a project with her school of each child making a Christmas card for the soldiers in the war. The magazine is called Blighty. The first edition of Blighty was published in London in May 1916, with the aim of giving men serving at the front a free weekly collection of the best pictures, stories and jokes from the British newspapers. John says, that in comparison to many of the trench journals that are produced in situ, it offers a sanitised message of upbeat patriotism. Blighty is officially sanctioned and numbered among its patrons Sir Douglas Haig and Sir John Jellicoe. In this extract, the editor explains the newspaper's origins to new readers. There is a copy of the poem, Wake up Britain by Robert Bridges, who of course has been the poet laureate since 1913. They charged 6d but said that it was non profit making, and any excess after printing and distribution costs would be given to charity. I thought Beth might copy the idea of the title. BLIGHTY is written large in red letters with snow covering and dripping off the tops of each letter. Peter has sent us a copy of their newspaper too, and it is called Lager Echo, or Lager Zeitany in German. Their Christmas edition is very fine, but too complicated an idea for little Beth to copy.

As last Christmas, we had a card and letter from Paul, and it seemed a bit less depressed than his from last year.

Dear Barbara,

I do wish you all the joy of this season. Things here have not really changed since I last wrote a year ago, so I will bore you with how my book is getting on. I am going to call it, “The Message of Asia.”

Because of the misery of my confinement, I fine solace in Eastern philosophy. I find the Eastern universalism not only a corrective to the intellectualistic and pragmatic outlook of the West, which finds logical conclusion in this war but also a key to the nature of the universe and a guide to reality. I accept wholly the Indian idea which looks upon all dualisms as the source of error. The chapters in my book are reconciling the various antitheses in the life of nations, the life of art and the life on the spirit, discussing such broad topics as Judaism and Christianity, aristocracy and democracy and the Asiatic and its European spirit in art, art and scinece, body and mind, good and evil, God and men. I use the latest discoveries and theories in science to justify the old Indian conception of the world of illusion. My fundamental principle is universalism attained through feeling of a rather mystic character, indivualism is the dividing, the exclusive principle in the world and is based on our reason, on intellect. Feeling is the unifying, the inclusive principle in the world and leads in the end to universalism. I have put in the last chapter the poetry of spiritual exaltation.

All the best to you all for the New Year.

Paul Cohen-Portheim

A few bit of news to end this year. On December 7th, the USA declared war on Austria and Hungary. And on December 15th the Russian Bolsheviks became allies of the Germans. What will it all mean in the end?