IOO PREUSSEN
warriors, gallantly holding the line against the onslaughts of marauding
pagans. It was no accident, when the Emperor William II paid an official visit
to Prussia to mark th completion of restoration work at Marienburg castle,
that he was welcomed by officials dressed in chain mail, sallets, and crusaders'
cloaks. His speeches, which stressed the glorious past of the 'German East',
were nicely calculated to offend Polish sensitivities. The Poles accepted the
challenge with alacrity. For them, it was most uplifting to be reminded of a
medieval contest from which the Polish Kingdom had eventually emerged tri-
umphant. The wars of the fourteenth centuries were fought again by scholars
and columnists in all the journals and popular magazines of the day. In 1900,
Henryk Sienkiewicz published his best-selling novel, Krzyzacy (The Teutonic
Knights), the Polish 'Ivanhoe', whose young Polish hero, Zbyszko, performs
stirring deeds of derring-do to rescue his Danusia from the clutches of the das-
tardly Grand Master's knights. In 1910, for the Five Hundredth Anniversary of
the Battle of Grunwald, a public subscription was launched to raise a monu-
ment in commemoration of the Polish victory. Excluded from Prussia by
official hostility, the organizers of the scheme were obliged to erect their mon-
ument in Austrian Galicia, in Cracow, where it was unveiled on 15 July by
Ignacy Paderewski, to the strains of a rousing anthem specially composed for
the occasion by Maria Konopnicka:
We shall not yield our forebears' land,
Nor see our language muted.
Our nation is Polish, and Polish our folk,
By Piasts constituted.
By cruel oppression we'll not be swayed!
May God so lend us aid.
We'll not be spat on by Teutons
Nor abandon our youth to the German!
We'll follow the call of the Golden Horn,
Under the Holy Spirit, our Hettnan.
Our armed battalions shall lead the crusade.
May God so lend us aid.
By the very last drop of blood in our veins
Our souls will be secured,
Until in dust and ashes falls
The stormwind sown by the Prussian lord.
Our every home will form a stockade.
May God so lend us aid.^17Despite such displays of animosity, the political aspirations of the Poles in
Germany remained modest to the very end. Loyalty to Prussia remained strong;
recognition of the solid material benefits of German rule was widespread; and
hatred of Russia was universal.^18 As conflict between the two great Empires
grew increasingly probable, sporadic hopes for a united Poland were largely
subordinated to fears of the Russian invasion to which all the eastern provinces