THE MODERN POLISH FRONTIERS 397could write about Poland in the sentimental tones of his nineteenth-century pre-
decessors. But his word are full of irony and ambiguity, and serve to discredit
the hostile stereotypes which were prevalent in the Germany of his youth:
I have always said that Poles are gifted,
Perhaps too gifted. But gifted for what?
They are masterly kissers of hand and cheek,
And, what is more, past masters of Melancholy and Cavalry.
Don Quixote himself, you know, was a highly gifted Pole,
Who took his stand on a hillock near Kutno
With the rays of the sunset carefully at his back.
Lowering his lance, with its red-and-white pennants,
He mounted his highly ungifted charger,
And quite dependent on such beastly horse-power
Rode straight at the flank of the Field Grey ranks...
Whether it was done in a masterly fashion or otherwise,
And whether they were sheep, or windmills, or Panzers
Which kissed Pan Quixote's hands, I cannot tell.
At all events, he was embarrassed, and blushed in masterly fashion,
So I cannot say exactly; - but Poles are gifted.^43Even so, old prejudices die hard. National antipathies can prove tenacious.
The myth of the thousand-year struggle between Teuton and Slav has not been
completely abandoned.^44 Yet common humanity demands that Germans and
Poles alike should be taught to think of themselves as the common victims of
their common enmity and to realize in whose interests that enmity was kept
alive. In reality, Polish-German relations have been neither so consistently
hostile nor so simple as the events of the Second World War, and the post-war
propagandists, might have led one to believe.^45
With this thought in mind, it is interesting to note how closely Tiegde's Elegy
corresponds with the mood of the best-loved of English elegies. Christopher
Tiegde, wandering round the battlefield of Kiinersdorf, was moved to thoughts
uncannily reminiscent of those of Thomas Gray in the churchyard of Stoke
Poges. In 1945, the pomp of Prussian power met its inevitable end, and few
Germans can now ignore whither the paths of glory lead. Every traveller who
crosses the new Polish frontier at Kunowice might profitably read Tiegde's lines,
composed over a hundred years ago on that self-same spot. The poet's obituary
to the great 'World-Stormer', inspired by a temporary defeat of the House of
Hohenzollern can be applied with still greater poignancy to the total collapse of
the world of Adolf Hitler:They can no more revile each other,
Those who lie here, hand in hand.
Their departed souls have gone together
To a beautiful country, a friendly land,
Where love in love's exchange is earned.
Whenever fraternal peace is spurned,