Perfidious Albion?

Sometimes, the things people say about the English are plain silly. Like, “It’s always raining in London”, and “the food in England is always lousy”. Oh, grow up.

It’s not always raining in London. In fact, it’s one of the driest cities in Europe, as any gardener (I’m one) can tell you, as we struggle to water the bone-hard soil. As for the food, well, considering how multi-cultural most English towns and cities have become, you’ve only yourself to blame if you can’t find a cuisine that suits. There’s no need, or excuse, for sticking to soggy fish n’ chips these days.

The other thing foreigners often say of the English is that they – we – are hypocrites, or at least, sit lightly on promises. “Perfidious Albion”, as the old French saying goes. Can one dismiss that charge so easily?

Last night, I sat down to watch a BBC programme called Behind Closed Doors, which might just as well be renamed “The Secret History of the Second World War,” and which has been running for several episodes. Last night was about the war in Poland. Apart from the oddly chosen actors – the man playing Stalin looked too much like a bank manager – this was no fictionalised “docu-drama” but real history, based on newly released archives, re-enacted.

What stuck in my throat, and indeed the throat of my fellow watcher, was the scene in 1943 in which Winston Churchill flew to North Africa to meet General Anders of the Polish home army, who had fought like a lion for the Allies but who now was worried that if he didn’t get his troops back to Europe, the Russians might be in a position to take over Poland after the war and turn it into a communist satellite. “Don’t worry”, Churchill assured the general, affably. “We came into the war because of Poland. We will not abandon you and Poland will be happy.”

Happy? Well, not exactly. In fact, Poland settled down to several decades of sometimes brutal, always dreary, Russian misrule, after the British did indeed abandon, ie betray, Poland to Stalin. Or, at any rate, did no more than squeak when the brutal German occupation was replaced by an almost-as-brutal Soviet one.

Quite what this betrayal meant in practice was then shown on the TV, which carried footage of the German destruction of Warsaw in the autumn of 1944, following the failed Warsaw Uprising. House by house, church by church, the Nazis burned and bombed their way through the ancient city, an act of cultural genocide if ever there was.

But the film then interviewed aged survivors of the Warsaw uprising who, having endured these appalling acts of Nazi retribution for the uprising, were – months later – beaten, raped or shot dead by the incoming Russians, who wanted to rid their “new Poland” of any likely dissident elements.

One old lady of 90-plus recalled how, after the German soldiers discovered her underground field hospital for fighters in the uprising, they first butchered all the wounded men that they found and then raped all the women nurses for good measure. Months later, she was arrested and beaten unconscious by a Russian corporal who wanted her to confess that she was – a Nazi spy! The film noted that the Germans killed more than 200,000 Poles in the last year of the war alone.

Of course, I know there is not that much the British could actually have done, physically, for Poland after the war. There was no possibility of British troops getting to Warsaw, unlike Prague, which Churchill was desperate to liberate before the Russians arrived, and which the Western powers could easily have taken had not the Americans decided to hand it to Russia on a plate – Roosevelt being persuaded that Stalin could be trusted not to impose communism on all the territories he “liberated”. But still, a promise broken is a promise broken.

Throughout my journalistic career, I’ve met a lot of people who claimed the British betrayed them, from Northern Irish Protestants, complaining of being betrayed to the Republic, to Croats, betrayed to Tito in 1945, Serbs, betrayed to NATO bombs in 1999 (“after we fought with you in two world wars”, etc, etc), and various others. But many of those “betrayals” rely on a tendentious interpretation of the word, suggesting promises were broken that, in fact, were never given in the first place. But Poland really was a betrayal, and that ought to stick in all our throats. And it shows what a big-hearted nation the Poles are, that they don’t make more of it.