“On Reaching Home I just rolled into bed and remained there till yesterday, in a good deal of pain but mostly suffering from a sort of sick-apathy which I am trying now to shake off,” wrote Conrad to the Galsworthys on 15 November 1914. After his return from Poland Conrad was ailing almost until the end of January. His complaints were both physical—the usual gout—and psychological: dejection and discouragement induced by “the thoughts of this war [that] sit on one’s chest like a nightmare. I am painfully aware of being crippled, of being idle, of being useless.” In the five months after his return to England he wrote only one short essay, “Poland Revisited.”

Despite its title, almost half of the piece deals with Conrad’s journey from London across the North Sea and Germany, not with his stay in Cracow and Zakopane. In the essay Conrad harked back to his first arrival in England, spinning distant associations as if trying to stifle the present and its more pressing thoughts. When writing about Cracow, he plunged into memories from forty years before; they are moving but inaccurate— for instance, Conrad spent only the last four months of his father’s life in Cracow with him, not the last eighteen. Moreover, the atmosphere of Conrad’s recent journey underwent a significant change in the telling. In “Poland Revisited,” Conrad’s Polish friends and interlocutors are presented as depressed, even despairing and resigned: there is talk of “final catastrophe,” lack of “all hope and even of its last illusions,” a feeling of “Ruin— and Extinction.” Similarly, Conrad wrote to Quinn a little later: “I’ve had to stand for two months the strain of living amongst the Poles who see with dismay the ruin of their hopes. For this indeed is the end no matter what manifestoes [sic] are issued or what promises are being held out. The situation doesn’t stand being thought about.”