My Heart is in the Marshlands

The quadrant-hatted Polack knows not where his borders lie

He bows down to the Virgin but the truth he can't descry

His dung-breathed Lettish neighbours lead him on a merry dance

While every passing Teuton deftly kicks him in the pants.

This disgraceful quatrain from the Edwardian hymn "God Is in His English Heaven" was penned as a rhyming tool in the sacred and profane education of Marcher youth, but still imparts some poignant truths about the history, culture and couture of the Poles.

It struck me that news coverage of the anniversary of the outbreak of war in 1939 has concentrated on the doings of Germany and Russia, rather than those of Poland - much as did the Second World War itself. This comes as no surprise to Poles, who are used but not reconciled to their roaming homeland being turned into a trampoline, vomitorium and crematorium by noxious neighbours.

I have given some account of my dealings with that splendid nation before, but the anniversary of the war brings to mind the events of 1989 in the swamp full of bison piss that the Poles call their border counties (Kresy) and the people who live there call Lithuania and bits of Belarus and/or Ukraine.

"Lithuania, my Fatherland!" ("Litwo! Ojczyzno moja!") is the stirring phrase that both launches the Polish national epic, Pan Tadeusz, and neatly sums up the problem Lithuanians have with it. They could always counter by writing an epos called Uncle Andrius that begins "Warszaw is my parking space", but I suspect that it would lose them the moral high ground.

Poland has generally prefered the geographical high ground, and sent General Żeligowski to remind the Lithuanians of this in 1920. Most military revanchistes would seize an outlying province or two, but Żeligowski showed the true élan of a Polish Uhlan by capturing the capital, Vilnius, and leaving the Liths with the consolation prize of the rest of the country.

Interwar Lithuania was unlucky enough to be governed by a pair of feuding college professors called Voldemaras and Smetona, whose verbal felicity proved no match for the sabre-gnashing cavalry of Poland's Marshal Piłsudski - a man who escaped German captivity in the Great War by feigning insanity with the greatest of ease.

The Marszałek decided to bury his own heart in Vilnius (his more cautious aides persuaded him to leave it until after his death), and he assumed that Lithuania would find this grande geste unanswerable.

Perhaps they did. History records, however, that the bluff plebian Stalin did not. After overrunning the Kresy in 1939 he gave Lithuania back its capital, only to seize the entire country a few months later in an extreme example of loan-sharking as applied to international diplomacy.

Lithuanian history was on hold for 50 years of Soviet misrule until I turned up in Vilnius in a borrowed Chaika limousine as interpreter for a Vassar-educated dominatrix with a mercantile interest in local ballerinas.

The lady in question earned her living as an impressario, and decided to scour the western bulge of the Soviet Empire in the hope of signing up the talented, underexposed and seriously hot ballet troupes for tours of the filthy West.

This was a good idea in principle, undermined by the local satraps' inability to understand the concept of an exclusive contract or what I was saying. My Russian wasn't bad on the whole, but a combination of cheap beverages and undiscerning company left me fading in and out of coherence, audibility and consciousness for most of the time.

Miss Vassar had tired of negotiations with the turtle-faced bureaucrats of Belarus, and told me to arrange travel forthwith to Soviet Lithuania, its well-regarded national ballet theatre and affordable leather goods.

I decided not to mention that Lithuania had declared independence a few weeks back, and that President Gorbachev had responded by imposing a blockade of the republic. This didn't worry the Lithuanians much, as their only imports from Russia were more Russians.

Their slogan at the time was "Beat the blockada with the lambada!", a marginally more practical approach than the Voldemaras/Smetona tactic of intimidating the Soviet Army with quotations from Virgil, but it wasn't likely to help us cross the border. I could imagine how louche and un-Socialist our reasons for entering Lithuania and, with luck, a few Lithuanians might sound to an austere KGB border guard with more bullets than witnesses.

I decided to go by the book and called the Minsk KGB. "Good morning, KGB," said the young lady in an encouraging display of glasnost. "Hello, No Good Boyo," I replied, before setting out our plans. The young lady said there would be no problem as long as our documents were in order. I hung up in the sure and certain knowledge that several months on a tuberculosis refresher course awaited any attempt to cross the border by normal means, and so had a word with a resourceful local friend.

He was that most elusive of creatures, a cunning Belarussian. He hired us a Chaika limo and liveried driver. "Sit in the back of this baby and it's a brave border guard who stands in your way," he grinned, fondling the fins of the regional Communist Party's favourite ride. And he was right. Our driver maintained the correct speed of measured authority as we trundled past emaciated conscripts in the dank forests of Aschemynne.

His pace faltered through the speckled hills of Vilnius, however, and we realised that he'd never been to the city and had no idea where the ballet theatre might be. "Drive into the centre, my good man, and leave the rest to me," I drawled.

In the hope of a few dollars more I'd bought a Lithuanian dictionary and memorised a few key phrases - "Good day!", "A beer? Why, thank you!", "And your sister is where, exactly?", "I wish to report this female American spy, Comrade Colonel", and "Excuse me, where is the ballet theatre?"

I cast a basilisk eye over the tracksuited trolls on the swollen sidewalks until the ideal couple glided into view. A pair of distinguished pensioners, his silver hair capped with a beret and hers with a pillbox hat, their stately gait spoke of hardback books, antique pianos and a non-predatory interest in the performing arts.

We pulled over, and I tried out The Phrase. "Aciprašau," I bowed, "kur yra baleto teatras?"

The gentleman blinked slowly, turned to his wife and asked "What did he say?"

In Polish.

These heirs of General Żeligowski had lived in Vilnius all their lives, from Tsar to Stalin and beyond, and to them the Lithuanians and their Sanskrit-for-Hayseeds language was no more than a passing irritant, like decimal coinage and Labour governments to my parents.

Being a Welsh I am used to people living in our midst without mastering more than a few curses in our native tongue, and so I switched to Polish and asked again where the ballet theatre might be. They gave me detailed instructions, which I repeated to the driver.

We drew up outside a sturdy Art Deco edifice near the city centre. Perhaps ballet was considered a lewd spectacle among the Papist Liths, but I was still surprised to see no sign of tutus, firebirds or six-foot homosexuals in eyeliner. We sent the driver in to light out the territory.

"It's the registry office," he reported five minutes later. "Births, marriages, deaths, tractor adoptions - that sort of thing. The ballet theatre was here in the 1930s, but it was moved to a new building decades ago."

Decades ago - the last time my Polish guides had gone to the ballet. A time when the dancers still pranced purely in Polish.

You have to admire this dedication to self-delusion, without which no beleaguered people can hope to survive. The Polish national anthem includes the line "Bonaparte has shown us the way to victory". Indeed, we all have much to learn from his fate.