Page:Albert Beaumont - Heroic Story of the Czecho-Slovak Legions - 1919.djvu/5

 seeing our country free and independent. I became a teacher in a gymnasium, and, according to Austrian law, I did only one year’s military service for having been a college student, and was given a sublieutenant’s commission, for which I cared very little. But it was better than serving as a private. I married in June, 1914, just a month before the war, and have not seen my wife since my departure from Prague! The war came as a stunning surprise, and filled us with anguish and terrible forebodings.

We knew that we Czecho-Slovaks would be sent to the first lines; that if any were to be butchered and sacrificed, we would certainly be the first. Had the Continent of Europe sunk under our feet and the waves of the Atlantic come rolling over the Alps to swallow us up, they could hardly have been a greater surprise! This is the first impression it made on us Czechs in Prague. We had no interest in this conflict between Austria and Serbia. Still less had we any sympathy with Austria's difference with Russia. Quite the contrary, our sympathies were all on the other side, with the Serbs and the Russians. We were in the position of being compelled by an inexorable circumstance to fight for our worst enemies, the Austrians and Magyars, against those we considered our best friends or our kindred, the Russians and Serbs.

All the lessons of our dear Professor Masaryk came back to me in a fearful turmoil of thoughts, foretelling in what a terrible position we should some day be placed as Austrian subjects. That position became morally and almost physically impossible; it is only Austrian and Magyar tyrants that could expect us to go and fight for their cause. The night the mobilisation order was published there was many a sad family dinner in Prague. There were whisperings, looks, and quiet understandings. Publicly it was dangerous to manifest our thoughts too openly. In many of us there was a resolution that if fight we must, fight we would; but some day or other „against“, not „for“, Austria.

I belonged to the celebrated 28th Regiment of Prague, which was known as that of the “Children of Prague“. The Germans thought that by giving us that name we would glory some day in our military exploits in behalf, of course, of Austria. We accepted the name with quite a different interpretation. We would fight as “Children of Prague“ for our town and our country alone, and not for Austria. We now glory in the fact that it was our regiment, the 28th of Prague, the famous “Children of Prague“, that was among the first, if not the first, that went over band and banner to a man to the Russians. I afterwards rejoiced to hear the fury it excited in Vienna. It was an honour to us that our name was struck out of the Austrian Army List and that we