Page:Bohemia – The Submerged Front.pdf/5

430 the Hradcany, the great castle of storied memories, but here today it houses the Magyar soldiers, and the great battlements which more than once proved the bulwark of Bohemian liberties, listen to the strange, unintelligible words that fall from the lips of the foreign soldiery. It seemed to me that the Hapsburgs do not trust even the Magyar overmuch. At guard-mount on this historic site every day at noon a thousand men would turn out, but not one in ten carried a rifle. Are they short of rifles or is it found that here, too, the Slovak spirit has crept in? To this and many other inquiries are found any but satisfying replies. Prague is a mourning city and a whispering gallery of most uncertain and intangible rumor.

The draft goes on automatically as ever in Bohemia, resulting here and there in blood-curdling massacres of unarmed men, women and children. It requires the presence here on the submerged front of such a large body of alien troops who, now that the pinch of the wasting war is being felt, could be utilized to such advantage in other quarters, that the Statthalter is reported to have expressed the opinion to Vienna that the draft gain was not worth the cost, especially in view of the fact that every recruit deserts to the enemy and joins his true colors on the Russian front whenever the bare possibility of doing so is presented. The whole land is garrisoned by Magyar and German soldiers and, latterly, detachments of the Landwehr from Prussia have been brought in to garrison practically all the Bohemian cities and towns. These men, together with the Magyars, as much by petty persecutions as by their cold-blooded murders have made themselves particularly obnoxious to the unarmed population; but as all men capable of bearing arms between the ages of eighteen and fifty-five are drafted to the front, there would seem at the present moment little chance of, and no utility at all in, an uprising.

Dr. Kramarzh, of the Austrian Parliament, the well-known historian and publicist, is still in jail at hard labor, his death sentence—on charges which were never made known to himself or to the world—having been commuted to fifteen years' imprisonment. Because news of the illegality of his trial excited deep and widespread indignation, the Austrian authorities have latterly favored drumhead court-martials, which leave no substantial record upon which an appeal to civilization and humanity can be based. Indeed,