Page:Bohemia – The Submerged Front.pdf/6

Rh since the Kramarzh case there has been only one large trial for treason. In this, six Bohemian bank managers are in jail undergoing preliminary investigation. They are charged with treason on the ground that they discouraged subscriptions to the war loans. Dr. Soukup, the most prominent Socialist deputy from Bohemia, has also been arrested, charged with treason. But as there was not a tittle of evidence against him, he was drafted into the army and sent to the front. This, it may be said without exaggeration, has been the fate, regardless of their age, or of their physical infirmities, of all the leading men in what the Austrians regard as the disaffected districts. In this way thousands have been killed at the front who never would have been sent there had it not been planned to put them out of the way in this expeditious and economical manner. But their spirit goes marching on. The severest penalties are being exacted of men who are charged with having surrendered to the Russians, whatever the circumstances attending the surrender may have been. Decrees of confiscation against the property of these men have been entered and their families, deprived of all means of livelihood, are turned out in the streets to beg. A great number of the minor political prisoners are reported from time to time in the German papers as having ended their own lives in prison. There is only too much reason to believe, from information that leaks through the news barriers, that these men died of hunger and of other forms of ill-treatment.

It is difficult to keep track of the scattered Bohemian military units, as the Austrian authorities throw into prison and confiscate all the property and the lands of the families involved, to the most remote degree of kinship. These men are fighting and dying anonymously in so far as this is possible. With the Russian army the Bohemian contingent is represented by at least two full divisions amounting to something over forty thousand men. These figures are at least four months old and there are undoubtedly now many more Bohemians in the army of the Russian Republic, as, whether from mere stupidity or with design, the old autocratic regime placed many obstacles in the way of the Bohemian recruit.

In the reconstituted Serbian army there are a very large number of Bohemians, many of them reserve officers who have been placed in command of the decimated Serbian