Page:Czechoslovak stories.pdf/17

 “We shall meet in Serbia, Russia, Italy, France”—according to the front against which they were sent.

The story of the Czechs and Slovaks, subjects of Francis Joseph, fighting on the side of Serbia and Italy to whose armies they had made their way in some inexplicable manner, drifted through now and then to the American public. But, most marvelous was the feat of those thousands of Slav soldiers, who, at their first opportunity, deserted to Russia—there to reorganize themselves into strong fighting units on the side where lay their sympathies.

Then came the downfall of the Russian Revolution and the collapse of the whole national morale. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk freed hundreds of thousands of German and Magyar war-prisoners in Russia. The Red Army was formed, threatening the vast supplies on the Trans-Siberian railway.

Separated, by thousands of miles, from their homes, the Czechoslovaks, a mere handful in the midst of the millions of German and Magyar freed war-prisoners of Siberia who led the vast armies of the Bolsheviki, present a picture of unexampled dauntlessness, of splendid courage with only the hope of the attainment of their country’s freedom to spur them on amidst their bleak and bloody five years’ isolation. It is, indeed, a theme for an epic. It remains to be seen whether that epic shall be written in the Anglo-Saxon tongue or in the language of those whose noble efforts achieved the recognition and the independence of Czechoslovakia.