Page:Namier The case of Bohemia (1917).pdf/5



With the exception of Bohemia, the land of the Czechs, each “subject race” of Germany and Austria-Hungary forms the “unredeemed” inheritance of a neighbouring State, and its liberation is therefore the particular war-aim of that State. But there is no Czech land outside Austria-Hungary, and the 10,000,000 Czechs and Slovaks inhabiting Bohemia, Moravia, Austrian Silesia and Slovakia have nowhere a friend on their borders; they find themselves completely encircled by their immemorial enemies, the Germans and Magyars. Prussia, Saxony, Bavaria and the Austrian Duchies surround them on the north, west and south, Magyar land on the south-east. Their only other neighbours, the Austrian Poles, are bound by ties of traditional friendship to the Magyars, and for the last forty years have maintained a tacit understanding with the Austrian Germans; they have long thrown behind them the Pan-Slav ideas which they embraced for a while in 1848, and have never in recent times shown any feeling for their humbler and more democratic Slav brethren. Unaided, entirely by its own strength, the Czech nation has survived