Page:The Bohemian Review, vol2, 1918.djvu/123

 tions for a share of food contributed by Germany. His own report states that what he got from Germany were soup cubes, dry vegetables and sauerkraut.

It is well known that quite a number of fakers supply the consumers with all the soup cubes that anybody can want, so what is the use of going to the fakers of Germany.

The dry vegetables furnished by Germany, are really, as we are informed, dried turnips that had been for more than two years lying despised in various German storehouses without finding a buyer, because it is unfit even for feed. Now Mr. Titta succeeded in buying it for his German countrymen at 45 pfennigs a kilogram. We wish our German friends good appetite for this dessert, a worthy crown of their political success.

The other foodstuff secured by Titta is sauerkraut. Everybody knows that Austria and Bohemia have more of it than they can use and that stores are overflowing with it. Apparently there is a surplus of it in Germany and there is danger that the sauerkraut will spoil. So Mr. Titta’s friends in Germany gave him the sauerkraut to get rid of him. Whether Mr. Titta himself will get rid of it is an other question. Our German countrymen, it seems, did a fine piece of business.

(The rest, about 12 lines, confiscated.)

A sad picture of the condition of food supply in the center of Czech territory, showing how miserably the people there live and how they suffer with hunger, is uncovered by a monster process which was opened before the Prague Criminal Court on May 28th. In several of the steel mills of Kladno and neighborhood workmen went on strike at the end of April of this year. Their pay stopped, and the people had nothing to eat. At the beginning of May, when no one, the authorities least of all, was giving their condition a thought, riots broke out that spread rapidly into the neighborhood (two lines confiscated). In connection with that more than 300 persons, mostly women and children, were arrested. But in many places unfortunately the matter got further than arrests. People will remember that newspapers wrot eofwrote of [sic] the defense of a flour mill and the killing of a laborer and the wounding of two others by the miller.

The first group of the plunderers just came before the criminal court: eight men, that is to say one grown up man and seven boys from 14 to 18 years old, and 29 women and girls from 15 to 50 years of age. All can read and write, all have attended school; all live, as they stated on what they earn, and out of the wages they support large families. The fathers are mostly in the army, dead or missing. They were suddenly deprived of their pay, the children could not understand it, clamored for food, no on would help them, and so they went into the nearby flour mills to get something. When their lawyer asked them, whether they met with resistance, they said no; whether they employed force, again no. And why did they go to the flour mills? Because flour is eight crowns per kilogram (about 75 cents a pound) and even more. “Some of the men were armed with sticks and posts,” says the indictment.

About eighty defendants have been arraigned in the Prague divisional court, being soldiers on furlough or otherwise subject to the military law.

The Minister of Defence, answering an appeal of deputy Klenensiewicz and others on behalf of soldiers who had been on the firing line from the beginning of the war, declares that the number of such soldiers is much higher than the deputy believed and the Minister is unable to grant the appeal in its fullest extent, but in order that these soldiers might be taken out of the immediately dangerous zone, at least for a certain period, an order has been issued that one-half of these men, as far as they do not themselves ask to be left at the front, should be sent back and assigned to duty as instructors of new levies.

They are to perform these duties for three months and then return to the front. The other half of such veteran soldiers will go back of the lines after the first half returns to the front.

While the Austrian Government is trying to stir up hate against America as the country that is responsible for the prolongation of the war by raising the morale of the Allies and their will to fight until victory, the Czechoslovak people use every opportunity to manifest their confidence in and friendship for the United States.

In the Czech papers unusual prominence is given to the lectures of Professor Karel Velemínský on America. This scholar spent a year in this country shortly before the war, studying the American school system, and is now lecturing under auspices of the most important societies of Bohemia and Moravia, such as the Society of Engineers, Bohemian Provincial Agricultural Bureau, Manufacturers’ Association of Moravia, etc.

Recently reports came to this country that the name of President Wilson was loudly cheered on the streets of Prague. Since then the Czech newspapers published the report that President Wilson has invited Alsatians, Czechoslovaks and Poles to take a prominent part in the celebration of the Fourth of July, and that this occasion will be used to bring into prominence the demands of the oppressed peoples of Germany and Austria for liberation.

Every public expression made by the American Government in favor of the Slavs and Latins of Austria is welcomed and given all possible publicity by the journalists of Bohemia.