Page:The Bohemian Review, vol2, 1918.djvu/130

 Czechoslovak regiments on the Southwestern Russian front, although there were some 300,000 Czech and Slovak prisoners of war scattered through the vast extent of the Russian empire. Kerensky himself as minister of war looked at first unfavorably upon the nationalistic aspirations of the Czechoslovaks and tried to discourage their recruiting. But the revolution in most places freed the prisoners, friendly and hostile alike, and the Czechoslovaks from the lower Volga, from Central Asia and from the Pacific streamed toward Kief to join in the fight against Austria. If the Russian front had not collopsed, the former Austrian soldiers would have played a big share in putting an end to Austria’s existence. As it is, they had a chance to prove their mettle. One brigade of them was at the front, when the short-lived Kerensky offensive took place in Galicia in June, 1917. This brigade captured four thousand Austrians and a large number of guns, but in two weeks it had to fall back, because the Russian armies threw away their arms and fled without being attacked.

The next few months, the time during which the disorganization of the Russian armies went on at an increasing rate, witnessed the rapid growth of the Czechoslovak army. Professor Masaryk, “the little father”, as these desperate fighters always call him, was in Russia and put a new spirit into the discouraged Bohemian exiles. A firm organization of the original Czechoslovak colony in Russia and of the far larger body of prisoners of war was carried out under his leadership to which all eagerly submitted. Emissaries went out from Kiev to all the internment camps from the Black Sea to the Pacific to call all true patriots to arms and to smooth away the difficulties offered in some places by the local authorities. Soon the volunteers commenced to pour into the concentration centers in the Ukraine. In most cases they came in train-loads, each group sped on the way with the best wishes of the local soviet. But even before the overthrow of Kerensky Masaryk lost hope of using the Czechoslovak forces to advantage on the Russian front. No one in Russia wanted to fight the Germans and Austrians, so eager were the Russians to fight each other; and in the general disorganization the small, but firmly disciplined body of fighters, like the Czechoslovaks, were tempted from all sides to join the bolsheviki or Kornilof or Kaledines or other promising causes which would have frittered away the strength of the small Czechoslovak army and probably caused its total extinction. As early as last fall Professor Masaryk planned to have his fighters transported to France and fight on the western front for the liberation of their homeland. Several thousand of them have in fact been transported by way of the Arctic Sea to the west to form the nucleus of the Czechoslovak army in France. In the meantime the Bolsheviki seized what government there was in Russia and it became impracticable to figure any longer on transportation by way of northern Russian ports. The only way to bring these eager fighters into the battle was to take them clear around the world, across European Russia, across Asia, over the Pacific, Canada or the United States, and the Atlantic.

In the meantime the position of the Czechoslovak troops in the Ukraine was becoming decidedly hazardous. There had been considerable fighting in and around Kiev between the levies of the Ukrainian Rada and the forces of the Bolsheviki, and the Czechoslovaks with difficulty managed to keep clear of this brief war. The red guards captured Kiev, but that only gave the Germans an excuse to rush to the aid of their good friends, the government of the Rada, the same government that a few months later was chased out of Kiev by a squad of German soldiers. And as the German flood overran the Ukraine, it nearly caught the Czechoslovaks. They were retreating out of the Ukraine, when their rearguards found themselves menaced by the Germans at Bachmach on March 11th. A battle was fought in which the German forces were badly worsted, and the Czechoslovaks were enabled to withdraw from territory occupied by their enemies.

At the time these men without a country were already on their way to Vladivostok. Masaryk received promises from the Allied representatives in Moscow that ships would be furnished for the transport of this army across the Pacific and the Atlantic, and at the same time the Bolshevik authorities agreed to help these dangerous men out of the country and to furnish trains to take them to Vladivostok. As soon as the troop movement to Vladivostok was on the way. Masaryk left Russia. He thought that his work in Russia was done. He had guided his children through one crisis after another; he brought them safe out of