Page:The Bohemian Review, vol2, 1918.djvu/132

 situations and saw them started on their way across Asia. When he came to Chicago and made his first public address in America, he told his countrymen of Chicago that his chief task for the present would be to see to it that transports should be promptly sent to Vladivostok.

But now Germany made one of those blunders, like the attack on Belgium and the declaration of ruthless submarine warfare, which lost the war for it. The representatives of Germany and Austria in Moscow demanded now that the Czechoslovaks, being originally Austrian prisoners of war, should be disarmed, placed under guard and delivered to the Austrians. Now it should be kept in mind that only a few months previously a military convention had been signed by the Bolshevik commander and the Czechoslovak chief providing for the free and unmolested transit of the Czechoslovak troops through and out of Russia, and that this convention was ratified by the people’s commissioners. But Lenine and Trotzky could refuse nothing to the Germans. Trotzky as minister of war demanded first the disarmament of the Czechs, and they submitted, merely keeping a few guns to each train. The conflict was thus postponed a little longer. A number of regiments actually reached Vladivostok without any more serious trouble than a month of most uncomfortable traveling—reaching the port they asked the local bolsheviks for barrack room and settled down to wait for their comrades.

Just how the fight started is still far from clear. Perhaps the orders came from Trotzky, perhaps the Moscow commissaries did not intend to go to extremes. It is quite likely that Count Mirbach thought that he could get what he wanted without Trotzky’s direct co-operation. For be it remembered that the people’s commissioners, elected by the all-Russian Soviet as the chief executive, were obeyed by the provincial and city Soviets only in so far as it pleased these local bodies. And in Siberia, where most of the German and Austrian prisoners of war had been interned, the local Soviets were very largely controlled by German agents, since the red guards were led by German and Magyar ex-prisoners. And so the first clash which changed the situation completely occurred at Irkutsk. A Czechoslovak troop train, waiting at the Irkutsk station, was fired upon by machine guns at the order of the German commander of the Red Guards. The Czechs had only a few rifles and bombs and a few score of them were killed, before they captured the machine guns practically with bare hands, killed the Reds and occupied Irkutsk.

It is not possible to relate in detail just what happened afterwards. We have to rely upon scattered press dispatches. But it seems that the conflict at Irkutsk pushed Trotzky into the position where the Germans wished to have him. He gave orders that every Czechoslovak caught with weapons in his hands should be immediately executed. The intervention of the Allied consuls at Moscow on June 13th had no result. War was on between the Czechoslovaks and the Bolsheviki.

A new front arose, called by Trotzky the Czechoslovak front. It was a battlefront far larger than anything else seen in this war, for it extended from the Volga to the Pacific, a distance of more than five thousand miles. And while now and then the war bulletins of the soviet announced Russian victories over the rebel Czechoslovaks, due no doubt to the fact that sometimes small Czech detachments had been pushed too far and had to be withdrawn, on the whole this unique campaign consists of a long list of Czechoslovak victories. Thus we read that on June 8th Omsk in Central Siberia was captured, on June 13th was announced the capture of Syzran west of the Volga, on June 15th Novonikolajevsk, a few hundred miles west of Omsk was occupied; on June 20th Bolshevik commanders report to Lenine that all Siberia is on fire with rebellion. The next report announces the occupation on June 25th of Tobolsk in Western Siberia and Krasnoyarsk in central Siberia; the following day we jump into European Russia again and read of the capture of Ekaterinburg in the Urals and Samara on the Volga. On July 5th the Czechoslovaks drove the Red Guards, composed principally of German and Magyar prisoners, beyond Lake Baikal, and at the same time the regiments at Vladivostok, which in the meantime had over thrown the Bolshevik rule on the Pacific, started out from Vladivostok and occupied the junction of Nikolsk after a bloody battle.

When the CzechcoslovakCzechoslovak [sic] army made its start for France, it counted only 50,000 men. There were 50,000 more volunteers who had not yet succeeded in reaching the