Page:The Bohemian Review, vol2, 1918.djvu/34

 ant of religious form, is very void of religious feeling. Immorality is proverbial both among the homebred clergy and the people. There are strongly Catholic provinces in Austria where the illegitimate birth-rate is 40 per cent of the total birth-rate; and the true history—as known to the Vatican—of some of the great monasteries in recent years would cause the salacious novels of the Middle Ages to appear bowdlerized. Yet no greater ecclesiastical festival has been held in recent years than the International Eucharistic Congress of Vienna in September 1912! It is characteristic that the occasion was made an apotheosis for the Emperor and the Imperial Family rather than for the Eucharist, and that the cost of organizing the Congress was largely born by Galician Jews in search of titles and Parliamentary honors.

But to return to the political developments that determined the character of Francis Joseph’s reign and led up to the situation out of which the present war arose. The ten years of black reaction of which the Concordat of 1855 was the characteristic feature, ended in disaster on the Lombard Plain, when French and Sardinian troops overthrew the Austrian armies, liberated Lombardy from the Austrian grip, and laid the foundations, of Italian unity. Just as the ancient history of Austria cannot be dissevered from the history of the Holy Roman Empire, so the modern history of Austria is inseparable from the modern history of Europe. Had the House of Austria been able to read the signs of the times, had it possessed the faintest inkling that moral factors—the sense of justice, respect for truth and sincere care for the well-being of peoples—play a large part in politics, it might today stand higher than any dynasty in Europe, and be surrounded by the respect of a peace-loving world. Its unmorality, its greed, its lust of power and its shortsightedness are among the indirect causes of this terrible war. “Nowhere in the world has Austria ever done good,” declared Gladstone, who, with all his faults, was a great seer. Were he alive today in the presence of this world-wide catastrophe he might cry with truth, “Everywhere in the world has Austria wrought evil!”

'Vaclav Klofac, leader of the Czech National Socialist party, was arrested shortly after the outbreak of the war and kept in military prison as a “preventive” measure until summer of 1917. He writes in the “Narodni Politika” of his experiences in prison. The part translated here deals with the rule of the sergeant in Austrian military prisons.'

A civilian finds it difficult to get accustomed to military discipline. He finds it still more difficult to get used to the discipline of military prisons. For it is not always a matter of discipline, but sometimes of chicanery, torture, arbitrary acts of men with little intelligence and less conscience. In Prague a prison is a prison; the military regime impresses upon the inmates its evil sides, but at that the regime there is not altogether devoid of humaneness and justice. But it’s very different in Vienna.

The entire world occupies itself with problems of the greatest importance. And we, the prisoners, were concerned all that time with trifles, with insignificant details which assume a tremendous importance for the man in jail. You outside talked about Lloyd George, Bethmann-Hollweg, Sazonov, Tisza, Wilson; while we thought continually about “adjunct” Papritz. A jail is a little world in itself, an island in the middle of an ocean, governed by regulations and principles peculiar to itself and terrible to untamed spirits. It is a society without contact with the outside world and consequently lacking any great thoughts. The daily life in the prison brings little change or novelty. What it does bring are matters purely personal and insignificant. They have to do with this or that “superior”, with this prisoner or that “preventively” detained citizen. Under other circumstances, if we had our liberty, such matters would not claim our attention for a minute. But in our jail there was nothing else for the mind to get hold of. A man deprived of liberty and the exercise of free will becomes very touchy. The least act of good will gives a hundred fold pleasure; any humiliation or roughness increases our suffering.

The regulations, it is true, enjoin upon the administrative officials and the guards the duty of taking into account the individual character of each prisoner. In the new military penal code it is even ordered that “preventive”” prisoners should enjoy all possible comfort and that their honor and their social position should be taken into consideration. But what good are regulations in these recent years? The Slav political prisoners detained in Vienna as possibly dangerous persons can tell at great length, how these regulations were being violated intentionally out of pure malevolence. It was the essence of the famous system of Papritz that these political prisoners against whom no charge was lodged should be picked out for special humiliation, should be convinced of their absolute unimportance, should be taught that any guard may with impunity make them suffer and poison their life.

Of course, there are exceptions; there are even honest and good men. We like to remember the good-hearted German Beschliesser or turnkeys. But in the end these men had to suffer for their honesty. The man who really ruled the prison was not the lieutenant-colonel nor even the chief inspector, Dal’Aiglio, a hardened and unfeeling man. In some strange fashion administrative “adjunct” Papritz gathered all power into his own hands. Whenever a guard or jailer showed any regard for our feel-