Page:The Czechoslovak Review, vol3, 1919.djvu/138

 Russian army during that awful summer of 1915 as far as Plock. We had a very miserable time, nobody seemed to care, whether we had anything to eat and we subsisted on what we found in the fields. Fully 70 per cent of my fellow prisoners died on the retreat of hunger, exhaustion and sickness. About October 15th we stopped retreating and life became more bearable.

I was employed on trench work until May 1917 when I was sent as a machinist to a shop making nails; my work was to repair steam engines. At first they paid me only one and a half rubles a day, as I was still classed as a prisoner of war. Later I made eight rubles a day, but when I was due to get twenty rubles as foreman of the shop I had to run away, because the Germans were invading the Ukraine.

As early as 1916 I sent in my application to be taken into the Czechoslovak legions with a number of friends, but we waited in vain for permission to join, as the Russian Government did not favor the Czechoslovak army. Finally a call came at the end of 1917 just when I was sick in a hospital, so that I could not go with my comrades. When I got well I hastened after the legions which were retreating from the Ukraine in order to go to France by way of Siberia and America. I got to the town of Romadan a few days after the last train with our soldiers had left; there were no more trains running and the Germans were twenty miles away. Only armored Bolshevik trains delayed the Germans. At that time the Bolsheviki were fighting the Germans, and so I made up my mind quickly to enlist in the Red Army, where I was soon made a company commander.

But when the break came between the Bolsheviki and our boys, I left the Red Army and started to go to America. I went as far as Orenburg, where there existed a fighting front making it impossible to go to Siberia; so I changed my plans and started out for Turkestan hoping to cross Persia and go to France or England. But I did not succeed and returned from Taskend back to Russia and lived for a time in Saratov, where I supported myself by making jewelry. I left Saratov on December 6th and came home without any great difficulties on December 22nd.”

The question whether our designation as “Bohemians” should be retained in modern English or whether it should be discarded and exchanged for something else, and for what, has been lately stirred up from various quarters, and its discussion in the columns of this Review appears as a timely topic. The discussion has been by Mr. Nigrin who as a linguist by profession can justly claim to be heard in this matter. The next question is, how do others feel about the subject and what do they think of his proposal to discard the old established name “Bohemian” and to adopt the name “Čech” from the Bohemian language in its stead with such spelling of the word as to be both intelligible and pronounceable to the American or English public without special explanation and assistance. Mr. Nigrin proposes the spelling “Chehs” as seemingly the nearest sounding expression of the enigma. Let us now approach the subject with out prejudice and consider it from two different points of view.

No doubt, anyone of us must always resent the idea that the name “Bohemian” should designate us as the Gypsies who had been taken for the Bohemians at one time by a fatal mistake of the French who did not bother themselves at that time about the truth of the matter or about their own ignorance. However, the name “Bohemian” is older than this mistake, and I believe that any attempt at correcting this mistake by killing the name by prohibition is bound to end in hopeless failure. It appears hard to say in this instance with ShakespearShakespeare [sic]’s Montague, “What is a name? It is not thy hand nor thy foot—give thyself another name!” That name is once here, attached to our existence both by history and by old custom and usage, and all efforts to supplant it with another name will lead not to the acceptance of the new nomenclature instead of the old one, but, on the contrary, to the producion of one or more synomyms that may survive beside the original name as equivalents, or so to say, parasites. Innumerable instances may be cited to prove it. Thus, e. g., we used to call in Bohemian the well known mineral Talcum “talek”. When the Bohemian mineralogy was put on scientific basis and new nomenclature was looked for, this mineral was named “mastek”, a name which designates in Bohemian the physical qualities of the mineral as closely as the other name does in Latin. And the result?—that today both names are being used promiscuously; instead of one name we have two synonyms expressing the same conception. So, too, if we shall succeed in establishing the name “Čech” as customary in English, we shall only create a synonym for the name “Bohemian” without doing away with the latter. And justly so. The historic nomenclature of our national entity as the ultimate successors of the Boii in our native land has always been and will remain Latin “Boemi”, “Bohemi” or “Bojemi”, and the Latin races have quite naturally accepted it like all the others of their Latin derivatives. To eradicate it would mean to abolish the natural process of etymology in the languages that sprang from the Latin. The name is simply here to stay, notwithstanding all vain efforts to change it. The difficulties in the attempt at eradication grow