Page:The Czechoslovak Review, vol3, 1919.djvu/307

 Charles bridge in a dignified procession singing the Austrian hymn to the tune of some comical popular song. On the wall of the Olšany cemetery appeared one morning a call for recruits: “Rise, ye dead, the emperor is calling out the last reserves.” Comical songs about Francis Joseph were especially popular and plentiful. Many were composed on the tragical marches of the mobilized Czechs from home to the front, many in the tortures of the barracks, in the trenches and on lonely watches. No one knew the authors. They passed from mouth to mouth in cities and villages and did more to create and maintain anti-Austrian sentiment than anything else could have done. The streets and the villages received the songs gladly, but with silence; only at home were they repeated with gusto. Official investigations never discovered a thing, for the Czech gendarmes did not care to make arrests. The result was hostile attitude at home to everything Austrian and wholesale surrender of Czech conscripts at the front. All this silent, but determined opposition, this repudiation of all compromise, emanated directly from the people.

Other expressions of what we may call spontaneous anti-Austrian propaganda were copies of articles from neutral and entente newspapers, appeals, proclamations, etc., circulated without any central organization, just haphazard. They were due to a great thirst for news, distrust of official bulletins, love of the sensational—in brief to the psychology of war. They were secretly typewritten in many copies in the editorial rooms of newspapers or in public offices, wherever a patriot got access to hidden information. I have still a few such leaflets—reports of Italian newspapers, Russian official bulletins and the famous manifesto of Czar Nicholas to the Czech nation, whether genuine or faked; at that time we did not worry over that, so pleased were we to get it. Today these bulletins strike us naive, almost childish, but four or five years ago they constituted a serious psychological factor, and they cost many a life. Possession of leaflets, like those I mentioned, was considered in countless cases by Austrian military courts to be sufficient reason for sentences of death or at least life imprisonment.

Until this activity became organized and employed as a factor in our national fight, it served the feed the hatred against Austria together with demand for news about the Czechoslovak campaign for independence abroad. A special mention at this point should be made of Annunzio’s article “Thousands” which appeared in Corriere della Sera and foretold Italy’s entry into the war on the side of the Allies. We typed this article in the editorial rooms of the Čas in hundreds of copies; I may mention that in payment for a copy of D'Annunzio’s article I received from Otto, the book publisher, a copy of Jirásek’s great novel Temno.

Shortly after the opening of 1916 I was asked to ascertain the sentiments of the various classes of the people all over Bohemia and to recommend, by what means we could maintain and intensify the anti-Austrian feeling. In the spring of that year I traveled through Bohemia from west to east and north to south, and the conclusion forced itself upon me that we must employ the spontaneous propaganda which was so wide-spread, and by a systematic, organized transmission of bulletins keep the nation firm in its opposition to Austria. So we decided to spread our bulletins by the means of a regularly published periodical.

We had plenty of material. We were getting Swiss and Dutch newspapers which contained official Allied war reports, a more or less impartial description of political and economic situation, editorials on the general military position, occasionally an item about the activity of our own people abroad. All that was a rare treat to us, for newspapers of Vienna and Germany did not publish anything of this sort and Czech papers were not permitted to do so. Our own people thirsted for such news, and it was up to us to spread it. Material means were furnished by Dr. Přemysl Šámal who gave my plans in this line all possible financial and moral encouragement. In Prague my chief assistant was old Fialka—a pensioner seventy years of age, who acted as colporter and delivered the newspaper and other bulletins to a known circle of reliable people. In the country I found friends who volunteered to spread the paper and its contents.

The paper, very primitive, just multigraphed, received the name of Hlasatel (Herald), after the Hlasatel that a hundred years ago called to the Czech nation to