Page:The Czechoslovak Review, vol3, 1919.djvu/76

 troduce order in the land. The people may be of easy minds. As Frenchmen, English men, Italians and Americans we have warm sympathies for both nations forming a majority of the people. As soldiers we do our duty. We have nothing to do with political questions. We ask of all elements of the people assistance in our administrative work. The republic is a government of order. Signed by Lt.-Colonel of the French Army Gilain, Major of the British Army Grossfield, Major of the Italian Army Naseda, and First-Lt. of the United States Army Voska.

On January 23rd, the commission of the entente forces requested the command er of the Polish troops in Teschen, Brig. Latinik to order his garrisons to evacuate the district of Teschen. After some hesitation he promised. But against all expectations in certain places Polish garrisons put up opposition and employed their arms against the forces of occupation, it is said at the orders of the Polish National Council. In spite of that the action went on rapidly; at 4 o’clock in the afternoon Oderberg was occupied, and all the Czechoslovak losses amounted to six killed and twenty-three wounded.

The entire question is now being looked into by a commission appointed by the executive council of the peace conference. Until their decision is given and approved by the main body, the Czech forces are ordered to occupy the entire coal district, while the Polish forces are in possession of the eastern part of the district of Teschen. The Czechoslovaks have full confidence in the justice oi their claims and in the fairness of the Allied representatives who have became arbitrators of the quarrel. Whatever the decision at Paris may be, the Czechoslovak government and the Czechoslovak people will accept it with a good grace. As to their present relations with the Poles, the Czechoslovaks hope that the present discord will blow over and that the two kindred nations, both menaced by Germans, will work together and support each other.

The outbreak of the war caught the Czechoslovak people in America unprepared. Not that they failed to realize at once the tremendous significance of the cataclysm for their native land, as well as for the entire world, but they had no organization that could speak for them and gather into one channel the strong currents of indignation at German-Austrian crimes and the desire to help their brothers in the old country to get rid of the foreign yoke.

The Slovaks had an existing organization, the Slovak League, but this body was not prepared to take advantage of the revolutionary situation. The Czech speaking people in the United States had been for years divided into two principal camps—the liberals and the Catholics, while the Protestants formed a third camp numerically small. There had been no cooperation between these sharply separated parties, neither were the parties themselves organized to undertake an intensive campaign on behalf of their kinsmen in Bohemia. There were societies and organizations in plenty, social, beneficial, athletic, but all concerned themselves with their local or special interests only. But there were a great many individuals among the Czechoslovak immigrants and naturalized and native born citizens who realized at once, as soon as Austria declared war on Serbia, that there was a unique opportunity for the Czechs and Slovaks in Europe to gain that liberty which the Czechoslovaks of America enjoyed. And so the fight of our people in this country against Austria-Hungary and Germany is dated from the very first days of the war, and this fight assumed a real significance and began to make itself felt as soon as Thomas Masaryk from his retreat in Switzerland got in touch with his countrymen in America. Numerous local organizations which sprang up in the summer of 1914 for the purpose of collecting money for widows and orphans in Bohemia were quickly transformed into branches of the Bohemian National Alliance, and these undertook as their special task in the great campaign for Czechoslovak independence financial support of all the activities in Allied and ne-