Page:The New Europe (The Slav standpoint), 1918.pdf/66

 The Napoleonic wars, the Thirty Years’ War, the Crusades—all these were child’s play compared with this war. Realist politicians and statesmen must grasp the inner meaning of German and European history; they must comprehend the direction in which history is pointing, and what Europe’s aims and objects can and must be.

I do not maintain that the liberation of Bohemia is the most vital question of the war; but I can say without exaggeration that the aims proclaimed by the Allies cannot be attained without the liberation of Bohemia. Her future will be the touchstone of the Allies’ strength, seriousness and statesmanship.

49. The restoration of the Czecho-Slovak State is only a part of the task which Europe, or rather the Allies, will have to undertake in reorganising eastern Europe; together with the Czecho-Slovak State there must arise an independent united Poland and an independent united Jugoslavia. Of all the acute national questions in the zone of small nations these are most acute and they are questions that are closely connected internally.

Between the Polish and Czecho-Slovak nations there is a strong national and cultural kinship. Under the same or similar conditions given by their geographical situation, the Poles and Czechs developed for a long time along parallel lines. Being neighbours they have been in contact from the very beginning; even in the oldest days their relations were friendly; sometimes they were unfriendly, but the relations were always there. The two nations even had kings in common. Cultural and literary (even language) reciprocity was strong at the beginning of the modern era.

The Poles occupy the same position with reference to Prussia that the Czechs occupy with reference to Austria. Prussia (Frederick the Great) is the real author of the plan to divide Poland. The unification and restoration of Poland will be the most impressive defeat of Prussian militarism which has been directing the Pangerman pressure towards the east. Bismarck rightly said that Posnania was more important to Germany than Alsace-Lorraine. We see with what energy Prussia opposes a “Greater Poland,” as the German publicists expressed it. From Berlin to Bagdad the road crosses Bohemia and Slovakia, but it may also lead across Poland; Berlin–Prague–Belgrade–Constantinople–Bagdad, and also Berlin–Warsaw–Odessa–Bagdad.

Austria made concessions to the Poles in Galicia and by its anti-Russian policies it gained the sympathy of the Poles in Russia and elsewhere; in spite of that Austria is an enemy of the Poles and a more dangerous enemy than the Poles have heretofore admitted. Austria maintained a very demoralising system in Galicia; it used the Ruthenians against the Poles, the Poles against the Ruthenians, but it did not oppose the policy of extermination urged by Pangermanism (Von Hartmann: exterminate!) and practised in Prussia. Russia, it is true, also acted brutally towards the. Poles, but it was not as dangerous as cultural Prussia. Mickiewicz, in his famous “Improvisation,” stated very correctly the qualities of the three executioners of Poland.

The Pangerman alliance of Prussia-Austria makes the interests of the Czecho-Slovaks and Poles identical. Without a free Poland there will be no free Bohemia—without a free Bohemia there will be no free Poland. This reciprocity and parallelism of political development may be traced throughout the entire history of the two States; I will call attention only to the connection of Grünwald with the contemporaneous national uprising of Bohemia; at that time, in the fifteenth century, the Hussite movement and the strengthening of Poland held up for a long time the march of the Germans to the east. The consequences of the White Mountain were felt even in Poland—between the respective events of 1620 and 1771 there