Page:The New Europe - Volume 3.djvu/449

 trucks. Ill-treatment of their prisoners and insufficient feeding were common occurrences. On the way to the internment camps they were ill-treated, and a batch of 43 persons were killed on the road by a Honvéd [Magyar Militia] detachment. In Talerhof near Graz individual interned persons were beaten till they bled, and tortured. For the first three days they were camped in the open; four stakes were planted in a field, and no one might leave the space thus marked out. Women, girls and men all slept together. Not till the fourth day were they taken to the sheds provided for them, and here they had to sleep on the bare ground. In these sheds their clothes were disinfected, but those interned—even the women and girls—had to undress and often wait naked for over an hour until they got their clothes again. In December 1914 the number interned reached 5,000. Epidemics alone carried off 1,200 in Talerhof: 2,000 are buried in the cemetery. Mr. Stribrny offered to provide over 70 educated witnesses in proof of his assertions.

He went on to “greet with joy a new world which is forming and which brings equality and fraternity. A new era is coming which regards the democratic republic as the highest and worthiest form of human government Only on the basis of the free self-determination of the peoples can a permanent world peace be established.” “As for patriotism, I only know of a Czech, a Polish, a Ruthene, an Italian, a Jugoslav patriotism, and so on. An Austrian patriotism is a mere artificially encouraged plant, but an extremely rare one. It has been Austria’s fate to be governed for a long time past by a reactionary bureaucracy which identifies the interests of Germanism with the interests of the State.”

La Saillie de l’Internationale. Alexandre Zévaès. (Paris: La Renaissance du Livre, 1917.) 2f. This book comes at a most opportune moment. It would probably do little to influence those people who are talking so optimistically about reviving the Internationale and preparing the way for the class-war; for them there can only come disillusionment. But for the ill-informed who imagine that peace can be brought about by methods such as these, M. Alexandre Zévaès’ succinct and excellently documented account of the collapse of international socialism in all countries during the war should be quite enough to convince them of their utopianism.

The plan followed by the well-known historian of French socialism is this: he first gives an account of the foundation of the first Internationale of 1864, then of its collapse and the subsequent establishment, in 1889, of the second. The progress of this organisation, from which so much was expected, is followed until the eve of the war; and then, by a short account of international socialism during the war in every European country and in the United States, we are led to see how it, too, went bankrupt beyond all possibility of resuscitation.

To anyone who studies the facts as given by M. Zévaès and supplements them with some attention to the correspondence of Marx and Engels the reason is perfectly clear. The Infernationale failed—