Page:The future of Bohemia by Seton-Watson (1915).pdf/26

 her noble struggle for the liberation of the Balkans, for opposing which Britain is to-day paying so terribly in blood and treasure. In 1908 it sympathized equally with Serbia during the Bosnian crisis; for it should be noted that Prague has long been a very important centre of Southern Slav culture, to which hundreds of Serb, Croat, and Bulgar students flock every year. In 1912 there was no country where the victories of the Balkan League aroused greater delight than in Prague; and to-day it is scarcely an exaggeration to assert that every man, woman, and child in Bohemia sympathizes with Russia, and longs for the victory of Russia and her Western allies, as Bohemia’s only hope of salvation. As a famous Bohemian put it to me during the war, even the Austrian police spies in Prague—so far as they are of Czech nationality—would welcome the Russians! And these are the people who, like their Serb, Croat, and Slovene kinsmen in the south of Austria-Hungary, are being compelled by a brutal and perverse system to fight the battles of Berlin, Vienna, and Budapest, to pay the bill run up by the crimes and follies of German-Magyar policy, to sacrifice thousands of their best sons, fighting against their own kinsmen and friends against all their dearest traditions and aspirations. Hideous as has been the fate of Belgium and of unconquerable Serbia, it may safely be asserted that in this war the most hideous fate of all has been reserved for the Czechs, Slovaks,