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Rh strong enough to hold it together against any disruptive forces. At that time he believed in the democratization, in the federalization of Austria—"that ramshackle empire." But when the World War broke loose, Edward Beneš was one of the first to see that the great catastrophe could marshal much more formidable forces against the empire from without than the German Alliance or any binding forces from within. And it was this opportunity which Professors Masaryk and Beneš made use of.

Thus Dr. Beneš became the organizer and the director (until his flight from Bohemia in 1915) of the Czech Mafia which so accurately reported to the Entente on the course of events inside the Habsburg Monarchy during the war. It was this organization which later engineered the peaceful underground revolution at Prague in 1918. In the meanwhile, Professor Masaryk, who travelled about Central and Neutral Europe in 1914 and the spring of 1915, did not return to Bohemia after Beneš warned him from Prague that he was suspected by the Austrian government. In August that year, Dr. Beneš, seeing the net draw closer over his own activities, crawled through the thick underbrush of the forests on the Bavarian frontiers under the very noses of the Austrian sentries. Once in Germany, he used a forged passport and arrived safely in Switzerland where Professor Masaryk had already initiated the Czechoslovak revolutionary movement. Beneš became at once his most intimate assistant and has remained so to the present day.

When the Entente began the war it concentrated its wrath on Germany as the archculprit. It was the task of such men as Masaryk, Beneš and ŠtefaníkŠtefánik [sic], the noted Slovak astronomer, from among the Czechoslovaks, and Pašić and Trumbić from among the Jugoslavs, with the assistance among others of Steed, later editor of the London Times,