World's War Events Volume III Part 22

The Czecho-Slovak Expeditionary Force is one of the most romantic armies of the ages and an important step toward world democracy and idealism. I learned to know the Czechs in a journey across Siberia on one of their trains. They furnished me a bed when beds were scarce, transportation when transportation was scarcer, and shoes when shoes were necessary. I have never seen a real Czech that I could not endorse.

[Sidenote: Two methods of travel in Russia.]

[Sidenote: A journey on a Czecho-Slovak train.]

Last March there were two ways to travel in Russia. If one was an American--relief worker, correspondent, Y.M.C.A. man--one could get a private car. Many Americans rode that way for a trifling cost and without inconvenience. And it was in such cars that some of Russia's severest critics traveled. The other way was intimate travel with the common herd. I started thus. It was at Irtishevo, a junction point near the lower Volga, that I changed. In a crowded station in the Russian disorder, I suddenly found myself looking into the eyes of a spirited, smiling young officer, who had evidently learned that I was an American journalist and who was explaining to me in three languages that there was no way out of my riding to Vladivostok with his military train. He wore a red and white ribbon. His alert bearing and enthusiasm marked him in the numbers of nondescript soldiers who were still traveling in the Russian chaos of last spring. I was about to protest mildly in French when three of his fellow soldiers of fortune seized my baggage, carried it around a countless number of trains and stowed it away in a compartment from which another officer, warned of our arrival just in time, was removing his personal effects. He may have stood up all night.

Anyway, I was a quite willing captive on one of the forty odd trains of the Czecho-Slovaks which had started to cross Russia and Siberia to fight for their liberty in France.

My friend was of medium height, well knit, deep chested, smart in bearing. The red and white ribbon on his cap was the badge of the Czechs. Before I had left them at Vladivostok five weeks later I could have picked a Czech out from any crowd by his air of determination backed by an enthusiastic good cheer which everywhere won its way from Austrian prisoner to warmhearted Russian peasant woman. All that night I heard them singing in that splendid, low, group chorus of theirs along the entire line of the train.

[Sidenote: The Czechs are finely disciplined.]

I found these finely disciplined fellows next morning sitting in the doorways of their freight cars. Some were playing on violins they had whittled out in the prison camps. The future of their cross country jaunt to the Pacific worried them not at all. They had fought their way out of the Ukraine, where German elements had tried to stop them. As former citizens of the Central Powers, they were quite happy in the chance to fight again for what their ancestors of five centuries before had stood. Bolsheviks there were among them. But a Czech Bolshevik differs from a Russian in that he shaves and thinks before he acts.

Never have I seen more sharp salutes or stricter discipline, and these men were in Russia where discipline was a curiosity. A Czech is so anxious to accomplish that he is willing to discipline himself. When a Czech marches, he marches irresistibly. In theory, he may be a Socialist. In action, he is a patriot.

[Sidenote: Teaching English to Czech officers.]

I found my place on the expedition as teacher of English to a group of Czech officers and members of the National a.s.sembly. My cla.s.s wanted English in order to be able to understand President Wilson's speeches as they traveled across the United States, for they rank the President with their own national leader, Masaryk. The Czech is literate in several languages, and if he wants another he gives a week-end to it. In my cla.s.s were university graduates, artisans, engineers and musicians. The Czech is a natural-born good mixer.

[Sidenote: The young men make friends everywhere.]

When our train would reach a town, these young men of action won friends wherever they went. Milk woman and bread seller all along the Trans-Siberian liked them, for they pay spot cash, deal honorably and don't know what ruffianism means.

The miracle accomplished by the Czechs is the result of discipline and courage rather than strategy. Their rise to power was on their own initiative. They could have stayed pa.s.sive as have so many times their number among the prisoners from other parts of Austria. But their stand for freedom from the Austrian yoke is uncompromising. They started out determined to fight for France and victory. The great bulk of the remaining Austrian prisoners are completely satisfied if only they can keep away from war. The Czechs are pa.s.sionate in their burning patriotism. The Austrian prisoners in Russia who still feel a certain degree of loyalty to Austria are pa.s.sive in their sentiment. Most of them shrink from enforced military service--either back in Austria or in a German-Austrian prisoner offensive on the spot in Siberia.

[Sidenote: Groups that have no love for the Germans.]

[Sidenote: Willing to join the Czechs.]

This Czechish heart centre of virile independence acted as a powerful magnet wherever their bands moved. All through Russia and Siberia, there are refugee groups from Poland, Lithuania, Courland and the Riga District. These people have no love for the Germans who drove them from their homes nor for the Junkers of their own communities who handed their lands over to the Germans rather than have them divided by the Bolsheviks. Germany is finding that there is a difference between saving landed proprietors from hostile peasants and workingmen and the huge task of enslaving these same peasants under the Prussian yoke. Hundreds of these elements in Russia's great refugee population wanted to enter the Czech expedition, but these fighters were compelled to keep their army small, compact and h.o.m.ogeneous. Transportation was insufficient.

Even Czech artisans were refused a place in the trains unless they could pa.s.s rigid examinations. The willingness of other forces to unite with the Czechs may well be counted on when the call for them comes in Siberia and Russia.

[Sidenote: The National a.s.sembly of Bohemia.]

[Sidenote: Attractive decorations of the cars.]

The General Staff train on which I rode carried, in addition to the cars for officers and men, a hall for the National a.s.sembly meetings, a complete printing outfit, a photographic dark-room, with full equipment for still and motion pictures, a bakery, kitchens and a laundry. It was on this moving train, all parts of which were connected by telephone with the car of the commanding officer, that the plans for a New Bohemia were being worked out. A daily four-page newspaper was published on the General Staff train. It gave the ideals of the expedition, the current news translated into Czechish, lessons in French for the use of the forces on landing in France, and quotations from Professor Masaryk.

About four thousand copies of this paper were printed every day and distributed not only among the Czechs but among many of the Austrian war prisoners, who were thus informed of the ambitious plans these fighting independents saw before them. Their trains showed their versatility and love for decoration and home-making. Not only were they clean, but hundreds of the cars were decorated with life-size drawings, and with quaint designs in evergreens. To enable the men to find their friends, a roster of the occupants of the car was printed on the red flanks of their freight wagons. On the roofs, model aeroplanes and wind-mills spun in the breeze. A Czech train reminded me of a picnic, and, aside from the earnestness, it was.

[Sidenote: Study and athletic contests.]

For some travelers, the Trans-Siberian trip is monotonous. It was not for the Czechs. They read and studied. They were always busy--even before their clashes with the Bolsheviks began to take up some time. The Y.M.C.A. had secretaries with some of the trains and sent supplies of literature and games. The Bohemians are the champion gymnasts of the world and athletic contests were arranged at every station, until at the call of a bugle the train would pull out, picking up sweating, happy men as it gathered speed.

[Sidenote: The Czechs distribute President Wilson's speeches.]

At the larger stations we spent sometimes hours, sometimes days. That gave a chance for the Czechs to mix with the Russian people. It gave the people an awakening sense of acquaintance with this happy race, who, while going from war to war around the world, were distributing the words of President Wilson to prove the sanity of their cause and the folly of the Russian collapse. The President's speeches were widely read and much appreciated. But these enthusiastic, friendly Czech soldiers were the living examples of the President's rather abstruse lessons of democracy. President Wilson might seem a political Messiah, but the Czechs were the John the Baptists who made the initial impression upon the Russian and Siberian peasants.

An Austrian prisoner at a Siberian station shouted one day so all could hear: "What is this freedom that you talk about?"

Immediately a thick-chested Czech strode forward.

"It is the one thing that makes a man a man," he replied. "It is the thing that links men together without weakening them individually. It is the thing that will wipe out tyranny, because a free man won't stand a tyrant."

As he talked to the slow-minded Russians and the slouching Austrian, this ruddy-cheeked Czech exemplified the advantages he preached. There was no slouch in his body, or character. The power that had gathered together a group which had been dispersed all over Russia and welded it into a fighting unit was not only pa.s.sionate desire for freedom and willingness to fight for it, but the power of self-discipline which made both possible.

[Sidenote: The spirit of crusaders.]

The Czech army was gay without license. In Irkutsk, during the Easter holidays, it ate ice-cream sandwiches or went up in tiny Ferris wheels in the true spirit of the reveler at a dry-town carnival. In Omsk one night it stood silent for hours, listening to the art of a Czech violinist playing for the wounded in the Red Cross car. It paraded the streets with a smile and an air of pride. It is boyish, open-hearted, lovable. It makes friends. Neat in dress, erect in bearing, enthusiastic in outlook--the Czechs win the Russian ma.s.ses. There is the spirit of the Crusaders in these fighters, a spirit of personal and national cleanliness. Liberty to them is not a thing to wave a flag over but to die for, if necessary. They are too sincere to be dramatic.

[Sidenote: A force in establishing confidence.]

Having come out of Armenia, with its remnant race of human wrecks, and after months of the demoralizing fatalism and moral laxity of the Russian, I was astounded by the miracle of stability of the tiny Czech force in establishing an economic frontier between the Germanophile sections of Russia and freedom-loving Siberia. Not only is this force the key to the military problem of opposing Germany in Siberia. But from the standpoint of sympathetic friendship between confused Russia and America, the Czecho-Slovaks offer the most helpful force in establishing confidence and turning into fact the good will which America bears to Russian citizenry.

They can best tell their own story. Lieutenant B---- of my English cla.s.s was typical.

"When war was declared, I was in Switzerland," he told me. "Late in July I climbed to the heights overlooking Austria. I could throw a stone over into that land of oppression. That very day, when I went down into the Swiss village, I heard that the Austrian mobilization had been ordered.

I could not believe that war would come. I returned to the land I hated and in two days I had joined my cla.s.s. We were to fight Russia. This was unthinkable. Better to mutiny against our German and Magyar officers than murder our brother Slavs.

[Sidenote: Czech regiments went over to Russia by companies.]

"And so it was that the word was secretly pa.s.sed through whole regiments of our men to desert to the Russians. The opportunity came when we faced Brusiloff's army. The Russians knew and were ready to receive us. We walked over in companies, with banners flying and bands playing and men falling before the shots that rang out behind us. We hoped to turn and fight against our oppressors. And for a while some of us did. But one by one those of us who had entered the Russian ranks were removed and sent to prison camps, whence we were scattered among the homes and factories of Russia. My own band of companies was soon thoroughly broken up and dispersed from Turkestan and the Caucasus to Tobolsk and Irkutsk. As German influences strengthened at the Russian court we were sent to worse and worse positions, malarial and barren territories. But we prospered in spite of all that was done to oppress us.

[Sidenote: Waiting the time to strike for liberty.]

"For a while I managed a cotton factory in Turkestan and later I went to open some mines further in the country. But all the while we kept in touch with one another and day by day we waited for the time when we could strike for liberty and Bohemia. Professor Masaryk was to give the signal for the blow for liberty.

[Sidenote: The Russian Revolution.]

[Sidenote: Czechs ask to go to France.]

"Then came the Russian Revolution. With the Czar, the German influences at Court were overthrown. We left our farm work and our shop benches. We poured out of the dark mines and united in Czech battalions to fight in the armies of Kerensky. At Zborov, we pierced six enemy lines but were forced to retreat because the other fighters failed to advance as fast as we. Then came the long wait for the time when Russia should find herself, as she is still trying to do. The Slav is not a coward once his mind is trained. There is hope for his ultimate recovery. The power of Czardom was enforced ignorance, and this made possible the infamous treaty of Brest-Litovsk. But we saw that there was no hope for a mere handful of us to hold the Russian front, and to attempt this would be to antagonize the Russian people. So we applied for permission to leave Russia and go to France.

[Sidenote: The journey to Vladivostok.]

"Everyone said that it could not be done. It meant going almost round the world. But we were determined and soon we had gained the support of the French Government and the permission of the Bolshevik leaders, who were glad enough to get us out of the country. They feared we would start a counter-revolution. But here we are in Siberia and the hardest part of our journey is over. Two weeks more should find us in Vladivostok and from there we can go very quickly to France, where thousands of our fellows are already fighting for the cause of liberty."

[Sidenote: The men are cla.s.sified by occupation.]

Captain H---- was in Omsk. Behind him, as I talked with him, was a card index file showing the occupation and residence of forty thousand Czech artisans resident in Siberia. Typewriters clicked in the bright office and outside a Czech wagon arrived with a ton of meat en route to the cold storage cellar which he had built in the outskirts of Omsk.

[Sidenote: Food is obtained at high prices.]

"I arrived here alone and with only a few rubles," said Captain H----.

"But I heard that some day my fellows would come through on their way to France. So I began organizing our resources. Many of our men have made much money as prisoners in Russia. They were generous. Men began to flock in and we took off their Austrian uniforms and put them into Russian uniforms--the uniform of our expeditionary force. Fighting men were listed and trained. Artisans we merely listed, and there are forty thousand names cla.s.sified by occupation and residence in those files. In three weeks we have taken in 610 Czech prisoners and sent them out in the uniform of the expeditionary force to France. Every shoe and belt and uniform is utilized and nothing is wasted except the hated Austrian uniform, which is in most cases worn to shreds anyway. We have established friendly relations with the people. Theoretically we are not supposed to be doing this. Theoretically, we are not securing food. But actually we are getting enough and to spare. Ten trains a week get several days' supplies here. Only in disorganized Russia could such things be. But we have to pay the secret agents of the local Soviet sixty-five rubles for meat. Its market price is thirty-five."

[Sidenote: Professor Masaryk in America is the leader.]

In my note-book, I cannot find the names of a dozen leaders of the Czech expedition. In a sense, there were no leaders. The outstanding fact in the Czech army is the democracy of it. The leaders are men who have been trained, but they owe their position to popular choice. Yet there is no foolish idea that military decisions can be made by a committee of soldiers. The Czech sacrifices personal ambition to his cause and that is why his cause is worth fighting for. The Russian cause, a thing of chaos, is losing force every day. I might almost say that the Czechs, in Siberia, were led by Professor Masaryk, in America, through the influence of his words in the daily paper. As prominent a figure among the Czechs as any one man in the expedition is Kenneth Miller of New York, director of the Y.M.C.A., and held on a high pedestal in the affection of 10,000 men. He has had much to do with the moving of the Czech trains in all their complicated travel arrangements.