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Let us therefore, my brother Czecho-Slovaks, proclaim aloud, so that the whole world may hear us: 'We do not want Austria because we realise that she not only does no good to us, but directly threatens our very existence. We are able to and want to maintain an independent state existence without Austria."
By this means they have done great service to the Allies, especially to Great Britain, by defending the East against the German invaders. Furthermore, it was the Czecho-Slovaks' bold action which induced Japan and America at last to intervene in Russia and for the sake of Russia, and it was their control of the Siberian railway which made such intervention possible.
General Brussiloff declared: "The Czecho-Slovaks, perfidiously abandoned at Tarnopol by our infantry, fought in such a way that the world ought to fall on its knees before them." The spontaneous and unanimous political action of the Czecho-Slovaks abroad became co-ordinated when Professor Masaryk escaped from Austria and placed himself at the head of the movement.
It was a source of deep satisfaction to see the scowling and hostile countenances of Germans, Austrians and Hungarians replaced by the cheerful and honest faces of the Thuringians, the Czecho-Slovaks and the Magyarians. Moreover I was assured on all sides that if these faces are not perfectly satisfactory, they will be altered in any way required.
"Since that sentence was written and uttered to the Congress of the United States, the Government of the United States has recognised that a state of belligerency exists between the Czecho-Slovaks and the German and Austro-Hungarian Empires, and that the Czecho-Slovak National Council is a de facto belligerent government, clothed with proper authority to direct the military and political affairs of the Czecho-Slovaks.
Still some German Czecho-Slovaks think they will ultimately overthrow the new State and get into the saddle again. And they make a solid and dangerous political bloc. Benes said they were much more amenable than a year ago, but in the Parliament House an adapted concert-hall I saw all the carpenters at work in a litter of shavings and broken wood.
On August 9, 1918, His Majesty's Government issued the following declaration: "Since the beginning of the war the Czecho-Slovak nation has resisted the common enemy by every means in its power. The Czecho-Slovaks have constituted a considerable army, fighting on three different battlefields and attempting, in Russia and Siberia, to arrest the Germanic invasion.
Their ignorance of the international situation and their lack of news from home, partly caused by Italian censorship, are exploited by means of propaganda without scruples. The Italian military authorities on their part deceive the Czecho-Slovaks by telling them of the continuous disorders and insurrections in Bohemia.
Speaking in the Reichsrat, deputy Stanek declared in the name of the Union of Czech Deputies on October 2, 1918: "This terrible war, started against the will and despite the warnings of the Czecho-Slovaks, has now reached the culminating point. Two worlds have been struggling in this war.
Their territorial demands were: "The restitution of provinces formerly torn from the Allies by force or against the wish of their inhabitants; the liberation of the Italians, as also of the Slavs, Roumanes, and Czecho-Slovaks from foreign domination, the setting free of the populations subject to the bloody tyranny of the Turks; and the turning out of Europe of the Ottoman Empire as decidedly foreign to Western civilization."
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