United States or Kenya ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
He was happy and therefore talkative and sincere. He continued.... "You ask how we get this money? Easily, comrad, very easily, indeed. Besides what we receive from Petrograd, we have other incomes. For instance, here, take this case of the Emperor. Why do you think we intend to send him to Ekaterinburg? Why should we send him towards the approaching Czechs?"
Meanwhile the Czechs again entered the Bohemian Diet on the day of the battle of Sedan, August 30, 1870, and issued a declaration of rights with which also the Bohemian nobility for the first time publicly identified themselves.
The Slovak leaders, however, refused to become the dupes of the Magyar Government. According to the Narodni Listy of May 5, 1918, a great manifestation was arranged by Slovak Socialists in St. Miklos on May 1 in favour of the union of the Hungarian Slovaks with the Czechs of Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia.
One of the interesting things about the Austro-Hungarian army, as well, of course, as an inevitable weakness, is the variety of races and temperaments hidden under these blue-gray uniforms Hungarians, Austrians, Croatians, Slovaks, Czechs.
This empire includes nearly a million Italians in its southwestern corner, and three million Roumanians in Transylvania. It has as its subjects in Bosnia and Herzegovina several million Serbians. It controls also two million Slovaks, cousins of the Czechs, who also would like their independence.
From Major Pichon I gathered that Ataman Kalmakoff with his Cossacks had taken up a position on the high ground in the village of Antonovka, keeping touch with the French on his left, and a company of the 5th Battalion of Czechs on his right, who guarded the road to Svagena, and that though he posted sentries in the usual way during the night, the enemy in large numbers crept between them, and when the alarm was given and Kalmakoff mounted his horse he found some thirty of his men already wounded or dead and his machine guns in enemy hands.
But the most important assistance the Czechs rendered to the Allies was their refusal to fight for Austria. Out of 70,000 prisoners taken by Serbia during the first months of the war, 35,000 were Czechs. Of these, 24,000 perished during the Serbian retreat, and 8000 died of typhoid fever and cholera at Asinara.
I am sure that if the government continues to pursue its present policy, Austria will fall to pieces before next winter and the Czechs are not going to save her. The Czecho-Slovaks, Poles and Yugoslavs, united politically and supporting each other, will surely sooner or later attain their object, which is to obtain full independence, national unity and political liberty."
"We'd do it right over again, most of us," said the young woman hotly. "Don't they ever teach you in your history classes that you'd all be heathen Turks if it hadn't been for the Bohemians?" Emil had fallen to mowing. "Oh, there's no denying you're a spunky little bunch, you Czechs," he called back over his shoulder.
"Austria would become an appanage of Germany as regards international relations, and the policy of Europe would be obliged to reckon, not with a free and independent Austria, but, owing to Austria's unconditional self-surrender, with a mighty, almost invincible Germany.... The Pan-Germans are right, the Czechs are an arrow in the side of Germany, and such they wish to and must and will remain.