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The Fighting Czecho-Slovaks: Masaryk
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 . 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. How the Czechs came to control Siberia.
The democracy of the Czech army and the ease with which it made friends continually surprise me. The officer who induced me to join them was a mere lieutenant, yet he never consulted anyone about taking me in. Was I not an American? Each day some officer was told off to arrange matters with the station masters. They moved their trains without bluff or bluster. Sometimes the Soviets hindered them in order to get what guns and supplies they could. But not till weeks after they started did any Soviet have the temerity to try to stop or disarm the men. The Russian masses were quickly won to friendship for the Czechs and the only force that tried to interfere was the Bolshevik battalions who acted under orders from distant points, where the man who gave the order enjoyed comparative safety. The way that their control of Siberia through an attempt to disarm them came about is as romantic as any feature of their story.
They have passes to leave the country.
The presence of forty thousand well-disciplined Czech soldiers whose loyalty to the cause of freedom was stronger than that of the rapidly changing Russian proletariat made it seem desirable to the Bolshevik authorities to rid the country of men so willing to fight and so little subject to the extreme socialistic doctrines then rife in Russia. Both Lenine and Trotzky by agreement with Professor Masaryk furnished these men with passes for leaving the country and in spite of the chaotic condition of transportation ample rolling stock, amounting to about sixty trains of forty freight cars each, was placed at their disposal or secured by the Czechs through their own efforts. Arrangements had already been made with representatives of the French Government so that plenty of money was provided for provisioning, equipping and transporting a minimum of forty thousand men over about six thousand miles.
Military equipment being taken away.
The Czechs resist.
Before these trains had gone far one local Soviet after another had insisted on their leaving behind the armored motor cars, aeroplanes, machine-guns and other military equipment which had been allotted to them by the Russian Government during the Kerensky offensive. By the time Penza-one day's run west of the Volga-was reached, after machine-guns had been mounted on the engines in fighting their way through the Germanized Ukrainian districts, the arms of each train had been reduced to 140 rifles and ammunition. But the Czechs knew enough about Russian conditions to realize the necessity for at least one gun to a man and when the Bolsheviki, early in June, started to disarm them, guns and rifles appeared from secret hiding places, to the extreme consternation of the disarmers.
Siberian Soviets delay the Czechs.
The Czechs overcome their captors.