December 13, 1918

World affairs, and these are what should be engrossing our attention, have taken a distinct turn in a new direction in the last week. In fact, it might even be said they have gone into reverse. For days we have stood at the bier of fallen empires or investigated the murder of mighty Tsars; we have witnessed the dethronement of kings and the flight of princesses; but today a new ship of state is launched and has put to sea in the stormy waters of Central Europe. Czechoslovakia emerges from the maelstrom of war and her chief magistrate is in Paris to receive the fraternal accolade of the leaders of world democracy.

When the Bohemian peasant cohorts were smashed by the feudal lords in the seventeenth century at the White Mountain, those who survived swore a mighty oath: “We shall live again! We shall come back!” and here they are, and I should say they are very much alive. Of course, in our midst there are many soothsayers and, as is the manner of their craft, many and varied are the prophecies they pronounce. Some say the new republic that swims into our ken out of the smoke of battle will prove a bulwark against the prolific German horde and its drang nach Osten; others find it no more valuable than a pop gun against siege artillery; and many, very many, say that soon, very soon, it will become a satellite to the great Slav Power, in its new incarnation—that it is destined to disappear in the whale’s jaw as does the unwary minnow.

But Paris, wisely I think, lives in the day, and the Parisians are incorrigibly romantic. The Odyssey of the Czech legionaries, the march across Siberia, has captured their sympathy and won their admiration. Thus, when on the morning of December 7 Thomas Masaryk, the recently elected president of the war-born republic of the West Slavs, reached the city on the Seine from the United States, he received a reception which compared not unfavorably with gala ceremonies of the days of pageantry before the war.

[On the outbreak of the Bolshevik revolution, the Czechoslovak troops serving with the Russian armies on the Eastern Front declared their intention to remain neutral toward the Reds and, under the leadership of the Slovak scientist, Stefanik, were supposed to be transported peaceably to France via Vladivostok. The dramatic complications and the heroic march that ensued, as related further on, caused a sensation in the Allied world and boosted the case for a Czechoslovak state. The National Czech Council (Masaryk, president; Durich, vice-president; Beneš, general secretary—with the Slovaks represented by Stefanik) was recognized as the future Czechoslovak government by Britain and America in September, 1918.]