ANGLO-CZECH
By J. R. GLORNEY BOLTON OIX years ago the Germans entered Prague. They are still in full control of Bohemia and Moravia, as they are of Austria. Each of these regions has been planted with well-developed war industries, and if the Germans manage to defend Southern Germany even after they have lost Berlin and the Rhineland, Austria and the two Czech provinces will be their principal arsenal. The Czechs actually expect that their country will be the last to be completely freed from the Germans. Yet the Soviet armies have already swept through Ruthenia and Eastern Slovakia. At any moment the Czecho- slovak people may hear Dr. Benes speaking to them on the soil of their own country. The lovely city of Prague, it is reported, has been systematically mined.
Enough is happening, in fact, to have made the Ides of March almost a day of jubilation throughout Czechoslovakia. For one thing, the people have been steadily overcoming their deep-set fear that, whatever else the Germans might have to surrender as the price of peace with the Western Allies, they would retain their Czech Protectorate. Gloomy forebodings were bound to exist in a subju- gated country which has watched the war from a standpoint of its own ; for often during the past six years belief in the ultimate survival of an independent Czechoslovakia was a desperate act of faith. Her people were less shocked than the people of Western Europe by the German entry into Prague, simply because they re- garded the dismemberment of their Republic as the direct and logical consequence of the Munich decree. They watched while Poland was vanquished without the Western Allies occupying an inch of German soil. They watched while Fiance signed her military armistice with Germany, and it was Mr. Churchill, as well as the German commentators in Prague, who said that Dunkirk was a military disaster.
Almost at the very moment of the Dunkirk disaster the new relationship between Britain and Czechoslovakia began. Czechoslovak soldiers, who had fought with some distinction n France, were being made to give up every scrap of their equipment and arms before they could board the little ships which were waiting for them in the Mediterranean. They arrived in Britain with the fixed deter- mination to renew their fight against the Germans ; and when they marched past their President in Cholmondeley Park none had arms, and many had no caps or tunics. They could not speak our language. They knew even less than ourselves about our powers of resistance. They saw nothing ahead of them save fighting to the death. These are the men who today—now magnificently re-equipped —are taking the lead in the difficult siege of Dunkirk. They regard it as an honour that they were chosen to drive the Germans from the last of their Channel bastions. Dunkirk has acquired an entirely new meaning.
And now Britain has become a second homeland for some 15,000 Czechoslovak citizens. The return to the first homeland has already begun, but it is a slow process. Not for several months will the transfer of the last Government department be completed, and it will be another year or two before any Czechoslovak school in this country is closed for lack of pupils. Many Czechoslovak citizens are skilled workers in Britain's war factories ; they do not intend to go back to Czechoslovakia until the struggle against Japan has been decided. Younger Czechs and Slovaks have spent some of their most formative years in Britain, and, indeed, five years or six are a large slice of any man's life. None, 'young or old, know what they will find in their first homeland, which must be profoundly changed by war and the enemy occupation. Personal contacts can be renewed, but never on the same unconsciously firm basis. The years of absence are seldom completely bridged.
What rs,000 Czechoslovak citizens have gained by their stay in Britain it is for some of them, not for an Englishman, to declare.
London assumed her temporary status as the capital of free Europe with an outwardly superb indifference. Not even the minority who wanted a general election in 'war-time ever though of propagating the idea that it would have enlightened Continental guests about our political democracy. It would have done, of course, nothing of the sort. Time and again demonstrations and lectures arranged for our Allies have fallen flat. The spirit of Britain—and particularly of London—was revealed to those who went seeking for themselves. They found it hidden in private homes, small restaurants, spacious clubs and little intimate streets. If they go back home in less fear of the official and the bureaucrat, they will have gained immeasurably. Thomas Masaryk insisted that his countrymen, if they were to become truly democratic, must learn how to de-Austrianise them- selves.
The Czechs go back English-speaking, but not Anglicised. The toughness of their own national character is in no way diminished.
They have reacted strongly against certain English habits of mind.
Our attitude to the Germans, for instance, they find hard to under- stand. They believe that we know not how to hate, and at least one Czech publicist has expressed his fear that we shall enable some of the chief _war criminals to evade trial and punishment. Their own attitude to the Germans is strictly Continental. Even in peace-time they had to put up the strongest resistance to German
influences within their own country, and when English friends express their belief that defeated .Germany will wholeheartedly repudiate
the Nazi creed they retort that the Nazi creed itself was broad-based upon sentiments which have prevailed in Germany since the days of Bismarck, if not since the days of Luther. This explains their implacable anger with thc Sudeten Germans and their record since 1938, and the desire to see the majority of them expelled from the republic. The idea of transportations, propounded by
Paul de Lagarde nearly eighty years ago, shocks the English mind, but not the Czech. There is a demand for a racially more homo- geneous Republic within- its pre-Munich frontiers. Nothing is gained by ignoring these profoundly different attitudes.
In the Czechoslovakia of tomorrow Russian influences will be far stronger than in the past. It is a direct consequence both of a common frontier with the Soviet Union and of Russia's new asso- ciation with the West. Already it has been reported that Dr. Fierlinger, Czechoslovakia's popular Ambassador in Moscow, will hold a key post in the next administration. Czechoslovakia's alli- ance with the Soviet Union gives her a large measure of military and diplomatic security. But she is bound to share with other countries a determination to play her proper part in the international comity. She is a State, not a province. She has to build anew the conditions of freedom ; and as the opinion of a liberated country must swiftly find its means of expression, very much depends on the speed with which Czechoslovakia restores the unfettered freedom of the Press. Newsprint can have an importance second only to food.
Czechoslovaks from Britain will mingle with compatriots who have had to work within the Reich. Differences may be sharply defined. There can obviously be no return to the conditions of 1938; but the quest for greater political and social freedom will go on, to enrich the national experience and to give us, who were the hosts of Czechoslovakia's Government and so many of her citizens, delight in the fellowship of a distant country.
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