SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK
STRIX
People forget that this is not the second but the third time in the first half-century of her existence as an independent state that Czecho- slovakia has occupied the centre of the inter- national stage; and, since I doubt whether your appetite for anecdotes about ptarmigan is this week at its keenest, I propose to write about the events of fifty years ago, when a strong force of Czechoslovak troops was withdrawing, imperturbably, from the heart of Russia.
First spies, then battalions
The 70,000-strong Czechoslovak Legion (as it came to be called) had its origin in a small holding unit called a druzhina, into which on the outbreak of the First World War were drafted members of the scattered colonies of Czech and Slovak expatriates who had settled in Russia. Their command of the languages used by their fellow-countrymen in the ranks of the Austro-Hungarian armies was their main asset; like native scouts in a colonial war, -they were allotted in dribs and drabs to front-line formations, where they were used to man listening-posts, to accompany patrols and to interrogate prisoners. Desertions from •and mass-surrenders by Czech and Slovak units, who had no wish to fight for their Austrian overlords, soon filled the Pow camps; but for a variety of reasons the Russian authorities refused to embody volunteers from this source in the druzhina, which remained a token force of about 1,500 until in March 1917, after the Tsar's abdication, the provisional government decided to raise a Czechoslovak Army Corps of two divisions. The senior commanders (mostly of high quality) were Russians, and in Kerensky's last desperate offensive the new mercenaries gave a good account of them- selves at a place called Zborov.
The image of a nation
Following the collapse of the Russian front, the Bolshevik Revolution and Russia's with- drawal from the war, the Czechoslovak Legion went, so to speak, off the radar screen. Masaryk and Benes, the leaders of a nation which did not yet exist as such, were well aware that the degree of sympathy with which their claims for independence would be heard at postwar conference tables depended largely on the scale of their contribution to the Allied war effort. Already 2,400 Czechoslovakians were playing a rather ancillary role on the Italian front, and another 1,200 were under arms in France; but the Russian contingent, though several times the size of the other two put together, was a long way from the shop window, and the Czech leaders fell in readily with a French suggestion that the Legion should be transferred from Russia to the Western Front, then under intolerable pres- sure. So the Legion headed east, for the Pacific. By midsummer of 1918, after a mala- droit attempt by Trotsky to immobilise their trains and disarm them, their leading echelons had seized Vladivostok, while other contin- gents, strung out over some 5,000 miles, had wrested control of the Trans-Siberian Railway from ill-organised Red Army garrisons.
Against the grim background of news from the Western Front this wholly unexpected feat
had, Masaryk noted in Washington, 'the glamour of a fairy tale.' But the situation now became bedevilled by misunderstandings and faulty intelligence. The Allies believed, firmly but mistakenly, that the heartland of Russia was full of German prisoners of war who, re- leased from captivity by the Treaty of Brest Litovsk, were being armed or were arming themselves; these were held to represent a serious menace, though nobody quite knew to what. The Czechs at Vladivostok thought that their comrades, some of whom were still on the wrong side of the Urals, needed rescuing: while these, who had hitherto been bringing up the rear, were misled by various French and American assurances into suppos- ing that their role was now to form the van- guard of a powerful Allied army advancing along the Trans-Siberian on Moscow. So the whole Legion turned about, -and President Wilson, who had hitherto vetoed all plans for intervention in Siberia, suddenly withdrew his objections to a project which, since its purpose was ostensibly limited to extricating Czechs, appeared humane and even chivalrous.
Over and out
The Czechs, never in need of extrication and now in fact moving towards, Moscow, defeated the Red Army wherever they met.it. But dis- illusion soon set in. The much larger White Russian forces for whom, as_often as. not, they provided the spearhead proved unreliable asso- ciates; their political leadership stank of in- trigue, corruption, rodomontade ,and ineffec- tiveness; from the Allies came only token and equivocal support. The Czechoslovak Legion, whose overriding motive was, .after. all, to re- turn to, and to ensure the independence of, its homeland, once more turned about and— carrying in its well-found, well-heated trains a great deal of what it regarded as the spoils of war but its critics called loot—headed back to Vladivostok, whence in November 1920 its evacuation was completed. The Allies—the Japanese, the Americans, the French and the British—were left to sort out a squalid muddle which, but for the sudden appearance of the Czechoslovaks upon the centre of the stage, would never have earned a footnote on the page of history.
Getaway
An army in retreat never emerges with an untarnished reputation; and the Czechoslovak Legion did, as retreating armies do, a number of unattractive things. But if you study, as I once did, first-hand accounts of its amphis- baenic progress between the Volga and the Pacific, you cannot fail to be -impressed by the way in which the Czechs and the Slovaks— :who had then no patria to be patriotic about, but were exiles, deserters or ex-captives from an alien empire—imposed their -will upon the Russians. They beat the Reds in battle and, when they abandoned the White cause, they retained their control of the Trans-Siberian Railway and thus (to the grave disadvantage of its Russian owners) ensured their escape to Vladivostok. Debrouillard Is the epithet which seems appropriate to their exploits of fifty years ago; I hope they will earn it again.
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