PRAGUE REVISITED.
IT would be difficult to overrate the good work which the Czecho-Slovaks have done since the Armistice. -If one glances at the map, their position seems impossible. It is said that an Austrian general who wished to enter their service asked if their map were that of a country or only of a frontier. Even without the addition of Sub- Carpathian Russia, which may be regarded as an expensive and embarrassing mandate, their country is open to invasion on every side. Sinuous branch railways in moun- tainous country have to be converted into a new main line ; while old main lines of communication, for instance, from Berlin to Vienna or Buda-Pesth are cut into pieces with all the duplication or more of frontier apparatus in order that Czecho-Slovakia may be one. Those who reckon by a balance of forces or even only by economic quantities can hardly take such a position seriously ; it is said that many Germans take this attitude. Yet if one looks back, -the Czecho-Slovaks were always idiere, and that is the reason why they are there now. Their position was not more easy, but far more difficult ; in a world-war raised by a challenge from the Germans, were they not on the main road between Berlin and Vienna ? They have kept their old national consciousness under centuries of the hardest conditions, and have converted it into a national morale which is now common to nearly every individual amongst them. They have, in their own way, done as much as any of the great nations to defeat a world-empire, but by methods which do not make empires but make peoples.
I have seen a good part of this story. In the War, the Czecho-Slovaks did not move until the right moment came, and then they moved wholesale, as by a national discipline, and thenceforward, in spite of all changes and chances, they never went back. They began coming over to us, when I was with the Russians near Cracow, by regiments, battalions and a constant stream of individuals, who, instead of regarding themselves as now happily out of the War, sought another and more strenuous turn of service on our side. This action, which the idiotic Magyar propa- ganda has described as a stab in the back, was prompted precisely by the national consciousness that they must have the management of their own affairs, from which they had been almost entirely excluded because they were Slays. Thus when Russia, the great Slav nation, broke under the weight of its sacrifices, the Czechs, for whom there was no going back, held good. They were the principal unit of character in a dissolving world, and it was their morale which was the principal asset in a resistance of Slavdom to Germany which made them at one time more responsible than anyone else for the administration of Siberia.
The Czechs are now to the fore in the work of reconstruc- tion in Europe, a task for which their past and their peculiar merits give them a Special competence. They gain enor- mously by having no pre-War standard to dominate them. It is still all uphill work, beginning from a point much lower down than where they stand now. So there can be no false sense of security in sliding back into some old groove. This is important to them, in the midst of a tired world ; they, at least, though even with them there is an admission of tiredness and of a lessening of effort, are forbidden to regard their task as finished. The morale remains practically unchanged, though with a changed field of work ; and there is the same thorough attention to detail of every kind, the same alert intelligence, with the .result that administration is everywhere well in hand and this country is an oasis of order and of productive work. To take one common standard—the resistance to post-War anarchy—Czecho-Siovakia passed out of the practicable area of revolution about the same time and very much in .the same way as we did. The exchange diffieulty—and the Czechs started absolutely out of nothing—is being valiantly faced and overcome. More than this, they have a positive advantage in the fact that the world generally is at present travelling in their way. There is a reaction everywhere against States as distinguished from peoples, against bureaucratic control and in favour of individual initiative, which among them is so strongly developed as to be very reminiscent of Scotland. On the other hand, now is a time when the State must be built up on the union of as many strong individual wills as possible. The Czechs start their new State at the beginning of this new period. In the miserable collapse of bogus Socialism in Russia they have the opportunity of showing what can be done by sound legislation which rests on the will and serves the interests of the people as a whole. It is a great thing that, after the will-o'-the-wisp of Communism, there should be this light and this example for Labour in general.
After some stay in the country and in the chief towns, these impressions were strongly confirmed by a talk with the Prime Minister, himself a Socialist of this productive kind, who seems to me to be one of the most alert and able statesmen in Europe. I think he sees more clearly through the difficulties of European disorder than anyone else whom I have met. Czecho-Slovakia must remain "in the air" until there is a restored Russia. Dr. Benes, therefore, cannot accept the French policy of boycott ; but he will not play with the idea of a recognition of Communism, a false peace which could not be sincere, because its sincerity would be alike suicidal for both the parties concerned. He has set himself to work for the actual needs of the Russian people, with the result that Prague has now a Rus- sian university of some sixty teachers and some two thousand students, mostly following technical studies ; and these students, trained in the free atmosphere of the Czecho-Slovak State, trained not only in their specialities, but in character and in the instincts of responsible work, may later contribute to the restoration of their country, a task which, if it is to be satisfactorily carried out for the peace of the world and for the defeat of commercial intrigues of exploitation, must be, at least in the main, the work of Russian hands. All thinking Russians whom I know regard this initiative of the Czecho-Slovak Government as the most far-seeing act of statesmanship and as much the best thing that has yet been done to help Russia.
BERNARD PARES.
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