At the larger stations we spent sometimes hours, sometimes days. That gave a chance for the Czechs to mix with the Russian people. It gave the people an awakening sense of acquaintance with this happy race, who, while going from war to war around the world, were distributing the words of President Wilson to prove the sanity of their cause and the folly of the Russian collapse. The President's speeches were widely read and much appreciated. But these enthusiastic, friendly Czech soldiers were the living examples of the President's rather abstruse lessons of democracy. President Wilson might seem a political Messiah, but the Czechs were the John the Baptists who made the initial impression upon the Russian and Siberian peasants.
An Austrian prisoner at a Siberian station shouted one day so all could hear: "What is this freedom that you talk about?"
Immediately a thick-chested Czech strode forward.
"It is the one thing that makes a man a man," he replied. "It is the thing that links men together without weakening them individually. It is the thing that will wipe out tyranny, because a free man won't stand a tyrant."
As he talked to the slow-minded Russians and the slouching Austrian, this ruddy-cheeked Czech exemplified the advantages he preached. There was no slouch in his body, or character. The power that had gathered together a group which had been dispersed all over Russia and welded it into a fighting unit was not only passionate desire for freedom and willingness to fight for it, but the power of self-discipline which made both possible.
The spirit of crusaders.
The Czech army was gay without license. In Irkutsk, during the Easter holidays, it ate ice-cream sandwiches or went up in tiny Ferris wheels in the true spirit of the reveler at a dry-town carnival. In Omsk one night it stood silent for hours, listening to the art of a Czech violinist playing for the wounded in the Red Cross car. It paraded the streets with a smile and an air of pride. It is boyish, open-hearted, lovable. It makes friends. Neat in dress, erect in bearing, enthusiastic in outlook—the Czechs win the Russian masses. There is the spirit of the Crusaders in these fighters, a spirit of personal and national cleanliness. Liberty to them is not a thing to wave a flag over but to die for, if necessary. They are too sincere to be dramatic.
A force in establishing confidence.
Having come out of Armenia, with its remnant race of human wrecks, and after months of the demoralizing fatalism and moral laxity of the Russian, I was astounded by the miracle of stability of the tiny Czech force in establishing an economic frontier between the Germanophile sections of Russia and freedom-loving Siberia. Not only is this force the key to the military problem of opposing Germany in Siberia. But from the standpoint of sympathetic friendship between confused Russia and America, the Czecho-Slovaks offer the most helpful force in establishing confidence and turning into fact the good will which America bears to Russian citizenry.
They can best tell their own story. Lieutenant B—— of my English class was typical.