to gain from the defeat of the Allies, but everything to lose from the victory of the Hapsburgs and the Hohenzollerns. They feel that nothing short of a decisive defeat of Austria will liberate them from the thraldom of German-Magyar domination. If Austria collapses in this war the Bohemians will be among the first to profit thereby.[1]
Is it really true that the Slavs are loyal? Is it not rather a loyalty wrung from them at the point of the bayonet? Besides, how can they protest against a war which was neither of their choosing nor of their making, when the military rule has made protests impossible? One must respect and even admire the French and the Germans when they declare that they are fighting for the existence of the fatherland. What are the Austrian
- ↑ For a student of Austrian conditions it is instructive to note how the war of the Balkan Allies against the Turk divided the sympathies of the people along racial lines. Save a fraction of the Poles in Galicia, the Slavs sided heartily and enthusiastically with the Allies. The Germans and the Magyars wished for the success of the Turks. When the Bulgars routed the Ottoman army at Kick Killise, the Vienna press ill-concealed its chagrin, while Slavic journals rejoiced as if it had been their own victory. Imagine the dismay of such a staunch champion of Austrian public opinion as the Vienna “Neue Freie Presse,” when the Serbs ctusbed the Turk at Kumanovo! For many reasons Serbia was for years looked upon as a kind of barometer of the hopes of the Austrian Slavs. A clever Bohemian journalist made the interesting prediction some time before the Balkan War that relief from Austrian thraldon may be looked for, not from Russia, as many dreamers believed, but from the small Slavic states in the Balkans. If these were victorious, prophesied this newspaper writer, the Slavs in the Hapsburg Monarchy were sure to gain morally from the victory. Official public opinion frowned on the war relief work among Austrian Slavs in aid of the Balkan Allies.
