now to suffer from police terrorism, which is as cruel as it is petty and inquisitorial—these cannot conduct the struggle. But on every front to which Czech soldiers are sent the Austrian generals fully understand what it means when a nation desires to break down the walls of its jail. From the very first day of the war it was clear that the Czech soldiers would not fight for the cause of the Germans and the Magyars against their friends—the nations of the Entente. They were therefore put at once under careful “observation” at the front as well as behind the lines. The watch increased in severity with every month of the war. “This is not a war secret,” said Prince Ludwig Windischgrätz in the Hungarian Parliament on August 28th, 1916, “and the whole world sees it, how the service battalions are composed—that in every Czech service battalion at least 40 per cent, of Magyar and German troops are included.”
Yet all these measures could not prevent the Czech soldiers from carrying out their purpose. Though carefully watched by their German and Magyar hangmen they continued individually and in groups, and even in regiments, to pass over to the side which, in the Austrian terminology, is that of the enemy, but to the Czechs is that of their liberators. In September, 1914, the 8th Regiment of the Czech Landwehr, when ordered to march to the Russian front, refused obedience, and attacked its German officers. Thereupon the 75th German Regiment was sent against it, and the Czechs had to pay the penalty of their revolt. The 36th Regiment, recruited from the district of Mlada Boleslav, also mutinied whilst still in Bohemia, and was deci-
