[Sidenote:  Teaching English to Czech officers.]

I found my place on the expedition as teacher of English to a group of Czech officers and members of the National Assembly.  My class wanted English in order to be able to understand President Wilson’s speeches as they traveled across the United States, for they rank the President with their own national leader, Masaryk.  The Czech is literate in several languages, and if he wants another he gives a week-end to it.  In my class were university graduates, artisans, engineers and musicians.  The Czech is a natural-born good mixer.

[Sidenote:  The young men make friends everywhere.]

When our train would reach a town, these young men of action won friends wherever they went.  Milk woman and bread seller all along the Trans-Siberian liked them, for they pay spot cash, deal honorably and don’t know what ruffianism means.

The miracle accomplished by the Czechs is the result of discipline and courage rather than strategy.  Their rise to power was on their own initiative.  They could have stayed passive as have so many times their number among the prisoners from other parts of Austria.  But their stand for freedom from the Austrian yoke is uncompromising.  They started out determined to fight for France and victory.  The great bulk of the remaining Austrian prisoners are completely satisfied if only they can keep away from war.  The Czechs are passionate in their burning patriotism.  The Austrian prisoners in Russia who still feel a certain degree of loyalty to Austria are passive in their sentiment.  Most of them shrink from enforced military service—­either back in Austria or in a German-Austrian prisoner offensive on the spot in Siberia.

[Sidenote:  Groups that have no love for the Germans.]

[Sidenote:  Willing to join the Czechs.]

This Czechish heart centre of virile independence acted as a powerful magnet wherever their bands moved.  All through Russia and Siberia, there are refugee groups from Poland, Lithuania, Courland and the Riga District.  These people have no love for the Germans who drove them from their homes nor for the Junkers of their own communities who handed their lands over to the Germans rather than have them divided by the Bolsheviks.  Germany is finding that there is a difference between saving landed proprietors from hostile peasants and workingmen and the huge task of enslaving these same peasants under the Prussian yoke.  Hundreds of these elements in Russia’s great refugee population wanted to enter the Czech expedition, but these fighters were compelled to keep their army small, compact and homogeneous.  Transportation was insufficient.  Even Czech artisans were refused a place in the trains unless they could pass rigid examinations.  The willingness of other forces to unite with the Czechs may well be counted on when the call for them comes in Siberia and Russia.

[Sidenote:  The National Assembly of Bohemia.]