PARIS 1919 (41 page)

As the nationalities of the collapsing Austria-Hungary scrambled to catch the eye of the powers, Bene
worked even harder. He assured the French that his country, unlike its neighbors, was ready for the fight against Bolshevism: “The Czechs alone can stop the movement.” To the British he explained that his goal was “to form a State that would be thoroughly loyal . . . especially to England and which would form a barrier between Germany and the East.” Bene
had a significant bargaining chip: the Czech forces that had come out of prisoner-of-war camps to fight on the Allied side. “I want all your soldiers in France,” Clemenceau told Bene
in June 1918, during the last great German attack. “You can count on me,” Bene
replied, “I will go with you all the way.”

In June the French foreign minister formally recognized the Czechoslovak National Council as the future government of an independent Czechoslovakia and put pressure on France's allies to do the same. The French also took the lead, then and later, in recognizing Czechoslovakia's borders, even the tricky ones. Bene
, and it was a measure of his achievement, was invited to sit in at the Supreme War Council to discuss the armistice with Austria-Hungary. Neither the Yugoslavs nor the Poles were invited to join him. By the time the Peace Conference opened, Bene
had established Czechoslovakia on the winning side, its past as part of Austria-Hungary to be mentioned only in passing and with regret. Unlike the Yugoslavs and the Poles, the Czechs had the advantage of speaking with one voice. Between Bene
and Masaryk there was an extraordinary collaboration, which endured until Masaryk's death.
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If Bene
was the workhorse, Masaryk was the man who gave Czechoslovakia life. He had the materials to hand: a people with its own Slavic language and literature, and many memories: of the fourteenth century, when the rich and powerful kingdom of Bohemia had reached north almost to the Baltic; of the few golden years when Prague was the capital of the Holy Roman Empire; and then the sadder story from 1526 on as, one by one, the last vestiges of independence were extinguished by the Habsburgs. But this history did not include the Slovaks, who may have spoken a similar language but had not been politically connected to the Czechs since the tenth century, when the Slovaks had fallen under Hungarian rule. And there they had remained even after the Habsburgs acquired Hungary. The Reformation, which had made the Czechs largely Protestant, had passed them by: the Slovaks remained firmly Catholic.

Masaryk was the son of a farm manager for big estates. He was born in 1850, just after the revolutions of 1848 ignited nationalism throughout central Europe. Pushed by his ambitious mother, he decided early on to escape rural life. Through sheer determination he got to the University of Vienna to study philosophy. He was a sober, hardworking, priggish young man with a striking confidence in his own opinions. At his first university posting he caused a sensation by disagreeing with a senior professor. When he moved into journalism and then politics, he showed the same propensity to challenge authority.
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When the war started, Masaryk slowly came to the conclusion that Austria-Hungary no longer made sense and that the future for Czechoslovakia (he assumed from the first that it would include the Slovak lands) lay in independence, possibly under Russian sponsorship. (That Slavs would work together was a hope he pursued until his death.) By 1915 he was safely in Switzerland. His family, unfortunately, were stuck in Prague. His wife, an American, suffered a nervous breakdown, from which she never really recovered, his eldest daughter was imprisoned, and his son Jan was conscripted into the Austrian army. Masaryk moved on to Britain, where he spent almost two years teaching at the University of London and making friends with a range of influential people, from diplomats to opinion makers such as Wickham Steed of The Times.
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The overthrow of the tsar in February of 1917 drew Masaryk to St. Petersburg. He urged the shaky provisional government to renew its attack on the Austrian armies and worked to transform Czech prisoners of war into an army that would fight side by side with the Russians. The Bolshevik revolution in November 1917 and Lenin's decision to sue for peace made those plans impossible. The Bolsheviks were nonetheless happy to send the Czech Legion, now 50,000 strong, on its way to the Western Front. The only feasible route was a roundabout one, six thousand miles on the Trans-Siberian railway to the Pacific port of Vladivostok and then by boat to France. With assurances from Bolshevik leaders, Masaryk left first, in March 1918, confident that his troops would be right behind him. Partway across Siberia, however, the Czech Legion clashed with Hungarians heading west to join the Bolsheviks. The fighting spread and the Czechs found themselves at war with the Bolsheviks. By the end of the summer Czech forces were effectively in control of most of the railway and, by chance, the gold reserves of the tsarist government. By this time the war was winding down in Europe, and the Czechs were more useful where they were. The Allied forces that had landed at Vladivostok in August might well want to move westward against the Bolsheviks. Caught up now in the Allied intervention in the Russian civil war, the homesick soldiers were condemned to another two years in Siberia. Bene
was not sorry to see this; indeed, he extracted a promise from the grateful British to recognize his Czechoslovak National Council as the official representative of Czechs and Slovaks. Masaryk agreed. “The dear boys will have to stay a while alongside their allies,” he said as he sailed off from Vladivostok to the United States to gather support.
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