that in February 1915 we based all our hopes and computations with regard to establishing large numbers of our contingents in France. It was accordingly arranged with Masaryk that the National Council would attend very carefully to questions concerning prisoners of war in the Allied countries as a whole, and that in particular it would not lose sight of the possibility of obtaining Czechoslovak prisoners of war from Russia for service in France. The intention was to inaugurate this scheme at the earliest opportunity, and if possible to adopt similar methods in Italy.
Within the next three months the journey of Dürich and Štefánik to Russia brought the scheme close to the stage where its gradual realization could have been started. Thus arose the idea which in its final consequences resulted two years later in our Siberian anabasis.
The proposal to transport at least a part of our prisoners of war from Russia to France was prompted by other important considerations.
The Russian reverses on the Eastern front were more and more shifting the centre of gravity of the war to the West. Masaryk’s fears concerning Russia were being fulfilled to an ever more alarming extent, and we saw that: the centre of our own movement was thus more decisively being fixed in Western Europe. This led to the natural conclusion that our problem would have to be settled in Paris, which was quickly developing into what was perhaps the most important Allied centre. It was clear that we should achieve success there if we had our own soldiers on the Western front, and it seemed to us then that we should obtain them most easily from Russia. The question of the Italian prisoners of war had at that time not yet been taken into account, and we still had very little news about our prisoners in Serbia. As a matter of fact, there were very few of them.
It was not our purpose to transport all our troops and prisoners of war from Russia to France. All we wanted was merely a part of the prisoners of war so as to have on the Western front in France, for all contingencies, thirty or forty thousand of our troops. Our alarm as to the turn which events might take in Russia confronted us with the question as to what would happen to our troops if they were all in Russia and a catastrophe were to occur there. In organizing the National Council, and in negotiating with the authorities, I myself saw clearly that our political significance in Paris would rise if we
