political persecutions and trials in Bohemia, we found a greater comprehension of our movement with regard to the prisoners of war and our military schemes.
From the moment when there appeared a justifiable hope that detachments of our prisoners of war were going to be transported from Russia, the question of our prisoners of war in the West acquired a new political significance. At that time there were in France about 4,000 Czech prisoners from Serbia who formed the remainder of about 25,000 of our people who had originally been captured there.(22) The greater part of these had, in company with the Serbian Army, undertaken that desperate retreat through Albania. For our troops this retreat had involved enormous suffering. While the Serbian Government had been concerned with saving the remnants of its army, it had regarded our prisoners merely as ballast who were depriving the Serbs of their food supplies, and so the Czech prisoners died of hunger and hardships by the wayside. The extent to which this catastrophe affected our people can be indicated roughly in figures. The total number who, in a pitiable condition, managed to reach the Albanian coast at Jadran and from there, with Italian help, the Island of Asinara, was about 11,000. There the treatment which they, as well as the Austrians, received was very bad. They contracted infectious diseases, such as typhus and dysentery, and again perished wholesale, their bodies being thrown into the sea.
As a result of intervention by the Serbian Government and by us, we managed to arrange for their transport to France. The number arriving there being, as I have mentioned, only about 4,000. And even there, at the beginning, they were wretchedly situated. This forms one of the instructive episodes in our history during the war. We were far from sharing the belief which prevailed in Viennese circles and amongst certain of our own people that the Allies were awaiting us with open arms. And if the official world of politics knew little about us at that time, the subordinate authorities were almost completely ignorant of us and treated our people accordingly. There were, of course, exceptions, but on the whole what our prisoners went through everywhere was in truth a calvary of suffering. This applies to Serbia, Russia, Italy, and France, particularly at the beginning. The Czechs who were prisoners of war in those countries could tell harrowing stories of their experiences. On Slavonic territory they were just as badly off as elsewhere. I
