lasted until nearly the middle of December. At the beginning of December the military authorities in the Ministry informed me that, in view of the precedent with the Poles, the Government would not accept the formulation we asked for, but in the end Štefánik succeeded in obtaining at least a compromise. The French Government withdrew the formulation attributing the constitution of the army to them, but would not comply with the proposal to attribute the constitution to the National Council. All reference to the constitution of the army was therefore omitted from the first article of the decree, which now assumed the following neutral aspect: “The Czechoslovaks, organized in an independent army, and acknowledging the authority of the Supreme French Command in military affairs. . . .”
And so, on December 16, 1917, it was possible to publish two important documents relating to the establishment of the Czechoslovak Army, and negotiated by the National Council. The first one was a report of the Government to the President of the Republic, stating the political and military reasons why France had decided to organize a Czechoslovak Army. At my request, emphasis was laid in this report upon the participation of our volunteers in the Foreign Legion, and it was pointed out that other States had already permitted the dispatch of Czechoslovak troops to France for military purposes.
The text of the actual decree comprised the main principles already contained in the previous army statutes which had been arranged. It first of all announces the full political recognition of the National Council and the autonomy of the army. There were a number of details contained in the statutes, but for fairly obvious reasons they were not yet formulated in the decree. The decree was to be published immediately, the statutes at a later date. The decree relating to the Polish Army had been drawn up in its first form as early as the summer of 1917, when events were not so far developed as in December of the same year. To declare in the solemn form, which distinguished the decree drafted in the summer of 1917, everything that was contained in the prepared army statutes, would have been a political manifesto which the situation at that time hardly justified. Moreover, by its very character, the decree was meant to be only concise and general in tone. And then, too, the Poles, who were somewhat more advanced
