were sent to Switzerland, and it sometimes happened that details of the proceedings in the Ministerial Council at Vienna appeared four or five days afterwards in the Allied Press. On other occasions items from Vienna were published in La Nation Tchèque and, as we ascertained, they infuriated the Government and police circles at Vienna. For they made it clear how rapid the communication was between Vienna, Prague, and Switzerland, and they accordingly demonstrated the efficiency of our organization.
For a long time, as arranged with Svatkovsky, I had ample opportunities for sending specially worded telegrams. It was not until the declaration of war by Italy that this had to be stopped, because most of these telegrams were sent to Rome. From May 1915 onwards all postal communication became increasingly difficult because persons sending letters abroad had to state their identity at the post office or at least leave an address for the reply. I therefore spent a great deal of time going from one Prague post office to another and giving sham addresses. I was prepared to be arrested in the event of any serious hitch.
This work made it necessary to be always on the alert. It also involved a good deal of travelling and the expenditure of much money. One of the most wearisome things we had to do was to codify or decipher messages. As time went on I obtained helpers for this, particularly Jan Hájek, my wife, and Miss Olič. Now and then I had occasional helpers or others who had joined the movement by chance. Thus, before my departure, I took Werstadt and Dr. Butter into my confidence, and they continued the work after I had left. It was about this time that we attempted to send messages through the advertisement columns of the Prague daily papers, mostly in the Národní Politika and Prager Tagblatt, but this scheme did not prove very successful. In the second phase of our activities it became necessary to limit ourselves to the use of couriers, for by this time our postal communications were likely to be discovered.(8) Moreover, the Austrian Government had taken to holding up letters intentionally for weeks at a time and this rendered information less valuable.
Long and interesting chapters could be devoted to an account of our couriers, but I will limit myself to mentioning a few of the most noteworthy of them. There was, for example, L. V. Fáček, to whom I have already referred. For a long
