especially on account of the constraint and bureaucratic pressure which the uneducated Camp Commanders had exercised. Thus, to many of our men, service in our Legion meant release. This was certainly the case in the post-revolutionary period of 1917 and particularly in 1918. The Legion offered greater personal safety and better treatment, especially for the sick; it offered, too, protection against Austria; for, had they gone home, they would have been put into the Austrian army and would have fared worse. More lives would have been lost.
The men themselves kept a sharp eye upon the various forms of malingering. About a hundred members of the original Družina—born and bred in Russia—made themselves scarce before the battle of Zboroff; but the great majority of our men were good, trustworthy fellows who did their hard job honourably and well. I had many an opportunity to watch them and to study in them the Czech character. As I do not know how many Czech and Slovak prisoners there were in Russia, I cannot say what proportion they bore to the total number of our Legionaries. My impression was that a fairly large number did not join us. Had exact figures been obtainable they would have formed a good measure of the general degree of enlightenment and political determination.
With the men my own relations were those of a friend and comrade, though my rulings were severe and, in case of need, very severe. In a commander of high rank or low, I think sincerity is the best quality. Next to it, consistency and, above all, justice are requisite. An army is unconditionally based upon authority. In war, commanders and officers discharge the same functions as leaders in political life. But a military leader must not be a demagogue. If he is, he soon pays for it, even in person, for war is a matter of life and death and, in the moment of danger, men stand no nonsense but judge their superiors pitilessly. Misconceived democratism leads officers into demagogic insincerity and falsehood.
Soldiers are franker than civilians. The relations of superiors to inferiors, and vice versa, are free from the formalities of civil life. They become, as it were, laconic, corresponding to the precision, definiteness and efficacy of the whole military mechanism. A comparatively high degree of equality, and the circumstance that soldiers have not to think of bread, clothing and quarters, that they are free from the economic struggle for existence, tend to make them open and straightforward. Living constantly in the society of his comrades and, so to speak, in public, a soldier becomes more objective, less subjective. In
