on July 6, 1915, the fourth centenary of the Czech martyr’s death, he was consciously challenging the whole work of the Hapsburg Counter-Reformation and was setting out to reverse the sentence of death passed upon the Czech nation after the Battle of the White Mountain in 1620? Even he could hardly then foresee that the fire of his faith would presently burn in every Allied country or that it would guide the Czechoslovak Legions on their epic march from the shores of the Black to the shores of the Yellow Seas. Nor could he have imagined, when he reached London later in 1915, an almost unknown professor of “enemy” nationality whose doings aroused the suspicions of the British police, that, on his return to England in November 1918, a company of the Coldstream Guards would render him military honours as the head of an Allied and belligerent State.
The thought of personal advantage was ever alien to him. Time and again, in the years before the war, he had risked all to bear witness to the truth. When war came, what stirred him to his depths and possessed him wholly was the idea that, after three centuries of servitude, his people might be reborn to freedom, to spiritual and democratic unity as Hus and the Bohemian Brotherhood had conceived them, and that to him it might be given to fulfil the seer’s vision of his illustrious prototype, Comenius: “I, too, believe before God that, when the storms of wrath have passed, to thee shall return the rule over thine own things, O Czech people!”
Those who may wish to learn the story of Masaryk’s effort will find it in this book. It is truly the story of “The Making of a State,” and of much besides. It is the work of a philosopher-historian, whom Fate made a constructive statesman. His broad learning and sense of history run through it. His analyses of pan-Germanism, of Communism and of Bolshevism are masterly. His critical faculty is ever alert, even when his own people are its object. Written by a Czechoslovak for Czechoslovaks in order that they may learn how they were redeemed, it nevertheless contains so much of enlightenment for others, it betrays so penetrating a discernment of the deep things of life, that it is indispensable to an understanding of the Europe which the war transformed and of the process of transformation itself.
Thus it is no mere literary record of the war, drawn up at
