He knew, too, that Allied statesmen did not, could not, feel as he felt or see as he saw. Genuine though their sympathy might be with the cause he upheld, it was not to be expected that they would pledge their own peoples to support a Quixotic crusade for Czechoslovak freedom, all the less since the Hapsburgs commanded the resources of a powerful Monarchy and might perchance be detached, by political skill, from the Allies’ main foe, Germany. In comprehending their position, despite his own conviction that they were wrong, Masaryk proved himself a greater statesman than they; for an essential quality of statesmanship is the power to understand the position of others better than they themselves understand it. Therefore, as soon as he had given them an inkling of his purpose, he set about making an army. To make it he went to Russia, where the main body of Czechoslovak prisoners of war was to be found. Having made it, he resolved to remove it from the Russian chaos and to place it alongside of Allied armies on the Western front. For this reason, he preceded it through Siberia to Japan and the United States in order to seek means of transporting it to Europe. Before it could reach Europe the war was over. Yet its work had been done. A vagrant professor who could put fifty thousand men into the field was obviously a more considerable personage in the eyes of Allied Governments than the ablest advocate of humanitarian ideals. Thanks to his army in Siberia and to the Czechoslovak Legions simultaneously organized in France and Italy, Masaryk and his devoted helpers, Beneš and Štefánik, won formal recognition for their people as belligerent Allies. They had gained freedom. It remained for them to make a State—a workaday task that might well prove harder than the heroic work of war and revolution.
A man less steeped than Masaryk in the traditions and history of his people, or a man whose authority as a leader had been less firmly established, might have found this task beyond his powers. For nearly three centuries the people, mainly of peasant stock, had been subjugated and Germanized. The native nobility of Bohemia had been executed or driven into exile at the beginning of the Thirty Years War after the overthrow of the Bohemian forces by the arms of the Hapsburg-Jesuit Counter-Reformation at the White Mountain on
