being torn down and the rosettes removed from the officers’ caps but no surprise was shown. In any case, it seems to have been thought, the new States would want their own coats of arms and emblems. In fact, all the local army headquarters were instructed to sort out the Austrian regiments according to their racial composition so far as this could be done peacefully and without revolt.
So excited and bewildered was Vienna that the Supreme Military Command submitted to the men in the field, on October 29, the question whether they favoured a republic or the dynasty. At all costs quiet and order were to be preserved lest Bolshevism supervene. Disorder and indignation might easily give rise to a revolutionary movement, especially as hunger had prepared the way for it. This was one reason why Vienna asked our National Committee in Bohemia to supply the troops with bread. But the predominant motive was the desire not to offer the Allies a spectacle of distraction and disintegration. Even after the revolution, the Austrian authorities did their utmost to gain the favour of Wilson and the Allies; and, to this end, they needed the argument that the Austrian peoples and the army were calm. Hence also the remissiveness of the Prague Military Command when it received its orders from Vienna—a remissiveness which suited our National Committee and was supported by it. It agreed to work with the Military Command for the purpose of maintaining order, feeding the men and securing the departure of the non-Czech troops. In the name of the National Committee, Tusar, the Czech member of Parliament who had already been appointed a plenipotentiary by the Czechoslovak Government, appealed at the beginning of November to the Czechoslovak soldiers in the Austrian army to remain obedient to their Austrian superiors since they would be brought back into the territory of our State as soon as railway communications should permit and the necessary arrangements could be made.
The Austrian authorities did not realize that their remissiveness in dealing with Prague was a two-edged sword. They did not see that, if they could point to the tranquillity and order in the Bohemian Lands, foreign countries could hardly fail to understand that our National Committee had succeeded in establishing the new State calmly and prudently. Thus their tactics failed, despite the feverish activity of Austrian envoys and emissaries who, with the help of pro-Austrian politicians, were at work not only at the Vatican and in neutral countries, but in London, Washington, Paris and Rome. Baron
