The Czechoslovak Review/Volume 3/Welcome to our volunteers

WELCOME TO OUR VOLUNTEERS.

On Labor Day the first contingent of Czechoslovak soldiers from America returned home after nearly two years of drilling and fighting. The Rochambeau brought 200 of them and the Chicago was to land 450 more before the end of the week. In all about 1500 are expected out of some 2500 men who enlisted here in answer to Štefanik’s appeal in the fall of 1917 and the first part of 1918. About 200 invalided men returned home from France last winter, and the rest will try to settle down in their native land, although they will find it difficult to forget America.

Czechoslovaks in this country feel a great debt of gratitude to these brave men. They could have stayed at home, for being technically Austrian subjects, before there was a free Czechoslovakia, they were not subject to draft; besides, half of them were men with families. Or they could have spurned this claim, and like thousands of their countrymen could have joined the American army at $33 a month and have enjoyed all those advantages which soldiers of less wealthy countries envied the Americans. But the men who are returning now wanted not merely to lick the Germans, but to have their efforts count for the cause of Czechoslovak independence. And so they fought in France under the Czechoslovak flag, getting a few cents a day, and after the armistice came, fought the Magyar bolsheviks and watched the German frontiers of the Czechoslovak Republic.

The country for which they offered their lives is at present exhausted and unable to show its gratitude by becoming generosity. So the Czechoslovak organizations in the United States, represented by the American Czechoslovak Board, agreed to pay each returning volunteer a bonus of $30, which will be supplemented by gifts from local organizations to their own veterans. It is confidently expected that every man will thus receive the same amount which the American government pays to discharged soldiers.