Page - 338 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

338 Under Surveillance noted Brigadier of Artillery Eduard Zanantoni. ‘2 of their battalions (88 from Beroun and 75 from Jindřichův Hradec) went over to the enemy without offering resistance, as was their duty. Martial law was imposed on the remainder of the regiment and it was withdrawn from the front line of battle.’795 The Commander of the IX Corps, General of Artillery Friedel, finally proposed to the Army High Command on 26 November not only that punishments should be given as an example, but also that all Czech replacement troops be divided among German and Hungarian regiments, and that from that point on, the Czech regiments should be assigned only German and Hungarian replacements.796 He also recommended that repatriated prisoners of war be penalised by being made to serve for an additional three years. Friedel was not alone in making this demand. This aside, however, the military and civilian authorities began to blame each other for the lack of discipline and the failure of troops to do their duty. For the Army High Command, the matter was clear : the responsibility lay with the Governor of Bohemia and to a certain extent with the Imperial-Royal Ministry of the Interior. For the latter, the opposite argument applied, and Interior Minister Baron Heinold responded to the accusations made by the Army High Command simply by saying that the cases reported from Bohemia and Moravia were only individual incidents. The problem was the ‘lax attitude of the military courts’, with the large number of acquittals leaving the population with the impression that one could in any case get away with anything. The Landsturm courts were not adequately staffed, he claimed, and many Landsturm auditors from the civilian population were ‘not nationally unbiased’.797 However, they did agree that agitation from abroad played a role, and that the Professor of Philosophy Thomáš G. Masaryk in particular, who had left Austria in mid-December 1914, was giving impetus to the irredentism. Masaryk brought together the groups of Czech émigrés in France and England, and finally united them in January 1915 to form the ‘Czechoslovak National Assembly’. His aim was to create an independent Czechoslovak state. Masaryk only experienced a setback in Switzerland, where the agitation of the émigré organisations was pro- hibited and their obstinate leader was threatened with expulsion. The ‘National As- sembly’ therefore published its first anti-Austrian manifesto in Paris in mid-February and expressed its demands very clearly : ‘We charge Franz Joseph of the House of Habsburg-Lothringen as an enemy of the Slavs and the Czech nation, unworthy to continue to bear the title of King of Bohemia, and we shall insist that he and the entire House of Habsburg-Lothringen forfeit all claims to the lands of the Bohemian crown. The Czech nation […] cannot do otherwise than to discard this treacherous, perjured king. With this document, all Czechoslovak soldiers and civil servants are freed from their oath to the Habsburgs.’ The proclamation was published in the London Times. And even if hardly anyone living in Bohemia and Moravia knew about it, it did serve as a signal, namely to the Entente Powers. After the Russians, the French and the