Page - 866 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

866 Peace Feelers in the Shadow of Brest-Litovsk of regular troops. The Czecho-Slovak Legion was regarded as the military organisation of the Czecho-Slovak National Committee in Paris, whose status was thus enormously enhanced by the French.2059 In December, the first Czecho-Slovak contingents were established in France. Italy also cleared the way for the establishment of Czech legion- aries.2060 In turn, the Serbian Army, which had been reorganised in exile, successively began to intervene in the fighting on the Greek border and in Albania, and gathered together all willing Austro-Hungarian prisoners of war of Serbian, Croatian and Slo- venian nationality who could be enlisted in the Italian camps to form a ‘1st Yugoslav Division’.2061 However, all these measures could only serve first and foremost as a stop- gap to make the period of ‘waiting for Uncle Sam’ easier to bear. Wilson’s Fourteen Points When the American presidential advisor, Edward House, returned to Washington from Paris on 18 December 1917, he had to report to the President that he had not succeeded in persuading the Allies to formulate a direct declaration of their war aims. In light of the Russian proclamation regarding the abandonment of annexations and contribu- tions and the repeated declarations of peace also being issued by the Central Powers, in the eyes of the American government such a declaration had become extremely urgent. Wilson then decided that the USA should formulate a declaration of its own.2062 House suggested only a general re-wording of the American war aims, but Wilson wanted to formulate a programme of war aims that contained specific demands and, above all, also moral elements. Not least, it was intended to provoke the German people to take a critical view of the policies of the German imperial government and the Supreme Army Command. The points formulated by Wilson as a result were certainly not limited to simply an isolated list of American doctrines. They were also not formulated in such a way as to exclude scope for subsequent interpretations. After all, what kind of politics would that be, which permitted no alternative readings ! However, it was of decisive im- portance that Wilson’s catalogue of war aims was written against the background of the negotiations in Brest-Litovsk. Therefore, it was not so much an idealistic programme as first and foremost a tactical trick in the great process of psychological warfare. The Fourteen Points became all the more important when a week before the opening of the peace conference, the Soviet People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Trotsky, already read out a new appeal for the conclusion of a general peace. He demanded the application of the right to self-determination, not only for the peoples of Alsace-Lor- raine, Galicia, Poland, Bohemia and the southern Slav provinces of the Habsburg Monarchy, but also for the Irish and the peoples living under colonial rule in Egypt, India, Madagascar, Indochina and elsewhere. The American Secretary of State, Lan-