Optimist

(See front cover)

Eduard, save up your pence, For Adolf soon will be over the fence. So runs the insolent jingle which Nazi sympathizers among Czechoslovakia's German minority sporadically plaster on Czech frontier barriers. No one need explain to worried Czechs that Eduard is their president, Eduard Benes (pronounced Benesh), that Adolf is their neighbor, Hitler, that the fence is a cup-shaped chain of mountains along the Czech-German border, a chain about the height of Vermont's Green Mountains. Since the Sixth Century this fence has served as a barrier against the eastward push of Teutonic tribes, but never has its protective power been of such worldwide concern as in 1938. Inhabited largely by Germans, the whole length of the fence has come to be known as the Sudeten region, although the Sudetes Mountains form only the northern side of the cup.

A large section of the world's diplomats believe that five weeks ago Chancellor Hitler made a feint in Czechoslovakia's direction when he moved 170,000 troops into "summer barracks" nearer the border. He had just Nazified Austria while French and Germans stood by with open mouths. Their mouths were still open when the Reich's soldiers began ominously moving around on their side of the Czechoslovak border. In this crisis the Czechoslovakian Republic, the keystone of democracy in central Europe, marched 400,000 troops up to its side of the border and the first German over the line would have been a dead German. Thus that crisis was solved, and little Eduard Benes was heard to observe that the machinery of a democratic state can work fast, too.

Last week, Czechoslovakia staged another display of her forces--of those who would form the backbone of her second-line defense. The event was the tenth Congress and athletic carnival of the Sokols, lasting a full month. Sokol Congresses, scheduled every six years, are much older than the modern Olympic Games and, like the ancient Olympics, their background is strongly national. The Czechoslovak Sokol, oldest national gymnastic organization in the world, was founded in 1862 by Philosopher Author Dr. Miroslav Tyrs and Dr. Jindrich Fuegner. The name Sokol, meaning falcon, was adopted because it is the traditional name for Czech folk-song heroes. During the years of Habsburg dominance, Sokol groups served to keep Czech nationalism alive. When the World War broke out members filtered into Allied armies, formed Sokol legions to fight their old masters. Today, the Sokol numbers some 800,000 men, women and children, one out of every 20 in the population, organized in 3,265 local branches.

The 460,000 male members are a storehouse of well-trained manpower for the nation's efficient standing army of 180,000 men. Significantly an important part of the Sokol Congress activities is the army's defense demonstrations.

Thousands of Sokols in their flashing uniforms--shirts of Garibaldi red, grey Czech jackets slung from their left shoulders, little round red caps with falcon feathers--last week poured into Prague's big, bustling Masaryk and Wilson (named after Woodrow Wilson) railway stations, stomped out to the mammoth Masaryk Stadium,* high above the silvery Vltava River and the cathedral towers of the capital. There, in white jerseys and blue trousers and skirts, they twisted and bent in mass exercise. Before the month is over, 160,000 members will have participated in such elaborate drills.

This year's Congress, expected to draw a million Czech and foreign visitors, marks the 20th anniversary of the birth of the nation. An allegorical pageant, "Construction and Defense," to be performed by 3,000 members eight times during the Congress, will picture the republic's 20 years, the Sokol contributions to its development.

Birth, Czechoslovakia, some 600 miles long but only 45 to 175 miles wide, has four provinces. Were it a fish the head would be Bohemia, inhabited largely by Czechs with Germans predominating along the western Sudeten border. The body would be the provinces of Moravia & Silesia, largely Czech populated, and Slovakia, thick with Slovaks, who are Slavs like the Czechs. The tail would be Carpathian Ruthenia.

The Czechs enjoyed independence under their own rulers from the tenth to the early 16th Century. At that time they gradually were subjected to Habsburg domination and in 1620, the Czech nobles were wiped out at the Battle of the White Mountain. Over a thousand years ago the Slovaks had been beaten into submission by the Hungarian Magyars. Through the centuries these peoples, like the Poles and the Irish, kept alive their national culture, agitated for liberation. The World War and Woodrow Wilson gave them their chance. Three Czech patriots actually achieved the nation's independence: gaunt, bearded Philosophy Professor Thomas Garrigue Masaryk, who died nine months ago; the Czech soldier-astronomer General Milan Stefanik, who was killed in an airplane crash in 1919 when freedom was in sight; and Eduard Benes.

Masaryk, Czechoslovakia's No. 1 George Washington, dreamed, wrote and taught a Czech national state during his university careers in Vienna and Prague. When the World War broke out, with a death sentence over his head, he shuttled between London, Paris. Russia, raising money and sympathy for his unborn nation. His assistant, Eduard Benes, meanwhile, faked passports, forged visas for Czech conspirators, escaped to Switzerland, then Paris where he and Masaryk set up a pre-natal National Council. The Allies were more than willing to foster a separatist movement in the heart of the Central Powers, and in 1917 Professor Masaryk set out for the U. S., there convinced Professor Wilson of the Czech case. Washington, D. C. is to the Czechoslovakian Republic what Philadelphia, Pa. is to the U. S. Republic. In Washington, in October 1918, after conferences with U. S. Czechs and Slovaks, Masaryk issued a Declaration of Independence for the new Czech-Slovak state and almost immediately after the Armistice a newly-convened National Assembly gratefully elected him the nation's first President.

Year later the Allied peacemakers, in the Treaty of St. Germain, set the boundaries for the new nation. To give Czecho-Slovakia a natural barrier which would serve to halt a German push to the east, the Allies, pressed by France and England, forwent strict interpretation of the principle of self-determination and recognized the Czech claim to the Sudeten region, largely populated by Germans. Also included within the frontiers was a small Polish minority in Silesia, a larger Hungarian minority in south Slovakia and the inhabitants of Carpathian Ruthenia, formerly under Hungarian rule, who requested union with the new nation. Thus, Czechoslovakia today (see map) includes some 7,400,000 Czechs, 2,300,000 Slovaks and 549,000 Ruthenians, all speaking varieties of Slav dialect, 3,231,000 Germans, 692,000 Hungarians, 82,000 Poles. Added to these are 186,000 Jews, living mostly in the Carpathians.

In its most concrete, practical form, this was the democracy the Allies had said they were fighting for. It was also an ethnological and linguistic hodgepodge and to make it work was the job of the Czech majority and its leaders. The leaders tackled it with enthusiasm and ability. For 18 years the republic was headed by

President Masaryk. Two years before his death last September he passed the presidency to his assistant, Eduard Benes, then his Foreign Minister. Today, this co-founder sits in Masaryk's chair in the Hradcany, the castle of the Kings of Bohemia which towers above the capital city of Prague.

Washington No. 2, At 54, President Benes is a small, nervous, mouselike man, with cool eyes, hair thinning and greying at the sides, a mouth that seldom smiles. Czechoslovakia's No. 2 Washington was born on May 28, 1884, at Koslany. near Pilsen, in Bohemia, where his father scraped a living as a peasant truck farmer. As the youngest, most gifted of the family of ten, Eduard was sent to high school, then the University of Prague. There he became a national figure, not in politics, but as the flashy forward for the "Slavia" soccer team.

At the University he became a pupil of Masaryk, drank in his ideas for a Czech state. Later, as professor of sociology, he continued his master's teachings through a secret nationalist society. Soon after the outbreak of the War, his underground activities were discovered, and he fled to join Masaryk in Switzerland. There pupil and master drafted their sales-talks to the Allies.

Elected Foreign Minister in 1918, Eduard Benes held the job for 17 years largely through sheer ability, for during that time his own political supporters, the Czech National Socialists, were usually the least influential of the major parties. During this time, France and Britain called the European tune from Geneva, League Delegate Benes' logical, forceful arguments were helping them carry many a day, and those nations flatteringly bestowed on him the title of "Europe's Smartest Little Statesman."

A teetotaler and a nonsmoker, Eduard Benes as President leads an unsocial life-- when not laboring in the Hradcany Castle he skis, plays tennis or secludes himself with his wife at his Benesov estate not far from Prague.

In the Way, Benes has only to thumb through a copy of Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf to learn that the future of Germany, according to the dramatic Fuehrer, lies in Eastern Europe--in the fertile, wheat-producing Russian Ukraine. And Benes knows that one German road to the Ukraine leads over his fence, up the Elbe, through Prague, across the rest of Czechoslovakia and a narrow 125-mile strip of Rumania. Benes is fully aware of Czechoslovakia's road-blocking position. Not impervious to drama himself, he told New York Timeswoman Anne O'Hare McCormick four months ago: "The destiny of Europe will be decided here. This country is a natural and necessary point for European equilibrium. If this position is given up all of Central Europe is gone." Bismarck put the same thing more succinctly years before. "Whoever is master of Bohemia is master of Europe," said the Iron Chancellor.

President Benes believes that the "Fascintern" will collapse of its own armor-plated weight. He thinks the job of the democracies is to avoid war at almost any cost until time comes to their side. Eduard Benes is thus an optimist. He refuses to believe that Germany will attack his little State. His optimism he bases on three considerations:

1) His defenses. With a standing army of 180,000, which may be upped by 1,500,000 reserves, many of them Sokol-trained, a force of 1,350 first and second-line planes and an extensive "Maginot Line" of concrete fortifications and emplacements rooted in the Sudetens, President Benes believes he could hold off a German attack for three weeks. By falling back to a second defense line in the cross-country high Moravian plateau east of Prague, his general staff is convinced the nation could hang on for three months more.

2) His foreign alliances would, during this time, come well into play. As Foreign Minister, Statesman Benes tied Czechoslovakia to a Little Entente alliance with Yugoslavia and Rumania against Hungary, a defensive alliance with France against Germany and an alliance with Russia that is predicated on France carrying out her obligations to Czechoslovakia in case Germany attacks. Czechoslovakians do not let visitors forget that they are blood cousins of the great Slav state of Russia. Eduard Benes naturally hopes for fulfillment of the pacts he drew up. But Yugoslavia and Rumania are gravitating closer to the Rome-Berlin axis, French Rightists openly predict that France will never come to the little nation's aid and even French Socialists and Radical Socialists are lukewarm to the pledge. The effectiveness of Russian assistance, weakened by purges in the Red Army and by internal conditions, is a large unknown. However, what Bismarck said about Bohemia still holds, and if Czechoslovakia's allies might not come to the aid of Czechoslovakia, they might come to the aid of democracy and Europe.

Sudeten Pains. The third and best reason for the President's optimism is his belief that he can patch up his troublesome minority demands, particularly of the Sudetens, and thus spike Hitler's handiest excuse for an invasion. Father Andreas Hlinka, leader of a Slovak ecclesiastical party, has demanded autonomy for his racial group, but his party polled less votes than in previous years in the recent municipal elections. Other minority protests pull even less weight. But one Czechoslovakian minority problem the world will not forget in a hurry is that of the Sudetens.

Five years ago, say the Czechs, nobody was aware of the sad plight of the Sudetens. The Czech contention is that Adolf Hitler has dramatized whatever case the Sudetens have into a vast and phoney political extravaganza. But the Sudeten Germans have caught the harsh and compelling sound of the Nazi bands just over the mountains, have listened to Nazi oratory and fallen under the spell of Adolf Hitler's pan-Germanism. Ninety percent of them voted as a unit for Konrad Hen-lein's Sudetendeutsch Partei in the local elections. Nothing unites a group like a grievance and Henlein's grievous story is as follows:

The Sudetens, next to Poland's Ukrainians, constitute the largest national minority in Europe. The Slavs held the Sudeten region as early as the Sixth Century but in the Twelfth Germans filtered in as monks, townsmen, traders, artisans. They naturally became the manufacturers of the 19th Century Bohemian industrial revolution. Favored by the Habsburg regime, they looked down on their agricultural Czech, Slovak neighbors. In the post-War years, when the Czechs became the top-dogs they turned the national trade to their allies and friends, which dried up Sudeten markets in Austria, Hungary, gradually supplanted German capital with Czech, eased out Sudeten workers, filled Sudeten administrative, police and army posts with Czechs. Although the Sudetens form only 22% of the nation's population, they now make up 50% of its unemployed. Most of those eligible for the dole receive only 35-c- a week.

The Sudetendeutsch Partei has said that it wants the Sudeten region given back to Germany. The Czechs grimly joke that if an anschluss were granted it would not be long until they were anschlussed, too. In point of fact, any dismemberment of Bohemia would be fatal to the Czechoslovakian Republic. Bohemia, seat of some 80% of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire's industries, is the industrial heart of the Republic. Effective and prosperous, it is the one island of conventional, economic well-being now in Central Europe.* Czechoslovakia is turning it over to nobody, and that is one reason why President Benes can confidently tell visitors that if they ask the next man they meet in the street whether he will fight the Nazi invaders, the answer will be yes--and his wife will fight, too.

President Benes hopes to cool the Sudeten crisis with a new minority statute. Last week in Prague, Premier Dr. Milan Hodza was conferring with Sudeten and other minority leaders. In a few weeks a new Czech minority program may be promulgated, offering the minorities more generous political and educational concessions. To remove signs of Czech dominance in the Sudeten areas, last week the bulk of the army reserves sent there five weeks ago were demobilized.

Bloodless Conquest? Most observers agree, however, that the Fuhrer will accept no "solution" of the Sudeten problem, will instead keep this pet caldron bubbling as long as necessary to force Statesman Benes into an agreement. The kind of agreement Hitler would like to make with Czechoslovakia would force Czechoslovakia into the economic structure of the Reich and place her foreign trade under German limitations.

To put Czechoslovakia under this economic yoke, Germany does not have to go to war with Czechoslovakia--she already holds the young nation economically at her mercy. Although Czechoslovakia is nearly 60% agricultural (see map, p. 17), producing wheat, rye, barley, oats, hop-vines in Bohemia, potatoes, and sugar beets in middle Moravia, and 32% of her land is forest-covered, she depends principally on her industries for her favorable balance of trade, which in 1937 reached an impressive $35,000,000. From her first city of Prague come machinery, refined sugar; dull, blackened Brno (see map, p. 77) exports textiles and the top-rank light arms produced in the Czechoslovakian Arms Manufacturing Co. plant. Bustling Moravska Ostrava, in Silesia, is the Czech Pittsburgh; Bratislava the site of the Nobel dynamite works. Pilsen workers brew the world-famed Pilsen beer, produce heavy machinery, locomotives, rail equipment in the main Skoda foundry. The vital Skoda munition units have been reported secretly moved into the interior. At Zlin is located the mammoth shoe factory of the Bat'a (pronounced Bahtya) family.

Nothing but a trickle of these products could leave landlocked Czechoslovakia if Hitler decided to crack down, for most of the country's trade is carried by German rails or rivers to the German ports of Hamburg, Bremen, Stettin and Italian Trieste. This would leave Czechoslovakia outlets only through Poland's Gdynia on the Baltic, or Rumania's Constantsa on the Black Sea. Since both these nations lean to Hitler already, the harassed Czechs would meet little cooperation. More important, closing of German ports would virtually cut off Czech imports of Swedish alloys, which she needs to add to her own rather low-grade ores necessary for armaments. The Czechs are already apprehensive over the prospects: last week in Berlin a Czech mission was striving to reach an agreement on the amount of goods which can be carried over the former Austrian railroads to Trieste; for weeks the Czech chambers of commerce have been quietly urging merchants to shunt their shipments through Gdynia, in an early effort to get on the right side of Poland; in what is still apparently unofficial action, private commission men in Hamburg have been hiking their fees on Czechoslovakian transactions for the past few months.

Thus it may well be that the destiny of Europe will be decided bloodlessly. If the powers on whom President Benes now optimistically depends do not move to guarantee his political status quo, the time may come when the little President will be sucked willy-nilly into the German sphere of influence. If so, Germany will have bullied or bluffed her way to European supremacy and the whole issue of Czechoslovakian independence will have been swallowed by issues far graver and deeper.

* Europe's dictator powers set great store by their stadia. The Masaryk Stadium, which would hold nearly three Yale Bowls, seats 200,000, is the largest in continental Europe and constitutes a sort of architectural nose-thumbing at the "Fascintern."

*For a full report on Czechoslovakian industry see FORTUNE for August.

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