English Translation

81a -64 was unfaithful to this conception of their task, but the majority of them were so. Under the leadership of the former consulate official Franz Kopecký from New York and with the support of Rudolf Voska from Stamsford, a camp of Czechoslovak legionnaires emerges from the work of the first volunteers in the quiet forests of the state of Connecticut behind the city of Stamford, the otherwise quiet groves resound from Slovak songs and from the voice of the field trumpet. Every day at five o'clock, her voice sounds in the silence of the forests and the remote farms, and soon everyone in the surrounding area knows that the Czechoslovak youth is concentrated there to prepare for the death dance to France. In the November and December days of 1917 the first expeditions depart with the participation of the whole of America, in the following months until the summer days of 1918 the American cities saw strange phenomena: small groups of Slovak and Czech volunteers come from all sides and from all the states of the Union yesterday to their district city, to Pittsburgh, Omaha, Chicago, Cleveland, etc., gather there on a certain day; to travel together with the train to Stamford, It was a deeply moving moment, so a March evening on the day of departure. In the streets full of light, the rain falls silently on the enormous city and through the streets of the Slovak and Czech districts march our Bur- ies. The same fellows who, six, ten or fifteen years ago, with fear in their souls, fled beyond the borders of their homeland to escape the Austro-Hungarian soldiereska, those who in their soul had so much deep hatred for soldierhood and militarism, these simple, degraded boys, proletarians and emigrants, they return in the same way, still poor and modest, in order to confront with the old enemies of the people and of man with the weapon in their hands, they willingly leave the country that had offered them so much opportunity of merit right now; as they never dreamed, they go to the French front, and not for themselves, but to beat for the brothers in their homeland. Sadly their ranks go, the heavy - 65 -