# The Czechoslovak anabasis across Russia and Siberia/Chapter 7

VII
Conclusion
WHY do we now recall these events after the lapse of ten years?
Last year, Czechoslovakia was celebrating the tenth anniversary of her independence. May not only she, but all the world, remember what were the forces which ten years ago, led to this freedom, what moral and spiritual factors brought it about that the Czechoslovak lands, whose political, geographical, strategic, cultural and economic situation had been so highly estimated by Bismarck, should belong by divine and natural right to none other than to the Czechoslovak nation!
This nation never ceased to thirst for liberty, but in the course of history had to recognize that freedom within its own State could be defended only by a sense of the creative and rational development of its physical and spiritual forces, by a sense of order, evolution and the growth of its life. The Great War and the repercussions it involved, the changes in the organization of the world and in the comity of nations, and especially the lesson of the Russian revolution, in which a brother nation showed to the world the whole bottomless pit and the immeasurable ravages resulting from mad fanaticism and despotic tyranny, all combined to teach the Czechoslovaks to appreciate the freedom which had ​been won back after three dark centuries of oppression, and to build up their renewed political life on a foundation of industrious energy, sound competition, and honest love of peace and tolerance. Surely the rich experience gathered in Siberia and Russia has not been without influence there, though it was deterrent rather than inspiring. If to-day Czechoslovakia invites the confidence of the world, and especially of Western Europe and America, she is not begging alms and favours. She is conscious that her sons gave their all in order that she might deserve freedom. She did not obtain this freedom without paying the price. And if we recapitulate merely the great march through Siberia and Russia, made by the Czechoslovak army in a decisive period of the Great War, we surely must acknowledge that this contribution to the common task of the Allies was a considerable one.
(1) The Czechoslovaks prevented a further advance of the Germans and Austro-Hungarians into the interior of Russia.
(2) They prevented the inroad of the German and Austro-Hungarian armies in the Don region, in the Caucasus, and into the Near East.
(3) They prevented the transport of supplies from these regions to Germany, and thus disappointed Germany’s hopes of obtaining new supplies and forces for the continuation of the war.
(4) At the time of the decisive German and Austro-Hungarian offensives in March, 1918, they held back in Siberia more than a million troops, an entire reserve army.
(5) They held in check all the physical and moral forces of Russian Bolshevism, whose untrammelled ​anarchical influence might have proved fatal to the successful conduct of the war, to the Allies, and to the whole world.
(6) They prevented also the Bolshevik propaganda from spreading into Asia, and particularly into India and China, at the most critical moment of the Great War.
(7) They tried to save national and democratic Russia, whose absence from the Concert of Nations is painfully felt to-day politically, economically, and culturally.
Their struggle against the Red Army, ten years ago, was a struggle against a peril which, to-day, threatens the world. They did not perish in that struggle, though at the end they stood almost alone. On the contrary, the struggle roused and strengthened in them those convictions which to-day are a guarantee to the world that Czechoslovakia is no “powder magazine of Europe,” as her unscrupulous and ignorant enemies wish to make the world believe, but a solid bulwark of peace, order and cultural effort, and a fertile seed-plot of vital energy.