Translated by Dora Round Tomas Garrigue Masaryk (1850-1937) was a philosophy professor who became the founder and first president of Czechoslovakia (1918-1935) and was a leading figure in world affairs between the wars. Capek, author of 'War with the Newts', and Czechoslovakia's most prominent writer during these years, interviewed Masaryk at great length and produced this volume that tells Masaryk's unique story.
"The pages of history recall scarcely any parallel episode at once so romantic in character and so extensive in scale." -- Winston S. Churchill In 1917, two empires that had dominated much of Europe and Asia teetered on the edge of the abyss, exhausted by the ruinous cost in blood and treasure of the First World War. As Imperial Russia and Habsburg-ruled Austria-Hungary began to succumb, a small group of Czech and Slovak combat veterans stranded in Siberia saw an opportunity to realize their long-held dream of independence. While their plan was audacious and complex, and involved moving their 50,000-strong army by land and sea across three-quarters of the earth's expanse, their commitment to fight for the Allies on the Western Front riveted the attention of Allied London, Paris, and Washington. On their journey across Siberia, a brawl erupted at a remote Trans-Siberian rail station that sparked a wholesale rebellion. The marauding Czecho-Slovak Legion seized control of the Trans-Siberian Railroad, and with it Siberia. In the end, this small band of POWs and deserters, whose strength was seen by Leon Trotsky as the chief threat to Soviet rule, helped destroy the Austro-Hungarian Empire and found Czecho-Slovakia. British prime minister David Lloyd George called their adventure "one of the greatest epics of history," and former US president Teddy Roosevelt declared that their accomplishments were "unparalleled, so far as I know, in ancient or modern warfare."
This account of President Masaryk's life was taken from his own lips and set down in his own words by Karel Capek. The chapters were not told consecutively as they are given here; they have been built up from material gathered by Capek during several years of intercourse with the President. For weeks at a time Capek stayed with President Masaryk and his family in their charming country house at Topolcanky, in Slovakia; and in the course of talks on summer days in the fields, beside a bonfire in the evenings, on quiet afternoons in the rose-covered summer-house, or on picnics which the whole family joined, he learned the facts, events and theories which he has woven into this book. This early work by Karel Capek was originally published in 1924 and we are now republishing it with a brand new introductory biography.
Battle for Castle examines the conscious creation and dissemination of Czechoslovakia's reputation as Eastern Europe's "native democracy" by its country's leaders.
