All we wanted was to go home.
Most of us hadn’t seen our fatherland since war had broken out in 1914 and we were conscripted into the Austro-Hungarian Army. As Czechs and Slovaks, we felt more brotherhood for our Russian opponents than for our imperial officers, so we hadn’t always fought well. Some of us had been stuck in POW camps in Russia for months, some for years. We longed to go back to our families, our homeland, and peace.
We couldn’t go west because a war was in the way. History called it the Eastern Front, but it was far to the west of places we came to know, towns like Chelyabinsk and Yekaterinburg, Irkutsk and Vladivostok. We never intended to take over the Trans-Siberian railway, prolong a civil war, spark the most infamous tsaricide in history, or end up in charge of the Russian Imperial Treasury.
We just wanted to go home. The rest was forced on us.
But one thing wasn’t an accident. After three hundred years of Hapsburg subjugation, we wanted a country of our own. And this is the story of how we got it, fighting for it half a world away along six thousand miles of snow-covered rail line.