An Army Without a Country: The Extraordinary Story of the Czechoslovak Legion - Paperback
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In August 1914, a group of Czech and Slovak men volunteered to fight for a country that did not yet exist. They called one another bratr - brother. They greeted each other with a single word: Nazdar. To the goal.
Over the next six years, these men - assembled from diaspora communities in Paris and Chicago, from prisoner-of-war camps on the Siberian steppe, from the ranks of the French Foreign Legion and the Imperial Russian Army - would fight on four fronts, cross five time zones, seize six thousand kilometres of the Trans-Siberian Railway, and help create the first democratic republic in Central European history.
Brothers in Arms is the full story of the Czechoslovak Legion: its origins in the Sokol gymnastic movement, its battlefield triumphs at Zborov and Bakhmach, its moral reckoning with Admiral Kolchak's dictatorship, and its extraordinary global evacuation across three oceans. Anchored in the experiences of individual soldiers, it traces how three remarkable men - the philosopher Tomás Masaryk, the diplomat Edvard Benes, and the Slovak astronomer-general Milan Stefánik - converted military performance into diplomatic recognition and armed men into a sovereign state.
Meticulously researched and compellingly told, Brothers in Arms reveals what ordinary men at their most purposeful can achieve - and the price at which such achievements are always purchased.
Anton Deakin grew up in County Wicklow and studied European history at University College Dublin before completing postgraduate work in modern Central European history at the University of Edinburgh. His fascination with the borderlands of the old Habsburg Empire - the landscapes where languages, loyalties, and nationalisms collided through the twentieth century - has shaped his writing for more than a decade. Brothers in Arms is the product of years of research in Czech, Slovak, French, and English archival sources, and represents his sustained attempt to bring the extraordinary story of the Czechoslovak Legion to the English-language reader who deserves to know it. He lives in Edinburgh, where he is at work on his next book.
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