96 The Great War 8,000,000 Including the Slovaks on the marches of Hungary, west of the Carpathians? Ever since the " Defenestration of Prague," ever since the Battle of the White Hill that sent the Winter King into exile, Bohemia has been subject to the German and millions of Czechs have maintained a desperate battle for racial independence. Now Europe was fighting be- cause the Czar chose to extend to the little Slav brother on the Danube the protection of his great Empire. Now the Serbs of Bosnia and Herze- govina, the Croats of Dalmatia and Croatia, the Slovenes of Carnlola, Carinthia and the Coast Lands, all the Southern Slavs from the Alps to the Balkans were included In the great Pan-Slavic renaissance, which had followed the victories of the Slavs of Bulgaria and Servia in the Balkans. Not as an appeal to a fraction of his own people, not as a pledge to bind the halting loyalty of some millions of subjects on a threatened frontier, was the Czar's rescript to be accepted. It had a far wider meaning not mistaken either in Berlin or Vienna or indeed In London.