A DISTINGUISHED CZECHOSLOVAK AIRMAN.

Otago Witness, Issue 3414, 20 August 1919, Page 59

A DISTINGUISHED CZECHOSLOVAK AIRMAN.

General Stefanic, the eminent CzechoSlovak professor of astronomy in Paris, who on the outbreak of the war enlisted in the ranks of the French army as a private and fought his way up to the grade of general, winning the Medaille Militaire, 'the French War Cross, the Cross of the Legion of Honour, the English and Belgian War Crosses, besides other distinctions, has been killed through a fall of 1500 ft while air-planing fron* Venice to Prague. And yet his death, which, of course, must have been instantaneous, was * fitting end to his marvellous career. Nor can it have been to him altogether niw welcome. For by reason of the wounds which he had received in the early stages of the war in France and of the consequent grave operations his life was one long physical martyrdom. He was rarely free from pain, subsisting only on liquid; food; endured, in fact, such tortures that any other man would have taken to bis bed and resigned himself to the recunv bent existence of a permanent invalid instead of continuing to serve the causa of France, the cause of the Entente, and above all the cause of his native land, whose independence he contributed bo much to bring about. His suffering, indeed, merely seemed to etherealise him and to' sweeten still further a very_ sweet character, of whom it was truly said that he was a saint as well as a hero: Stefanic's last public appearance ir*. America was at the banquet given by the France-America Society at the Waldorf, in New York, on Lafayette Day, last autumn, when he and his fellow guest his close associate and chief. Professor Masaryk, now President of the Czechoslovak Republic, embracing the ancient kingdom of Bohemia. Stefanic was gifted with an extraordinarily keen sight, which, Tendered still more acute by his _ astronomical studies in Paris, caused him to devota his attention to the upper currents of the atmosphere, and when flying became pos-' sible he lost no time in qualifying as a' pilot, in order to verify his theoretical conclusions. On the outbreak of the war he immediately enlisted as a -private Jn the ranks of the French army. But before a couple of months were past he was recognised as a famous scientist, and otn tained without difficulty his transfer to the

air service, distinguishing himself repeatedly in aerial combats, winning one promotion and one honour after another, until brought low by the wounds from which he never entirely recovered. As soon as he was able to leave the hospital ho undertook a special mission from the French Government to Serbia at the time when her army was in retreat, and reached King Peter and Crown Prince Alexander by an airplane flight from Italy, across the Adriatic, and. across the Albanian mountains, landing with but a quarter of a gallon of petrol in the tank of his machine. In 1916 he was serving on the Italian front, dropping Czech leaflets among the Czech regiments of the Austrian army, and incidentally discovering the large concentration of AustroHungarian troops in the Trentino ready for the offensive of May, 1916. Thanks to this discovery, the then Italian Generalissimo, Cadorna, who had been in entire ignorance thereof, was enabled to take, although somewhat tardily, the necessary measures that ultimately checked the offensive. Then Stefanic was sent bv the French Government to America to recruit the hundreds of thousands of Czecho-Slovaks in the United States and Canada for service in France, and from here he was despatched to Siberia to bring courage, organisation, and assistance to the Czechoslovak war prisoners of Russia in Siberia, who, forming themselves into a proEntente army after the downfall of the Czar, did so much to save Siberia from being entirely subject to Bolshevism, and thereby a prey to Germany. In Siberia he accomplished wonders in the way of smoothing out hostility between the various rival factions of his fellow-country-men and of bringing about an understanding between them and the various antiBolshevik Russian commanders, notably Admiral Kolchak.