Any history student knows that in 1915 the Russians tried to cross the Carpathian Mountains into the plain of Hungary and that they were unsuccessful. Very few know that among the defenders was an Austrian infantry officer, Hans Kohn, who three decades later would be teaching government at the Harvard University Summer School. Though the Russians were turned back, he and his company were captured and were sent as prisoners of war to a summer Cossack camp in Turkestan.

For the next four years Kohn was shipped up and down the whole continent of Asia, where he got a taste of Russian prison camps from the Ural Mountains to the Pacific Ocean. His Russian captors gave him surprising liberties, which included catching malaria and typhoid fever with only the help of a broken down Czech dentist to pull him through. For two years after the Bolshevik Revolution, he was imprisoned in the Siberian cities of Novosibersk and two other unpronounceable locations. Kohn, who just before the war had completed law school in Prague, acquired his first teaching experience in these cities. Among the 10,000 prisoners was a large number of university professors and college students who organized a miniature university within the prison walls. Kohn taught history, government, and philosophy, which, combined with his almost storybook adventures, gave him a perfect background for his later writings and teachings.

Kohn's travels sent him zigzagging across Europe as he had covered the map of Asia. Leaving Vladivostok in 1920, he returned for a few months to his home in Prague, a free man for the first time in five years. Then he went to Paris and finally London, where for four years he had access to the historical wealth of the British Museum. In 1925 he traveled to Palestine, where he continued first hand his study of the history and politics of the Near and Middle East. From Palestine he came in 1931 to the United States and since 1934 has been the outstanding lecturer in the history department at Smith College.

Perhaps more famous as a writer than a teacher, Professor Kohn has just completed "World Order in Historical Perspective," and with the help of a Guggenheim fellowship is in the process of writing a monumental four-volume "History of Nationalism." He teaches Government 18 (The Struggle for World Empire) and gives weekly lectures in current events at the Harvard Summer School.

Like all men who know what they are talking about, Kohn says emphatically that at present we are losing the war, but he feels that what we need is neither optimism nor pessimism but a grim determination. From one who has spent the greater part of his life studying the history and workings of nationalism comes the somewhat surprising statement that militarism and aggression are not at all inherent in the German people. Kohn feels that our greatest mistake in 1918 was the failure of the Allies to destroy forever the prestige of the German militarists. If this time every German is absolutely convinced that his nation is completely and utterly defeated, Kohn believes that the rampant nationalism of the 19th and early 20th centuries may yet be replaced by a lasting system of collective security. A little paradoxical, perhaps, is his greatest wish-that the phenomenon about which he has written and studied all his life will soon be a thing of the past.