This frequent misdirection by the Supreme Council, however one may explain it, created an electric state of the political atmosphere among all nations whose interests were set down or treated as "limited," and more than one of them, as we saw, contemplated striking out a policy of passive resistance. As a matter of fact some of them timidly adopted it more than once, almost always with success and invariably with impunity. It was thus that the Czechoslovaks--the most docile of them all--disregarding the injunctions of the Conference, took possession of contentious territory,[178] and remained in possession of it for several months, and that the Jugoslavs occupied a part of the district of Klagenfurt and for a long time paid not the slightest heed to the order issued by the Supreme Council to evacuate it in favor of the Austrians, and that the Poles applied the same tactics to eastern Galicia. The story of this last revolt is characteristic alike of the ignorance and of the weakness of the Powers which had assumed the functions of world-administrators. During the hostilities between the Ruthenians of Galicia and the Poles the Council, taunted by the press with the numerous wars that were being waged while the world's peace-makers were chatting about cosmic politics in the twilight of the Paris conclave, issued an imperative order that an armistice must be concluded at once. But the Poles appealed to events, which swiftly settled the matter as they anticipated. Neither the Supreme Council nor the agents it employed had a real grasp of the east European situation, or of the rôle deliberately assigned to Poland by its French sponsors--that of superseding Russia as a bulwark against Germany in the East--or of the local conditions. Their action, as was natural in these circumstances, was a sequence of gropings in the dark, of incongruous behests, exhortations, and prohibitions which discredited them in the eyes of those on whose trust and docility the success of their mission depended.