agreement with any joint Allied manifesto in our favour which might be made. I therefore asked him that, should there be any negotiations with the Allies on this subject, Great Britain might not oppose an Allied collective manifesto of this kind.
I negotiated also with Lord Robert Cecil, to whom I submitted the same demands. The negotiations at once took a very favourable turn. Lord Robert considered the possibility of a political manifesto which would apply to our nation and our army, and he linked this up with the general question of the use of our troops within the scope of Allied military operations as a whole. He took the view that a manifesto of this kind could not be regarded as a promise that fighting would be continued until we were liberated (as in the case of Belgium), but merely the eventual recognition of the sovereignty of the National Council and of our army as an Allied army. I expressed my agreement with this conception of the situation.
The decisive negotiations with Lord Robert Cecil on the subject of political recognition and the utilization of our army took place on May 15th and 17th, when I explained our point of view to him: The Czechoslovak National Council had made an arrangement with France by which our troops, numbering about 30,000 at a minimum, were to be transferred to that country. We insisted upon carrying this out, although we were to fight also on the Eastern front if it should be renewed. The transport of these troops, however, would have to be taken into account, and in this respect Britain, in particular, was to afford assistance. In view of the precarious conditions of our troops in Siberia, it was desirable that they should receive moral encouragement by a solemn declaration recognizing the unity of our army on all fronts. This would acknowledge us as Allies on an equal footing with the rest of the minor Allies.
In my decisive interview with Lord Robert Cecil on May 15th, when for the first time he admitted the possibility that Great Britain would recognize us as Allies actually during the war, it seemed to me that there was a marked divergency of views between France and Britain as regards our Siberian army. France, needing at home every possible soldier, took her stand upon the resolutions passed at Abbeville, and demanded the transfer of our Siberian army to the Western Front. The British, as I then conjectured, fearing the pressure of the Bolsheviks eastward, had, for the time being, exhibited merely a tendency to maintain our troops in Eastern Siberia chiefly to limit the
