German and Austrian Governments were urging the Soviets to disarm the Czechoslovaks in accordance with the terms of the Brest-Litovsk peace treaty. It would have best suited the wishes of these Governments if the Czechoslovak Army had been demoralized, disorganized by attacks from gangs of prisoners, or even scattered and possibly added to the ranks of the Communists. They would, in fact, have welcomed anything likely to prevent our troops from reaching France. All this led to ever-increasing conflicts on the railway route along which our army was advancing, and these conflicts were intensified by the anarchy within Russia, and the inability of the Central Government to compel the local Soviets to adopt a uniform course of action against the Czechoslovaks.
It cannot be doubted that at first the Soviet Government was actuated by a sincere endeavour to assist our army in proceeding as quickly as possible from Russia and Siberia to France. But it had no confidence in our troops, continually fearing as it did their intervention in internal affairs. Hence the demand for their disarmament, the main purpose of which was to minimize this manifest danger to the Soviets. Later on Trotsky, and especially our Communists, hoped that it would be easy to disorganize and bolshevize the disarmed troops. It was naturally an attractive undertaking for the Bolshevik doctrinaires to prevent the transport of our troops to France, and thus to make it impossible for them to have any further share in the imperialistic bourgeois war of Western Europe.
From the development of events it is clear that if the Soviet authorities had straightforwardly assisted us in our journey eastward, the instructions and aims of the Allied representatives in Siberia would not have been modified, nor would there have been any partial intervention by Japan. The mutual distrust between the Bolsheviks and ourselves, the misunderstandings to which it gave rise, the later insincere and ambiguous policy of the Soviet authorities, with the resulting misgivings of our troops as to the safety of the whole army—all this inevitably resulted in warfare. If the actions of all the parties concerned are closely scrutinized, it is impossible not to assign the original and main responsibility for the whole conflict to the Soviet Government and its representatives.
Thus it was that, in the second half of July, the idea of a Siberian intervention had come to a head among the Allies. President Wilson, after some hesitation and after making
