soldiers and war materials. The natural shortage of cars, resulting from such uninterrupted use without sufficient time for repairs, was now aggravated by continued railway strikes west of the Urals, which held up the traffic so effectively that army evacuation trains would have been compelled to remain in the sidings at Siberian stations, where, with the inevitable shortage of food in sufficient quantities for such numbers of men, there would naturally have developed revolts, robberies and struggles. Owing to all these causes, General Linievitch was forced to retain the army in Ssupingkai and to make what slight progress he could by sending the men back in small groups by the regular trains.
The army had by this time, of course, learned about the peace which had been made at Portsmouth through the intervention of America's great President, Theodore Roosevelt, and was awaiting with impatience a speedy return to Russia. This delay in the evacuation angered and antagonized the soldiers to a degree which manifested itself in some regiments in the form of revolts that brought much trouble and concern to the High Command.
Though during these first weeks life in Harbin was comparatively quiet, we were not destined to remain passive witnesses to the great tragedy that was being enacted on the vast stage of Russia from the Austro-German frontier to the shores of the Pacific. On November 23, 1905, the Railroad Union in Harbin received a telegram from the Central League of Unions at Moscow, announcing that at one o'clock on the night of the 24th a general strike of all railway, postal and telegraph employees would begin, to support the demand for the abolition of the death penalty so lavishly dealt out by the specially instituted field tribunals in Poland and Finland and the
