Committee but some of my associates in the central body became panicky and recommended the blowing up of railway bridges to check Rennenkampf's advance after he should cross the Manchurian frontier. As these demands grew in insistency, I asked General Linievitch to endeavour to avert the catastrophe by stopping Rennenkampf. Linievitch properly sensed the impending disaster and issued orders that the approaching penal detachment was to turn back from Transbaikalia. This came as a distinct blow to the opposing forces, as the officers of the cruel General had already begun their investigations and the preparation of a list of revolutionary leaders, who were to be summoned before the military courts and, by natural consequence, shot. On this list it turned out that my name stood, contrary, alas, to all alphabetic precedence, in the first place.
The question led to a lively correspondence between General Linievitch and General Rennenkampf, who was operating under specially conferred powers. No one was prepared to foretell the outcome of it all, when a very unexpected event wrought a peculiar and entirely unanticipated solution. The son of a railway official, who had been shot by order of Rennenkampf, threw a bomb at the latter's car. Although the General happened at the moment not to be in the car and therefore escaped injury, he sensed through this act the element of personal danger and consequently acquiesced in the demand of Linievitch that he return to European Russia, thus relieving our Committee of the danger that was threatening us on the west.
The next battle in our struggle was that with the Little Committee, which was making ever-increasing use of anarchistic methods and was having its forces augmented by particularly efficient individuals smuggled through to
