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an action against the Bolsheviks, I would have fought against it with every inch of my energy firstly from the humanitarian point of view, which one had never the right to forget, even in war time, and further, as I repeat, from the French point of view. That is a point upon which I wish to lay emphasis in the clearest possible manner. What I accidentally learned at the meeting at the American Consulate-General shocked and revolted me to the last degree, by throwing a completely new light on the real plans of our representatives as well as the „diplomatico-military“ procedures by which they proposed to support intervention and „to bring it rapidly to a successful end“. No longer against German Imperialism (for they no longer discussed that question), not even,—I have a full right to say so,—against the Bolsheviks, as they themselves boasted but simply and in fact, whether they fully understood what they were doing or not,—against the unfortunte Russian people themselves, whom it had always been only a question of „aiding fraternally as far as possible!“ Without doubt, this meeting was not, as I have already pointed put, an „official conference“: it bore the character of a private business conversation: but that does not alter and never can alter in the least that, in the presence of the official representatives of the United States and of France, Consul-General Poole and Grenard, without being reproved for one single instant by the latter, an English officer (whom the Extraordinary Commission for combatting counter-revolution later on identified, without any doubt whatever, as Lieutenant Riley) was able to explain to a French agent the details of a
