gained the upper hand in Russia in the early days of November, 1917.
The Bolsheviks cancelled the Russian treaties with the Allies and began at once to treat with the Central Powers on the question of a separate peace. Yet to the last moment the Czechoslovak army held out on the Russian front against the Germans and were ready to fight against the common enemy. Not until the ignominious and, for Russia, humiliating peace of Brest-Litovsk and the great invasion by the German and Austro-Hungarian armies of the Ukraine and Western Russia which ensued in the spring of 1918, was the small Czechoslovak army corps forced to beat a retreat eastwards, a retreat that was not uncontested. At Zhitomir in Volhynia and at Kiev the rearguard had many fights against the Germans. In the great battle at Bakhmach the whole Czechoslovak army corps fought its way after a hard struggle, but without incurring heavy losses, through the surrounding lines of the enemy. From there it was able to continue by rail in a huge convoy of about eighty trains, and to leave the Ukraine, which at that time was under the control of the Central Powers, for what was already Soviet territory farther east. As early as the autumn of 1917 the commanders of the Czechoslovak troops declared their neutrality in the party strife and civil war in Russia. It was emphasized that their aim was to recover Czechoslovak independence, and that they hoped to realize it by fighting on the side of the Allies against the Central Powers. They assured the Soviet Government, on whose territory they were, that they were not enemies, and asked only for permission to proceed through Soviet territory to Vladivostok,
