to confer with all the military authorities and even with the Tsar. As a curious detail I may mention that the Tsar sent me, through Štefánik, very friendly greetings and urged me to go on with my policy—this at a time when the Russian Ministry of the Interior was playing off Dürich against me! Part of Štefánik’s work in Russia was to neutralize the exaggerations of Dürich and some of Dürich’s friends. For this work he had also the authorization of the French Government. With Dürich he sought to reach an agreement by the so-called Protocol of Kieff.
From Russia, Štefánik went at the end of 1916 to the Roumanian front, where he organized many hundreds of our prisoners of war for service in France. There they arrived in the summer of 1917. He himself returned in January 1917 to Russia and thence to Paris, staying with me in London on the way. In Paris he kept in constant touch with Southern Slavs and Italians; and from Paris went again to Rome. The summer (June–October) of 1917 found him in America for the purpose of enrolling Czech and Slovak volunteers. He hoped to get a lot of them but was disappointed. On the other hand, he won Roosevelt for our cause. His strength of character may be judged from the fact that when, on the day of his departure from New York for Europe, he was taken seriously ill after a big meeting in the Carnegie Hall, he had himself carried to the ship on a stretcher. He was then hurrying back to Italy, as far as I remember.
From April 1918 onwards he was again in Italy, where he took part in the Congress of Oppressed Austro-Hungarian Races; and, after effective propaganda, he concluded with the Italian Prime Minister, Orlando, the Conventions of April 21 and June 80 of that year. On September 6 he came to me in Washington on his way to join our army in Siberia with the French officer, General Janin, who was to command it. His original intention was to bring our army back from Siberia to Europe by way of Turkestan, the Black Sea and the Mediterranean—the existence of a Russian railway through Central Asia, and the Allied operations against the Turks in Asia Minor evidently suggested this idea to him—but he recognized that the plan was impracticable and, in February 1919, he returned from Russia to Paris, where he secured the support of Marshal Foch for the transport of our army to Europe by way of Vladivostok. In Paris, too, he convinced many people that the Russians were incapable of an offensive against the Bolsheviks. Then, in the spring of 1919, he
