Vladivostok.
I started from Moscow at 8 p.m. on March 7, 1918, and reached Vladivostok by the Trans-Siberian railway through Saratof and Samara. I travelled in a third-class ambulance car, sleeping on a sort of mattress which I had bought at Moscow. The carriage was full of English people who were going to Europe. The time passed in observing Siberia, in reading, in finishing my little book, “The New Europe,” and especially in procuring daily bread. We had to buy our food wherever we stopped. Nevertheless, travelling in Siberia was better than in European Russia. We often waited long in railway stations and between stations. The carriages, as well as the engines and the permanent way, were out of order. There was, for instance, a long wait at Amazar, for we had been warned in time that two trains ahead of us had collided and that the line was damaged. At Irkutsk we stayed a whole day and were able to look at the town and buy things. I collected whatever current literature and older publications I could get, as well as local newspapers and pamphlets. Klecanda sent me several telegrams, in cypher and otherwise.
The British Mission was accompanied from Kieff to Vladivostok by a Bolshevist guard of four soldiers. With their leader I had daily discussions on Socialism and the social question. They were curious Socialists and still more curious Communists.
At Vladivostok I spent a day seeing my fellow-countrymen, visiting the Czech “Palacký" Club and, above all, at the Post and Telegraph Office. Fellow-travellers took a number of letters to Europe for me and I sent telegrams to Paris, London and America. At Vladivostok I received news of the Allies which supplemented what I had learned during the journey by telegram and from Siberian newspapers. It was an anxious moment. The great German offensive in the West had begun on March 21, 1918, while I was travelling, and the Bolshevist papers in Siberia had naturally made the most of the French and, especially, of the British reverse. As far as our own army was concerned, the chief thing in my eyes was that the fighting with the Germans near Bachmatch was finished and that, after the march of our divisions from the Ukraine into Russia they had, on March 16, voluntarily handed over a proportion of their arms. On March 26 a treaty was signed with the Bolshevists guaranteeing our men an unmolested passage to Siberia and Vladivostok. True, this had been already agreed
