to France surrendered its weapons to the Soviet authorities. With the exception of General Dieterichs, who was accompanying the Corps to France, the officers have been dismissed.
This news is good. The corps going to France needs no weapons, as it will be armed again in France. The officers in question are Russian officers who had joined our army.
To the French Ambassador, M. Regnault, I expressed verbally the same views. At the English Embassy I heard what was happening in Europe. I called also upon the Japanese Foreign Minister. At that time the Japanese, naturally, knew little about us, and I gave the Secretary of the provisional Shidehara Cabinet a memorandum in Russian, and asked the British and the American Ambassadors to use their influence on our behalf with the Japanese Government. We needed Japanese help for the transport of our men from Vladivostok onwards, eventually across Japan, and for supplies of clothing, boots and other things that were unobtainable in Russia and Siberia. Everywhere I raised the question of getting ships.
In Japan, as elsewhere, I was in touch with the press—and had, for some days, trouble with the Tokio police, whom my English passport perplexed. The newspapers called me by my name, whereas the passport was made out in another name. It was not surprising that it took the Japanese police a few days to clear up the discrepancy, for in London the same thing happened to me. There, my passport bore my own name but had been issued by Serbia, and the police could not understand how this fitted in with the facts of the case. I had already lectured at London University; the Prime Minister, Mr. Asquith, had sent one of his colleagues to introduce me to my audience; but the police of my quarter were uneasy for days. St. Bureaucras is the same everywhere—though the officials were quite right to do their duty.
While in Japan I read the well-known speech of the Austro-Hungarian Foreign Minister, Count Czernin, of April 2. His personal attack did not surprise me. The important point was that the former French Prime Minister, Painlevé, and especially Clemenceau, should have answered so categorically the Austrian falsehoods about Austria’s peace proposals, and that the letter written by Prince Sixtus of Bourbon on March 31, 1917, should be published. Austria lied, the behaviour of the Emperor Charles himself was unseemly and pusillanimous, and the affair ended with Czernin’s resignation on April 15th. As
