the Eastern Front and possibly might play its feeble remnants of
military forces on the side of the Germans. The Allied Supreme Council
at Versailles decided that the other allies must go to the aid of their
old ally Russia who had done such great service in the earlier years of
the war. On the Russian war front Germany must be made again to feel
pressure of arms. Organization of that front would have to be made by
efforts of the Allied Supreme War Council.

They had some forces to build on. Several thousand Czecho-Slovak troops
formerly on the Eastern Front had been held together after the
dissolution of the last Russian offensive in 1917. Their commander had
led them into Siberia. Some at that time even went as far as
Vladivostok. These troops had desired to go back to their own country or
to France and take part in the final campaign against the Germans. There
was no transportation by way of the United States. Negotiations with the
Bolshevist rulers of Russia, the story runs, brought promises of safe
passage westward across central Russia and then northward to Archangel,
thence by ship to France.

This situation in mind the Allied Supreme War Council urged a plan
whereby an Allied expedition of respectable size would be sent to
Archangel with many extra officers for staff and instruction work, to
meet the Czechs and reorganize and re-equip them, rally about them a
large Northern Russian Army, and proceed rapidly southward to reorganize
the Eastern Front and thus draw off German troops from the hard pressed
Western Front. This plan was presented to the Allied Supreme War Council
by a British officer and politician fresh from Moscow and Petrograd and
Archangel, enthusiastic in his belief in the project.

The expedition was to be large enough to proceed southward without the
Czechs, sending them back to the West by the returning ships if their
morale should prove to be too low for the stern task to be essayed on
the restored Eastern Front. General Poole, the aforementioned British
officer in command, seems to have been very sure that the Bolsheviks who
had so blandly agreed to the passage of the Czechs through the country
would not object to the passage of the expedition southward from
Archangel, via Vologda, Petrograd and Riga to fight the Germans with
whom they, the Bolsheviki, had compacted the infamous Brest-Litovsk
treaty.

All this while, remember, the old allies of Russia had preserved a
studied neutrality t