onvenience. And it was in such cars that some of Russia's
severest critics traveled. The other way was intimate travel with the
common herd. I started thus. It was at Irtishevo, a junction point near
the lower Volga, that I changed. In a crowded station in the Russian
disorder, I suddenly found myself looking into the eyes of a spirited,
smiling young officer, who had evidently learned that I was an American
journalist and who was explaining to me in three languages that there
was no way out of my riding to Vladivostok with his military train. He
wore a red and white ribbon. His alert bearing and enthusiasm marked him
in the numbers of nondescript soldiers who were still traveling in the
Russian chaos of last spring. I was about to protest mildly in French
when three of his fellow soldiers of fortune seized my baggage, carried
it around a countless number of trains and stowed it away in a
compartment from which another officer, warned of our arrival just in
time, was removing his personal effects. He may have stood up all night.
Anyway, I was a quite willing captive on one of the forty odd trains of
the Czecho-Slovaks which had started to cross Russia and Siberia to
fight for their liberty in France.

My friend was of medium height, well knit, deep chested, smart in
bearing. The red and white ribbon on his cap was the badge of the
Czechs. Before I had left them at Vladivostok five weeks later I could
have picked a Czech out from any crowd by his air of determination
backed by an enthusiastic good cheer which everywhere won its way from
Austrian prisoner to warmhearted Russian peasant woman. All that night I
heard them singing in that splendid, low, group chorus of theirs along
the entire line of the train.

[Sidenote: The Czechs are finely disciplined.]

I found these finely disciplined fellows next morning sitting in the
doorways of their freight cars. Some were playing on violins they had
whittled out in the prison camps. The future of their cross country
jaunt to the Pacific worried them not at all. They had fought their way
out of the Ukraine, where German elements had tried to stop them. As
former citizens of the Central Powers, they were quite happy in the
chance to fight again for what their ancestors of five centuries before
had stood. Bolsheviks there were among them. But a Czech Bolshevik
differs from a Russian in that he shaves and thinks before he acts.
Never have I seen more sharp salutes or stricter disc