We also began painfully to piece together the broken structure of human society.  For over a year no law but force had been known in these regions, and many old wrongs and private wounds demanded liquidation.  I made many journeys to outlandish villages and settlements, with a small personal escort, fixed a table in the centre of the street, and with the aid of the parish priest and the president of the local council, heard and decided disputes, public and private, from threats and injury to the person to the possession and occupation of a farm.  There was no appeal—­the stolid Tommies who stood behind me with fixed bayonets put my judgments beyond question.  I remitted one or two points of property law to legal decision, but all parties in each case protested that they would have preferred my instant judgment.  Three murderers I remitted to a court which I called together with an old Russian officer to preside, but he was so terrified at the prospect of having to order their execution for fear they might be Bolsheviks—­whose name was a terror to everybody—­that I had to send them to another district to enable the law to be carried out.  The report of these proceedings spread with such rapidity that it became quite embarrassing, if not impossible, to deal effectively and thoroughly with the daily increasing number of litigants.  I began to understand the reason why in more civilised communities legal proceedings are made so expensive.  Either the Russian peasant is a most litigious person, or else he mistook a free system of justice as a healthy English pastime which he thoroughly enjoyed.

It was extremely flattering to be told that these people preferred that the “Anglisky Polkovnika Boorpg” should decide their disputes than that they should be reserved for a Russian tribunal.  It was the most interesting work I had so far done in the country.  The trial of even the simplest case gave me many insights to Russian institutions and character that only years of book study could otherwise have accomplished.  I learnt the difference between the right of the peasant holder as compared with that of the Cossack circle.  The law of the forest afforded an education in itself.  The intimate relationship of Russian family life, from the highest to the lowest, was constantly laid bare before me with all its romance and mediaeval trappings and its sordid substratum of violence and superstition.  In fact, I became so interested in this work that it was with the greatest regret that I relinquished it for a more urgent and important call.

The Allied forces in the Transbaikal had now accomplished their task of dispersing the forces of lawlessness, and had made some progress in the work of administration, but if this work was to be consolidated and made of permanent value it must be given a centre, other than the Allied command, around which it could rally and to which it might reasonably look for guidance and support.  The Siberian Government had been established