There was one queer point which needs to be placed on record.  Admiral Koltchak observed that the Japanese were still causing him much trouble.  They had been unable to approach him personally but had been “getting at” his officers, whose business caused them to make frequent visits to the Ural front.  They made statements to the effect that the only state which was in a position to help Russia was Japan.  The other armies were war-weary and clamouring for demobilisation and therefore unwilling to fight the Bolsheviks.  If Admiral Koltchak was compelled to make a reasonable arrangement with Japan, their army would guarantee to liquidate the Bolshevik forces in two months and establish a monarchy satisfactory to the Russian officers.  This propaganda had reached the front, and had been referred to as assuming very serious importance by his front-line generals in their dispatches.  To counteract this pernicious influence, he was proposing to visit the front himself to point out the impossibility of Japan, as one of the Entente Allies, being able herself to execute such a programme.  I asked him how this propaganda began and who engineered it.  He answered:  “General Muto and a staff of twenty-six officers and intelligence assistants are working hard here in Omsk to influence Russian opinion in their direction.”  Finally the Supreme Governor said, “I make no complaint against these very excellent Japanese officers, they are only carrying out the orders of their political and military chiefs, but it makes my work of restoring order much more difficult.”

There were other little rifts within the lute.  The Russian officers are Royalist almost to a man, and will remain so, for they are all most childlike in their adherence to this principle.  Some gossip informs one of them that Prince Kuropotkin is still alive and has been seen on the Russian frontier.  “Oh!” he exclaims.  “Then the admiral will be handing over his power to Kuropotkin directly he hears the prince is alive!” Next day he may be told that the prince is not a soldier and his enthusiasm at once oozes out of his finger tips.  The next day some British supplies arrive, and then he is all for reliance upon the Allies.  A few days later, the Government not having been recognised by the Powers according to his wish, he curses the Powers and becomes morose.  The day following he hears in a restaurant that Demitri-Pavlovitch is hiding as a peasant in Siberia, and he is immediately in about the same ecstatic condition as the shepherds who beheld the Star over Bethlehem.  Every possible—­or impossible—­person under the sun becomes to him a potential saviour of his country; never does he think how he and his comrades themselves might save her.  The Russian officer, indeed, is “just a great, big, brave, lovable baby, and nothing else.”  “Gulliver’s Travels” ought to have an immense circulation should it ever be translated into the Russian language.  The “Arabian Nights” appears as an unimaginative narrative of humdrum events compared with the stories in current circulation in Omsk and Siberia generally.