I take this opportunity to renew the expression of my profound appreciation of the interest you take in our situation and of the valuable assistance you so generously offer in this most important matter of pacification of the labouring classes in Russia.

Yours sincerely,

(Signed) A. KOLTCHAK.

Lt.-Colonel JOHN WARD, M.P., C.M.G.,
Commanding 25th Bn.  Middlesex Regiment.

This is believed to be the first correspondence ever conducted by the head of any Russian Government upon a purely labour subject.  It shows that in supporting Admiral Koltchak we had at least this fact to recommend our policy:  that he was a democrat, and anxious that his country should be in labour matters amongst the first flight of nations.

The question now to be solved was:  What attitude would the anarchist adopt to this new evangelism?

I was ready to start on my journey when there began such a blizzard as is occasionally described in the literature of Polar exploration.  For forty-eight hours from the south came a furious gale.  It was not too cold, only about twenty degrees of actual frost, but with the wind came blinding snow—­not snow such as we see in England, but fine snow, like white dust.  It beat on your face, found its way between the flaps of your head-covers, where it thawed and ran down your neck and chest and saturated your underwear.  It smashed straight on to your eyeballs, and froze in cakes to your eyelashes and cheeks, so that in five or ten minutes you were blind and unable to find your way or move in any direction.  All sentries had to be withdrawn and sent to the nearest shelter, for it was impossible to locate oneself or see a building till you blundered up against it.  A note in my diary records that “a guard of eighteen Russians and one officer walked away from their post and have not been seen since, and six days have passed.”  Roofs were torn off the houses, and the strongest buildings rocked in a most alarming manner.  The snow piled itself up against the houses till it covered the windows on the ground floors and half-way up those of the second.  This southern gale took twenty-four hours in which to blow itself out, and a four days’ calm followed, during which the snow was cleared from the railway and traffic resumed.  The next startler was a message from Irkutsk stating that a terrific gale was breaking down from the north—­a recoil from the one just described—­accompanied with sixty degrees of actual frost, making it impossible to live out of doors.  This storm struck Omsk on February 20, and no words can describe the complete obliteration of man and all his works accomplished by such a gale.  Nothing can live in the intense cold created by such a wind.  Hence movement and life cease, and King Frost has the whole field to himself.  In a few hours the earth is levelled; all the indications remaining of the ordinary log dwellings are a few snow-banks with a row of dark posts from which smoke is emitted, showing that there are human habitations underneath.  By February 22 this storm had worked itself out and we were able to proceed.