Last March there were two ways to travel in Russia.  If one was an American—­relief worker, correspondent, Y.M.C.A. man—­one could get a private car.  Many Americans rode that way for a trifling cost and without inconvenience.  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 discipline, and these men were in Russia where discipline was a curiosity.  A Czech is so anxious to accomplish that he is willing to discipline himself.  When a Czech marches, he marches irresistibly.  In theory, he may be a Socialist.  In action, he is a patriot.