The reason for their being in the district of the Urals is one part of the romance of their adventurous life.  Out across Siberia, near the Manchurian frontier, during April and May, the Cossack General Semenoff was operating.  He had closed to traffic the Trans-Siberian line by way of Harbin, so that the first twelve thousand Czechs had had to use the single track Amur Railway line to the north by way of Khabarovsk.  By May 4 an international proletariat army thoroughly mercenary in character and numbering possibly three thousand men, largely Austrian prisoners of war, was enlisted to repulse Semenoff from the region of the railway junction at Karuimskaya.  Obviously since it was known that the Czechs were financed by France and that France favored intervention in Siberia it was indiscreet to allow thousands of Czech soldiers whose bravery was unquestioned to pass within fourteen miles of the army under the command of Semenoff.  Fictitious floods on the Amur and some well-founded stories of the poor condition of the single track Amur line were conjured up by the Siberian Soviets as a reason for temporarily preventing the Czechs from proceeding to France.  The only real service performed by Semenoff’s provocative army of mercenaries and Chinese and Japanese irregulars, was the indirect one of detaining the Czechs in Siberia, a service on which the Cossack leader never figured.  There is no question but that to get to France was the sincere desire of the Czechs and there was no suggestion that their forces could be or desired to be used in Siberia.  Having left the Austrian army rather than fire on their brother Slavs the Czechs could scarcely be expected to have much enthusiasm for fighting Russians over an ill-defined intervention program through thousands of miles of Siberia.  Chafing under the enforced delay, these soldiers insisted that they be allowed to proceed to France.  This seemed out of the question to the Bolsheviki whose only alternative was to disarm them.  The Czechs who had carefully avoided any aggression upon Russians until then, immediately set up a stout resistance, quickly overcoming their would-be captors and thus almost miraculously putting the small force which had then probably reached one hundred thousand men in control of thousands of miles of railway reaching from Novo Nikolayevsk to Tcheliabinsk and thence along the two branches leading to Ekaterinburg and Zlatoust.  This virtually established an economic boundary between Siberia and Russia along the line of the Urals, since the unsettled condition of the country makes the railway the only practicable line of communication.

[Sidenote:  How control of the railway is secured.]

[Sidenote:  The Russian peasants friendly.]