so that the purchasing organisation in Ukraine, especially at first, suffered from a chronic lack of means of payment.

But, in any case, a better arrangement of the money question would only have improved matters in a few of the best supplied districts, for the principal obstacle was simply the lack of supplies.  The fact that Kieff and Odessa were themselves continually in danger of a food crisis is the best indication as to the state of things.

In the Ukraine, the effects of four years of war, with the resulting confusion, and of the destruction wrought by the Bolsheviks (November, 1917, to March, 1918) were conspicuously apparent; cultivation and harvesting had suffered everywhere, but where supplies had existed they had been partly destroyed, partly carried off by the Bolsheviks on their way northward.  Still, the harvest had given certain stocks available in the country, though these were not extensive, and the organisation of a purchasing system was now commenced.  The free buying in Ukraine which we and Germany had originally contemplated could not be carried out in fact, since the Ukrainian Government declared that it would itself set up this organisation, and maintained this intention with the greatest stubbornness.  But the authority in the country had been destroyed by the Revolution, and then by the Bolshevist invasion; the peasantry turned Radical, and the estates were occupied by revolutionaries and cut up.  The power of the Government, then, in respect of collecting supplies of grain, was altogether inadequate; on the other hand, however, it was still sufficient (as some actual instances proved) to place serious, indeed insuperable, obstacles in our way.  It was necessary, therefore, to co-operate with the Government—­that is, to come to a compromise with it.  After weeks of negotiation this was at last achieved, by strong diplomatic pressure, and, accordingly, the agreement of April 23, 1918, was signed.

This provided for the establishment of a German-Austro-Hungarian Economical Central Commission; practically speaking, a great firm of corn merchants, in which the Central Powers appointed a number of their most experienced men, familiar, through years of activity in the business, with Russian grain affairs.

But while this establishment was still in progress the people in Vienna (influenced by the occurrences on the Emperor’s journey to North Bohemia) had lost patience; military leaders thought it no longer advisable to continue watching the operations of a civil commercial undertaking in Ukraine while that country was occupied by the military, and so finally the General Staff elicited a decree from the Emperor providing that the procuring of grain should be entrusted to Austro-Hungarian army units in the districts occupied by them.  To carry out this plan a general, who had up to that time been occupied in Roumania, was dispatched