A very tense condition of affairs existed, when on January 31 I asked for a special interview with Admiral Koltchak that I might introduce my colleague and comrade, Colonel Johnson, and talk over the situation. The admiral was out walking by the river, quite unattended, but in full view of the guard at his residence near the river bank. It was his first walk since his illness, and he looked quite recovered. The talk naturally veered round to the Allied declaration in favour of the Bolsheviks and the situation it had created in Omsk. The admiral's attitude was quite simple. "We can talk and make compact with every party and Government in the different districts of Russia, but to compromise with Bolshevism, or shake the hand, or sit down and treat as equals the men who are outraging and murdering the Russian people—never! No decent Allied Government acquainted with the facts would ever expect it."
I asked him to consider the question as in no way decided by the Paris message, that I felt sure there must be some points connected with the decision that required further elucidation. "Yes!" said the admiral. "There must be some facts with which we are not acquainted, for while the British Government advise an arrangement with the Bolsheviks they continue to furnish me with generous supplies for the Russian Army." I left quite satisfied that he still retained his faith in the friendship of England.
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.
The two following extracts from my diary record incidents which occurred at this time.
"February 1, 1919. Last night three Bolshevik conspirators entered the officers' quarters of the 1st and 2nd Siberian Regiment disguised as Russian soldiers. The first intimation outside that anything was wrong was rapid revolver shots inside. The sentry captured one of the imitation soldiers as he tried to escape from the building. In less than two minutes the conspirators had shot five officers, two of whom were mortally wounded in the stomach. One conspirator was shot dead, one was captured, one got away. The knout was applied to the prisoner, and at the hundredth stroke he gave the whole conspiracy away. Over fifty arrests followed his confession, with the result that all is again quiet in Omsk."
"February 3, 1919. Lieutenant Munro has just arrived at Omsk from Vladivostok with comforts from the ladies at Shanghai, Hong-Kong and Singapore. Words fail to describe the feelings of both officers and men as they received these tokens of love and remembrance from their own countrywomen in this cold inhospitable climate. It is a beautiful feeling, and though the actual work performed is the effort of a few, the whole sex receives a crude sort of deification from these womanly acts. The way one of the commonest Tommies looked at a small wash-flannel that had evidently been hemmed by hands unused to work of any description, and asked me if I would give the lady his thanks, would have gone to the heart of the fair but unknown worker could she have witnessed it.
"I heard news of general insubordination among the Canadian troops that had just arrived at Vladivostok. If all the information received could be relied upon, the sooner they were shipped back to Canada the better. There is enough anarchy here now without the British Government dumping more upon us. I can see that it is a great mistake to mix Canadians and British troops in one Brigade. Naturally, British soldiers carry out orders; if other troops do not, then the British troops have to do all the work. The situation produced is that the highest paid soldier does no work and the lowest paid all the work. It soon percolates to the slowest Sussex brain that discipline does not pay. Nothing but the wonderful sense of order in the make-up of the average Englishman has prevented us from becoming an Anglo-Canadian rabble, dangerous to Bolshevik and Russian alike. I am told that Brigadier Pickford had done his best to maintain order and discipline in his ranks; that he had been compelled to make very awkward promises to his troops which having been made had to be fulfilled. In all the circumstances it was generally agreed that the proper thing to have done was to send the Canadians home to their farms, and leave the few Britishers who were there to carry on. We had established excellent relations with the Russians which it would have been a thousand pities to spoil."