T

ELL the average American that Siberia looks like the middlewestern United States and he will firmly believe he is being buffaloed. A wildly beautiful virgin country, wooded hills, beautiful lakes and rivers, rolling prairie, frowning mountains-no, Siberia is not a place of perpetual ice and snow at all. It is a great overgrown replica of the United States as the United States was fifty years ago.

And the analogy of Siberia to America is startling. For Boston there is Vladivostok. For the Appalachian range we have the long line of mountains running down from Kamchatka to North China. For the St. Lawrence there is the Amur River. For the Great Lakes there is Lake Baikal, and on the western side of the lower end of Baikal, for Chicago there is the city of Irkutsk.

But the analogy does not stop there. From Irkutsk westward comes the great rolling prairie section. For Kansas City there is Omsk. For Denver there is Ekaterinburg. The Urals will take the place of the Rockies. Thence on into European Russia and for San Francisco on the coast there is also Russia's coastal city, Petrograd. Only everything in Siberia is three times the size of the United States.

Just imagine a country three times the size of America and the people in it only twice the number there are in New York City. You begin to get some idea of the problem that confronts those who would revamp Siberia in a moment.

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It is about as easy to revamp Siberia in moment as it would have been to change the United States from what it was in 1849 to what it is in 1919-in a

moment.

I traveled over 8000 miles in central Siberia this last year. I went into the country with almost the first lot of

Japanese troops immediately the intervention had been decided upon. I was in there when the armistice was signed. Since returning home I have had many letters from friends whom I left up there among the soldiers and Red Triangle workers. What I have to say about Siberia and its problem and its future is therefore based on seeing Siberia with new eyes, free from prejudices, unbiased from racial contact with her people as they were before the war. Now that the censorship is off, I should like to say a few things about Siberia here at home which the boys that come back from there will say anyhow, and which may help us to understand the reasons for a great many things we read-or do not read-in the newspapers.

Germany and the Red Guards

Here is this great wildly beautiful country, so much like our United States

in appearance that if the Yank could meet a few church spires and factory chimneys in the landscape he wouldn't be homesick at all, rich beyond all dreams of wealth, peopled by a lot of Manchurian Chinamen and poor, ignorant peasants. At first the Allies went into Siberia to checkmate German activities in the Far East. Germany was using the Red Guards to pull her chestnuts out of the fire with the idea of grabbing all the country available for her to grab and which she stood a chance of retaining after the war was over. The Allies, hardpressed on all fronts, had to stop this at all costs with the handiest resources available. These resources last summer were three in number: The Czecho

Slovaks who had crossed Siberia from the Ukraine and arrived at Vladivostok on their way to France via America; the Japanese army, which had taken almost no part in the war worth the name and was out there in the vicinity ready for a hurry-up call for duty; and the American forces in the Philippines -this last being almost a negligible quantity.

The Czech army was already strung along the Trans-Siberian at strategic points, thereby holding the country at its mercy because whoever controls the Trans-Siberian controls Siberia. Being the best timber procurable as well as available for the job, they were ordered to

at that, if the Japanese had deported themselves as the soldiers of Britain, France, Czecho-Slovakia or the United States deported themselves. But they did not. They did not because they could not. They were Japanese at the core and no amount of foreign uniforms and foreign rifles could change them. They brought their racial habits, culture and antipathies with them. And things didn't go well-not a cent's worth.

Now one of the first racial characteristics of the Japanese when he gets out of his own country is to look on the rest of the world as Japan's back yard. The average Japanese is brought up to understand that Japan is the center of the universe and that all other countries revolve around Dai Nippon. It is provincialism of the worst and most malicious kind, mixed with a very great amount of racial conceit based on ignorance. In the at

straighten Siberia out temporarily, anyhow.

Then the Japanese were sent up to aid the Czechs. That was unfortunate. The Japanese are mighty fine boys-to those who have lived among them in Japan and understand them. But put them up in a strange country like Siberia, away from their own habitat and culture, and they are round pegs in square holes with no planes or sandpaper to make them fit in anywhere. The Jap is not a mixer. He can fight his own battles, but he can't lump it shoulder to shoulder with the other fellow of another race and do teamwork. He has never had to do it. It simply isn't in him. He talks a different language, eats a different menu, sleeps in a different fashion, has a different god and follows a different ideal. He's an odd stick, and I say it with all due sympathy and regard for a fine lot of Japanese people whom I have come to know in Japan.

Add to this handicap the racial antipathy left over from the Russian- PH. Japanese war, and we certainly have a Situation-with a capital S.

You can't make any Russian believe in the first place that the Japanese won that war fifteen years ago. What Japanese soldiers whipped was not Great Russia but one miserable halfdrunken army at the end of 6000 miles of single-track railroad that didn't give a hoot whether they fought or not. If they did fight it was because the Japanese were on the hill across the river shooting shells over among them and it was "kill or be killed." Thousands of them never knew what the war was about, anyhow. And even with Japan backed a wall, fighting for

to

her homes and firesides as the Japanese boys were, the belief exists all through the rank and file of the Russian people that if the war had gone on six months or a year more and Roosevelt had kept away from Portsmouth, Japan would have been whipped to a standstill. You can get out your histories and commentaries and try to argue this out. But that won't alter what the Russian people believe in their semi-illiterate way. Very good.

'Twixt Devil and Japan Sea

Up come the Japanese to help out the Czechs and what happens? Bad blood soon shows. The Siberian Russians tolerate the Japanese, first because they are one of the Allies fighting a common enemy-Germany. Second, because they can not help themselves.

But things wouldn't have been so bad,

control and submissive to the semi-divine monarchy, all sorts of clap-trap have been resorted to in training the minds of the young. And up into Siberia marched several thousand raw Japanese country boys all clothed in the same color and size uniform and carrying rifles, on the end of which were mighty business-like bayonets. I bunked with them for three months and I flatter myself I know something about their attitude toward Russia and the whole war. They had no interest in the war; half of them believed like their commanders for a long time, that Germany was due to win anyhow; they were out of place up there in the ice and snow that hit Siberia along in the middle of October, and underneath their stoical exterior was a distaste of the whole business and a disposition to take it out on the Russian people. With this curious hodge-podge of likes and dislikes and antipathies and racial characteristics, they joined with the white races in trying to checkmate Germany with the Russians caught between the devil and the deep blue Japan sea. Well, Otani was made commander-in

But the railroad is not reorganized

chief. Just why that was done, diplomacy can probably explain better than a third-rate newspaperman who had better keep his mouth shut and swallow whole what the censor handed him. But Otani was made commander-in-chief, and the Japanese soldiers went into the field to aid the Czechs. What resulted can best be visualized by picking up a handful of sand. The sand as a handful is something you can see, feel and swallow. But open your hand and every single grain and particle of that sand sifts down to the ground by itself. And that is what took place with the Allied military machine in Siberia. The Allied armies were up there, nominally under Otani, I believe. But the conglomeration of races was such that they couldn't understand

nor appreciate one another and they couldn't do team-work. That is, not naturally and spontaneously, like the soldiers of France, Great Britain, Italy and America from Flanders to the Alps. There was a want of lubricating oil everywhere, the whole aggravated by the uncertainty of what the Russian people themselves might do if they once took it into their heads to turn anti-Ally and start something.

When the Japs got up there in sufficient force to saw wood, the Czechs already were holding the Trans-Siberian in pretty fair shape excepting at a few points where the Bolsheviki had broken through temporarily. But they were not numerically strong and they were calling frantically for assistance. The Japanese came up a pretty awed and scared bunch of boys at first who saluted everything in a uniform that they saw on the streets of Vladivostok. And as there was a particularly aggravating lot of Bolsheviki in force just then along the Amur River (which I have likened to our St. Lawrence in its geographical position), the Japanese started northward to clean them up.

The Coming of the Yanks

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It wasn't much of a job-not as fighting went in the late war. It was mostly guerilla fighting done from trains. Á month saw most of it completed. And why not? The Japanese were wellequipped and trained, fighting a foe that was ignorant, disorganized, restive under discipline and yellow at heart. The Japanese lost some men and some of them suffered frightful mutilations, a fact which made them fanatical in vengeance. But they took the country and they occupied it. They acquired self-confidence and soon made the big Russians "walk turkey." Their attitude was: "Well, you've got your great, overgrown, bullying country into a hell of a mess, haven't you? Little Japan, that you always despised, has had to come up and fight your battles for you and straighten you out. Well, we'll straighten you out, all right, you big tea-drinking, bosch-eating lubbers Relatives at the prison portal. Note the shrine -we're in control here and if you want with the holy statue reanything, come and see us." moved by the Bolsheviki

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Bolshevik prisoners waiting for transportation, with the temperature forty degrees below

The cocky little five-foot soldiers, feeling their oats (or their rice) with the impertinence of small people who realize they are small, settled down among the Russians with all their bags and baggage like unwelcome relatives come to spend a visit of a year.

The bad blood cropped out. It was impossible to help it, for human nature is human nature the world over. And there was all kinds of enmity coming to the surface in minor scrapes and bawls when the Yanks came up from the Philippines.

Now the Yanks came up from the Philippines ostensibly to do America's share in the intervention and whip the Bolsheviki. But by the time they got there, no Bolsheviki were in sight to whip. The Czechs had the situation well in hand as far as Omsk; it was away down in Samara and the Ukraine that they couldn't hold back the Red Guards We from sheer weight of numbers. didn't have the troops to send way down there into the back door of European Russia and Japan couldn't send hers because of the difficulties in transportation and supply the Russian war situation reversed. So the Czechs had to sit on the ragged edge down there and do the best that they could-which, praise and all credit to them, they did and are doing to-day, principally using Fabian tactics. So the Yanks merely filled in the chinks there in eastern Siberia and acted as a sort of court-plaster proposition in trying to heal the sore between the Japanese and the Russians.

Two Important Factors

And Washington and Tokio gave it out that "all was well."

So the Allied armies settled down to winter there in Siberia, the Japanese at odds with the Russian people, the Czechs holding the fort all along the TransSiberian with some help from the British and French and some tardy help from America in the shape of clothing, medicines and supplies, and the Yanks making themselves useful on general principles, keeping the Japanese and the Russians sweet as far as possible and nobody knowing what the plan was or the purpose of the whole affair and everybody giving it out that the Peace Conference would explain and wind up everything.

T

TO-DAY the little boy who was peering over the top of the gate had something in his serious eyes quite different from the wistfulness and hungry wonder about the world outside that looked from them on ordinary days. It was expectancy, such a solemn, awed rapture of expectancy as would only be possible to a little boy who had waited all his small life for something to happen and was now about to realize his longing. The gate at the end of the damp graveled path was the one opening in the long line of cypress hedge, which had grown tall and prickly and forbidding as the thicket which enclosed the Sleeping Princess. There was the carriage gate, of course, but that had not been opened for so many years that vines and bushes had strayed from the untended beds and made a barricade across it. So all of the world that the little boy knew he saw over the top of this sagging wooden gate. By standing on the lower crossbar he could just rest his arms not too uncomfortably on its top rail.

The Blair place was on the outskirts of a rather sleepy little town, and the road past it was not much used, so there were not many exciting happenings to reward the watcher for his long vigils. All the neighboring houses stood like the Blair house in large gardens, and somehow, to the little boy's fancy, they seemed to be withdrawing themselves from him, not only behind their trees and hedges, but behind intangible barriers of respectability as well. He had felt for a long while, without in the least knowing how to put it into words, that he and his were in some strange, dark way separated and cut off from human kind.

Very likely Grandmother Blair would have objected to the child's standing on the gate, exposed to the glare of an imaginary publicity. But Grandmother Blair did not leave her room now. Aunt Agnes had found him on his watch-tower and by not ordering him down had tacitly made herself a party to his law-breaking. Aunt Agnes still worked a little among

some roses which had resisted the en

croachments of the wilding shrubs and the spreading shadow of the long untrimmed evergreens. She among her roses and Hugo on his gate were accustomed

now to smile at each other in an understanding way, under the blank eyes of the house front, where the windows had had their blinds pulled down ever since the little boy remembered. It was a bleak and sober kind of smile, of course, without laughter in it or any gleam of merriment. It did not show Aunt Agnes's dimple, which once upon a time used to deepen so alluringly in her soft cheek upon the least twinkle of amusement. But she was not amused now, naturally, and neither was Hugo, only each groped, as it were, for the human touch of the other in the deep shadow in which they both moved.

From the depths of the cab, like a butterfly from a chrysalis, came something bright and colorful

Beyond the arrival of the grocer and the butcher, the little boy's best hope hitherto had been that some country wagon would come rattling by, the dingy harness flapping on the big, later he had spoken. "Hello, youngster!" unkempt horses and a rancher on the seat were the words that warmed Hugo's heart. who, while he shook the reins over the necks The little boy's return "Hello" was deof the team, would turn his head to throw livered with an incongruously polite and a glance of furtive curiosity at the boy. Or solemn air. It set the key of their future sometimes people on foot would stroll intercourse, which was on a high level of that way, and when they saw him they mutual courtesy. A remark about the would whisper and stare over their shoul-weather-did Hugo think it favorable for ders in a fashion which somehow left him crops?-or a suggestion that the wind was shrinking and afraid. Lately, there had about right to-day for kites, and the brown arisen a brighter possibility-Hugo's man had strolled on. But he managed friend might pass. Hugo called him his to leave behind him, somehow, a warm friend, the tall brown man who had been assurance of good will and comradeship. strolling by almost every day for the last Hugo never failed to be at the gate at the few weeks. It had begun, this queer particular hour, marked by the slanting friendship, with the brown man's giving golden bars of sunlight, when the passing the boy a glance which was kind without of the brown man might be hoped for. being curious, so that Hugo had wished he would look at him again. A day or two

But this was not a day whereon some one of these things, or some other