and many old wrongs and private wounds demanded liquidation. I
made many journeys to outlandish villages and settlements, with a small
personal escort, fixed a table in the centre of the street, and with the
aid of the parish priest and the president of the local council, heard
and decided disputes, public and private, from threats and injury to the
person to the possession and occupation of a farm. There was no
appeal--the stolid Tommies who stood behind me with fixed bayonets put
my judgments beyond question. I remitted one or two points of property
law to legal decision, but all parties in each case protested that they
would have preferred my instant judgment. Three murderers I remitted to
a court which I called together with an old Russian officer to preside,
but he was so terrified at the prospect of having to order their
execution for fear they might be Bolsheviks--whose name was a terror to
everybody--that I had to send them to another district to enable the law
to be carried out. The report of these proceedings spread with such
rapidity that it became quite embarrassing, if not impossible, to deal
effectively and thoroughly with the daily increasing number of
litigants. I began to understand the reason why in more civilised
communities legal proceedings are made so expensive. Either the Russian
peasant is a most litigious person, or else he mistook a free system of
justice as a healthy English pastime which he thoroughly enjoyed.

It was extremely flattering to be told that these people preferred that
the "Anglisky Polkovnika Boorpg" should decide their disputes than that
they should be reserved for a Russian tribunal. It was the most
interesting work I had so far done in the country. The trial of even the
simplest case gave me many insights to Russian institutions and
character that only years of book study could otherwise have
accomplished. I learnt the difference between the right of the peasant
holder as compared with that of the Cossack circle. The law of the
forest afforded an education in itself. The intimate relationship of
Russian family life, from the highest to the lowest, was constantly laid
bare before me with all its romance and mediaeval trappings and its
sordid substratum of violence and superstition. In fact, I became so
interested in this work that it was with the greatest regret that I
relinquished it for a more urgent and important call.

The Allied forces in the Transbaikal had now accompli