ealize the necessity for at least one gun
to a man and when the Bolsheviki, early in June, started to disarm them,
guns and rifles appeared from secret hiding places, to the extreme
consternation of the disarmers.

[Sidenote: Siberian Soviets delay the Czechs.]

[Sidenote: The Czechs overcome their captors.]

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 capt