It is true that from the very beginning of the conflict the leading intelligence officers like Colonels Ralph Van Deman and Marlborough Churchill, the real moving spirits of the military intelligence branch of the General Staff, recognized the importance of the Slavic languages, and Colonel Graham D. Fitch included the Slavic languages among those handled in the Translation Section of which he was the chief. Yet on the whole, the Corps of Interpreters and other concerned branches and units paid little attention to them and nearly all the American agents in the Slavic territories were persons who had already known the languages. Even in the case of the Siberian and Archangel expeditions, the problem of interpreters was not placed on a firm basis. For some years after the War, almost all the officers and men in the State Department were persons who had served in these forces and had attained a certain amount of Russian or some other language without any formal training. The situation was the same in the committee formed by Colonel Edward House to study the peace settlement. It is true that most of the professors of Slavic were connected with this but it was very soon discovered that much of the available material could not be used unless it was in one of the Western languages or, in some cases, in Russian (and, of course, with a Russian bias). Thus the World War, and American participation in it, did not result in any marked increase in interest and there was for some years a strong feeling that a knowledge of the languages was secondary. The old divisions between language and the historical sciences were still perpetuated, gradually breaking down between the wars. It is true that after the War, the War Department made a half-hearted attempt to train certain regular officers in various subjects with a possible eye for making them instructors in West Point. These included two men who had been on the Siberian Expedition. Lt. Col. Benjamin B. McCroskey and Captain William Gent were sent to study in the Department of Slavonic Languages at Columbia University. With the growth of isolationism the experiment was not pressed, and step by step all of the government services lost interest except for a few young men in the State Department who were often sent in some indefinite capacity to the Baltic republics with the intent of learning Russian.