[Illustration: The new British army entered Archangel in June with great pomp and ceremony. The Duma building at Archangel was decorated in honor of the new army that came to finish the Bolsheviki.] In the address of welcome that was made to this new army on its arrival, the commanding general said that no better equipped army had ever been sent out by the British Empire. This was easy to believe. Not only was there the newest and latest equipment, there was quantity, such amplitude of everything as to inspire the greatest of confidence, and we who had lived through the poverty of the previous winter felt that there would be no such handicap upon those who should now turn the tide of battle and march victoriously to Petrograd. About half of the men in this new army were volunteers. Many of them told me that they had enlisted because they could not find work, but that they had specifically volunteered to come and rescue besieged British soldiers from Archangel. When they found themselves three hundred miles up the Dvina River engaged in an expensive offensive they groused as hard as the Americans or Canadians ever had, but this did not interfere with their fighting. These men gave a good account of themselves, and they would have gone right through to Kotlas and Viatka and Vologda if something entirely beyond them had not changed the British plans. *XI* *THE NEW RUSSIAN ARMY* There were broadly three classes in the Russian army: first, the volunteer Slavo-British Legion of men who enlisted in order to draw army rations and buy from the Y.M.C.A; second, the conscripted "mobilized" army of men forced to join against their own choice; and, third, a large body of ex-Bolshevist prisoners who chose the army in preference to prison and labor, and who because of this volition on their part were made a part of the Slavo-British Legion. In each of these classes were many men who had been on the "Eastern" front in February, 1917, and who then threw down their arms and went home, "having finished with war forever." Politicians and militarists who were unable to understand that act have been equally unable to understand any of the subsequent acts of these strange and natural men. I am horrified at what these men have since done, and abhor it, but I think I understand it, at least somewhat.