But the retreat was on. Every embassy received orders from home to leave with all its citizens, bag and baggage, and in the early days of September they went as from a pestilence, shipload after shipload, the Americans, the French, Italian, Chinese, Serbian, Japanese embassies, consulates of all sorts, Y.M.C.A., Y.W.C.A., military missions, bourgeois Russians, and any number of enterprising citizens of enterprising countries got out. The military preceded, accompanied, followed. By September twentieth, the last British soldier was out and the washout was complete. We heard wild rumors that the Labor Congress continued to meet in spite of the army, that they turned upon the Russian military leaders, who are well-known to be monarchist in sympathy, and informed them that they must make peace with the Bolsheviki, and that there was some bad rioting in Solombola. Two British soldiers had been beaten to death in the streets by Russians. More Russians had been shot because they were suspected of Bolshevist sympathies. As our ships pulled out of the harbor great fires broke out in the vast lumber yards on both sides of the river, the laborers were charged with Bolshevik sabotage, and an enormous pall of black smoke hung for days over the scene of this most unfortunate expedition, a sinister emblem of the ruin and hatred that lay behind us, and a symbol of angry protest from the sky itself over our stupid failure to understand the Russian people. *XVII* *MILITARY INTERVENTION FINANCE* The financial contrivances of this Military Intervention in North Russia, while conceived with the best of intentions, perhaps, and being presumably in the interests of Russian welfare, created much suspicion and bitterness among the peasants and the soldiers. The country having been flooded with Kerensky and Bolshevik paper money, it was impossible to maintain any general European value, so a new rouble was issued called the "English rouble," with a guaranteed minimum value based on deposits of securities with the Bank of England. But the peasants were not interested. They did not give up their old roubles for the new. So it became necessary to force matters. A schedule of depreciation of all old roubles was published. While the English roubles stood as guaranteed at forty to the pound all old or "Russian" money, as the peasants called it, stepped down a ladder of fortnightly rungs from forty-eight to fifty-six, to sixty-five, to seventy-two, to eighty, to ninety, after which it was to have no value whatever. It was hoped, of course, that all people would avail themselves of the opportunity thus offered to dispose of their worthless money and the region would have a sound currency of some intra-national value as a result.