That afternoon I rode up to headquarters, passing through the muddy streets swarming with pigs, till the Svetlanskaya, Vladivostok’s main street, was reached. Then our automobile whizzed up hill and down dale over this Broadway of Asia, passing soldiers of many nations en route--French, Czechs, Russians, little black Annammites from the French possessions, Italians, Canadians, British, Japanese, Cossacks from the Don, the Urals, the Ussuri, the trans-Baikal, and bluejackets from Japanese, French, British and American warships in the bay. The city of Vladivostok itself presented a spectacle that would have brought joy to anybody who yearned for a job as a professional philanthropist. For “The Mistress of the East” had jumped her population from the normal, which was forty thousand, to about one hundred and eighty thousand. Refugee barracks on the edge of the city were filled with people from the interior. Trains came jammed to the last shelf against the ceiling, and poured battalions of travellers into the Trans-Siberian station, where they settled down to sleep in the corridors regardless of the throngs marching over them. They looked like rag-bags come to life--these hungry, dirty, tattered people from the hinterland, a human caravan in a panic. They smelled like a circus menagerie. Among them were many typhus victims. Beside these sick camped the well--with little complaint--and set up housekeeping on any available floor space. Some who had perhaps an aristocratic taste for privacy, or who found the air of the waiting-room a trifle spicy, filtered out to other habitations. There were, of course, no vacant rooms at the hotels or elsewhere. Money could not always buy shelter and rarely seclusion, since the average sleeping chamber accommodated all the way from five to a dozen persons. Even billiard tables commanded a good price as places of repose. And shows lasted till dawn, so that people who slept in the daytime could be amused while sitting up all night. Thus, when one-half of the population got up in the morning, it met the other half going to bed. Judging by conditions in Vladivostok, it was obvious that a terrible state of affairs existed in the hinterland. The refugees, clamoring for food, said so. Statistics of food-prices, gleaned from the refugees as well as from the inland press, proved a state of famine. [Illustration: THE AMERICAN ARMY MULES ARRIVE IN VLADIVOSTOK FOR DUTY] [Illustration: STREET SCENE IN VLADIVOSTOK WITH BAY IN THE DISTANCE]