Being an officer, you are blessed with many pockets. So now you plot out, as it were, your khaki façade. The upstairs right hand, as Barrie would say, becomes the Imperial pocket; the upstairs left, is sacred to your American money; while the downstairs, right and left, is given over respectively to the “Zolotoi Roq” and the shaving-stick store. In other words, you are a walking bank for at least two establishments in that town. You are virtually holding some of their money in escrow. You may have it, but eventually it will belong to them. And it will be your fate to wear out your field boots carrying that money back to the place of its redemption. Yes, the light has dawned upon you--your lower pockets are mortgaged! It is probably at this point in your Siberian monetary education that you wish on your soul that you had brought along your own little printing-press! (And you feel sure that you could have produced better looking rubles than even General Horvat’s American-made ones--with their pictures of a lightning express.) But lacking the press, a supply of cigar-store certificates from home would come in handy. For you learn that the doughboys have already successfully put into circulation the pink coupons of a certain popular cigarette. But the monetary problem in Vladivostok is comparatively simple. This is borne in upon you when you leave the city for the interior. (If you leave on one of the innumerable Russian holidays, and all the shops are shut up, you must overeat at the “Zolotoi Roq” to get rid of that currency, but you must carry with you the paper belonging to the closed shops.) For once en route, you begin to acquire various kinds of Bolshevist money. And some of this money is good only in its particular zone. If you pass out of that zone without knowing it, you find that money worthless. So travel through any single province is as complicated, from the standpoint of money, as if you had been passing through several different countries. Suppose the same conditions obtained in the United States. In going from New York to Philadelphia, you would have to get rid of your New York money in exchange for Philadelphia money--if you could. (Less discount for exchange.) When you reach Trenton, you wish to buy a sandwich. But the vendor will not take your Philadelphia money. So you offer a coupon off a Liberty bond--value five dollars--and receive in exchange some Trenton money, good only in Trenton. It is either that or go without the sandwich! If you travel as far as New Orleans, you have eleven kinds of money, no one kind of which has any value to you.