It was a warm and sunny morning. The roofs of the city became visible as we tramped up toward the high ground, covered with the brick barracks built by the Russian army, and beyond the town shone the wide reaches of the Amur River. The city had been captured from Bolshevist forces but a month before, and the Twenty-seventh Infantry, under command of Lieutenant-Colonel Morrow had hastened to get into action with the Japanese, but arrived too late. The Bolshevist forces resisted up to a certain point, and then melted away. They became peasants working in the fields--and the Japanese asked these peasants where the Bolshevists were! So although Khabarovsk was accustomed to a large Russian garrison in normal times, and had already become accustomed to the American doughboy, our column attracted considerable attention. And I was sorry that transportation had not been arranged for the men’s heavy bags, which they packed on their shoulders in addition to their regular marching kits, for six hundred men bent under baggage, struggling up the hilly roads, do not present an inspiring spectacle. We Americans in foreign parts do not seem to care anything for the psychology of the land in which we are operating; we are intensely practical, and entirely too sure that the American way of doing things is the best way, and take no account of the effect we may create upon foreign peoples--overlooking the fact that first impressions are most vital. Now Asia is a land in which the bearing of burdens marks one of the lowest caste. The Siberian is Asiatic in his viewpoint, being so closely in touch with China and Manchuria. And, as in China, to be seen carrying heavy burdens when there is no necessity for it, means that a man’s standing is ruined; no matter how smartly he may dress, or how decently he may comport himself, or what he may do to show his superiority after he has been seen at what is considered debasing toil, the Asiatic never forgets that this foreigner has been a bearer of burdens. He carries forever that impression in the back of his head, on occasion dares to be insolent, and judges by that standard all people of that race.