Crossing the continent in our special car, we began to study Russian, to scan maps of the Russian Empire, to talk of strategy, and to go on learning how to be as secret as possible. This last was accomplished by crowding fifteen officers into one of the drawing-rooms, and holding in this sweat box, what the young officer who had taken upon his shoulders the weight of the Russian campaign, called “conferences.” These conferences did no particular harm, and so far as I could see, no particular good, unless it was to make us yearn for cold weather and more congenial surroundings for our corns. I am going to call this young officer Smith, not because I have any animosity toward the well-known Smith family, but because it is handy. We also called him “the oldest living boy scout in the world.” And he provided much amusement for us, as he pinned the big map of the expansive Russian Empire on the wall of the drawing-room, and discussed the railroad tunnels around Lake Baikal, and showed us how we could get round the flank of the Bolshevist army at Samara. We were all aware of the fact that General Graves was going to have a lot of labor taken off his mind (real, hard-thinking labor), and as Smith spoke of thousands of versts as readily as if his mother had kept a boarding house for versts, we realized that before long we would have plenty of elbow room. (Incidentally, Smith never left Vladivostok, and his wide study of Russian geography was of no use to him except for conversational purposes.) We began to suspect that this intense interest in the campaign, before we reached Siberia, was, in addition to being help for the Chief of Staff of the Siberian Expedition, making a decided impression on the son of General Graves, a young major who had seen and done good fighting in France and wore the Croix de Guerre, and now was being sent to Siberia. He attended one conference in that hot drawing-room, and then, undoubtedly feeling that we were safe in the hands of Smith, spent the remainder of his free time in the observation car, which indicated to us all that he was gifted with an extraordinary amount of good sense. Smith on his own responsibility organized a little general staff, and with a typewriter, wrote orders about various trifles, covering what the officers and field clerks should do in Chicago, and what they should not do, assigning an officer to the duty of looking after baggage with the serious mien suitable to ordering a battalion to go over the top at zero hour, setting forth with maddening exactitude the minute at which the field clerks would go to the depot quartermasters in Chicago to buy uniform caps.