This little machine was running on a high gear, when General Graves arrived. He drew the fires and stopped the engine. Presently two more transports arrived, with reinforcing troops, and our Intelligence party, direct from Washington. Our officers had presumably been selected for Siberian service because they were experts in their various lines, and necessarily being enthusiasts for their own line of endeavor, showed great interest in the situation. They laid down a barrage of questions on the staff, ranging from where they were to sleep, to data on the available coal supply from the Golden Horn to the Urals. They had been cooped in a hotel and a transport for some two months since leaving Washington, some of them had never been away from the United States, and they brought an element of romping boyishness to the sedate, quiet and somewhat bored staff. Some of them, though captains, had never been near an army, and their civilian enthusiasms jarred headquarters. Having quelled one epidemic of enthusiasm, the staff rather crossly and tactlessly set about stamping out this fresh access of desire for picturesque action. The staff, it was said, assumed the attitude that it was competent to run the Siberian expedition without the aid of a “lot of theorists and amateurs from civil life.” The younger officers on duty, fresh from West Point and feeling much exalted at finding themselves wearing insignia of rank which in the old army sometimes took twenty years to attain, reflected the attitude of the elders, and two hostile camps developed in a single building. And this was the war I walked into, all unknowingly, when I came back from Khabarovsk. I found myself “one of that Intelligence bunch,” and no matter how politely I asked for some action of a routine nature in order to carry out my own orders, I found that the wheels did not turn for me. Of course, there was not a flat refusal, but there was what might be called “mental sabotage”--my requests were forgotten till I had to resort to plain language to get what I needed. And the Intelligence party, I was informed, had been summoned and told to “keep quiet, to betray no initiative, not to criticise, and to keep busy doing nothing.” And in order to nullify as far as possible all attempts of the individuals of the party to accomplish anything in their own lines of endeavor, the “chart” of the organization was dismantled, and each officer put at some duty with which he was unfamiliar. For instance an expert on ciphers was sent far into the interior, and an expert on maps was put in charge of several translators, though he had a most limited knowledge of Russian. And the Chief of Intelligence found himself with some fifteen officers who had been shipped half way round the world at government expense, and drawing an average of two hundred dollars a month in pay, buzzing indignantly about his ears, and doing little but making his life a burden.