In time, most of the officers were sent away to inland cities, where they remained as observers, till they signified their desire for discharge after the armistice in accordance with the terms of their commissions. And in justice to the majority of these officers, I wish to assert that they were highly efficient in their various vocations, and that most of them had distinguished themselves in civil life. One had been minister for the United States to foreign countries and was schooled as a diplomat; others were professors of history and could tell the various life-careers of big and small nations; some were ethnologists, and could give the pedigree of any nondescript person found in the motley throngs all over Siberia; many had previously been in Russia several years, spoke the language well, and found themselves in familiar surroundings. With a few exceptions, they did the duties of glorified office boys, while attached to an expedition which needed above all things, an alert and efficient system of Military Intelligence. They did their best under disheartening conditions. XII AN ARMY IMPRESARIO For a week or two after my return to Vladivostok, I familiarized myself with the Intelligence organization at Headquarters. So far as I could see, we had no authority over anybody who happened to be suspected of enemy activity, or actually guilty of some act against the American or Russian laws. When we found a man who had come in under a fraudulent passport, and had in our files data which proved him to be a Bolshevist agent, or sympathizer, we could take no action, other than hold his American passport. Then we notified the Czech commandant, and he was arrested after passing from our custody. So we exercised no military or police authority over anybody but our own nationals, or such Russians or other foreigners as fraudulently claimed American citizenship and attempted to travel as such. In order to watch the incoming ships, all the Allies sent passport officers aboard them, and each officer conducted the examination of his own nationals. There was a line of Russian steamers, running between Tsuruga, Japan, and Vladivostok, known as the Russian Volunteer Fleet; and a similar line owned by the Japanese. These little steamers served as ferry-boats, gathering in Japan all travelers bound for Vladivostok who arrived in ports of the Far East in liners--this was the funnel through which passed the stream of civilians who came first to Shanghai, Nagasaki, Yokohama and other ports. And before these steamers docked, they were boarded by a Japanese, a Czech, a Russian, a British, an American and a French officer, and the polyglot lot examined before they were allowed to land. I attended some of these examinations, provided with a list of suspicious characters, and with the various interpreters in action, the smoking-room put to shame anything that must have been heard at the Tower of Babel.