It has great cities with paved streets, electric car lines, pretentious stores, massive theaters, imposing mansions. And a high-caste Siberian Tartar knows how to make his residence imposing. Many of the great railroad stations, when lighted and viewed at a distance by night, resemble the marble halls which come to us in dreams. But alas, Siberia has its little earth-lost country villages—its “small towns” too—its Podunk Corners and its Gilberts Mills, its East Gileads and its Hastings Crossings. Russian writers have dwelt unduly upon peasant life in these earth-lost villages—as though an American Tolstoi drew a picture of contemporaneous American life solely from Rupert Hughes’s “Carthage” or Sinclair Lewis’s “Gopher Prairie”, eliminating and ignoring entirely Boston, New York, Palm Beach, New Orleans, San Francisco. There are many intermediate steps in Russian living between six log huts clustered on a prairie where half-wild males and females rear families like animals, and the Imperial Ballet at St. Petersburg or the Grand Mosque at Moscow, as both existed before the cataclysm. In the heart of Eastern Siberia is Great Baikal, a lake sixty miles long and twenty to thirty miles wide. On the northwest corner of this lake, back on the Irkut River, lies the city of Irkutsk. In size it compares with Springfield, Massachusetts, or Cincinnati, Ohio. The river flows through the metropolis. The railroad station and freight yards are set upon the western bank, the main part of the city upon the eastern. Connecting the two is a dilapidated floating bridge of gray, weather-beaten, flood-racked timbers. Irkutsk was the farthest western point reached by Japanese or Yankee troops in the recent Intervention. From Irkutsk westward to the Urals, the Germans were checkmated from shipping submarines in sections across the Trans-Siberian for submersion in the Japan Sea and “unrestricted” warfare in the Pacific, by a stout little army of pro-Ally Slavs who should have a place in history with Ulysses on his Odyssey and Leonidas at the Pass. From Russian internment camps under Kerensky “the Talker”, the Czecho-slovaks—pronounced “Checko-slow-vacks”—started for France, via Siberia, Japan, America, the Atlantic. The Germans, through Lenine, heard and said they should not go. France said they should go and supplied the money. The Czechs were willing, eager, to go. So they fought their way forward, holding the Trans-Siberian as they moved, to journey no farther than Vladivostok. But there were no _Lusitania_ horrors in the Pacific. II Far down the southern end of the Irkutsk railroad yards on a muddy night in September, 1918, three men in khaki sat in a caboose freight car around a small sheet-iron stove. Upon a near-by shelf-table, a lone candle burned in an empty bottle.