As already stated in previous installments of this work, the Czecho-Slovaks were Slavic soldiers of the Austrian armies who had been taken prisoners by the Russians, and who, after the fall of the Czar, volunteered to fight against the Central Powers with the Allies because of their desire to obtain independence for Bohemia and Slovakia, parts of the dominions of the Austrian empire. They look a leading part in the offensive which Kerensky attempted against the Teutons, and which failed so disastrously on account of the broken morale of the Russians. When the Bolsheviki seized the reins of government, the Czecho-Slovaks refused to lay down their arms and asked that they might be permitted to retire from Russia by way of Vladivostok, whence they hoped to be transported to France and allowed to take their place with the Allies on the western front. To this arrangement the Bolsheviki agreed, and the Czecho-Slovaks began at once embarking on trains over the Trans-Siberian Railroad. But before even the first contingents had safely reached Vladivostok, friction broke out between them and the Bolsheviki, which presently took on the aspect of an armed conflict, with remarkably successful results for the Czecho-Slovaks, who gained almost complete possession of the railroad and large areas of Siberia. The Bolsheviki maintained that Allied intrigues had caused the Czecho-Slovaks to turn on them, while the Allied representatives laid the blame to German pressure applied to the Soviet Government. Captain Vladimir Hurban, an officer of the Czecho-Slovak Army, who came to Washington to report to Prof. Masaryk, President of the National Council of the Czecho-Slovaks, supplies details which are not only of vivid interest in themselves, but assist in fixing the responsibility for the bloodshed which resulted in such advantages to the Allied cause. "When the Bolshevist Soviet Government signed the peace treaty in the beginning of March, 1918," says Captain Hurban, in his personal narrative, "our army of about 50,000 was in Ukrainia, near Kiev.... The Germans advanced against us in overwhelming numbers and there was danger that we would be surrounded.... The Bolshevist Red Guards had seized the locomotives and were fleeing east in panic. Under these circumstances Emperor Charles sent us a special envoy with the promise that if we would disarm we should be amnestied and our land should receive autonomy. We refused to negotiate with the Austrian emperor.