Page:Albert Beaumont - Heroic Story of the Czecho-Slovak Legions - 1919.djvu/77



MILAN, March 30.

The two weeks which were so exciting for our troops in the regions of the Volga and the Urals in May and June last year were no less exciting for the echelons that had already entered Siberia, and which were scattered at long intervals along the Siberian line from Cheliabinsk to Omsk, Tomsk, and Irkutsk, and even beyond Lake Baikal as far as Vladivostok. The question was to occupy by force this wast railway line and all the principal stations, including some large towns of a quarter of a million or half a million souls, and to hold them against Bolshevik forces, who were now urged by wireless messages from Moscow to join with the enemy prisoners and annihilate the Czecho-Slowak [sic] legions. The struggle lasted for weeks, and was marked by some severe battles, especially in Central Siberia and around Lake Baikal, and finally also at Vladivostok. During these first weeks no help came to the Czecho-Slovaks from the Japanese, British, or American troops, and they had to fight the battles all alone. The story was related to me as follows by Captain “S“:

The conquest of the Siberian Railway and its numerous stations was a much greater task than that of occupying the region of the Volga and the branch line in the Urals west of Iekaterinburg. On the Volga front we had only about fifteen echelons left, thas is about as many battalions, whereas there were about fifty battalions, or echelons, from Cheliabinsk to Irkutsk, comprising the intermediate stations of Kurgan, Petropavlosk, Omsk, Novonikolaievsk, and Krosniarsk. The distance was about 3,000 kilometres to Irkutsk. For a while there was no communication between the Volga group and that of Central Siberia. Each had to fight independently for its position, and, as I have mentioned, the echelons at Samara were so out of touch with those in Siberia that our battalion, stranded, as it were, at Zlatoust, had to march