troops, whose oft-expressed sentiment was "Home or Fight!" The head of the British Military Mission in Siberia, Major-General Alfred Knox, was anxious to have the Canadians at Omsk, where they would help form "a tangible Allied force at the front". This move Elmsley could in nowise make; and there were heated exchanges. between the two generals. "If they [the Canadians]"; wrote Knox on 27 December, "only think of playing the American-Japanese sitting game in the Far East, I honestly don't see much use in their coming at all.

And so the Canadian Siberian Expeditionary Force was held at Vladivostok, where officers and men were quartered in Russian barracks some twelve miles from the harbour. A small staff of eight officers and 47 other ranks was sent to Omsk to administer the two British battalions there. The troops found the climate at Vladivostok pleasant enough - much like that of Eastern Canada. But the city itself, with its normal population of 40,000 almost quadrupled by refugees of many nationalities, was a centre of corruption and vice. There was little to do except routine training; though voluntary auxiliary services working, with the Canadian Red Cross and the Y.M.C.A. provided some amenities. There were occasional football games with the crews of British naval vessels in port, and baseball games with the Americans. The sole operational task given the Canadians came in April 1919, when General Otani called for a small Allied column to suppress an insurgent

Bolshevik force in a village some thirty miles north of Vladivostok.

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