July 1918
There was no need to correct anyone's position at the range. The arrival of the American detachment from Military Intelligence, men who should have been at their stations in the Philippines, had joined them early. Some of the detachment had garrison guns, like Guan, others a majority had personal purchase firearms.
It had been one of the defining layout to sortie was everyone needed a forty five caliber side arm, but that really wasn't so much of an ask. Personal side arms while not universal to Xian units were comparable at rates to the US Army.
It shouldn't have taken them a week to reach Lake Baikal from Yekaterinburg, and every day that they sat here he was waiting for something else to go wrong. The Whites had managed to take the city, but it still seemed presumptive to celebrate.
But maybe that was paranoia. The two intelligence wonks were both young lieutenants and seemed confident in what they were told by the British about the action on the front. Reports that were then being parroted back to Washington... which was a problem, but a problem equally being compounded by their reports on the less rosy news of events in eastern siberian towns.
He knew well the fate of such reports. They would be confined to dust ridden drawers in a file cabinet except when they were trudged out to serve a political purpose. Wilson might have had to join the war , but it didn't mean he was committed to the Anglo-Francish entente's ideas. Wilson would be looking for any excuse to avoid material commitments, and if not Wilson than his advisors who saw this nonsense in Peter, and Moscow as some flowering of Russian democracy... but that was nonsensical wishful thinking from a thousand miles away from the bloodshed.
"Be worried the Japs being here, is gonna give the frogs the wrong idea."
"When do the French ever get the right idea about a situation?" Was the response he mustered to Bill's drawl as they sat around the pot of coffee as men thumbed rounds into magazines. "But I take your point they've been shrilly," all but demanding, "calling for Japanese troops for the war in europe for almost four years now." One would have thought France assumed Japan was their ally not the British. It would be four years soon enough... Allen suspected if there had been no BEF, maybe if their Kaiser Bill hadn't tried to build such an outsized navy or whatever then the French probably would have fallen... it wouldn't have stopped the Russians from crashing into Eastern Prussia, but from the word the Germans had run them back off... and that had contributed to their current mess. "No sense for us worrying about it."
"A million men would help, you know." The British officer remarked putting his cup down while a handful of sergeants reset the plates.
"Not if they freeze come winter." Bill grunted shaking his head, "Sending boats is one thing."
"He's right, winter campaigning is a mess, and that railway, it took us a whole week to get-"
"That's three thousand kilometers, general." It was funny the rank came up now.
"Eighteen hundred miles, what you will end up with back logs," What they already had ended up with, "Are back ups in the system. You're already seeing it, where groups going one way run into groups going the other, and there is no clear order to who moves for who." Not the least of which was because there was no clear chain of command.
"Well how would you improve the white's situation?"
"Pull the czechs off the front."
"What?"
"You hear me out, this french idea of just constantly attacking is going to cause a mutiny." The english man colored, "It will, its amazing the French lasted as long as they did and commend them for it, but their officers are fucking morons for putting their men through the sausage grinder like that." They should have realized it wasn't working in 1914, "No take the czechs, and the rest of the slavs off the line you want them to fight they need time to to train and train others, and be rearmed. Pulling them off for rest, and retraining will let you settle out disciplinary issues, and it will give you time to secure the railway, which means you'll stop bottlenecking transit of men and supplies."
They had an audience. Most likely some of the johny come latelys had come to try their hands at the pistol tables. Not that he fancied their mice guns, their bigger brownings were meant for shooting at fifty and farther targets despite the parabolic arc a 45 government flew at. If you wanted you could drop a bullet on a man at a hundred feet even if that had been demanded with little consideration for being realistic, but that was what ordinance had been demanding in 1907... and Ordinance did tend to get its way.
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If ... well it hadn't taken long MacKinder's military attaché to figure looking at the map that the Urals would have been the best place to shore up and stop things... but by the summer of 1918 that was too late. It sounded great on paper but the back end things needed to be straightened out, and while it might have still been possible with the White's spate of successes it would never come to pass.
In the future ... on other days looking aback he would wonder what might have happened to their world to the relations if Russia had been sundered between a Bolshevik 'European' / 'western' russia and the Urals... and whether or not the British could have made good on their economic concessions in the Baku oil fields in the caucus.
Of course if that had been, then Wall Street would have likely pressed hard to sink dollars freed by the end of the war into Siberia in the economic concessions promised by the interim government of 1917... and damn what Wilson thought about how American should act.
It didn't matter, that wasn't what happened. The British would talk about a unified White movement, and all of Siberia and Central Asia, and the Urals. The Japanese Home Secretary could take about wanting to put a million men in Russia, and Terauchi could talk about how their needed to be a joint mission of Japanese, English, American, and Chinese all together to stop Bolshevism and its anarchy but getting the details where everyone would sign was a bridge too far.
What might of been...
"The fighting to the west is displacing more people than we thought," The doctor muttered looking up from the telegram, "It seems as if something happened on the southern front," Whatever that was supposed to entail, "And is pushing the Cossacks down the rail lines towards Kirghiz, the ones that aren't the ones following the Whites under Kolchak are heading this way." The surgeon pinched the bridge of his nose... and sighed, "We'll have to write to Wilson, there has to be something to do or we'll have a crisis."
It wasn't an outlandish sentiment. It shouldn't have been a funny suggestion, or some kind of joke... but it kind of felt like one.
"Tch, and what? Wilson can't make up his mind to do a damned thing right." There was a pause and they fell silent. Wilson had overruled the Federal reserve regarding what was good solid data about the insolvency of the French... and for that matter the risk of the British pound, and then he'd turned around and nixed a mere pittance of the money being loaned to the french to in turn buy up midwestern grain to Duan's government in Beijing... and i he wasn't willing to do that what were the chances he'd be willing to approve real aid to the Whites with bastards like Bullit pretending the bolsheviks weren't cutthroats... or for that matter, "Japan can't be sure of American loans and if they can't be sure the diet can't vote to mobilize."
Goto Shinpei could talk about a million men to the British, or people could take the interior minister at his word and and as a rosy idea, but the reality still sat that the money for that had to come from somewhere... and a million men was a lot of mouth's to feed, and Japan was already having problems with food prices inflating. If the US had to ship food here, if it did that would be food probably pushing prices higher at home in the states, and also on the market abroad... which was going to cause discontent beyond what was already mounting.
A million just wasn't going to be practical.
--
Without Wilson being willing to definitively commit to US support for a broad policy of intervention in Siberia, or in Russia in general the British and the Japanese ministries took more limited means... and one nominally reckoning on Chinese involvement. That was going to prompt protests from down south of course, but Canton likely wouldn't have been happy with Duan agreeing to anything on paper... and the British conditions were that Duan had to have parliament ratify the agreements, a condition Terauchi had immediately latched on to as well.
They hadn't specified which parliament, and thus Duan's planned elections made alot of good sense. The list of names that Brit had been able to put from those coming up from Manchuria were largely officers who had been in the Russo-Japanese war, men who had sense made colonel, or even garnered stars.
That presented potential issues. Some of those men, as younger men, had thought at the time that Japan should have walked away from the war with Siberia for their troubles. There had been days back then that Allen had wondered why the Brits hadn't jumped the Russians... he had understood why Uncle Sam was staying out, but at the time he had expected as the ally of Japan and as fairly belligerent towards the Russians as the Brits were why they hadn't taken the opportunity.
That Japan had opened the war, and Japan hadn't asked for British involvement beyond 'neutrality' did probably a role, but at the same time the French had been pressuring the British to stay neutral... but there were days he looked back on 1905 and wondered what would have happened if it had gone differently.
It didn't matter. It hadn't.
"With Peter, and Moscow," The two largest cities in the Empire, "Under bolshevik control," And with the third largest city of the empire under german control, "and Lenin refusing to recognize foreign debts Taka has a point about nationalizing the Eastern Chinese Railway system," The Russian Manchurian line, the only reason they hadn't done that sooner was because in 16 the Russians were officially cobelligerents and so pressuring that that line in the maritime be ceded for outstanding debts made sense... that and the Brits might have been paying the interest up until last year.
But it was gonna spark a fight that was for sure... but on the other hand, "Suppose that explains the telegraph..."
"The french aren't going to like that, but we shouldn't be surprise. The British are talking to Lansing about recognizing spheres of influence , I think they'll expect him to pull an Ed Gray, which I don't think is going to work."
"Won't know until it happens."
Allen got up and walked the edge of the room, and took a glance at the yard, "We have to get home, we're staying here too long, and Nicholas is an idiot, a well meaning idiot, sure but I want stuff him on a ship for England sooner rather than later before he starts wanting to take command of the army."
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Notes: this is the penultimate July 1918 chapter there is a little bit more to cover and then we go into the handful of sections wrapping up the year as a whole
