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1922. Not illustrated. Excerpt: ... INTERVENING IN
SIBERIA I CERTAIN fragments of scene and speech come
back to me with a peculiar insistence, as I write this
third portion of my book. I have no hesitation in
setting them down as I do, I think accurately enough, if
not word for word. I remember them well because they had
impressed me. That is the secret of memory. I have
forgotten much, but there are scenes I cannot forget,
fragments of speech that still ring in my ear, and I
shall remember them always; at least, till I have
finally pinned them to paper. The Admiral and I, and a
few others--interesting types, I can assure
you--travelled to Siberia, where we engaged in a series
of comic opera attempts to wipe out the Russian
revolution. By now, "Intervention" has been relegated to
the shelf of history. But I cannot but remember it, not
merely as an adventure in futility, as admittedly it
was, but as an ever-shifting, changing sense of being
alive. For the experience of love is inseparable from
its background. Alone it does not exist. It is a
modulation of impressions, an interplay of
"atmospheres," a quickening of the fibres of that
background into throbbing tissues of an elusive,
half-apprehended beauty. It was raining heavily when we
arrived in Vladivostok, and the port, as we surveyed it
from the boat, looked grey and hopeless, like the
Russian situation. A flat had been allotted us, a bare,
unfurnished flat in a deserted house standing in a grim
and desolate by-street; and there the Admiral made his
temporary headquarters. It poured all day long, and it
seemed, indeed, as though the rain, playing havoc with
the town, would never cease, even as the misery and
blundering in Russia would never cease, and that our
efforts were not wanted and could do no good. That night
I entertained General Bologoevsk...
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