ABSTRACT
The effects of the fickleness of fate can rarely have been better demonstrated than in the examination of two quite diverse careers of two quite different Lieutenant-Colonels, one British, the other American. Both would play crucial roles in the unfolding Kolchak story. Kolchak was among those who were anti-Semitic, claiming as one of the reasons for his low regard of the American forces, the high proportion of Jews within their ranks. One morning in November 1917, Lieutenant-Colonel John Ward was summoned to headquarters and placed under orders to hold himself and battalion in readiness to proceed to an unknown destination. The Bolsheviks had observed in the ordinary people a macabre habit of collecting human remains as souvenirs of bomb outrages or other similar bloody atrocities on the nobility. Knox had been the former Military Attache at the British Embassy in St Petersburg. Knox was a charismatic and natural leader ideally suited to harmonize a joint allied approach in Siberia.
