A Supreme Council was held at Tokio June 7, attended by Prince Fushimi,
Field Marshals Yamagata and Terauchi, (the Premier,) and Lieut. Gen.
Oshima, the Minister of War. A joint conference of the Field Marshals
and the Admirals was summoned for June 10.
The Entente Governments of Europe were declared in a Tokio dispatch
dated June 15 to be bringing increasing influence to bear to induce
Japan to intervene in Russia. Among the several French officers who
arrived in Tokio to consult with the General Staff was Major Pichon,
who was head of the French military mission to Russia, and whose
recall was demanded by the Bolsheviki. Major Pichon was reported to
be striving for intervention in Siberia as a military necessity with
the same energy that he opposed Rumania's entrance into the war as
an ill-advised step. Major Pichon formerly was Military Attaché at
Bucharest. The partisans of intervention were finding support from A.
I. Konovaloff, formerly Minister of Trade and Industry in the Russian
Provincial Government, and especially from Jules Destrée, who was
appointed Belgian Minister to Petrograd in August, 1917. M. Destrée,
who is a Socialist, arrived in Japan after vainly seeking to return to
Europe across Finland.
"It is urgently imperative for the defense of the interests of the
Entente that there shall be a liberation of the Russian people from
Germanic domination," M. Destrée declared. "The Trans-Siberian Railroad
is the only remaining communication with the outside world, and this
could be destroyed at any time by the German prisoners, of whom
there are 20,000 under arms in Siberia. I saw armed Germans at every
station, ostensibly allies of the Bolsheviki. The destruction of the
Trans-Siberian Railroad would mean the complete abandonment of Russia
to the Teutons."