ONEGA
13th Feb., 1919
"Americally Sowest London for H A E F France. Due to primitive conditions of life and continuous service in the field under Arctic conditions, officers and men are beginning to feel the strain. Practically the whole Allied Command has been on continuous duty in the field all winter with no reserves in Archangel. Limited Allied reserves are now being supplied from Murmansk, a few coming on ice breakers and others by rail to Kem and then by horses and sleighs to destination. Recommend present force be entirely replaced as early as practicable in the spring, with an adequate force commensurate with its mission, supplied and equipped so that it can operate in an American way."
STEWART
VI
ONEGA
General Ironside became Commander-in-Chief of the North Russian Expedition at the commencement of winter, and the "offensive war" forthwith came to an abrupt termination, without ceremony.
At that time, one company of Americans and ninety-three Slavic Legionaires composed the Onega or right wing of the Allied army which was at Chekuevo, some hundred and forty miles from Archangel on the Onega River.
A landing party of the original Poole force, expert rifle marines from the United States warship, Olympia, had taken the port of Onega after a noisy fight in September, and a few days later, gave it over to this Russo-American detachment, three hundred strong, whose object was to accord right lateral support to the Railway Column, and above all to safeguard the significant winter road connecting the Railway with Onega, along which the winter mail came sporadically, and the only reinforcements, three companies of British Yorks, were brought from Murmansk during the cold days of February.
As the Americans, verst post to verst post, fought their way south along the Railway line, so this detachment went forward at bloody experience and kept abreast, until the Bolsheviks, following the Railway victory at Verst Four Forty Five, grew cautious, and drew back up the Onega Valley to Turchasova.
And when winter came, the forty miles between Turchasova and Chekuevo, were a shadowy No Man's Acre along the twisting, snow highway of the river, where hostile patrols prowled, and life was held by uncertain tenure; but the disputed ground was narrowed by half when the Americans moved up part of their small number nearly midway to the Bolshevik village, and took station at Kyvalanda, in order to watch a southern trail inlet to the important Railway road, along which were regularly dispatched visiting patrols to the scattered villages of Bolshie Ozerki, that they might hearten and keep contact with the few pathetic Frenchmen and Allied Russians who made an audacious pretense of maintaining a post there, and far off on the snow, deserted many miles from the Railway, reminded one of a choice morsel of tenderloin, baited for puma.
The Onega detachment joined in the operation for Plesetskaya, which the new Commander-in-Chief, in furtherance of his defensive policy of consolidation, was anxious to take before the intense cold.
Plesetskaya was an important base, and had they lost it, the Bolsheviks would have encountered great, almost insurmountable obstacles, in bringing troops from Vologda, and concentrating them in an aggressive winter warfare, for this point was a junction of the principal highways leading from the Railway line to Onega, Kochmas, Tarasovo and Shenkurst.
But this Allied advance failed, primarily for the same cause that the whole Expedition failed, through ridiculous paucity of numbers, and in the second instance (although there were several more), because it was impossible to maintain any semblance of liaison over the difficult lateral terrain which separated the five Columns, theoretically converging in the push for Plesetskaya.
So on New Year's day, after they had met the enemy and soundly punished him in two sharp engagements, and standing to, were about to drive him from his Turchasova stronghold, the Onega Americans were given the disappointing order to fall back and resume post at Chekuevo, where long, black months followed, and life took on a grinding, monotonous, drab, depressing atmosphere, lifted only by an occasional, welcomed brush or "wind up," till lo, in March, the sun shone high and streamed in extravagant, effulgent light on the glaring snow fields, the days grew longer and still longer, in this eccentric, topsy-turvy, North world, and finally there were as few hours of darkness as there had been of light a few months before.
Late in the month, a patrol was driven off from Bolshie Ozerki by the shot from many rifles, and a combat party the next day ran counter machine gun emplacements, was extricated only by adroit leadership, and after worming a long distance through the piling drifts.
It was learned then that the little garrison at Bolshie Ozerki had been annihilated, but it was thought by a strong raiding party, bent upon capture of the ration and ammunition convoys between Onega and the Railway. Not yet was there a suspicion of the enemy's surprising, gigantic manoeuvre, which with incomparable, superior force, sought to turn the Allied flank at Obozerskaya, carry through to the Dvina, fuse with the Bolshevik Vaga army, then sweep on to Archangel and make good the Moscow boast to cast every foreigner in North Russia into the White Sea.
The British Colonel, irritated by the enemy resistance at Bolshie Ozerki, was determined to chastise "the raiders" thoroughly, and felt very confident when his seventy Americans were joined by the three companies of Murmansk Yorks, which had marched one hundred and seventy miles from Soroka on the Murman railway in the hope of reaching the hard pressed Vaga Column, before it was too late.
The only access to Bolshie Ozerki from the west is a wagon road, eighty feet wide, which cuts a swath through the ambient forest. Passing sleighs had packed this road so that it gave good going, but at either side among the trees was a hopeless, floundering snow bog nearly four feet, and two miles out from the village, the Bolsheviks had improvised an outguard, which swept this only approach with machine guns that had the concentrated fire of three battalions.
At dawn, on the twenty-fourth day of March, the Americans, supported by the Yorks on either flank, crept through the trees by the roadside to the attack on Bolshie Ozerki. At five hundred yards, the enemy opened fire, a murderous plunging storm of steel and lead that must completely quell all thought of further approach, still none turned back; dragging and pushing themselves through the snow by knees and feet and elbows, the men made four hundred yards; here the American officer was killed, two of the British officers were hit and went down as if struck by lightning, and it was seen by volume of the fire that the odds were hopeless, yet the little company, facing utter massacre, burrowed in the deep snow, and, in the stiffening cold, hung on to the last round, till the retirement order came at dusk; the sacrifice was a heavy one, but not in vain, for by this devoted stand the stupendous nature of the enemy operations to overwhelm the whole Expedition at Bolshie Ozerki was fully revealed, and every man at the rear position, vividly conscious of the desperate character of the fight, steeled himself for the grim business in hand.
Back in Archangel, General Ironside saw in a flash that the life of his army fluttered in the balance. He scoured the city for every available fighting man, collected the few he could, a varicolored assemblage of Americans, British, Allied Russians and a platoon of French mounted on skis—Le Legion Courier du Bois—all counted, five hundred eighty men, and rushed with them to the battle. There, this iron General, well knowing himself to be faced by great unknown numbers, tossed caution high to the four winds. He dragged his artillery over the snow from the railway at Obozerskaya, and set it twelve miles off in the woods, daring the enemy to capture it. He brought out his handful of divergent troops, and, smashing down trees, built up rough barricades, a cordon about his guns; then, cut off from all hope of accessible retreat, this fighting man, whose fighting stuff had been welded among the Northwest Mounted Police of the Canadian frontier, threw down the challenge of wild death battle to the Slavs.
Very close, not even a mile away, down the Bolshie Ozerki trail, the Bolsheviks had concentrated their artillery and thrown out their advance works, and now commenced a blasting duel between the opposing batteries that tossed skyward mountainous geysers of snow, made fragments of the trees, and, through every lighted hour, shook the forest end to end with a ceaseless, reverberating roar, that pounded upon the ear with the vindictive echoes of tortured damned souls.
Fortune is a fickle mistress, but she loves the strong and smiles her favor on the brave, and in this strange mad Arctic forest fight, the Briton gained her countenance by thus handsomely risking all at a throw, and by his dashing courage, his magnificent, irresistible, reckless courage.
The Slav, more cautious, and overestimating the strength opposing him (as the Bolsheviks did time after time), did not strike while the iron was hot, but held off until he had gathered together three regiments; the 2nd Moscow, the 96th Saratov, the 2nd Kasan and several companies of ski troops; and the road that paralleled the Railway line to the Bolshevik camp at Shelaxa, near Plesetskaya, became a pitiful trailing havoc of dead and dying horses, driven to exhaustion in hysterical haste to bring still more artillery, more supplies, more ammunition to the waiting assault.
But every day spent by the Bolshevik chief, in fortifying his attack, was bringing victory to Ironside. In this winter campaign, with lack of transportation and dwelling quarters, it was always impossible to concentrate overmastering numbers of troops without costly postponement of the striking assault. The most troops that could be assembled were assembled by the Bolsheviks at the Vaga and Bolshie Ozerki—probably eight thousand to ten thousand at each place, and these were brought together with enormous labor, incredible striving, heroic suffering in the cold, which plundered the soldiers' strength, so that they were weakened by privation and shaken by much exposure, and in the case of Bolshie Ozerki, came to the fight too late.
So this battle that might have taken the life of the Allied North Russian Expedition was lost, the fleeting opportunity for success sped away when after the first fell stroke the precious element of surprise was profligately squandered. And the Americans, bracing themselves for the storm, fell to under the engineers, and working night and day, erected a citadel in the woods, strengthened the barricades and actually finished two bullet proof blockhouses before the first battle shock. Immense stores of ammunition were stacked high about the guns, and as the men labored, their confident enthusiasm grew; every soldier, under the stimulating, mesmeric influence of his great chief, knew, with unwavering faith, that the fight was won, grew impatient in the blood lust, and whetting his bayonet, waited like a primitive savage, serene in the unshakable conviction "that one Allied soldier was the equal of twenty Bolsheviks." So, in truth, he had to be in the battles of Bolshie Ozerki.
It was a tactical custom of the enemy to attack the front and rear positions, sometimes he struck both simultaneously, but seldom the flanks. Therefore, General Ironside placed his Americans forward and back, where the gun emplacements were, and then stood poised for the onslaught. If the law of averages traversed its orbital course, all might be well, but if the Bolsheviks forsook their usual custom, these dispositions might well prove fatal; for although the Yorkmen were scattered among them as bolsters, the green, Russian, Archangel troops on the flank positions were as yet untried, and the presumption was against them in the pending death fight that would give no quarter.
But when the enemy came at last, on the seventh day, he came just as the General had speculated he would come in an attack on the rear guns; then in greater strength followed through at the front barricades. The next dawn, at three thirty o'clock, the full fury of the assault was uncovered, as three swaying rows of men hurled themselves forward like swelling, tidal waves, and when this forward attack was at its climax, a wild horde stormed the rear.
In such an encounter, the great chance of success is in overwhelming the weaker adversary by sheer preponderance of numbers, to palsy his intelligence by bearing down on him with an awesome multitude, and before he has recovered, sweep him off his feet. But with these Americans, there was no such terror wrought hiatus, for the very intensity of the situation seemed to electrify their fiber, and fire their brains with the steady, blue flame of coordinated intelligence; under these overwhelming tidal attacks these fighting men were never so alert, never so keenly and appraisingly aware of every event, never so thoroughly mindful of every tense situation as it transpired; for they knew that piling cumbersomely through those bogging snow depths, the oncoming Bolsheviks were shackled nearly as effectually as if bound with ankle ropes, and they were acutely conscious of the verity, that in the circumstances, one steady man behind a bullet proof barricade, deliberately directing a functioning machine gun, had the weight of three hundred rifles.
So now it was a glorious thing to be in the blockhouses and the log barriers and to witness those human multitudes surge on, then slacken, and falter and fail and shrivel as they came, while machine guns swept them line to line, and flank to flank, and piled the dead and left crumpled, moaning heaps of men, where red, ugly blotches widened on the snow.
The blockhouses where men were crippled and maimed and shell-shocked,
far away from gala Archangel.
By noon, the fury of the storm had nearly subsided, the Commander of the Saratov Regiment, thinking his troops had won their ground, rode on his white horse nearly into the defenses and was shot down as he came, and from this time, the firing became desultory, except when some violent commissar drove small groups forward to be killed, or others, made desperate by despair, sneaked creeping out, and so were killed, and the rest lay flattened on the snow, not daring to go forward or back.
At nine, the sun went down upon the tumult of a bloody, grewsome day; it became cold again, and there followed dusky, unnatural silence, shattered occasionally by the rasping crack of snipers' shots, where in that night of horrors, the unfortunate Bolsheviks passed the acme of mortal misery. For if defeated, they returned to their own camp, death was waiting for them, and ahead were the remorseless Americans ready to shoot on sight, without stint of mercy. So, fairly caught between two fires, they lay out through the endless, black hours of terrible cold and frost, and gangrene took a greater toll than all the gunshot wounds.
Yet great as was the enemy distress, all knew that when the next day dawned, new forces would come up and press on to another determined assault, and it was to divert as many of these reinforcements as possible, that General Ironside ordered the Onega Detachment to move against Bolshie Ozerki from the west.
That same night, one of the York companies left the Onega Detachment and followed an unreconnoitred trail through the forest to strike again the hostile village from the north at daybreak; but long before dawn, became confused in the darkness and was hopelessly lost when the attack began on the road where another British company was to move against the village. A Polish company of Archangel volunteers, who were to execute a corresponding south flank movement, came from Chekuevo too late, so that the brunt of the fight fell upon the unsupported Yorks on the road.
Thirty minutes after the first faint light, dogs, tied to trees by the Bolsheviks, sighting the approaching front attack, gave boisterous, barking alarm, and, on the instant, the woods were made hideous with the rasping rattle of many machine guns. Many of the little band were hit in this first storm, but the rest kept on, dragging themselves through the yielding, four foot snow, while inches over their heads, the air howled hideously with the passage of flying death. In the snow, rifles became clogged in the breeches, so that the bolts would not drive home, and men had to dig them clean with fingers stiffening from cold, but still, a little at a time, the attack wormed on and on. At one hundred yards, the gallant, British captain rose to lead a rush at the machine gun positions and was killed in his tracks; then the second officer was hard hit, and when the delayed Polish company came forward in support, and two of its number got shot through the bowels, the others bolted like sheep and could not be driven to the battle again.
Then the Yanks went in and stood manfully to the fight by the side of their distressed comrades, but against heart sickening, desperate, despairing odds, as the merging Bolsheviks came from both sides and massed in a vicious, determined counter attack that would have overcome all, but when doom seemed certain, the lost York Company emerged from the woods, by some act of a benevolent Providence, to meet and stay the fullness of the thrust, until darkness came down to save the valiant, little band on the snows.
This last, noble effort of the Onega Detachment had been made with a single thought—that of baring their breasts to the blow that otherwise would have fallen on their tired comrades in the barricades out in the forest from Obozerskaya; and great as the cost, its effect had been the final discouragement to the Bolsheviks who made one more ineffectual effort to gain the Allied Railway flank, then drew back in full retirement to the south.
The enemy sustained great losses in these battles of Bolshie Ozerki, upwards of two thousand casualties, many of them from the frost, for the villages could shelter but a fraction of the large forces, and many had to live in such makeshift quarters as could be devised.
Time was of the essence in this undertaking of the Bolshevik commander, and he had paused when he should have struck out with every man in his control, but by his dalliance, spring joined the league of his enemies. Soon the freezing clutch of winter would be broken in the warm sun, and, unless he hastened to withdraw to the south, his artillery would be mired in the yielding roads.
In June, the new, conscripted, Russian soldiers came to take Onega's posts, and the heavily-tired Americans went back to assembly at Archangel, buoyant and bright-eyed at the prospect of home, till they met on the city streets a few invalided Category B Scots going back to the battle lines, because the Bolo droves were gathering again and every man was needed there. Then the light smile passed from the lips of the Americans, a blush came to their cheek, home was forgotten and all thought of home; for there was a man's work out in the forest swamps far to the south—where death lurked and misery waited; and hardly a man who would not have chosen the swamps with their physical suffering and their ambushed death than escape and bear the stinging reproach of deserting a mate in distress. Better to play the wretched game through to the uttermost end than to be faithless to the traditions of one's blood, to quit the field with the honor of a nation stained and shamed in burning disgrace.
For was this such a flagitious, disgraceful brawl in which their mates had bled their manhood blood away that American soldiers should sneak from it thus, like cuffed and beaten mongrel curs?
Time, soothing time, will smooth with gentle, cooling fingers, the harsh lines of fretful hardship, the distressful burdens of campaign and trying vigils of sleepless peril, and even burn a purple halo of romance about this miserable, petty, little war, but some hurts the assuaging balm of time can never heal.
Many had cast off at the call of country and given all with generous unstinting affection, and those who were coming back did not begrudge the sacrifice; but rankling deep forever in the living consciousness of every Archangel soldier is the thought of this ignoble quitting and the weak abandonment by his country of everything to which he had pledged his manhood faith.—The causelessness of it all—Alarming, unbalancing reflections, a moral devastation that will not be quieted—Corroding grief for those who flushed with promise were "taken from life when life and love were young" in a shabby brawl for nothing.—A dangerous cynical bitterness is with the soldier of North Russia, mordant and enduring, that grows ever more bitter with the years.