Archangel: The American War with Russia

by John Cudahy

PINEGA

19th March, 1919.

C. G. Tours.

HQ: 3407, Following telegram repeated from Archangel quote Information as to future possible relief for this expedition would materially improve the morale of troops after their long winter of Field Service, and it would also assist me in making arrangements for the future. So far I have not received any official information as to prospects.

Signed Stewart unquote.

Repeated to G.H.Q. and Agware.

Wheeler.

"It has always been a cardinal axiom of the Allied and Associated Powers to avoid interference in the internal affairs of Russia. Their original intervention was made for the sole purpose of assisting those elements in Russia which wanted to continue the struggle against German autocracy, and to free their country from German rule, and in order to rescue the Czecho-slovaks from the danger of annihilation at the hand of the Bolshevik forces."

G. CLEMENCEAU.
D. LLOYD GEORGE.
WOODROW WILSON.
V. E. ORLANDO.
SAIONJI.

From note, dated 26th May, 1919, Allied and Associated Powers to Admiral Kolchak.

Patrols were often clad in white smocks

X

PINEGA

The Orthodox Church of Russia is hated by the Soviets with an intense and vehement hatred, for the institution of kings was sustained by religion even more effectively than by the Imperial Guards. Therefore, no opportunity to deride reverend personages and sacred objects is ever neglected by the Bolsheviks, or to violate with leering and uncouth pleasure, the hallowed worship places.

Under the nimbose influence of Red Moscow, the religious precepts of the people will be snatched ruthlessly from them. Harsh and unyielding though these precepts be, they are the only note of spirituality in the life of the moujik, and without them he wallows in a mire of crass animalism. There was in Holy Russia many a homily in patience and honesty and humility; but will these homely virtues endure in the arid waste and the spiritless air of agnosticism?

At Pinega, some ninety miles east of Archangel (and nearly one hundred fifty on the devious road), the cleric party was well fortified, and the outstanding civic feature of the city was the ancient monastery, standing commandingly at the edge of Lake Soyla.

The Pinega monks were quite naturally opposed to the Bolsheviks, but the mayor was a Soviet, and the city was divided in allegiance between White Archangel and Red Moscow when the detachment of Americans came in October.

The Americans' presence shepherded the wavering ones to the fold. A company of Home Guards was organized, and from outward signs the cause of the Allies had ascended to triumph. But the surrounding Bolsheviks were far from disbanded. They gathered in much strength under the leadership of Kulikoff, a competent horsethief, and commenced to plunder the slender, household larders of the peasants in the lower Pinega valley, to whose succor a police force of thirty-five Americans and two hundred White Russians were dispatched in mid-November. This police party penetrated eighty miles southeast and took Karpagora, after an engagement, but early in December was overpowered by the returning Bolsheviks. A few of the Americans were killed, more wounded, and the rest went back to Pinega, posting the White Russians in outlying villages as they retired.

So critical was the outlook that another American detachment came the one hundred and fifty miles from Archangel, ten days' journey in the darkness and the cold. But, more important to Pinega than these Christmas reinforcements, was Joel R. Moore, who came with them, wearing the shoulder straps of an infantry captain for the time in being, but whose life profession was that of college instruction, as skilled in applied humanity as the classical Humanities, and possessed of tact and understanding and sympathy, and that indefinable gift of leadership. He organized the Russians for their own defense in this bloody internecine fight, and shamed their leaders to vivid consciousness of dreadful responsibility to their pitifully dependent people.

In February, a vicious and prolonged attack in conjunction with the great Vaga offensive was made on Pinega, but the defense was well held, and when the situation looked most strained, and the fall of the city almost sure, the Bolsheviks slackened and fell back without overt cause or reason for relenting in their fierce assault, just as they did on the Vaga when the life of the Expedition was the stake.

No soldier who was in it will ever forget that mid-winter march from Archangel in gray days and cold, when the spruce trees cracked in the frost with the report of rifle shots; when the wind, a blearing blast, swept down and piled great billowy swells on the whitened trail, covered men head and foot like powdered, clownish figures, plastered their eyelids and nostrils grotesquely white with hoary frost, and flicked snow particles under headgear where they stung with the sting of pelting sand; other days when oppressive calm would stifle the air with the mystery of eternal stillness, jarringly profaned by the crunch of heavy, marching feet, the shambling of the little convoy ponies; and the tenacious trail would lower to great sheeted space, that swelled to the summit of long hills where village roofs were etched in steel on a burnished background, where the ineffectual sun strove vainly to thrust back imprisoning cloud curtains, slate hued and black.

Sometimes the way brought the soldiers through the phantom glade of a fairy forest, where delicately spun aigrettes and fragile, filmy plumes held by doubtful tenure on a limb would wave precariously in the wind and be lost in shapeless, irretrievable chaos of crumpled snow, but tens of thousands of others would fill their places, and inconceivable, bizarre festoons would spring to magic life, countless balloons and garlands and wreaths, and massive, ponderous globes, all shaped by the infinite artistry of the frost in an endless profusion of enchanting wonderment.

Sometimes their canopy would be a lilac sea, with islands of suave saffron, and slender, garish emerald reefs, which could never escape the tristful quality of the haunting Russian skies, where tragedy and melodrama ever unfolded till night clasped in blackness the brief twilight of those doleful winter days.

Under their humble roofs, the patient people revealed a hospitality that was moving in its utter absence of guile. The cherished samovar would be brought forth from a covert trove to kindle the uninvited guests with steaming tea, and in the evening all the villagers would troop to the crowded huts to doff their hats and cross themselves with pious orisons, and gaze with never wearying gaze at the strangers from the far fabled land of miracle and hope. Years from now moujik grandmothers will group rapt children around the oven stoves to tell them of the strange Americanskis who once came so many miles in the dread winter cold to help afflicted Russia.

Out in the frigid night, the aurora of the north swung swaying evanescent curtains, now fluttering with faint ethereal light, now springing to flowing, colorful life again, and one could fancy that Thalia signaled from the night heavens a playful spectral heliograph, mocking these silly little men so far below, that strove to conquer the dread elements of that gaunt Northland.

But, if in the whole campaign the somber veil of tragedy was ever lifted, it was at this front where the altruistic intention of the Allies seemed to have caught the consciousness of the people (whether or not this intent was in fact altruistic), they bore not only benevolence, but even humble touching gratitude towards their deliverers, and even undertook the burden of their own battles. Many Russians were lost in these battles for Pinega, but after the first expeditionary engagements not one American fell.

In January there was a massed assault, and when the fall of the city seemed almost sure, the Bolsheviks slackened and fell back, with their blade poised for the heart thrust.

But in March the defenses were safe in the competent hands of a regiment of White Russians, who were the defenders of their own towns, and the "Allied Legion" of no nation. Likewise there were two field guns with a Russian personnel of artillery, a unit of Russian machine gunners, carefully trained in the service of these rapid, death-dealing instruments of specialized modern war, and all these soldiers of Russia raised their heads high and proud as eagles, wearing no man's collar.

So it came that the Americans were free to take their leave for more pressing fronts and were given "Farewell and come again" from the hearts of the Pinega people, with generous, overflowing good will, abounding grateful acknowledgment of their genuine, upbuilding service. Perhaps this was more the conceived purpose of the Expedition to sustain the foundling democracy of Russia, to strengthen and instill solidarity and faith in the hearts and counsels of the Russian people, and to achieve such end by unsanguinary means. Perhaps the means might have been different and the melodrama never enacted if a college professor, with methods of applied humanity, had directed from the outset. But it is to offend the military to consider thus, and to be guilty of shameful heterodoxy.