THE PLAN OF CAMPAIGN

"I consider it my duty to inform you in plain language that unless considerable reinforcements are sent before the end of October, the military situation both at Archangel and the Murman Peninsula will, in my opinion, become very serious."

ADMIRAL KEMP, in command of British warships at Murmansk, to the Admiralty, 26th August, 1918.

The Province of Archangel stretches from the Norwegian frontier across the Arctic Ocean east of the Ural Mountains of Siberia. It includes the Kola Peninsula, which lies well north of the Arctic Circle, and the further-most point south is below sixty-two degrees latitude. The total area is six times that of the average American state.

It is a poverty distressed and cheerless, destitute region, which, during the reign of the Romanoffs, like Siberia, was often a place of exile and asylum for political dissidents. War accentuated the poverty of the province, and the only remanent sign of former industry is at the port of Archangel, where large timber mills, owned mostly by British capital, line both sides of the harbor.

The port was founded by Ivan the Terrible during the Sixteenth Century, and ever since then has been a British trading post. At Onega, Kem and Kamdalaksh on the White Sea, there is, or was, before the war, some small traffic in timber products, furs and flax. But this commerce is of small consequence. Prenatally, Archangel was destined for pauperism, for it lies in the far north, where life is poor and hard struggling, and there is little soft sunshine to woo riches from the earth. Nor are treasures concealed beneath its sear and barren surface. The curse of sterility taints the air, and it was never written in the Divine Plan that man should dwell in this fortuneless, forsaken region. He was banished there, or driven by the pitiless pursuit of his own misdeeds. For nearly half of the year, the White Sea is an impenetrable ice barrier, and then communication with the world beyond can be had only through the Murman railway to the far north port of Murmansk.

In the city, the East comes abruptly face to face with the West. The exotic colors of the great domed cathedral were brought from ancient Byzantium, when the Greek church was made the faith of his country by Vladamir; and bearded, sad-faced priests, with their black robes, glide through the streets like nether spirits, and the mysticism of the ancient, mystic East.

This is the native atmosphere of Archangel, and it will not be in a generation that the city will, without consciousness, take on the soft adornments and the practical utilities of Occidental civilization. The glaring electric lights, the incongruous, modern buildings and the noisy tramway that clangs down the street—these do not belong to Archangel. They are a profane encroachment on her ageless, dreaming tranquillity and eternal repose; her enigmatical, perhaps profound philosophy of nitchevoo.

Fundamentally, Archangel is a primitive center of primitive beings. Instinctively, it is a dirty hole. Hopelessly, it is a filthy place, where noxious stenches greet the nose and modern sanitation is unknown.

In the days of peace, there were perhaps three hundred fifty thousand people in the province, and sixty thousand of them dwelt in Archangel. The only other cities of importance are Pinega, with three thousand persons, some one hundred miles to the east, and Shenkurst, two hundred miles south on the Vaga River, where there were four thousand. But as a whole, the inhabitants are moujiks, dwelling in little villages of two or three hundred log huts, that in structure and design bear close resemblance to the cabins of our frontier civilization.

About these villages, the peasants have cleared the forest for a few hundred yards, and in the brief, hot months of the midnight sun, they raise meager crops of wheat and flax and potatoes. When winter comes, they are continually indoors, gathered about great ovens of fireplaces, and long through the dismal, cold, black days they sit and dream, or merely sit. They are unsophisticated folk, incredibly ignorant, but gentle, quiet mannered, sweet natured souls, despite a harsh, uncouth life; and very responsive to kind treatment.

Cholera visits them with recurrent, devastating plagues, and takes fearful toll, for they live in the midst of nauseating squalor, with total disregard to sanitation, and drink from surface wells, that in the sudden spring are reservoirs of sewage and all manner of obscene refuse.

All along the rivers and roads of the interior, at intervals of five to ten miles, are strung these moujik villages.

There is, among these people, no agriculture as we practice it in our country, with a set of prosperous looking farm buildings for the cultivation of two hundred and five hundred broad, fertile, American acres. In Russia, I never saw more than five hundred cleared acres for an entire village.

Yet, from these small, unfecund patches, the peasants, somehow, wrung the means of sustaining life, and those who toiled in the fields divided the scanty harvest with the aged and the weak, and the children who were fatherless: so that there was no mendicancy among the moujiks, and no affluence either.

There are two railways in Archangel Province, the Murman road, which begins at Murmansk on the Arctic Ocean, extends south to Kem through Petrozavodsk, and forms a juncture fifty miles east of Petrograd with the Trans-Siberian, nine hundred miles from the point of beginning; and the Archangel-Vologda railway, which reaches from Archangel four hundred miles south to Vologda, where the Siberian road comes in from Viatka on the east and leads to Petrograd. Both railways have the standard five feet gauge single track. During the winter of 1919, the Murman road, with a theoretical capacity of thirty-five hundred tons, had an actual hauling capacity of only five hundred tons a day, and its rail connections were in very poor condition and badly in need of repair. The Vologda road had a single track, but with sidings every five miles. Both roads had obsolete rolling stock, rickety, tumbled down cars and wood-burning locomotives of a type used in our country fifty years ago.

During the war with Russia, the Allies, with a medley force of friendly Russians, British, Canadians, French, a battalion of Serbians and a battalion of Italians, held the Murman railway as far south as sixty miles beyond Soroka, which is a little south of Archangel and two hundred miles to the east.

There were no Americans on this Murman railway front, except two companies of railway transportation troops, which reached Russia in April and were the last to leave in July, 1919.

Patrols with webfoot snowshoes went forth on the snow

Beyond the Murman and the Vologda railways, the only other highway to the interior is the Dvina, a dirty colored, broad spreading river, which from its beginning, as the Witchega, at the base of the Timan Range in Vologda province, follows a swift flowing course one thousand miles northwest to the sea at Archangel.

Sometimes, when its banks are low and it sprawls out in play, its waters glide noiselessly with a look of gentleness and peace, and the Dvina puts one in mind of our Mississippi; but usually its cold depths are freighted with grave mystery and melancholy foreboding, and then it is the spirit of Russia, hurrying by forested shores and high, desolate bluffs, where a mill, near a huddle of soiled log houses, flaps its clumsy, wooden wings, and a white church, with fantastic minaret, rears aloof, chaste and austere, in the midst of squalor.

During the period of navigable water, in the days of peace, the Dvina was plied by steamers and barges and watercraft of every description, but the freeze commences in early November, and then, until the last days of May, its waters have become a bed of thick ice.

Then, except by the Vologda railway, the only method of transportation between Archangel and the interior is by sledges, drawn over the snow by little shaggy ponies that can perform miracles of labor and seem impervious to the terrible, cold winds. These ponies are the embodiment of the moujik temperament, docile and mild mannered, very patient and long suffering, and never resentful of the most severe chastisement.

The whole province is a plain of low, gentle slopes, covered with small fir trees and several varieties of dwarfed pine. A long, dormant season and the severity of winter preclude any luxuriant, ligneous growth. Even the underbrush is sparse and thinly scattered, and commercially, about the only value of the Archangel forests is for the manufacture of pulp. The bottom of this spindly pine woods is covered with a tundra. Sometimes, there are patches of waist deep water, and in other places, a morass that seems bottomless.

Such is the character of all the North Russian forests. The natives tell stories of men, unfamiliar with the country, who have lost their way and floundered in these treacherous marshes until they passed from sight without a sign of their passage.

During the rains of fall, and when summer bursts upon winter, in June, is the season of rasputitsa. The wagon roads then are sloughs of deep mire, and little travel is attempted. The first snow falls in November and gradually mounts, until in January it has a uniform height of three feet, except in the open places where there are great drifts much higher. No thaw comes until late February, and so moving for any distance on foot is impossible without skis or snowshoes. Cold follows the snow, gradually increasing in intensity until there are January days of forty-five and fifty degrees below zero Fahrenheit.

When the wind is high and the air filled with great, white blasts, this cold of Russia presses on the diaphragm like a ponderous weight and breathing becomes a gasping effort. In the depth of winter, the sun is banished, and during the latter part of December, only a few hours of pale, anemic glimmering separates the black Arctic night; a shadowy gloaming, like shortlived, desert twilight.

Splendid, fighting men were made weak cowards by the cumulative depression of the unbroken, Russian night and its crushing influence on the spirit; for the severest battles of the campaign were fought during the cold, black months of winter time.

Preparations for opening hostilities in the war with Russia were made in April, 1918. The Allied Supreme War Council had been alert to the presence of German troops in Finland and their fanciful menace to the Murman railway; and in the quiet harbor of Murmansk, British and French battleships had been idling purposelessly since early spring. In April, one hundred fifty Royal Marines landed from the British ships and were followed in a few weeks by four hundred more, also a landing party of French sailors. On 10th June, the United States warship, Olympia, appeared at Murmansk, and one hundred American bluejackets disembarked. These Allied forces penetrated down the Murman railway to Klandalaksh, some two hundred fifty miles south, and, in addition to holding Murmansk, seized the port of Petchenga on the coast of Finland.

Then the scene of intervention shifted southward, and on the 1st August, General Poole, with a party of five hundred fifty French, British and a few American marines, escorted by a British cruiser, a French cruiser and a trawler fleet, attacked Archangel, which, after a bombardment, was surrendered next day by the weak Bolshevik rear guard.

The main body of the enemy had carried with them far up the river to Kotlas and down the railway to Vologda, rations, rifles, guns and ammunitions, American manufactured. Likewise, they had seized and carried off nearly all available means of transportation; and when the Allied troops examined the vast storehouses in the harbor and at Bakaritza, they found that the Bolsheviks deliberately, systematically and with great thoroughness had stripped the shelves of every conceivable thing of value. If the object of the Archangel Expedition was to safeguard the vast munitions and stores there, it had failed signally and at the outset.

Still the enemy had fled, for, by some occult form of necromancy the Bolsheviki had now become "the enemy," and it is a major premise of the military that a fleeing enemy must always be followed up. Small heed that little was known of the strength or disposition of the retiring army. They had fled. Two forces were immediately dispatched in pursuit, up the river and down the railway; and, to augment the strength of the invaders, new troops were sent from Europe.

The 339th American Infantry arrived at Archangel on 4th September, 1918. It was composed of Wisconsin and Michigan men, mostly the latter; men from our farms and from our cities, who had been drafted for war against Germany.

Like most of our civilian soldiers, they had no exuberant ecstasy for the grim business ahead, but still possessed a remarkable appreciation of the war and its deep significant issues. And they had a quiet courage that was good to see, and a quiet resolution shorn of sentimental heroics to give their lives for their country if the sacrifice was necessary. Not one of them was deeply agitated by the emotion of "Making the world safe for Democracy," which is the desiccated war cry of the academician and never could reach the heart depths of any people; but they did feel in some vague, yet definite way, that a soulless military system, which had trampled brutal, iron-clad boots through the gentle fields of Belgium, might some day carry its hateful spate to the Michigan village or green-hilled Wisconsin farm, where an old lady with spectacles sat behind the window of a white cottage, and near lilac bushes growing fragrant in the lane a wholesome faced girl waited.

These soldiers of Russia were of the same type as our men who fought in France—no better and no worse; another way of saying that they were the best soldiers in the world. They were all drawn from the Eighty-fifth Division of the National Army, and came from all the races and shades and grades and trades of our many colored American society.

Many of them had had only a few weeks of crowded military training, and were still civilians in physique and bearing. Most important of all, they were civilian in mental constitution.

With the 339th Infantry, came the 337th Field Hospital Company, the 337th Ambulance Company, and the 310th Engineers, a splendid, upstanding, competent battalion, that in the approaching ordeal upheld the best in our American traditions, showed extraordinary power of adaptitude, extraordinary resourcefulness, no matter the difficulties, were ever cheerful and undaunted, and altogether splendid.

Roughly, the entire force of the Americans aggregated forty-five hundred men. It was augmented about a month later by five hundred replacements, snatched here and there from the infantry companies of the Eighty-fifth Division in France.

That September day the Americans landed at Archangel, and the fagged engines of the troop ships Somali, Tydeus, and Nagoya came to rest, those who looked from the decks breathed in the oppressive air a haunting presentiment of approaching evil.

Halfway from camp at Stoney Castle, England, five hundred of the little company had been stricken with the dreaded Spanish influenza. Eight days out at sea, all medical supplies were exhausted, and conditions became so congested in the ships' quarters that the sick, running high fever, were compelled to lie in the hold or on deck exposed to the chill winds.

At Archangel, there was little improvement. Soldiers were placed in old barracks, there they lay on pine boards. They had insufficient bedding, and for warmth had to keep on their clothing and boots. In this way many died and many more were enfeebled for many months, but "stuck it" with their companions and went to the front.

Had the Fates placed a curse on the Expedition from the beginning?

There was an air of inscrutable haunting sorrow in the lowering skies, glinted limpid with a sinister, bronzed light from a sun that flamed to crimson death among the dark trees over the bay.

Across the harbor projected the tiny red roofs of the city, the venerable cathedral, ghostly with great white dome, grotesque fantastic spires and minarets, garish in the fading light with startling pigments of green and gold. A mournful stillness brooded over a scene weird and alien to the men from far off Michigan and Wisconsin, who had a feeling that they had left behind forever the stage of tedious factory days and prosy farm life, and moved to another sphere, shrouded in mystery, filled with unparalleled, dread adventure.

Besides the American regiment, there was a British brigade of infantry nearly the same strength as the Americans, in the main composed of Companies of Royal Scots, most of them catalogued by the War Office as Category B2 men; unqualified for the arduous, exhausting tasks of an active field campaign, but fit enough to safeguard stores in Archangel, "light garrison duty."

Many wore the bronze wound stripe, and many had two and even three of these honorary decorations. These war-tired soldiers, wearied to the point of cruel exhaustion, had given freely and without stint of their body on the Western battlefields for King and Country; but the great Empire was backed to the wall and fighting for her life in an insatiable conflict, she exacted the last draining dregs of their gasping strength. That these "crocked" Category B men performed prodigies of fortitude and miracles of endurance, and acted deeds of stirring, spiritual courage in this war of the Far North is a permanent tribute to a manhood that England breeds, and imperishable glory to British arms.

The French sent eight hundred and forty-nine men and twenty-two officers, a battalion of the 21st Colonial Infantry, two machine gun sections and two sections of seventy-five millimetre artillery.

On the railway front, there was an armored train, with one eighteen pounder, one seventy-seven millimetre and one hundred fifty-five millimetre Russian naval howitzer. Then came early in the campaign the Sixteenth Brigade Canadian Field Artillery consisting of the 67th and 68th Batteries, each with six eighteen pounders and tough gunners seasoned and scarred by four years of barrages and bombardments in France, rather keen for the adventure of North Russia while the fighting was on, and thoroughly "fed up" when there was a lull in the excitement.

These Canadians, in peace, had probably been kindly disposed farm folk, gathering the rich bronzed harvests of Saskatchewan fields.

But four years of war had wrought a transfiguration of many things and no longer did life have its exalted value of peace times. No, life was a very cheap affair, but, cheap as it was, its taking often made exhilarating sport. At the end of a battle these quiet Saskatchewan swains passed among the enemy dead like ghoulish things, stripping bodies of everything valuable, and adorning themselves with enemy boots and picturesque high fur hats, with abounding glee, like school boys on a hilarious holiday.

Yet there was nothing debased or vicious about these Canadians. They were undeliberate, unpremeditated murderers, who had learned well the nice lessons of war and looked upon killing as the climax of a day's adventure, a welcomed break in the tedium of the dull military routine. Generous hearted, hardy, whole-souled murderers; I wonder how they have returned to the prosy days of peace, where courage counts for little, and men are judged not by the searching rules of war, but by the superficial standards of secure being; and living is soft and slow, an affair of rounding chores, with few stirring moments to illumine the dull routine of most of us.

At the outset, the Canadians and a few inaccurate Russians were our only artillery. Two months after the commencement of the campaign, two Four Point Five howitzers, with British personnel, joined the Allied Forces, and there were several airplanes, considered obsolete for use in France, but good enough for the Arctic sideshow.

The air pilots were daring and courageous men, but, besides being hopelessly handicapped by defective machines, they complained that the forests of North Russia made definite discernment of the ground a very difficult thing. The facts are that they dropped several bombs on our own lines, and twice with tragic disaster. There was never any apparent reason to believe that the airplanes caused the enemy even passing uneasiness, but we were always agitated as their menacing drone approached, always grateful when they trailed off to distant skies.

The complete combat command of the Commanding General of the Allied North Russian Expedition at the outset of the campaign was then:

One regiment of American Infantry,
One brigade of British Infantry,
One battalion of French Infantry,
Two sections of French Seventy-Fives,
Two sections of French machine gunners,
One brigade (487 men) Canadian Field Artillery,
One armored train,
One 155 millimetre and
One 77 millimetre Russian howitzers.

There were a few groups of Russian Infantry with the Allied troops, but at the outset these did not number over three hundred men. In all, there were approximately nine thousand five hundred combat troops.

With this force, the Allied Commander proposed to engage in an aggressive campaign, to drive the enemy before him and follow up along the two main ways of ingress to the interior. Troops were at once dispatched down the railway to penetrate as far as the city of Vologda four hundred miles to the south, and other troops were sent by tug and barge up the Dvina River, with Kotlas, three hundred miles southeast, as their immediate objective. From Kotlas, there is a branch railway leading two hundred fifty miles further south to the Trans-Siberian at Viatka.

When their missions were accomplished, the Railway Force at Vologda would be nearly due east of the Dvina Force at Viatka, and distanced four hundred miles across the Trans-Siberian railway.

Beyond this stage, the Allied plan was somewhat hazy. It contemplated rather vagrantly a fusion with the Czecho-slovaks along the Siberian railway, after penetration south to this trunk line.

A volunteer brigade of these adventurous soldiers who had been Austro-Hungarian prisoners, but whose whole-souled sympathy was with the Allies, organized in their native Bohemia and Moravia, and joined General Broussiloff in the spring of 1917 to take part in the victory of Zborow near Lemberg. Moving to the railway between Kiev and Poltava in the Ukraine, the brigade recruited more Czech prisoners in Russia until it had grown to the strength of two divisions.

After the peace of Brest-Litovsk, this army corps pushed forward to the middle Volga in the direction of Kazan and Samara intending to reach Vladivostok and sail from there to join the Allied Command in France.

The Soviet authorities promised them safe convoy over the Siberian railway, but instead, treacherously attacked at Irkutsk in Siberia on 26th May, 1918, and the Czechs then divided into two groups, one determined to fight through to Vladivostok, the other under General Gaida bent upon joining the Allied invasion from Archangel.

Although this last aim was not realized (and would have profited little if it had been) the Czechs performed a service of inestimable consequence to the Allies by acting in conjunction with the Anti-Bolshevik Siberian troops, and with the small Allied Eastern Expedition of Great Britain, Japan and the United States, in holding the Trans-Siberian open from Omsk to the coast, so preventing the transportation of many thousands of German prisoners back to Germany. When the Archangel fiasco was brought to a close they withdrew to their own country in October, 1919. And, reviewing the whole unproductive Russian effort in retrospect, the Czechs came closest towards a realization of the mythical "Eastern Front," for, while they could not engage in aggressive action, they did much by negative methods, denying Germany great numbers of returning soldiers that might have been welded into a considerable effective combat force for the Western theatres of war had they been free to enter their country from the Eastern frontier.

The hopelessness of a junction between the Archangel Expedition and the Czechs became certain at the beginning of the northern campaign, and General Poole was advised by the British War Intelligence that Gaida had been driven back in Samara five hundred miles from Viatka and could advance no farther before the commencement of winter.

Still the optimistic Allied Staff clung tenaciously to the belief that all the Anti-Bolshevik Russians could be joined, the Czechs, the Cossacks that General Denekin had organized between the northern Caucasus and the sea of Azov, and a group of loyal officers of the Imperial Army with General Korniloff along the Don. It was within the Allied range of possibilities that all these scattered groups might join the British, French and Americans on the Siberian railway, and after the Staff was thoroughly committed to an offensive campaign, there arose the hope of cooperation from the friendly Russian forces in Siberia. On 18th September, 1918, at Ufa, there was a meeting of representatives from the Governments of Archangel, Eastern and Western Siberia, Samara and Vologda, which purported to form a Central government of all Russia, and to restore the Constituent Assembly.

On 25th October, this group moved to Omsk, created Admiral Kolchak Military Dictator 18th November, and proposed to raise a strong armed force to purge Russia of Bolshevism for all time.

The Allied governments were quick to recognize this Omsk group as the de facto government of Russia.

It was hoped that the armies of Admiral Kolchak could get in communication with the Allied Forces working down from the Arctic.

This, then, was the culmination of the first stage of the campaign: There was to be a junction of the Americans, French and British from the North; Czecho-Slovaks, and the armies of Kolchak from the East; Korniloff and Denekin from the South. Tens of thousands of patriotic Russians were to join the colors of these armies, converging somewhere on the Trans-Siberian, between Perm and Vologda; from Vologda the way would be unopposed to Petrograd, and from Petrograd the Allied-Russian legions would move on and reconstruct the Eastern front, threatening Germany from the northeast!

There was nothing lacking in the imagination of the plans of the Allied High Command, whatever else might be said about them.

The Northern Expedition with great combative esprit set forth vigorously to traverse Archangel the whole length of the province by river and railway with two "Columns" which were even to penetrate well into Vologda Province. Starting from Archangel, the Dvina river and the Vologda railway rapidly diverged east and west, so that at the first point of contact with the enemy, the two main bodies of the invader were seventy-five miles apart; and if their object, i.e., to reach the Trans-Siberian had been realized, they would have been four hundred miles apart on that railway.

There was no wire communication between these Allied Railway and River Forces, and of course liaison over the lateral terrain impassable swamp in fall, and a field of deep floundering snow in winter, was impossible.

As the invasion developed, the two columns of necessity operated as independent expeditions, with no attempt at establishing connection.

To reach their joint objective, the Siberian railway, it was necessary for the River Force to travel one hundred fifty more miles than the Railway Force. Moreover ice was expected during the first part of November, and if Kotlas was to be taken by the river, it was necessary to advance the three hundred miles in scarcely six weeks from the time of leaving Archangel.

When forced to assume the defensive in the late fall, the Dvina Column was nearly fifty miles in advance of the Railway front position, and the Vaga Column, an intervening force that was found necessary to prevent an enemy rearward movement on the river, was fifty miles in advance of the Dvina Column.

Lacking any effective communication between bodies of troops, the military incursion was expected to penetrate an unknown alien country, where there proved to be far more hostile sentiment than friendly cooperation.

There was no reconnaissance of the country; no physical inventory of the lay of the land; no reliable military maps; no knowledge of the paths through the swamp-bottomed forests; no information of the roads. Many an early attack was lost because the frontal advance failed to get support of the flanking party that became hopelessly mired in the deep marshes and never got to the fight.

The climatic conditions were a permanent obstacle to an offensive campaign. When the snow came and the weather grew intensely cold, even if we had possessed the necessary men, it would have been madness to think of an offensive in the open. Then it was possible only to dig in and hold on.

Yet despite the intense sub-zero weather there was little trouble with the field guns which during the most severe days recoiled and ran up without any jar. Moreover, there was not so much suffering from the cold as might be supposed. The Command thought that the Siberian railway would be reached before the serious winter set in, nevertheless the expedition was excellently well equipped for the Arctic weather. Soldiers were issued long fur lined coats, fur hats and had an abundance of other good warm clothing and plenty of blankets. The men from Northern Wisconsin and the Michigan peninsula did not mind greatly the severe winter days. There was some frost bite from unavoidable exposure, and much terrible privation in the defensive actions; but on the whole the Allied soldiers withstood the cold as well as the Bolsheviks.

The strength of the enemy was an unknown factor. So were his positions and his dispositions. There were no supports, no reserves. The base of the invading army in Russia was Archangel, a fortnight's journey from the far-most front and nearly three thousand miles from the main base in England; Archangel, in complete isolation during the six months of winter.

There were no reinforcements at Archangel ready to relieve the jaded soldiers so far away, who had to continue doing double duty and fighting against greatly superior numbers with no promise of relief. More important than the objective fact was the thought of being thus forsaken that froze the soldier's heart and numbed his brain and never left him through the long blackness of the days. It was the same feeling of palsied hopelessness that comes over the city bred man who finds himself lost in the wilderness. The soldier felt he was abandoned by his country, that he was forgotten and left to his fate in the grisly plain of pitiless, white Russia.

Then there was no diversion, no break in the gloomy, monotonous, despairing hours; no relaxation from the ceaseless vigilance in the guard against surprise attack; no respite from the constant threat of annihilation. The drear, sorrow freighted clouds menaced death. There was the message of Death across the bleak, endless, desolate snows. Death haunted the shrouded, hopeless days, and in the shadow of the encircling forests, Death waited. It was the most severe strain to which human intelligence could be subjected.

Many lessons were learned in the war, and none so clearly as the one that human endurance cannot be taxed beyond capacity without a resultant of diminishing military returns.

In France it soon became a corollary, universally accepted by all the Staffs, that men could not be subjected to the strain of continuing horrors and uninterrupted drain of physical resources without a pronounced lowering of fighting morale. It was calculated to a nicety how long a soldier could endure mental shocks and suffer hardships until his nervous system snapped and his distraught brain could tolerate no more.

These things were all weighed in the precise scales at the laboratories of the war establishment and provision was made for human limitations, so that there grew up three units in every combat army. One of them attacking, or standing the brunt of enemy assault; another in the supporting trenches, to be used in great emergency, but most important of all to become accustomed to the terrifying effect of the big guns; and a third that was far back, where there was a warm bath and clean clothes, peace in the sky and the soft grass still grew green, where men drank deep their little day of life, and found oblivion from the animal filth and unspeakable griefs, the awful hideousness of modern warfare. It came to be recognized that reliefs of troops on the combat first lines were as necessary as ammunition and ration supply.

But there were few and in some cases there were no reliefs for fighting men in North Russia, because there was no support unit from which to draw reliefs, and no reserve unit to call forth from the rear for those at the front.

The Russian Expedition, if its object was to drive the Bolsheviks clear of Archangel Province and south of the Siberian railway, required for execution of this object an army corps with entire component of artillery, and in this war with Russia, Great Britain and France and the United States failed because of:

1. Inadequate forces in the Allied Command.

This was not only true with respect to numbers, but also with respect to armament and equipment.

We had no artillery support. We were outgunned from the outset and continued to have marked artillery inferiority throughout the campaign. Time after time, the infantry, after gallant success, was shelled out of position, while our own guns were silent because outranged. The effect on the morale was most disastrous.

On the River Front, there were three Allied gunboats which cooperated effectively during the first days, but during the latter part of October, when the fight began, these withdrew to Archangel in fear of becoming caught by the ice which formed at the mouth of the Dvina, and then moved slowly upstream against the strong current.

It took a week for this ice barrier to travel one hundred miles against the course of the river, so that the enemy had unhindered opportunity to bring up his artillery mounted on watercraft, which he did, and blasted our positions for two weeks after the Allied boats had gone back to winter quarters.

Nothing was more discouraging than this hopeless inferiority in long range guns. Assaulting troops, no matter how spirited and courageous, cannot hold their advance in the teeth of a bombardment that scatters emplacements like chaff before the wind and shocks men into a state of insensibility. The stunning effect of massive, high explosives is more important than the casualties caused by direct hits. Nerves are palsied, then fly from control under unremitting blasting salvos. Fortifications are blown to atoms, and debris thrown up like vomit in a deafening belch, a bolt of hottest hell; while the earth quivers like a frightened living thing. And if modern warfare has demonstrated one thing more than any other, it is the prime necessity of artillery support, especially during the attack. After three years' experience, the French and British Staffs laid down the rule that for an offensive to be made with any hope of success, there should be a field gun covering every ten yards of the objective and a heavy gun every thirty yards.

The British provided fifty-six heavy guns and howitzers per division, and of these twenty-nine were six inch and over.

The French had fifty-eight guns in each division, forty-six of which were six inch and over.

These divisions were made up of two brigades of two regiments each, a total of fourteen thousand four hundred men.

The Americans in France had two regiments of 75 mm. guns and one regiment of 155 mm. guns for every combat division on the first lines. At Archangel there was not a six inch gun in the Allied Command until the late days of spring when the Americans were evacuated. There was only the Russian naval howitzer on the armored train. And the only other heavy guns were two Four Point Five howitzers of the 41st Royal Field Artillery.

Besides this fatal lack of artillery, the Allied Command was miserably supplied with other armament. In the early days we had only a few machine guns and these were Vickers, with water cooled system, that became frozen and would not function in the severe cold. We had few Trench Mortars and no rifle grenades or hand grenades. But most disheartening of all were the Russian rifles issued to the infantry. They were manufactured in our country by the million for use of the Imperial Army; long, awkward pieces, with flimsy, bolt mechanism, that frequently jammed.

These weapons had never been targeted by the Americans, and their sighting systems were calculated in Russian paces instead of yards. They had a low velocity and were thoroughly unsatisfactory. The unreliability of the rifle, prime arm of the infantry, was an important factor in the lowering of Allied morale.

2. Underestimation of the enemy forces and his military capacity.

The Allied military authorities looked with contempt upon the Bolshevik movement, and viewed it as simply a sporadic outburst of outlawry that would pass like all disorganized brigandry.

The facts were that this war was waged against the government of the Russian people. The de facto authority was in the hands of Lenine and Trotsky at Moscow. The Omsk group was distinctly an expression of the minority and the ancient Imperialists who were obstinately impervious to the new Russia flaming in revolution against age long abuses and tyrannies of the old order that could never be returned. The Omsk group never quickened any popular response. It lacked essential authority. The spectacular success of Admiral Kolchak before Perm was not followed through, and his government waned while the Bolsheviks grew in strength every day.

The Soviet army was despised as an undisciplined rabble, without equipment or officers or commissary organization. But the Bolshevik soldier was as well equipped as we were, and incomparably superior in the larger arms. He was often better rationed, and sometimes led better.

During the winter of 1919, Trotsky, an outstanding military genius, raised from the Kerensky rabble an army of one million men, which William C. Bullit of our State Department saw in March of that year at Moscow, and described as thoroughly soldierly looking, thoroughly trained, well rationed, and well provided for.

From Moscow to Vologda, is less than three hundred miles by the railway which continues straight to Archangel. Why the Soviets did not concentrate a division on the railway, move straight to Archangel and leave the scattered Allied battalions bottled up in the interior is one of the many mysteries of the Expedition.

In February, Omberovitch, the Commander of the Bolshevik Northern army, announced that he would hurl the foreign invader into the White Sea and concentrated over seven thousand men in an attack on Shenkurst, the Allied position on the Vaga river. This force was ten times the strength of the defenders, who were driven back verst by verst over the deep snows to Kitsa, sixty miles down the river, and the Allied Staff prepared rearward positions in anticipation of withdrawal about Archangel and a last stand there a few weeks later. The enemy struck again with overpowering numbers at Bolshie Ozerki near the Railway.

But he never consolidated his success. For some inscrutable reason withheld the knockout blow, and, before he could reorganize for another advance, spring came with the nasta or thaw, and he had to pull back his artillery or abandon it in the bog. He also brought great forces in November to the assault of the River position, and attacked the Railway in spring with large numbers and with great vigor; but despite his vast superiority in guns, and his great advantage in strength, he could not, or did not, break through to complete victory and destroy our scattered, weakened battalions.

Perhaps one reason the Bolsheviks did not massacre the puny Allied forces was because the nature of conditions in North Russia did not permit the concentration of great masses for the attack. The little villages, even with greatest crowding, could only house a few hundred men. Except at Shenkurst, where the most ambitious thrust was made, there was shelter for only a few thousand soldiers, and shelter was as essential as rations in this war of the Arctic.

Another reason may have been that Lenine had sagacity and imagination enough to know that a complete massacre would have fired the people of Great Britain and France and America with burning indignation and a demand for revenge which their governments could not deny. Better to whittle away the little Allied company by methods of attrition. There was no prize in Archangel. The Bolsheviks had stripped that city of everything valuable long before the Allies came to Russia.

3. Ignorance of the military commitment.

The difficulties of conducting an offensive campaign in Archangel province were at the outset not understood or realized by Allied Headquarters.

Military men have asked me why the Commanding General did not, if determined upon an aggressive warfare, concentrate his small numbers for an advance on the Vologda railway, leaving a cordon of well fortified outposts about Archangel, sufficiently distant to protect the city from artillery bombardment.

By such a method, he could have held his little force well in hand, would have safeguarded Archangel and fulfilled the real mission of the expedition (if guarding Archangel was the mission), with small cost and few casualties.

The answer to this is that British Headquarters was determined upon an offensive program, and committed itself to a punitive chase of the Bolsheviks, regardless of the nature of such an undertaking, heedless of where it led, blind to consequences.

As the Allies pushed into this unknown country, it became apparent that between the two Columns advancing by the Dvina river and by the railway, there stretched a great, unsounded territory, entirely unreconnoitered, and through which by many routes, the enemy could threaten the tenuous unguarded lines of communication with Archangel.

It was necessary to put out flanking parties and to keep an eye to the rear. At Kodish, fifty miles east from the Railway and also on the Vaga river, which forms a junction with the Dvina one hundred and fifty miles from Archangel, it was imperative to organize invasions auxiliary to the two main bodies. Likewise, from east and west, threats were made upon the security of the city of Archangel, and it became necessary to establish detached outposts in Pinega Valley, one hundred miles on the left flank, and Onega Valley, about the same distance on the right flank.

Also, isolated garrisons were installed in villages in the rear—at Seletskoe on the Emtsa, and at Emetskoe, where this small tributary flowed into the Dvina; at Morjagorskaya, midway between Emetskoe and Bereznik, and Bereznik itself, fifty miles farther south on the Dvina, where there was an important subsidiary base; at Shred Mekrenga, where there was an important road, and at other villages in the interior, little groups of soldiers were stationed, and often lieutenants short from civil life found themselves "Officers Commanding," faced with the problems and responsibilities of Field Officers.

By December, the Allied fighting forward stations in Archangel Province were extended in the form of a huge horseshoe, and a line drawn from flank to flank and covering the forward position would have reached out five hundred miles.

There were six principal American battlefronts: Pinega, Onega, the Vologda Railway, Kodish, the Vaga River, and the Dvina. Each of these in the war of North Russia formed a distinct episode quite apart from the others. The soldiers on the Dvina were entirely in ignorance of the fate of their companions on the Railway. At other points in the interior many did not even know that there were American outposts at Onega and Pinega; and so the history of the expedition must of necessity be a series of disjointed apparently fragmentary accounts of each separated battleground—in truth a description of six little campaigns with only one point of contact, that all Americans went out from Archangel in the fall of 1918 and in spring the following year those who still lived quit (under orders), from the same quarter.

Twice during the expedition an attempt at liaison was made between the Railway and its theoretical supporting flanks, Onega and Kodish, and Shred Mekrenga, but both occasions demonstrated that cooperation was impossible. The other forces on the rivers and at Pinega were as unrelated as if they had been situate at opposite poles. Each operated an independent, unconnected war, learning about the other fronts only through wild and distorted rumors of disasters, and hearing from far off Archangel only intermittently.

Thus the Allied North Russian Expedition melted away in the snows, and the first flushed extravagant egoistic ambition of conquest and aggression was followed by a sober appraisal of the grave peril of annihilation.

When the policy of aggression had been carried so far that it was too late to change, General W. E. Ironside assumed command. He was a great tower of a man, the embodiment of soldierly force and resolution. He directly announced that all ideas of a further offensive were abandoned and that all fronts from thenceforward would be content to hold their ground.

General Ironside has been criticised adversely for not withdrawing his scattered troops to Archangel to await the breaking up of ice in spring, when ships could enter the harbor and the fiasco be terminated by evacuation of Russia. But this criticism is unfair and unwarranted.

It was too late for such a change of policy. It would have been disheartening to the defenders of these distant fronts after the costly toll of the defense to have abandoned their hard fought posts. It would have been a giving of ground that would have heartened the enemy and thrilled him with new life; for the Bolsheviks were never exalted by victory, they paid dearly for every inch they gained, and our men, except when overwhelmed on the Vaga, never retreated from a position which they had fortified and determined to hold.

There were no prepared defenses on the outskirts of Archangel, and the defensive garrisons between the front lines and the city were far separated and inadequately fortified to withstand an extensive assault. Transportation of the retreat over the deep snowed roads would have been beset with terrible and afflicting hardship. There were long, cruel snow spaces between the villages that lay along the backward way and very scanty opportunities for shelter.

The task given to General Ironside, to retrieve the North Russian Expedition, was not within the range of human accomplishment. He did the best he could with the means at hand, which was to hold grimly on until those who directed from far off Europe, and who knew nothing of the gravity of the situation, or did not appear concerned if they did know, came to some sort of decision.

General Ironside conducted his defensive campaign with inspiring leadership, with unfailing heartsome courage; and he won the sympathy of all by his rare tact and understanding, and the affection of all by his consideration for the men, his efforts to stay the casualty lists.

4. The want of a definite moral purpose.

Since the days of Thermopylae, the effect of spiritual stimulus upon the fighting qualities of fighting men has been known the world over. The military people make a concrete thing of this, and attempt to diagram it, analyze and classify it in their treatises, where they call it morale.

As well might one try to reach out and touch any other manifestation of the soul. This exaltation that comes over soldiers and makes them glad to die, firm in their faith of the sacred character of their cause is above all finite measurements.

It is the purging light of the spirit that floods men's souls and raises them aloft from the restraining imprisonment of physical being to the heights of the gods. On no other grounds can one explain the superhuman valor of the lone Cheshire Company of the "Contemptibles," which, in the retreat from Mons, held up until dusk a German column of three battalions.

The French had morale at Verdun when they said, "They shall not pass," and fulfilled the eloquence of their words by the offering of their bodies.

The Americans had morale at Chateau-Thierry.

SITUATION MAP—Showing principal battlefronts

The British at Mons, the French at Verdun, and the Americans at Chateau-Thierry, fought as they did because they knew, or thought they knew, the cause of the fight.

But in Russia, the soldier was never told why he fought. At first, this was not thought necessary. Then the High Command, remembering the importance of morale, and recognizing the need of some sort of explanation, if only for the purpose of regularity when men were asked to risk their lives, issued proclamations that puzzled and confused the soldier more than if a course of silence had been followed.

While all this time to the Americans came newspapers from home with accounts of speeches by politicians and demagogues who fired Bolshevik bullets from the rear and extolled the Soviet cause, hailing it as an heroic progression in human effort.

There is another axiom in the military books, that soldiers fight best on their native soil and in defense of their homes; but here was a company taken fresh from civil occupations, with a civilian mental outlook, set adrift in an alien country, six thousand miles from home, engaged in a desperate, sanguinary war, and asked to undergo privation and hardship, to face untold perils for unmentionable reasons.

Still, though the expedition was committed to no definite moral purpose, there was a morale in North Russia. A morale that arose from comradeship in a fated enterprise, a morale of seeing the bitter game through, taking risks and meeting perils that must be borne by others if even one shirked his share. A noble, selfless devotion, playing the man's part in a lottery with Death, where Life was the stake. The upholding of some elemental metaphysical creed that could be definitely felt but never understood, a code of challenged manhood that had come down through many generations of warring ancestors—this was the morale of North Russia; it brought forth the best and the purest in our manhood, and recorded deeds that no survivor can recall without quickening heart beats, and a profound belief from what he saw, that the spirit is supreme and triumphs over the body of man.

5. The Russian people did not rally to the Allied Cause.

If the fight was for Russia, the Russian people were cold and apathetic, the worst of ingrates. Many Russians had the impression that we had come to restore another Romanoff to the throne.

The statement of the American government, with respect to the reasons for military intervention, put the case as if the Allies were engaged in a high-minded, selfless service for Russia, but the great mass of moujiks were indifferent to our immolation, and showed undisguised relief when we finally and ignominiously quitted their country.

During early August, a government of the north had been installed at Archangel by a coalition of Cadets, Minimalists, members of the People's Party and Social Democrats, with a bourgeois cabinet and with an old man, Nicolai Tschaikovsky, as President of the province. But it was a fact known to all that the Allies determined the policies of this government, that it was in fact merely a guise for an Allied Protectorate.

This government of the North it was that had invited military intervention; but had a plebiscite been called, the people would have registered their voice in unmistakable terms and volubly Russian "Let us alone. Nitchevoo."

Thus the campaign was another effort of England to impose her will upon an inferior people, and bring them for their own good to a higher order of things, disregardful of their volition in the premises. It was an echo of South Africa and Egypt, Mesopotamia and India, inspired by that lofty faith in Britain and the immortal commission of the Empire to rule an afflicted world and bring the blessings of sustained order, where only trouble and chaos prevailed before.

In Archangel, an ambitious attempt was made to recruit Russians under the high sounding name of The Slavo British Allied Legion, and after most energetic efforts, about two thousand starved moujiks, seeking something to eat, joined the ranks; indifferent mercenaries never to be trusted in the tight positions. They were given the khaki of the Tommy, but there all resemblance to the British men of war ended. Their pay was in worthless rubles. They were given an inferior ration, were treated patronizingly. Between them and the Allied soldiers there never was that generous comradeship that leaps the restraints of divergent language and manners when men fight shoulder to shoulder for life and some things that are more dear than life itself. It was a case of alien spirit above all else. British officers never could understand why the Russian officers, with the acute, sensitive nature of the Slav, were quick to feel and keen to resent, seemingly studied slights and snubs and discourtesies. Russians of culture and refinement never could penetrate the unfailing reticence and frigid unsympathetic exterior in which gentlemen of England have been schooled for generations beyond memory, habitually to conceal the emotions.

When the utter failure of the volunteer system became certain, thousands of Russians were coerced into the army by a draft system; but these failed too, because their hearts were cold to Russian patriotic British appeals; because there was no great moral issue, no moving cause for the fight.

The war with Russia was in fact a typical British show, conducted by that conquering people who have spread the dominions of the mother country to every shore of the far seas. A war that was waged with the invincible will, that noble effacement of physical comfort; that indomitable purpose and masterful determination; that courage and careless naivete, and contempt of danger and risk; that splendid sportsmanship, that love of fair play; and all the sublime self sufficiency, all the muddling, blundering and fuddling, the lack of understanding, the brutal arrogance and cold conceit, and apparent heartlessness and want of sympathy that are forever British.

Naturally, the British assumed direction, just as in France when the first Americans came Clemenceau and the Earl Haig demanded that they be fed piece meal to the French and British front divisions; but the soldier, Pershing, sensing the important moral value of having his men go to battle under the American flag and directed by American officers, waited and would not yield to the strongest pressure. And it was an American army that brought us to glory at Saint Mihiel and Chateau-Thierry and the Argonne forest; an all-American army led by American divisional commanders.

There are racial differences, racial prejudices, racial disparities, and racial asperities that cannot be gainsaid even under the influence of impersonal military discipline, and experience has shown that soldiers yield a more ready obedience to leaders who speak their own language; understand the philosophy of their daily lives, and at no other time did General Pershing so demonstrate his greatness, his complete understanding of the perplexities in Allied military organization as by his courageous insistence upon the solidarity of the American army on the battlefields of France.

But in Russia the American regiment was at once merged with the British Command, and from first action until the end of the campaign, British Headquarters directed and controlled the dispositions and conduct of the Americans.

At Archangel there is a modern, spacious white building, and here from steam-heated headquarters Colonel George W. Stewart commanded the United States 339th Infantry, here were quartered his staff officers, the unemployed "brains" of our Northern American army. He never saw any part of his regiment in action. For a long time I believe he had not even a vague notion regarding the location of his British dissipated troops.

Embassies of France and Serbia, Poland, and Italy were in Archangel, and the American Ambassador, David R. Francis, came from Vologda there early in August, and stayed until sickness compelled him to leave for England during the winter. And there was an American Military Attache who developed into a Military Mission with Colonel James A. Ruggles as chief, and a staff of officers to assist him. Also there was an American Consulate, with an American Consul General, Dewitt C. Poole, who at times appeared to take over a supervision of the American share in this strange, strange war with Russia.

And over across the harbor at Bakaritza, a well-fed Supply Company watched over mountains of rations and supplies that had been brought all the way from far off America; supplies and little good things and comforts that would have heartened and brought new life and hope to the lonely, abandoned men on the far fighting lines in the snow. These supplies never reached the front, but the Supply Company, with American business shrewdness and American aptitude for trading, acquired great bundles of rubles, and at the market place converted these into stable sterling, and came out of Russia in the springtime with pleasant memories of a tourist winter; likewise a small fortune securely hid in their olive drab breeches. But there were others who ate their hearts away, fretting and chafing, in Archangel, whose petitions to go to the front to play the man's game were denied by those in command.

British G.H.Q. brought six hundred surplus officers and forty thousand cases of good Scotch whiskey. Some of the officers had come frankly in search of a "cushy job" in a zone they thought safely removed from poison gases and bombardments and all the hideous muck of the trenches. Others, much to their disgust, had been sent to the polar regions because some one in Headquarters had thought they possessed some peculiar qualification to command or "get on" with imaginary Russian regiments that were to spring to the Allied Standard.

So it was that Archangel became a city of many colors, as gallant, uniformed gentlemen strode down the Troitsky Prospect, whipping the air with their walking sticks, and looking very stern and commanding, as they answered many salutes, in a bored, absent-minded way.

There were officers of the Imperial Army, weighed down with glittering, ponderous honor medals, and dark Cossacks with high gray hats, and gaudy tunics, and murderous noisy sabers. Handsome gentlemen of war from England, from Serbia, Italy, Finland, France, and Bohemia, and many other countries, all arrayed in brilliant plumage, and shining boots, and bright spurs, and every other kind of "eye wash." And, of course, there were large numbers of batmen to shine the boots and burnish the spurs, and keep all in fine order, and other batmen to look after the appointments of the officers' club, and serve the whiskey and soda.

In the afternoons there were teas, and receptions and matinees, and dances in the evening, when the band played and every one was flushed with pleasure and excitement. Such flirtations with the pretty barishnas, such whispered gossip and intrigue and scandal in light-hearted Archangel!

At Kodish, at Onega on the Vaga, and at Toulgas, far off across the haunting snows, sick men and broken men, men faint from lack of nutrition, and men sickened in soul, were doing sentry through the numbing, cold nights, because there were none to take their places in the blockhouses, and no supports to come to their relief, no reserves to hearten them and give them courage.

The blockhouses so far away, where men were maimed and crippled and shell shocked, and the black hopelessness that crept into men's hearts, and strangled men's hearts, and overcame their soldier spirit—in the blockhouses—far, so far off from gala Archangel.