Archangel: The American War with Russia

by John Cudahy

THE RIVER

"There ought to be an efficient American Hell Raiser from one end of the front to the base, with a rank of lieutenant colonel."

DOCTOR JOHN HALL (Major Medico 339th U.S. Infantry).
21st October, 1918.

"The Government of the United States has never recognized the Bolshevik authorities and does not consider that its effort to safeguard supplies at Archangel or to help the Czechs in Siberia have created a state of war with the Bolsheviki."

Cablegram, State Department, Washington, D.C., to David R. Francis, American Ambassador, Archangel, Russia.
27th September, 1918.

VIII

THE RIVER

Half of the original Poole Expedition was selected for the punitive pursuit down the railway, a garrison was left to guard Archangel, and the trifling group that remained followed the dark course of the Dvina into the unknown region of the interior. There were told off for this river expedition two depleted companies of the Tenth Royal Scots Regiment, and twenty-five of the American marines crowded into merchant barges and towed slowly up-stream by small tugs. The only escort was an armored British monitor, and seen from the shore, as they made their toilsome struggling way against the swift racing river course, conspicuous, unshielded targets on its broad surface, the dauntless little band looked tempting ambush prey.

At Chamova, some one hundred and eighty miles from Archangel, the enemy gave sign of having abruptly recovered from his first stampede. He turned and showed his fangs, and the pursuit stopped short.

It now grew apparent that the retreat had not been as riotous as first supposed; in fact, there was good reason to believe that it was a part of Bolshevik strategy, and evidence was accumulating that Trotsky had ordered the withdrawal from Archangel to make certain of the millions of American made supplies and ammunition, had taken a careful appraisal of the military situation, and elected to give battle in the interior. When the Americans arrived they were met at the wharf by an agitated Brass Hat who said the Allies at both fronts were standing at bay and the situation had assumed a very precarious phase.

The Third Battalion was rushed to the Railway, and the First Battalion, in dirty, ill-smelling barges, followed the pioneer Poole Expedition up the river one hundred and fifty miles to Bereznik. These barges had carried many cargos on Dvina's waters, cargos of livestock and flax and other agricultural produce, but were new to human freight, and in their cramped, miserable, dank quarters, the scourging influenza broke out afresh among the troops, and those who had already been weakened by the disease grew fainter and fainter as they followed up the unknown waterway till a day came when one after one they quietly passed to the bourne of that country of gentle unwaking sleep, and sometimes off on the gloomy foreboding river the passage of this antic caravel seemed more a funeral processional than an aggressive expedition of war.

The tired comrades who were even denied the vibrant thrill of the fight, and its doubtful glory, were with simple soldier ceremonials given to the soil of Russia, ceremonials, moving because of their simplicity and that wholesome, fullhearted sentimentalism which has always marked the American character—and always must be of our America.

Here in these little churchyards, tragic death seemed robed in sorrow more sacred with the brown, barren embankments like a shroud of mourning, the grave skies drooping and disconsolate and the sombre recesses of the forest where taps trailed in grieving cadences and echoed within the soldier's spirit long after its last note had been lost in the gloom. Laden with inarticulate depression and confused melancholy, thoughts of life's crazy theatre, the crushing power and immensity of fate, the tragedy of all, these men fresh from the fields and shops of Michigan and Wisconsin groped their dazed way back to the barges where dark shadows with ominous fingers reached over the waters and death, in this haunting, melodramatic land waited, suspended in the alien air like a pestilential vapor.

The first stop was five days out from Archangel at Bereznik, near the junction of the Dvina and its main tributary, the Vaga. Here there was a group of commodious, well constructed log buildings, which had served as hunting lodges for the Tsar Nicholas and his retinue during the days of the Romanoff dynasty. It was decided to make use of these buildings for storage purposes, and to have Bereznik as the subsidiary base of the Dvina expedition until progress was made so far up the river that practical considerations would impel the movement of the subsidiary base to a more advanced position.

So from the time of the arrival of the Americans on the 13th September, until the close of water at the end of October, rations, munitions, clothing and other accouterments of war, in value over one million pounds sterling, which had been brought all the way from England, were loaded on every craft that could be commandeered at Archangel and transported the one hundred and fifty miles to Bereznik.

One of the American companies was left to guard these precious supplies and the others hurried on to take up the gage of offensive campaign. There was a brush at Chamova, but the enemy did not make his first stand until he came to Seltzo, nearly thirty miles further upstream, and now well over two hundred miles from far away Archangel. Except on the Vaga, this was the furthermost south achieved by the Allied troops.

At Seltzo, it became clear that the Soviets had no intention of running further, and that the foreigners would be fortunate if they held the ground already gained. The tactical abandonment of Archangel having accomplished the effective seizure and retention of everything of value in that port and extended the invader far into the interior, revealing with obliging frankness his numerical weakness, had realized the ends sought by the Bolsheviks, and the signs were now many that they intended to strike back and strike back hard.

Why did not Poole retire to Archangel?

The futility of the attempt to reach the distant Siberian railway with the ridiculously small force at the disposal of the Allied Commander was glaringly apparent to every common soldier.

Why did not Poole, like Joffre at the Marne, shift his policy to meet the exigencies of the military situation, draw in his far scattered fronts to Archangel, construct an enceinte of defenses about the city, and hold on until help came in the spring, or until some definite action was determined for Russia?

Many lives would have been spared and much misery averted had this been done, but the lives of a few men, and the permanent impairment of the lives of many more, do not weigh heavily in the scales with those who sit in the councils of the inner sanctum at General Headquarters and think nothing of the spending of divisions and even army corps. Perhaps it would have been too galling to Anglo-Saxon pride to admit being on the defensive before an inferior people like these poor Slavs who were to be chastised with thoroughness and dispatch. Then, too, it was always safer for Archangel to have the outposts far into the country, and flattered the Allied Command in the belief of still being the aggressor.

When Ironside took command he not only conceded that the Allies were conducting a defensive campaign, but with soldier bluntness declared that the Expedition was in gravest peril. It was too late then to draw in the far dispersed battalions. They would have to fight it out on the wide separated snowbound fronts, and show by deeds the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon. If they failed, if they were faint hearted and even so much as faltered, the entire force was doomed.

On the morning of 19th September battle was joined at Seltzo. A mile of open marsh lies outside, through which the stream at the border of the village meanders from the forest to pay tribute to the mighty Dvina. The only easy approach is along a narrow road that parallels the river and crosses a bridge over this deep icy stream. On this morning of battle the Americans waded the swamp until within fifteen hundred yards, when suddenly from the scattered concealment of the houses there burst such a furious fusillade of musketry and machine guns and Pom Pom guns that they dropped low in their tracks and could go no further.

Two other companies moved through the woods on the flank to assist the frontal attack, but their location was determined by the enemy batteries, and his infantry laid down such a withering fire, that the battalion, exhausted from a day of fighting and a heart-breaking march, without rations and with no cover from the cold and the drizzling rain, was compelled to bivouac that night in the soaking morass, hopeful that with next morning would come promised artillery support, for without it further advance was unthinkable.

All through the night the Bolshevik guns searched for the Americans who were new to combat, ignorant of the ground, and had not an inkling of the enemy strength or his fortifications or dispositions. And at dawn a reconnaissance patrol stumbled into a large enemy force, was scattered and came back with no information, save that the Bolsheviks had assembled in superior numbers and were well supplied with ammunition. As daylight broadened, the shelling from the river became so violent that the attackers had to choose between a further advance or complete retirement; to stay where they were meant destruction.

So with grave misgivings the attack was renewed, although there was still no sign of promised artillery support; machine guns guarding a trench system in the woods killed and wounded many Americans, but the advance would not give ground, and supporting comrades at flank and rear kept up such a sustained unfailing fire that the Bolsheviks were led to believe that the attack had been replenished during the night.

During the fight the American lieutenant colonel "caught in a bracket" had stayed in the rearward village, Yakovlevskaya, but at dusk he emerged with the important Field Pieces which laid down an effective feu de barrage on Seltzo. Hardly had it lifted when the battalion arose and with splendid dash and gallantry stormed forward to the village, entered it and took possession. But the story of Seltzo is the story of the whole campaign. After the infantry, with inspiring display of courage and at great cost, had gained a position, its small forces would be drafted for some other distant hard-pressed front, or the position would be left to the mercy of the Bolshevik guns until no course was left except evacuation.

The monitor which had convoyed the battalion up the Dvina, fearful of being caught by the ice that was expected to creep upstream from Archangel at the beginning of October, but did not actually come until mid-November, went back before the battle and was gone for the duration of the winter. A few days after the battle, the artillery left and was seen no more at Seltzo. Also Headquarters ordered two of the companies to proceed to Shenkurst on the Vaga, the second city in the Province, where it was alleged a large number of Russians in sympathy with the Allied cause were anxious to have a garrison of American troops during the approaching winter.

So it came that there was no artillery to avenge the smashing havoc of the enemy heavy guns in this furthermost Dvina village where one infantry company of Scots, a like number of Americans, and a few Allied Russians held on under terrific shell fire that from river and forest racked and battered them.

The enemy had a complete battery of three inch pieces, which he was free to bring up to the edge of the woods beyond the village, and down the river on rafts and improvised gunboats he floated three six inch guns and two Nine Point Two naval pieces, and for days with this combined armament he smashed and blasted until many of the houses became a riot of shredded and splintered timbers, and it was only a question of time before the garrison would be decimated utterly.

On 14th October the Bolsheviks attacked the defensive positions with great vigor, but were thrown back in complete repulse with many killed; yet that night and in the first morning hours the defenders slipped away in the darkness, for under unhindered bombardment the place had become a death's trap where all must eventually perish.

After this escape in the night there was a heart-breaking drag through the mud, until late the next day the tired Allied soldiers found harbor in Toulgas some fifteen miles back. Toulgas is typical of the North Russian village, a group of bedraggled log houses huddled together on a hill, which bends down in a long easy slope to the plain, where, like Seltzo, a stream comes out of the forest and margins another cluster of huts on the flat ground which the moujiks call Upper Toulgas.

This stream is deep and numbingly cold, and has cut an abrupt channel through the yielding soil so that fording it is a difficult feat at best. For an enemy to make the attempt in daylight would be suicidal. In darkness, any considerable numbers cannot fail to give the alarm. A road comes down from the hill and crosses a wooden bridge to the forward village. Watching the bridge is the inevitable white church, and its gaudy minarets, consciously aloof and superior in the poverty of the scene. In the setting of dun barren ground the white edifice flashes in undefiled purity against a low shrouding sky, more black than gray, which rests upon the darker tufted forest.

The fighting Canadians

Across the road is the priest's house, like the others of bark stripped logs, differing from the others only in its greater size. With a little barricading the walls of the priest's house were secure against the lead of small guns, but it was death to stay there during the avalanche of high explosive shells that was poured out by the Bolshevik gunboats.

After the battle of Armistice Day, the bearded priest of Toulgas Church was found amid the hideous battle litter of his wrecked home, the crown of his head cut clean as with a scalpel, exposing the naked brains. Near him were two children, a boy and a girl, sleeping by the guardian who from infancy had taught them of a Providence who watched over the good of earth, and surely would not desert them through this malignant turmoil that had descended to the quiet moujik country with terrible death and indescribable misery like the recurrent plagues. So sleeping, a shell had found the unconscious children, and lulled them to that everlasting sleep. The big shells had a way thus, of stealthily sniping their victim's life away with no mark of their dread approach, as if disdaining the brutality of violence. But again they would pounce down with the atrocity of a fiend, smash head from trunk, and members from the torso, and leave great gaping wounds gushing black blood with unspeakable, horrible ghastliness.

Back of the church, on the same side of the road, is a moujik house with the customary stable attached in rear. A platoon used this as billeting quarters. It was shielded by the church forward, and gave shelter to the little reserve that would replenish the blockhouse at the bridge with men and ammunition, and, if the blockhouse was knocked out, would stand off the Bolsheviks from crossing the bridge.

From the billet house to the church is about thirty yards. The priest's house is nearly opposite the church across the road. The blockhouse was built just before the Armistice fight and stands on the bank of the stream guarding the bridge about twenty yards forward of the priest's house. It is thirty yards over the bridge, and in front of the first line of Upper Toulgas houses, a field, shorn of all cover, stretches one hundred yards to the stream.

Back of the center village on the hilltop the ground undulates almost unnoticeably in a series of folds and reaches a shallow draw. A little beyond this, perhaps two hundred fifty yards, is still another clump of huts known as Lower Toulgas. In this draw, the Canadians built emplacements for their two Field Pieces, which during the first battles were the only artillery for the defense of Toulgas.

The forest gives way for nearly a half a mile before Upper Toulgas. From Upper Toulgas to Lower Toulgas is an ample two miles. From Toulgas, itself, the center village, to Lower Toulgas is a scant three-quarters of a mile.

On the forest flank the ground has been cleared for a space, varying from three hundred to less than sixty yards. This clearance is greatest opposite the upper village. In the lower village it narrows, until in rear the trees close in on the road that leads back to Bereznik and Archangel, affording excellent opportunity of concealment and surprise attack for an enemy that would have the endurance and the hardihood and the courageous daring to march through the deep swamps of the woods.

On the left the Dvina spreads out in a wide expanse, two miles. Opposite the rear and center villages the river banks are high and steep, nearly precipitous, but at the forward village on the flat ground the level is only a few feet above that of the water. Across the river there is not the slightest sign of cover as far as the distant embankment on the opposite shore. The chances for surprise from this quarter are practically none, and without surprise, infantry advancing over the waist-deep snow against machine guns, would have to be possessed of fanatical courage and be in overwhelming strength. The river could be nearly neglected as a source of danger.

To defend the three Toulgas villages we had: One company of American infantry; one company of Royal Scots infantry, and one section of Field Artillery, manned by fifty-seven Canadians.

In command of this force was Robert P. Boyd, an American civilian, who, scarcely a year before, had graduated with the rank of captain of infantry from a three months' officers' training school at Fort Sheridan, Illinois.

Shortly after occupation of Toulgas, ice choked off navigation of the lower river, and replenishments of supplies and ammunition had to be brought by small one pony sleighs from Bereznik. The distance was some fifty miles, and the journey by Russian pony was usually two days, but when the snow was deepest, the weather bitterly cold, and the days had but few hours of light, it took three days.

There was a field hospital at Bereznik, vicariously supplied, and attended by a medical personnel of changing nationality, British, Russian and American by turns.

We converted one of the huts of Lower Toulgas village into a dressing station, where first aid was given the wounded; but we had no facilities, no operating equipment, or surgeons, or surgical instruments to care for the serious cases. If a soldier was hard hit and lived, he had to be brought to Bereznik.

Following the retreat down river from Seltzo, there was hardly time for a tactical survey of the situation, for the construction of temporary redoubts on the forest flank and at the crucial bridge, when enemy gunboats opened fire on our positions and for three days kept up a determined bombardment. When dusk came on the third day, the shelling lifted, and when the night grew black there was a roar of many rifles and a mad yelling from the woods as a horde of Bolsheviks fell on the center village. In the darkness and wild confusion, the tumult of battle made by the roar of musketry, the shouting and screaming of many foreign voices sounded like the onslaught of a Division.

But, even with the advantage of overpowering numbers, a night attack to succeed, demands most accurate knowledge of the enemy position, and most rigid control by a leader of his men. The Bolsheviks were not thoroughly trained in these early days, although later they displayed impressive military skill and the utmost cooperation between officers and men; now their lead went high and shrieked through air several feet above the heads of the unscathed Americans, who had concealed Lewis guns in a dugout at the point of the enemy rush and turned these loose upon the massed Bolsheviks, felling them like cattle in a slaughter pen. One American private, swinging an automatic rifle from his hip, shot until there was a semi-circle of prostrate forms before him, some of them fifteen yards away; and once a few of the enemy came so close that they were spitted at the end of the bayonet.

At the height of the fight the Canadians opened up their guns and rained the woods with shrapnel which threw the wavering Bolsheviks into worse commotion and disorder, for while the Lewis guns scattered death in front, rattling shrapnel bullets threatened death in rear, and thus, huddled together in the darkness like stampeded sheep, they were shot down until the fierce exulting battle yells were changed to moans of the wounded and appealing cries for mercy.

At a signal, the Canadian guns ceased firing, the Royal Scots, shooting low and true, went into the counter, and the disorganized Bolsheviks, seized with blind animal terror, lost all semblance of order and fled in violent flight, each man for himself, to the sheltering recesses of the forest.

After this night attack there was nearly a fortnight of quiet on the Dvina, with no outward sign to show the enemy intentions. Patrols went out into the woods and came back with the report that Zastrovia, the nearest village upstream, was clear of hostile troops; but, while the Allied Command took under advisement the opposing contentions of retirement and holding on, the Bolsheviks were assembling large fresh forces of infantry, and bringing heavy guns from Krasnoborsk, preparatory to striking the most ambitious blow yet attempted.

All at Toulgas were aware that the lull was ominous. All knew that this phase of security was a very transient one, and directed by the American engineers, every man who was not on guard duty, worked building log blockhouses, at tactical strong points about the center village, one of them to guard the bridge over the stream to the upper village, where there was a small outpost, which in case of frontal attack was to give the alarm, then retire to the defenses.

The defense centered around the middle village. There were no fortifications to protect Lower Toulgas, and the Canadians in the draw in front of Lower Toulgas had for their protection only a squad of Americans under a sergeant, with a Lewis gun. The great danger in the situation lay in the threat of the capture of the rear village by an attack from the close-edging forest. If this lower position was taken, the garrison would be trapped, starved and cut off from all communication with Bereznik and Archangel. Customarily, there were kept on hand rations sufficient to last from two to three weeks.

When the British Brigadier General R. G. Finlayson inspected the Toulgas area, on 10th November, apprehension of such a rear attack was expressed by some of the officers, but the general could see no real menace from that quarter, and said that it was a military impossibility for a large body of troops to successfully execute a flank movement through the heavy swamps of the woods.

The day following, Armistice Day, at dawn there was a crackling of rifles in Upper Toulgas, then the crash of guns from the river, as a great number of Bolsheviks swarmed from the forest, deployed in perfect order, and advancing in squad rushes, drove the little outpost back to our main lines. Timed, it seemed almost to the moment, came the roar of musketry far at rear, the staccato rattle of machine guns and dominating all the din and tumult, the ringing Cossack Hourra! Hourra!

Our surprise was complete. Hundreds of dark figures sprang from the woods and closed in on Lower Toulgas.

A Bolshevik scout

Had the Bolsheviks been Germans, they would have immediately rushed the Canadian guns, and the story of Toulgas would have been one of massacre. They did rush the guns, but not until it was too late. The march through the forest had been an exhausting one, and the Bolshevik soldiers were very tired and very hungry. A few critical moments were spent searching the houses of the captured village. One of the Commanders, Melochofski, a stalwart giant of a man, with a high, black fur hat, entered our hospital billet, and flourishing his arms, gave a loud-voiced order to kill the invalided soldiers. The British medical N.C.O., with rare tact and extraordinary presence of mind, placed rations and two jugs of rum before the big Bolshevik leader, who helped himself liberally to the spirits and under their benign influence momentarily forgot about the execution.

Probably in this way and in ransacking Lower Toulgas, not over three minutes were lost, but never were three minutes more costly, for during that time the Canadians swung round their guns, and, when the Russians rallied to renew the attack, they were met by muzzle bursts.

Nearly a hundred years before, at Wilma, the iron veterans of the Grand Army had been shaken by that blood chilling Hourra! Hourra! of charging Russians; but now it only made those leather faced men at the guns laugh with the wild, delirious delight that comes only to the born fighting man, then only when the fight is at its height. They swore fine, full chested, Canadian blasphemies that were a glory to hear, crammed shrapnel into their guns, and turned terrible blasts into the incoming masses that exploded among them and shattered them into ghastly dismembered corpses and hurled blood and human flesh wide in the air in sickening, splattering atoms. While all the time the American sergeant and his single squad kept up an incessant fire with his Lewis automatic, and those Canadians who were not hit, and were not needed at the guns, worked the bolts of their rifles with the energy of fiends, so that the crackling of small arms sounded like the bursts of machine gun fire from the emplacements, and deceived the Bolsheviks, who thought it was the fire of machine guns. These Canadians had used the rifle often in the untracked places of the Western World, were well schooled in marksmanship, and now when the target loomed big and at extremely short range, they covered the ground with dead.

The mere weight of those approaching great numbers would have shaken and turned ordinary troops, for the onslaught was not stopped until less than fifty yards from the guns; but the Canadians were not ordinary men and they gave not the slightest hope of being turned. They would have stood by with their bayonets to the last, and when the Bolsheviks saw the unyielding determination of these Western savages, to whom fear seemed unborn, and knew that more devastating death storms of shrapnel awaited further advance, their morale broke down, the front wave hesitated, panic spread with telepathic swiftness, and in the control of overpowering fear, the whole force bolted and scampered like rabbits to the covering trees. There they were rounded together by the remaining commissars, and from places of concealment directed a hot fire on the guns.

So quickly were they reorganized that fifteen minutes after the assault had been turned back, the Company of Royal Scots, hurrying across an open field to the support, were subjected to such a blighting fire that the ground was strewn with the huddled figures of their dead and wounded.

As the day advanced the chief commander of the Bolsheviks was killed and three other commissars were picked off and killed. The march through the marshy forests had been made at tremendous toll in vitality, the advantage of surprise had now passed, rations were running low, and, unless the attack could be pressed with renewed forces, there would be another bivouac in the wet and cold, for the Canadian devils watched Lower Toulgas, and, at the first sign of occupancy, hammered and pounded and shook the houses with high explosive until they were untenable utterly. During the afternoon an American force from the center village pushed back a band of riflemen that hung at the fringe of the woods, and, as evening fell, the enemy fire grew less sustained and it was evident that unless reinforcements arrived, the attack would fail. But hours passed and no reinforcements. The rifle reports sounded more and more erratic, and, as the night wore on, there was only the sporadic crack of a few snipers in the rear woods, who held on hopefully waiting for the supports that never came.

Prisoners said there were six hundred and fifty in this rear attack and an equal number had taken the upper village, where they kept up a steady volley fire, but seemed to wait upon success of the rear party before storming our fortifications. Therefore, far forward in the blackness of the night, the Canadians sent forth two salvos, to let this frontal attacking force know that the guns were intact and that a fight was waiting beside them.

So ended the first day of the battle of Armistice Day. There was firing all through the night from Upper Toulgas, and luminous flares burst startlingly from unexpected places in the blackness, but after the failure of the rear movement, no further sustained and determined attack was attempted.

When a patrol from the garrison entered Lower Toulgas the next morning, men nerved themselves for a fearful grewsome spectacle in the hospital billet; but lo, their comrades were unharmed, and a woman in the uniform of a Bolshevik soldier was caring for them as well as the enemy wounded. She had come with her sweetheart, Melochofski, the thirty miles from Seltzo—Lady Olga, as the soldiers called her—and had bivouacked the two cold nights with the soldiers in the woods and swamps. She saved the lives of our injured men by pleading with Melochofski. Later she ministered to him as he died in the same hospital room where he would have witnessed his helpless enemies die.

She was a member of the Battalion of Death, this extraordinary woman, of intelligent, almost beautiful appearance. Madame Botchkoreva also had been a member of the Battalion of Death, so named because it chose to die rather than betray Holy Russia. Madame Botchkoreva, who had come with the American soldiers on the transports from America, and had spoken to them on shipboard so eloquently and so movingly of her country and its sacred, unshakable loyalty to the Allied cause, was said to have interceded with President Wilson, urged the sending of American troops to succor afflicted Russia, and prevailed upon the President.

American soldiers had already witnessed grotesque inconsistencies in this strange campaign. After the first fight they picked up shell fragments with the letters "U.S.A.," and learned that all, or nearly all, the Bolshevik ammunition was manufactured in their own country. They were told that they had been commissioned to safeguard valuable war supplies, and, coming to Archangel, had seen the great warehouses there destitute of those supplies. Now they were mystified by Lady Olga, who fought against Madame Botchkoreva in this baffling Russian war. Who was the greater patriot? Each a soldier in the uniform of her country, each had plighted her heart to beloved Russia, each had taken solemn oath to defend her country until death; and both now thought they were offering their lives for the defense of that country!

In this rear attack, one hundred Soviets were killed, many more wounded, many taken prisoners, a few rejoined their comrades at Upper Toulgas, and the rest faded in the forest and were lost. Weeks afterwards, the villagers at Nitzni Kitsa, fifty miles to the west, told of three Bolshevik soldiers who came to their village in a crazed condition, clad in rags, and half starved, babbling an incoherent story of the frightful battle of Toulgas on Armistice Day, and of hundreds of their comrades, lost in the woods and perishing in the treacherous quagmire of the swamps.

Following Armistice Day, early the next morning there was a flash at the bend of the river beyond Upper Toulgas, then the screaming passage of a shell, and the dull, vibrating, smashing roar of high explosive as it struck near the bridge. Two enemy gunboats were seen mounted with three inch and six inch guns. Further up the river and beyond sight was still another craft with six inch guns. Concealed among the trees, just on the edge of the clearing before Upper Toulgas, was a complete Bolshevik Field Battery, and these combined cannon now concentrated on the blockhouse that guarded the bridge. Shells, tossing geysers of dirt and debris, struck all around, and ploughed a deep circular furrow within a radius of five yards of the death house, where seven Americans sat with blanched faces and set teeth, counting the seconds between the hideous successive whine of the plunging shells, and waiting silently for certain destruction. At the edge of Upper Toulgas, Bolshevik infantry stood crouched for the dash, watching for the strongpoint to collapse under the terrific pommeling bombardment.

A stack of hay was near the important post, where a shell smashed, scattered the hay to right and left, and clogged the loophole that outlooked to the enemy position. The American sergeant in command sprang from the blockhouse, snatched the obscuring hay, and was back again, while bullets from the amazed Bolsheviks spurted inches over his head.

Again the same thing happened, and again the sergeant, Floyd A. Wallace, with as noble an exhibition of cool, deliberate courage as man is capable, went out to clear the covered loophole, and did clear it, but he crawled back with a hole in his tunic from a machine gun, and his drab coat was soaked deep red from a grievous wound.

It was noon when the blockhouse was hit. It crumpled like paper under the impact, and one man, drenched with a welter of blood, was seen to drag himself from the wreckage and crawl back to the priest's house. I saw this man on the deck of the transport when the Americans were leaving Archangel in June, every soldier radiant at the prospect of farewell to the army and Russia, and going home, but he had not yet learned to smile, and written on his face and deep in his eyes was the look of one who has gazed at hell.

When the bridge post was knocked out, one American, carrying a reserved Lewis gun, followed by two more each with panniers of ammunition, rushed from the house back of the church, and the three, dashing a few yards at a time, then throwing themselves flat on their faces, made the cover of a trench by the side of the priest's house, and, when the Bolsheviks came forward to the bridge, scattered them with a heavy fire.

In the emergency, a Vickers gun was hastily barricaded against a church window that looked down on the bridge. A platoon had come down the hill from the center village when it was seen that the blockhouse could not survive, and, using the skirmish tactics of the Indian, had passed through a tempest of rifle and machine gun bullets to the billet house, and reached the church. These were only a few instances of brilliant initiative. Nowhere than at Toulgas during the battle of Armistice Day was there better truth of that French saying during the war: "Every American private soldier is an officer."

Several times the Bolsheviks felt out the bridge, and the commissars in rear could be heard urging their men to the attack, but each time they drew back before the heavy, well directed fire of the Americans, and, although the artillery smashed the white church and made of the priest's house a rent and tattered ruin, the defense held at every point till with merciful darkness the gunboats ceased their cursed belching, the guns in the forward woods subsided to blessed silence, and, screened by the shielding night, the Americans were able to bring in their wounded and send relief to those who had stood at the most exposed posts without rations or water for many long hours.

On the third day of battle, the Bolshevik batteries were augmented by two six inch guns brought down river from Seltzo to Andreevskaya, and all guns as throughout the first two days stayed safely beyond the furthermost range of our feeble three inch pieces. Despairing of breaking down the obstinate defense of the bridge, the bombardment shifted to our fortifications on the forest flank of the center village, and here for hours high explosive projectiles and clouds of shrapnel fell at the rate of one shell every fifteen seconds, ranging from the strongpoints that guarded attack from the direction of the woods, to a row of huts on the side hill close by, where a platoon was quartered as a reserve for these outposts.

Hardly had the Americans withdrawn from one of these huts, when its roof was smashed with deafening explosion, and then bolts struck right and left with stunning rapidity like raging messages from hell, flinging debris and dirt and fragments of wood in wild disorder that fell down upon the prostrate men crouching in a nearby fold of ground. The houses on the hill were raked through and through and many became a chaos of splintered timbers; the air was stabbed by the sibilant, vindictive snarl of the shells, fluttered and throbbed with their violent passage, the ground trembled in quaking travail; shrapnel burst in gray clouds, fell rattling on the house roofs or plumped down to the wet ground with suggestive vicious thuds, and the cumulative effect of successive thunderclap detonations was like a physical pommeling on the brain.

But through it all the Americans held fast, clinging to sanity by sheer point of a desperate wilfulness and facing the Bolshevik infantry men with unwavering front, so that they dared not show themselves and were still back in the forest when night came to heal the hideous turmoil of the day and still the shaking salvos that stormed through every hour of light, and would be renewed at first dawn, for the Bolsheviks never relented in their determination to take the village Toulgas.

The great Trotsky himself directed the attack. Prisoners said that, stationed like Napoleon on one of the river craft, he watched the battle from afar. The Soviet leader made an address to his soldiers and told them that he intended to keep hammering at Toulgas if it took all winter to break down resistance of the garrison. The battle was fought on the first birthday anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution, and its objective was to sweep through the Allies' lines to Bereznik, where the soldiers were promised many gifts from the valuable stores there.

On the evening of this third day we took an appraisal of our fast failing resources and estimated the prospect of a further stand. If the attack had settled to a siege, it looked as if there was small hope ahead, for a quarter of the little company had been hit, and those who remained were hollow-eyed from fatigue, so weary that they staggered like drunken men. All night long, enemy patrols prowled about the defenses, sounding them for a weak point, rifles cracked and snapped and through the black sleepless hours, machine guns beat the devil's own tattoo.

There was a tacit understanding in the way each man eyed his mate that when the fortifications fell there would be a street fight in the center village and the Bolsheviks would take no prisoners. These men from Michigan and Wisconsin had come from Camp Custer, and, when the trial came, Custer's spirit would triumph over flesh and live again the glory of the Little Big Horn. Likewise in those fighting ranks were heirs of Cromwell's men and a host of sires whose imperishable battle deeds have risen to the heights of gods the strength of mother England's fighting men. So there was no thought of surrendering Toulgas, and evacuation was entirely out of the question. If the Bolsheviks were bent upon a determined siege, they could bring fresh levies of men and new guns from their Dvina Headquarters at Krasnoborsk, a short distance from Seltzo; but Toulgas had no new guns to draw upon, and there were no supports and no reserves for Toulgas.

Our Command decided that the only hope lay in a bold counterstroke. The Scots relieved the Americans at the outposts, and in the murk of early morning, on the fourth day of battle, the American company crept through the noiseless forest and surrounded an observation post in the woods on the flank off Upper Toulgas. Several Bolsheviks were killed and the rest fled to the enemy village in panic, with the report of a great force which had overwhelmed them. The observation post with many rounds of small arms ammunition was set afire, the explosions sounded like the musketry of a regiment, and the tired and discouraged Bolsheviks thought it was a fresh regiment firing unseen from the unknown depths of the forest.

Fortune plays a great part in war, and uncertainty accounts for many things that appear inexplicable reviewed from the comfortable distance of peace; perhaps the most important information that can come to a commanding officer is knowledge of enemy strength and his fighting morale, and the Bolsheviks had no such information. They had lost their Chief Commander Foukes in this forest counter-attack, and a message from him, found on the body of a runner who was trying to reach Upper Toulgas, read:

We are in the lowest village. One steamer coming up river—perhaps reinforcements. Attack more vigorously. Melochofski and Murafski are killed. If you do not attack I cannot hold on, and retreat is impossible, 11th November, 1918. 12:30 P.M.

FOUKES.

With Foukes, four of the five commissars had been killed, and now when the frightened survivors of the detached outpost spread the alarm of overwhelming numbers of Americanskis in the forest, the Bolsheviks were seen fleeing Upper Toulgas in skeltering disorder.

The Americans dared not pursue, for to do so would have revealed their true strength, and they were outnumbered four to one. Besides, they were too elated at being rid of the enemy to give him the chance to return to the attack. They contented themselves with taking prisoner those stragglers who could not keep pace with the leaderless rabble that dispersed into the forest.

A row of houses isolated near the stream at the edge of Upper Toulgas was suspected of being the dwelling place of unfriendly peasants. The Bolsheviks used these houses as vantage points for sharpshooters, and in the counter combat a number of prisoners were taken from them, so now, when we gained the upper hand, "sniper's row" of huts was condemned, the peasants were cast out with their scanty possessions, and as the first snow filled the air and spread an apron over the drab colored ground, the homes of their fathers became a sea of crackling flames, and the poor moujiks, women and children sobbing hysterically, and men with mute sadness and uncomprehending resignation on their bearded faces, set forth to begin life anew.

The prisoners taken in this battle of Armistice Day, all except one, expressed no martyr's devotion to the cause of the Soviets. Some spoke of being impressed in the Red army at the point of the bayonet, and being kept in the ranks by the same argument. Others said that they had joined to escape starvation, and there appeared to be something plausible in this assertion for as far as we had gone into the interior the people of the Archangel villages were in desperate want. The Bolsheviks had commandeered all available food supplies which at best were not bountiful, barely sufficient to sustain the life of the villages through the long cold winter; a few potatoes with a little wheat which the peasants had cached in forest dugouts sustained life in some manner. Later had not the Allies doled out rations of flour and other food stuffs from Archangel, many in the Province would have perished of slow starvation during that winter of 1919.

The ration of the Bolshevik army was ample enough; a portion that looked princely to the moujik: a funt (fourteen ounces) of meat, one and three-quarters funts of bread, with tea, sugar and tobacco for every soldier.

If the stories of the prisoners were true and not inspired by motives of gaining sympathy, one could believe those Russians of the intelligencia who asserted that the Bolshevik party was a minority party of terrorism, and that very few Russians were ardent Soviets.

Even Lenine himself, once said that of every one hundred Bolsheviks fifty were knaves, forty fools, and probably only one a sincere follower.

Two highly cultivated artillery officers, who had held commissions in the Imperial Army, gave themselves up shortly after the battle of Armistice Day and told a tale of being forced into the Bolshevik army by the threat to kill their families if they refused. They said that all Bolshevik officers were ceaselessly observed by spies who were quick to report to Staff Headquarters the slightest symptom of a wayward disposition, or the suspicion of any gesture of mutiny.

Few of the prisoners wore any regulation military uniforms. In appearance there was nothing, except the carrying of firearms, to distinguish them from the moujiks of the villages. Both were clad in like valenkas, or felt boots, dirty, gray, curled, high fur hats, shapeless dun-colored tunics. Many of the villagers were in sympathy with the Soviets, and despite all vigilance, there was an active system of espionage between many moujiks and the Bolshevik leaders with which it was impossible to cope. Our Intelligence received information that the rear attacking party had been conducted to our lines by a prominent resident of Toulgas, and sometimes the enemy showed amazing knowledge of our forces and the state of our fortifications that must have come from those in whose houses we dwelt as unwelcome guests.

There was but brief respite after the four days' battle of Armistice Day, for the American engineers set all hands vigorously to work on the winter defenses. Around the center village, blockhouses were built on the forest flank, and at front and rear at points distanced from two to three hundred yards one from the other. Coils of barbed wire were transported over the snow from Bereznik and strung in wire aprons between the strong points. Every blockhouse had an automatic rifle or a machine gun, and some at the more important posts had two, all targeted and trained to lay down a devastating, enfilade fire along the connecting wire barriers. A few Colt machine guns that were air cooled arrived, and helped the morale immensely, for they had no difficulty functioning in the very low temperatures. Then, when there was more time, the blockhouses were reconstructed with heavy timbers and piled high with sand so that they became bomb proof to anything except the explosion of a six inch shell, and even along the unfeared river bank there were placed two small blockhouses with machine guns.

When the snow mounted high and icy winds stung with the sting of wasps, Toulgas had become a fortress, well nigh impregnable, unless her defenses were penetrated from within, or the attack came in hopelessly overpowering numbers.

But scarce had all this preparation commenced, when came glorious news of the Armistice. The war was ended, and it was taken as a matter of course that the coming peace would extend to the war of the Arctic Circle.

From the outset the soldiers never had any rampant enthusiasm in this strange conflict with its motives of mystery, but while the struggle in France went on they stilled their questioning doubts and followed the work set out for them by their officers in the uncertain belief that somewhere back of the scenes at Paris or London or Washington those in the high places had charted a wise policy beyond the comprehension of a common soldier; and that in some devious, undisclosed way the campaign in Russia was necessary, was playing its inexplicable part in completing the defeat of the Germans. Even when weeks elapsed and no announcement of change in policy was forthcoming, the men were patient and did not complain. But when at the end of November, Consul General Poole sent word from Archangel that the Americans in North Russia would continue at their tasks to the end, knowledge came to the soldier with stunning reality that the great struggle in which he was prepared to die had no relation to the war with Russia, in which he probably would die, that he was engaged in a war which had no assignable reason for its being, in which many of his companions had already been killed, and the end was not in sight.

The uncertainty, the isolation of the distant snowbound fronts, the ever present prospect of being trapped by enemy occupation of the villages along the extended communication line, and now that the excitement of the fight had waned, the depressing monotony of the days ground down the spirit of the men. They commenced to lose heart. Life became a very stale, flat, drab thing in the vast stretches of cheerless snow reaching far across the river to the murky, brooding skies and the encompassing sheeted forests, so ghostly and so still, where death prowled in the shadows and the sinking realization came home of no supports or reserves along the two hundred miles of winding winter road to Archangel.

Week follows week, and November goes by, and December, and no word comes from the War Department. No reassuring message to the perplexed Commander-in-Chief, defining the purposes of the war, its duration, when relief will come. No word comes and the soldier is left to think that he has been abandoned by his country and left to rot on the barren snow wastes of Arctic Russia.

Men move about wintered Toulgas emitting great clouds of vapored breath, shuffling over the snow in the clumsy Shakleton Arctic boots, wrapped in great coats against the bitter, deadly cold; on their faces the condemned look of felons from whom all hope has fled.

In the dismal huts of the village soldiers are packed with the crowded moujik families like herded animals, where the atmosphere is dank and pestilent with an odor like stale fish. Filth is on the floor and vermin creep from the cracks and crevices of the log walls.

In December and January there are only a few hours of feeble shadowing light, then tragic blackness blots out the snows and the mournful woods and the skies of melodrama. With night the tiny windows are shrouded with board coverings, a candle flickers in the low ceiling room, unless the issue is exhausted, then a bully beef can is produced, filled with bacon grease and an improvised rag wick which flutters a hesitant glimmering through the heavy gloom.

There through the long dark unwholesome hours, the Americans sit and think thoughts more black than the outside night. Red, hateful, revolutionary thoughts like those of the maddened mob that rushed Louis Seize to the guillotine, and that would threaten the stability of any nation. Black thoughts of their country and the smug, pompous statesmen who with sonorous patriotic phrases had sent them to exile; of the casual people at home and their damned complacency and their outlook on war as a gorgeous heraldry of youth, a gay, romantic adventure.

Sometimes it almost seemed as if malignant Bolshevism had poisoned the air, for once in February when the situation looked worst and nothing seemed certain except annihilation for the whole garrison, the American soldiers at Toulgas threatened, unless promised early relief, to walk out like disgruntled factory hands. The same thing, but with a more serious aspect, occurred in an American company at Archangel; and the French on the Railway had, at first rumor of the Armistice, flatly deserted and returned to Archangel. At Kodish a company of British refused to fight further in this indefinite war, and among the first conscripted Russian troops there was serious mutiny resulting in much bloodshed.

But there was nothing mutinous in this expression of opinion at Toulgas. It seemed the only course to civilian soldiers who were schooled in strikes under an industrial system where the strike has always been the concerted expression of disapproval by those who toil in the ranks. When the nature of a mutiny was explained to these men, they felt a burning shame for what they had done so unwilfully, and never again, throughout the many discouraging, hopeless days that followed, was there the smallest hint of protest from these civilian American soldiers.

When the days were shortest, the commissary transport broke down, and for a time the principal ration was corned beef that was frozen in the tin, and a nauseating mixture of vegetables and stewed meat that had been alternately frozen and thawed in the tin, and when eaten, gave some loathsome skin diseases and others dysentery.

Cooking and eating were the only breaks in the melancholy monotony; there was no diversion, no relaxation, no recreation, and the divine gift of humor which was the salvation of the Western soldier, was denied to the soldier of North Russia, for humor springs from buoyant spirits, the wells of radiant health, and the Americans on the Dvina were so physically depleted that in February the medical officer of the First Battalion reported that one-third of all those on active duty should be committed to the hospital without delay. But these sickened soldiers could not be sent to the hospital without abandoning the undermanned posts that guarded the garrison.

Robbed of physical resistance and broken in spirit it was pitiful to see strong men and brave men become shrinking cowards, filled with a vague, sapping dread, under the uninterrupted strain and the depressing influence of the long nights. Fidgety sentinels were constantly seeing lurking Bolsheviks conjured by their morbid imagination from the menacing shadows of the woods, and there was an epidemic of accidental self-inflicted wounds, which always occurred at the ticklish, unsupported, advanced positions.

The doctors pronounced many as cases of neurasthenia induced by much loss of sleep, unbroken fatigue, and continual drain upon the nervous forces. They looked solemn and dubious and said it was demanding too much of human endurance to expect the defense to hold on without relief through the many winter days that stretched ahead.

One January night, terrible in the severity of its cold, all hands "stood to" and waited for the rush from the woods, for sentinels had heard the muttering of many voices and had caught the movement of bodies among the trees; but no attack developed, and in the morning the tracks of timber wolves were found approaching almost to our wire, where the pack had stopped to sniff the scent from these strange tenanted loghouses, standing apart on the snow, like outcasts of the village.

The few sentinels kept far in advance at the front village were always having jumping nerves, and robbing exhausted men of precious sleep; but once in truth they were nearly surrounded during the night and escaped by a miracle. So it was decided to burn the houses, as "sniper's row" had been burned in November. Some two hundred peasants were turned out in the snow, and Upper Toulgas became a dirty smudge on the whitened plain over which our range of visibility extended far to the forward woods, and our field of fire was increased comfortingly.

The High Command passed out word that Arctic conditions would preclude any active fighting, but the prisoners spoke differently. They said that the Bolshevik Staff expected the Allied soldiers to die like flies in the cold winter, that the enemy intended to strike when the cold was most bitter, the snow deepest, and so they did.

In January, with a temperature forty degrees below zero Fahrenheit, at midnight, Bolshevik batteries from across the Dvina commenced shelling Toulgas, and continued for fifteen minutes a bombardment that went wild in the dark and struck harmlessly far from our works.

Directly the last shell had been fired, enemy infantry advanced in the open and rushed our front posts. In the darkness there was frantic, wild fighting and struggling in the deep snow, shrill yells and a confused babble in a foreign language, the hideous moans of the wounded, the ringing commands of the commissars in rear, urging their men forward to sure death, and the prolonged explosions of machine guns spurting a rain of bullets over the heads of the attackers to warn them of a death that waited in rear if they turned back.

In two hours the force of the assault was spent, the last shot had been fired, and the snow before one of the blockhouses, where enfilading fire had cut up the attack, was covered with Bolshevik bodies. The fight was an uneven one, for the Americans in the blockhouses fired from bullet proof cover and were sheltered from the weather; but the Bolsheviks had to advance against barbed wire, struggle in the snow against targeted machine guns and had no protection from paralyzing cold. Many of the prisoners were so badly frostbitten that arms and feet were amputated to save their lives.

In February, acting in cooperation with the enemy offensive on the Vaga, a large force of fresh troops composed mainly of the Eighty-second Tarasovo regiment, who knew nothing of the reputation of Toulgas and the fate of other attacking parties, waded through the cold snow forests, clad in white smocks to blend with the color of the ground, floundered up to our lines in the impenetrable night, and were not discovered until they were engaged in cutting the wire between two blockhouses. They were fairly trapped then between the enfilading fire of two sets of machine guns and suffered fearful carnage before they fought their bloody way back wading ponderously through the deep snow to the forest.

Some of the dead came abruptly to life and gave themselves up when a search was made of the bodies next morning; horribly frozen by exposure, they said they preferred an uncertain chance of life at the hands of the Englishskis and Americanskis, to the certain chance of death in a further attempt to conquer Toulgas.

After this sanguinary fight, the Bolshevik soldiers met in a great assemblage, made bitter speeches against the Commander who had led them to disaster, and resolutions were passed which threatened death to any commissar who insisted on another assault of Toulgas and the fighting fiends who defended it.

So this village, far up the Dvina, was no longer the prey for wild midnight sorties and desperate melodramatic clashes in the deep snow, and there might have been comparative peace for the garrison were it not for adherence to those cardinal precepts of military orthodoxy that aggressive contact with the enemy must be always maintained and reconnaissance is vital to a successful combat campaign. It was to conform to these inflexible precepts of the military that patrols left Toulgas seeking for Bolsheviks. Sometimes they went forth on webfooted snow-shoes, and scouted the forest far on the threatening flank to discover whether the enemy had found some new method to approach our positions, and then they served a useful purpose. But the customary patrol party was the one that went out every day, a band of three or four, along a trail of padded snow just wide enough for a single file, that led through the front forest, five miles to the nearest enemy position at Zastrovia.

A hunter can understand this tracked snow trail. It was like a game runway that leads to a salt lick, fresh signs show that deer pass every day, and it is only a question of time until the hunter gets his chance for the fatal shot.

Sometimes, by the mere coincidence of fate, a patrol would turn about in the trail and start back towards friendly lines, when a machine gun would snap and crack and a rush of bullets sing harmlessly high, where another hundred yards meant death from the ambuscade; and often the scouts would come to the hidden waiting spot where imprints in the snow left the story of a large Bolshevik force that had stayed long, but, overcome by the cold, had been forced to quit the death hunt.

Often the Bolsheviks would leave bundles of propaganda on these patrol paths, much of it written in English, inciting British and American soldiers to mutiny, to kill their officers and join the Soviets in a revolution for the world wide supremacy of the proletariat.

Death walked these white runways. Death, and his romantic partner, Chance. But the color of youth had vanished before dour, wan reality with the soldier of North Russia, and the romance of Chance was lost on him. Yet it was strange how often men could walk these suicidal paths and escape unscathed. The goddess was kind, she visited them with benevolent mood, save a few times such as once in March, when from a party of seven, only one got back to tell of the fatal ambush.

When a platoon hurries out to pick up some sign of the others, it is caught in the open at Upper Toulgas, pocketed from the supporting fire of our own lines. There in the open snow, and denied all cover, the men are trapped like condemned animals. They flatten on the snow and fire at an unseen foe that pelts a withering fire from behind trees three hundred yards on a quartering forward flank; bullets whip the snow beside them and sweep by in such a storm that the air whimpers and cries aloud like a tortured living thing. At the end of three hours snow clogging in rifle breeches has frozen solid and they can shoot no more. Then, when it looks as if all were lost, the last man on the line gets back to the artillery, but is so winded and funked by his experience that his directions are a confused babble and the artillery opens up at risk of hitting our own men, shrapnel bursts in front of the platoon, the murdering fire from the clump of trees slackens, and the officer is able to withdraw his men to a God-given dip in the ground, all that are left of them, for out on the white snow still stretches a crumpled drab colored line; some lie very still, others writhe in the agony of grievous or fatal wounds.

Two days after this shambles of the snows, an officer and three men were met, on the forest runway to Zastrovia, by the fire of a large force of Bolsheviks, but until the day the Americans left Toulgas, there was no abatement of the perilous policy of patrols in this undefined war, where the loss of every life seemed sacrilegious sacrifice.

And this amazing campaign so prodigal of men's lives continued through the lengthening winter days.

At the end of March the sun had mounted high, and the snows were fields of myriad dazzling diamonds. A new fresh fragrance filled the air, and brought the promise of vague, perceptible hope. Spring was coming with the sun, and the renewal of youth would not be denied.

Then the Headquarters of the American Expeditionary Force took cognizance of the war with Russia and sent a general officer to command the forces from Archangel.

Then the Secretary of War announced that no more troops would be sent, and the units there withdrawn.

This was the end, but the Americans did not know it. The Royal Scots came to take over the defenses, the old Category Bs, with their wound stripes, their traditional, cockney jauntiness and just a hint of superiority in their eyes for the Yanks who were leaving the show.

It was strange how that night the winter's harshness relented in the gentle lulling wind, and in the luminous spell of the limpid moon, weary, war-worn Toulgas was at peace, sleeping, in unbroken white stillness.

Far up the sloping hill the rude silhouette of the center village is etched against a starlighted sky. Forward the church, shell gashed and mutilated, with its grotesque minarets, and the moon, a pendulous globe of living fire. Clear in the lucid light is the hard contested bridge, that means so little and yet so much; beyond, the charred ruins of the sacrificed village, and, still farther, the somber, gloomy forest. Vividly white gleams the church beneath the steely mystic moon, but whiter than the church or moon are the endless wastes of immaculate, unmarred snows that reach across the great river to the lurking darkness of the distant shore and abroad to the sinister shadows of crested trees.

This is Russia of the American soldier—a cluster of dirty huts, dominated by the severe white church, and, encircling all, fields and fields of spotless snows; Russia, terrible in the grasp of devastating Arctic cold; the squalor and fulsome filth of the villages; the moujik, his mild eyes, his patient bearded face—the gray drudgery and gaping ignorance of his starved life; the little shaggy pony, docile and uncomplaining in winds, icy as the breath of the sepulcher; Russia, her dread mystery, and that intangible quality of melodrama that throngs the air, and lingers in the air, persistently haunts the spirit, and is as consciously perceptible as the dirty villages, the white church, and the grief-laden skies.

It was not until nearly June the Americans were told that their bizarre service to their country was at an end. They were to go by slow stages back through the Dvina villages, always within call in case of dire need. But at last the purple day comes, and they are going home. A troop ship off among the ice floes of the White Sea toils westward, and upon its decks is a throng of soldiers who gaze with equivocal valediction upon the failing Russian coast, which mingles imperceptibly with the distant haze, and so passes like this shameful war to the bourne of memory's empire. The fairy rumor has come true, the Americans are going home.