“Don’t know, sir,” answered the corporal gloomily. “I never look at the temperature—I can feel it all right. But Pavlo, here, told me this wasn’t very cold for them.”
Bob closed the door and turned to look at the Russian peasant who was on his knees beside the stove, stoking it with small pieces of wood.
“He seems to keep warm enough, yet he hasn’t as thick clothes on as we,” he remarked, studying Pavlo’s hunched-up figure, in sheepskin jacket and round fur cap.
“No, sir, but he stays on level ground,” said Denby. “I don’t believe there’s anything would keep out the wind up there.” He jerked his head toward the sky, picked up fur helmet, gloves and goggles and handed them to his captain.
“I shan’t want you to go up with me to-day, Denby,” Bob told him. “I’ll take a single-seater and scout along the river.”
Bob wore a heavy fur flying-suit, leather lined. His helmet covered all of head and face not protected by his goggles. Over his boots would be drawn a second pair, made of skins sewn together with the fur left on. Yet he faced the Arctic winter day reluctantly. Bob had always hated extreme cold, even in his boyhood days at home, and two years of the mild French climate had completely spoiled him for ice and blizzards. And the Archangel winter came near to being what up to now he had only known of in books of Polar exploration, read before a blazing fire:—a wilderness of snow and ice, and a thermometer that dropped steadily lower every day, until the freezing misty air penetrated through any number of layers of clothing to the very bone.
It was not only this, however, which made Bob linger at the doorway of his shack instead of starting off to his afternoon’s work with his usual alacrity. He felt no enthusiasm for the present campaign. It seemed to him a miserable mistake, a gloomy anticlimax to the war’s glorious ending. Russia ought not to be an enemy, but an ally. The spectre of Bolshevism, stalking so boldly abroad upon these frozen plains, rose up to cloud the joy he had known for a few weeks after the great victory.
More than this, he knew at heart with the soldier’s clear-seeing mind, that the American and British lives to be pitifully lost on the snow-fields of Archangel could not stem the tide of Bolshevism, which, if it were to be fought at all, needed a mighty effort to crush its maddened onslaught. Bob’s thoughts of all this were vague and undefined as he pulled on his gloves and left the shack with Denby beside him. But they were persistent enough to take the edge off his energy, and to change the ardent eagerness of past months to a dogged, but low-spirited, determination to do his duty.
From a big flying-shed a hundred yards away an aviator was coming toward him, running stiffly over the snow to start the blood in his cramped limbs. A second flying-shed stood near the first, with a small barrack and half a dozen shacks beside it. A snowy road wound past them across the plain to the town of Archangel two miles away. The noon sky was cloudy and threatening, hiding the winter sun from the cold earth. A single plane droned overhead, flying northeast.
“Beastly weather, Gordon, I’ll say. Got a good fire in the shack?” called out the aviator who now approached him, clapping his numbed hands together.