Now he was above some of the shifting clouds, and, flying slowly, he looked down upon the river Dwina, its broad stream choked with blocks of ice, between which the deep blue water gleamed. In spite of the clouds and mist a glorious panorama lay spread below him as, hovering for a moment before commencing his eastward flight, he made a careful survey with his glasses in every direction.
He was almost over the river, facing northeast. On his left lay the town of Archangel, its roofs snow-buried. West of it was the ice-bound Gulf of Archangel, and, beyond that, the wide frozen expanse of the White Sea. In front of him stretched the endless plains that fronted the Arctic Ocean. On his right, far up the river, he caught a glimpse of the town of Kholmogory.
There was something inexpressibly dreary and abandoned about the scene. The very names were barbaric and meaningless on his lips. “Petrograd seems almost near home,” he thought, “now that I’m six hundred miles north of it.”
He turned east and began following the course of the Dwina to where, around a little village nestling by its banks, he could see American troops in squads and companies moving here and there, and motor-trucks painfully nosing their way along a snow-blocked road. A trench-line was faintly visible, east and west of the river. Not a shot disturbed the silence, in which the roar of his airplane’s motor was the only sound.
Bob flew on eastward, approaching the Bolshevik lines. The enemy was strongly entrenched, with artillery behind him, but at the first snow-falls the fighting had grown intermittent. Bursts of firing and short, hard-fought engagements alternated with days of inactivity on both sides. As he flew over the trenches now anti-aircraft guns were trained on him and shots came near enough to make him rise another hundred feet.
For the second time in two days Bob remarked with surprise the presence of a growing purpose and organization among his adversaries. The Bolsheviki seemed to be abandoning their somewhat hit-or-miss methods for a better ordered scheme. Ordered by whom? Bob had heard rumors of Russian officers of the old army forced into Bolshevism to train Trotsky’s Red troops.
He flew on behind the trenches, risking a lower level in his desire to see the new lines of communication, unsurveyed up to now by the tiny handful of American and British aviators around Archangel. For a few moments he dodged back and forth in quick tacks to throw the gunners off their aim. Then, leaning out over the cockpit, with his glasses he studied the narrow lines showing dark against the snow-fields. In five minutes the deadly fire of the anti-aircraft guns forced him to rise again above the clouds. He rapidly sketched in on his field map what he had seen, ready to try another descent.
The icy air penetrating his lungs made him gasp a little. The air seemed to have substance, body, as though he were in the grip of a block of ice. It got past the ear-tabs of his helmet and made his ears tingle. His feet were numb through leather and fur. In the dull cheerlessness of his mood a profound depression began to steal over him, but at the same time half-unconsciously he fought against it, and some forgotten lines came into his mind with all the vividness of words learned in childhood. He found himself silently repeating them:
“Say not the struggle naught availeth,
The labor and the wounds are vain——”