Sharp on the hour of midnight April 19th “F” Company silently withdrew from the front line positions and started across the river, the ice of which was already beginning to move. As they marched through the inky darkness of the woods the dummy guns began discharging which kept the enemy deceived as to our movements.
As the last man crossed the river a rocket went up as a signal to the Engineers that “F” Company and the other infantry units had arrived safely at Ignatavskaya. The following moment the entire surrounding country shook to a series of terrific explosions both at Kitsa and Maximovskaya and then a great red glare emblazoned the sky as the two oil soaked villages burst into flame. The engineers quickly joined the party and from then on until the following morning they continued in a forced march back to prepared positions at Mala-Beresnik and Nizhni Kitsa on opposite sides of the river about eight versts in rear of Kitsa.
The positions here were a godsend after our experience of the past two months in the open and exposed positions further up the river. Here for more than two months hundreds of Russian laborers had been busily engaged in stringing mile after mile of barbed wire about the positions and constructed practically bomb-proof shelters. Furthermore, our artillery commanded a good view of the river, which was all important, for as the ice was now moving out we knew that the enemy gunboats would soon come steaming down river with nothing but land batteries to stop them since the mouth of the Dvina and the White Sea would not be free from ice for several weeks to come, thus making it impossible for our gunboats there to get down to these positions.
And the ice went out of the upper river with a crunching roar. The Reds came on with their water attacks, but with little success. The Canadian artillery was well prepared and so well manned that it beat the Red flotilla badly. Fortunately the Bolo gunners were not as accurate as on former occasions. So losses from this source were comparatively few.
The lower Dvina was unusually rapid in clearing this spring. The 310th Engineers had assisted by use of dynamite. The Red army command had counted on three weeks to press his water attacks. But by May tenth gunboats had gone up the Dvina to help batter Toulgas into submission. And when on May seventeenth Commander Worlsley of Antarctic fame went steaming up the Vaga on board the “Glow Worm,” a heavily armed river gunboat, the worries of the Americans in the battle-scarred Vaga column were at an end.
With the gunboats now at their disposal the morale of all ranks was greatly improved and it was thereupon decided to retake the position at Ignatavskaya immediately across the river from Kitsa, which position was held by the enemy, giving him the opportunity of sheltering thousands of his troops there with his artillery on the opposite side of the river to further protect them.
On the morning of May 19th several strong patrols went forward into the woods in the direction of the enemy and quickly succeeded in gaining contact with his outposts. The Bolo must have sensed some activity for at 10:30 a. m. he commenced a violent artillery bombardment. Shortly thereafter his airplanes came flying over our lines and machine-gunned our trenches. The men had long since become so accustomed to this little by-play that they gave it little consideration other than keeping well under cover. Others even gave it less regard, as the following amusing incident indicates:
During the shelling of that morning a great number of enemy shells exploded in the river and these explosions immediately brought large numbers of fish to the surface. The company cook, seeing such a splendid opportunity to replenish the company larder, crawled down to the edge of the river, jumped into a rowboat and soon was occupied in filling his boat with fish, utterly disregardful of the intermittent shelling and sniping. That evening, needless to say, the cook was the most popular man in his company.
At 9:30 p. m. the boats brought down battalion after battalion of fresh Russian troops from Zaboria who were landed near our positions under cover preparatory to the attack on Ignatavskaya. It might be well to mention here that at this time of the year the Arctic sun was practically shining the entire twenty-four hours, only about midnight barely disappearing below the rim of the horizon, making it dark enough in the woods in the dull twilight to advance without observation. At midnight the infantry pushed forward along the road toward the Bolo outpost positions. American infantry also covered the opposite bank of the river.
Our guns on the river in conjunction with the land batteries immediately opened up with a terrific bombardment, shelling the Bolo positions for twenty minutes until the infantry had gained the outposts of the village and a few moments later when the barrage had lifted they entered Ignatavskaya, which had been in the hands of the enemy for more than a month. Our attack took the enemy clearly by surprise, for in the village itself we found great numbers of enemy dead and wounded, who had been caught under our curtain of fire from the artillery, and for the next several days we were busy in bringing in other wounded men and prisoners from the surrounding woods, estimated at more than two hundred alone.