Doughboys stretched their sea legs comfortably and formed in column of squads under the empty supply shed on the quay, to escape the cold drizzle of rain, while Major Young explained in detail how Captain Donoghue was to conduct the second train.
All night long the two troop trains rattled along the Russki railway or stood interminably at strange-looking stations. The bare box cars were corded deep with sitting and curled up soldiers fitfully sleeping and starting to consciousness at the jerking and swaying of the train. Once at a weird log station by the flaring torchlights they had stood for a few minutes beside a northbound train loaded with Bolshevik prisoners and deserters gathered in that day after the successful Allied engagement. Morning found them at a big bridge that had been destroyed by artillery fire of the Red Guards the afternoon before, not far from the important village of Obozerskaya, a vital keypoint which just now we were to endeavor to organize the defense of, and use as a depot and junction point for other forces.
No one who was there will forget the initial scene at Obozerskaya when two companies of Americans, “I” and “L”, proceeded’ up the railroad track in column of twos and halted in ranks before the tall station building, with their battalion commander holding officers call at command of the bugle. An excited little French officer popped out of his dugout and pointed at the shell holes in the ground and in the station and spoke a terse phrase in French to the British field staff officer who was gnawing his mustache. The latter overcame his embarrassment enough to tell Major Young that the French officer feared the Bolo any minute would reopen artillery fire. Then we realized we were in the fighting zone. The major shouted orders out and shooed the platoons off into the woods.
Later into the woods the French officers led the Americans who relieved them of their circle of fortified outposts. Some few in the vicinity of the scattered village made use of buildings, but most of the men stood guard in the drizzly rain in water up to their knees and between listening post tricks labored to cut branches enough to build up a dry platform for rest. The veteran French soldier had built him a fire at each post to dry his socks and breeches legs, but “the strict old disciplinarian,” Major Young, ordered “No fires on the outpost.”
And this was war. Far up the railroad track “at the military crest” an outpost trench was dug in strict accordance with army book plans. The first night we had a casualty, a painful wound in a doughboy’s leg from the rifle of a sentry who cried halt and fired at the same time. An officer and party on a handcar had been rattling in from a visit to the front outguard. All the surrounding roads and trails were patrolled.
Armed escorts went with British intelligence officers to outlying villages to assemble the peasants and tell them why the soldiers were coming into North Russia and enlist their civil co-operation and inspire them to enlist their young men in the Slavo-British Allied Legion, that is to put on brass buttoned khaki, eat British army rations, and drill for the day when they should go with the Allies to clear the country of the detested Bolsheviki. To the American doughboys it did not seem as though the peasants’ wearied-of-war countenances showed much elation nor much inclination to join up.
The inhabitants of Obozerskaya had fled for the most part before the Reds. Some of the men and women had been forced to go with the Red Guards. They now crept back into their villages, stolidly accepted the occupancy of their homes by the Americans, hunted up their horses which they had driven into the wilderness to save them from the plundering Bolo, greased up their funny looking little droskies, or carts, and began hauling supplies for the Allied command and begging tobacco from the American soldiers.
Captain Donoghue with two platoons of “K” Company, the other two having been dropped temporarily at Issaka Gorka to guard that railroad repair shop and wireless station, now moved right out by order of Colonel Guard, on September seventh, on a trail leading off toward Tiogra and Seletskoe. Somewhere in the wilds he would find traces of or might succor the handful of American sailors and Scots who, under Col. Hazelden, a British officer, had been cornered by the Red Guards.
“Reece, reece,” said the excited drosky driver as he greedily accepted his handful of driver’s rations. He had not seen rice for three years. Thankfully he took the food. His family left at home would also learn how to barter with the generous doughboy for his tobacco and bully beef and crackers, which at times, very rarely of course, in the advanced sectors, he was lucky enough to exchange for handfuls of vegetables that the old women plucked out of their caches in the rich black mould of the small garden, or from a cellar-like hole under a loose board in the log house.
“Guard duty at Archangel” was aiming now to be a real war, on a small scale but intensive. Obozerskaya, about one hundred miles south of Archangel, in a few days took on the appearance of an active field base for aggressive advance on the enemy. Here were the rapid assembling of fighting units; of transport and supply units; of railroad repairing crews, Russian, under British officers; of signals; of armored automobile, our nearest approach to a tank, which stuck in the mud and broke through the frail Russki bridges and was useless; of the feverish clearing and smoothing of a landing field near the station for our supply of spavined air-planes that had already done their bit on the Western Front; of the improvement of our ferocious-looking armored train, with its coal-car mounted naval guns, buttressed with sand bags and preceded by a similar car bristling with machine guns and Lewis automatics in the hands of a motley crew of Polish gunners and Russki gunners and a British sergeant or two. This armored train was under the command of the blue-coated, one-armed old commander Young, hero of the Zeebrugge Raid, who parked his train every night on the switch track next to the British Headquarters car, the Blue Car with the Union Jack flying over it and the whole Allied force. Secretly, he itched to get his armored train into point-blank engagement with the Bolshevik armored train.