Along the main street, Troitsky Prospect, runs a two-track trolley line connecting the north and south suburbs mentioned in the preceding paragraph. The cars are light and run very smoothly. They are operated chiefly by women. Between the main street and the river-front near the center of the city is the market-place. This covers several blocks and is full of dingy stalls and alleys occupied by almost hopeless traders and stocks in trade. As new wooden ware, home-made trinkets, second-hand clothing and fresh fish can be obtained there the year around, and in summer the offerings of vegetables are plentiful and tempting, the market-place never lacks shoppers who carry their paper money down in the same basket they use to carry back their purchases.
Public buildings are of brick or stone and are colored white, pink, grey or bright red to give a light or warm effect. Down-town stores are built some of brick and some of logs. Homes are square in type, with few exceptions, built of logs, usually of very plain architecture, set directly against the sidewalks, the yards and gardens being at the side or rear. For privacy, each man’s holdings are surrounded by a seven-foot fence. Thus the streets present long vistas of wooden ware, partly house and partly fence, with sometimes over-hanging trees, and with an inevitable set of doorsteps projecting from each house over part of the sidewalk. This set of steps is seldom used, for the real entrance to the home is at the side of the house reached through a gateway in the fence.
The houses in Archangel are usually of two stories, with double windows packed with cotton or flax to resist the cold. When painted at all, the houses have been afflicted by their owners with one or more coats of yellowish-brown stuff familiar to every American farmer who has ever “primed” a big barn. A few houses have been clap-boarded on the outside and some of these have been painted white.
The rest of the street view is snow, or, lacking that, a cobbled pavement very rough and uneven, and lined on each side—sometimes on one side only, or in the centre—with a narrow sidewalk of heavy planks laid lengthwise over the otherwise open public sewer, a ditch about three feet wide and from three to six feet deep. Woe be to him who goes through rotten plank! It has been done.
So much for general scenic effects at Archangel. The Technical Institute, used as Headquarters by the American Forces, is worth a glance. It is a four-story solid-looking building about one hundred and fifty feet square and eighty feet high, with a small court in the centre. The outside walls of brick and stone are nearly four feet thick, and their external surface is covered by pink-tinted plaster which catches the thin light of the low-lying winter sun and causes the building to seem to glow. On the front of the building there are huge pillars rising from the second story balcony to the great Grecian gable facing the river.
Inside, this great building is simple and severe, but rather pleasing. Windows open into the court from a corridor running around the building on each floor, and on the other side of the corridor are the doors of the rooms once used as recitation and lecture halls, laboratories, manual training shops, offices, etc. Outside, it was one of the city’s imposing buildings; inside, it was well-appointed. To the people of the city it was a building of great importance. It was worthy to offer the Commander of the American troops.
Here Colonel Stewart set up his Headquarters. The British Commanding General had his headquarters, the G. H. Q., N. R. E. F., in another school building in the centre of the city, within close reach of the Archangel State Capitol Building. Colonel Stewart’s headquarters were conveniently near the two buildings which afterward were occupied and fitted up for a receiving hospital and for a convalescent hospital respectively, as related elsewhere, and not far either from the protection of the regimental Headquarters Company quartered in Olga Barracks.
Here the Commanding Officer of this expeditionary force of Americans off up here near the North Pole on the strangest fighting mission ever undertaken by an American force, tried vainly to keep track of his widely dispersed forces. Up the railroad he had seen his third battalion, under command of Major C. G. Young, go with General Finlayson whom General Poole had ordered to take Vologda, four hundred miles to the south. His first battalion, under Lieutenant Colonel Corbley he had seen hurried off up the Dvina River under another British Brigadier-General to take Kotlas hundreds of miles up the river. His second battalion under Major J. Brooks Nichols was on duty in Archangel and the nearby suburbs. These forces, and his 310th Engineer Battalion and his Ambulance and Hospital Units were shifted about by the British Generals and Colonels and Majors often without any information whatever to Colonel Stewart, the American commanding officer. He lost touch with his battalion and company commanders.
He had a discouraging time even in getting his few general orders distributed to the American troops. No wonder that often an American officer or soldier reporting in from a front by order or permission of a British field officer, did not feel that American Headquarters was his real headquarters and in pure ignorance was guilty of omitting some duty or of failure to comply with some Archangel restriction that had been ordered by American Headquarters. As to general orders from American Headquarters dealing with the action of troops in the field, those were so few and of so little impressiveness that they have been forgotten. We must say candidly that the doughboy came to look upon American Headquarters in Archangel as of very trifling importance in the strange game he was up against. He knew that the strategy was all planned at British G. H. Q., that the battle orders were written in the British field officer’s headquarters, that the transportation and supplies of food were under control of the British that altogether too much of the hospital service was under control of the British. Somehow the doughboy felt that the very limited and much complained about service of his own American Supply Unit, that lived for the most part on the fat of the land in Bakaritza, should have been corrected by his commanding officer who sat in American Headquarters. And they felt, whether correctly or not, that the court-martial sentences of Major C. G. Young, who acted as summary court officer at Smolny after he was relieved of his command in the field, were unnecessarily harsh. And they blamed their commanding officer, Colonel Stewart, for not taking note of that fact when he reviewed and approved them. The writers of this history of the expedition think the doughboy had much to justify his feeling.