The remainder of “K” Company moved upon the right of the enemy front line at the river crossing. At the time Donoghue struck, a frontal demonstration was made upon the Reds by the English marines and American machine guns firing across the river and by the Canadian artillery shelling the woods where the Red reserves were thought to be. The plan failed because of the inability of Captain Cherry to reach his objective, on account of the bottomless swamps that he encountered. Captain Donoghue gained a foot-hold and then was forced to dig in and during the afternoon repulsed two counter attacks of the Bolos, having paid for the capture of the two Bolo machine guns by severe losses.
During the night under cover of these two platoons, “L” and the English marines crossed the river, where the Reds had held them so many days. And during the following day the right of the Bolo position was turned by a movement through the woods.
But at four o’clock in the afternoon the enemy’s second, position, a mile north of the village, developed surprising strength. In fact, the Reds counterattacked just at dark and once more the doughboys lay down, on their arms, in the rain-flooded swamp, where the dark, frosty morning would find them stiff and ugly customers for the Reds to tackle. In fact they did rise up and smite the Bolshevik so swiftly that he fled from his works and left Kodish in such a hurry that he gave no forwarding address for his mail. Captain Donoghue set up his headquarters in Kodish and sent detachments out to follow the Reds and to threaten the Red Shred Makhrenga and Taresevo forces. During this fight, or rather after it, the Canadians taught our boys their first lesson in looting the persons of the dead. Our men had been rather respectful and gentle with the Bolo dead who were quite numerous on the Emtsa River battlefield. Can you call a tangle of woods a field? But the Canadians, veterans of four years fighting, immediately went through the pockets of the dead for roubles and knives and so forth and even took the boots off the dead, as they were pretty fair boots.
The officer who reports this says he has often heard of dead men’s boots but had to go to war to actually see them worn.
In passing let it be stated that many a footsore doughboy helped himself to a dry pair of boots from a dead Red Guard or in winter to a pair of valenkas, or warm felt boots. One of “Captain Mike’s” nervy sergeants protested against being sent back to Seletskoe to get him a new pair of shoes, for he hated the ill-fitting British army shoe, as all Americans did, and prevailed upon Donoghue to let him wait a few days till after a battle when he sure enough helped himself to a fine pair of boots.
One thing the American never did take from the dead Bolo was his Russian tobacco, for it was worse even than the British issue tobacco. A good story is told on one of Donoghue’s lieutenants. During the excitement of burning the bridge over the Emtsa at Tiogra, time when the two forces fled from one another, the officer, greatly fatigued, sat down on the bridge during the preparations by the men. He was missed later on the march and the man whom the captain sent back to find the lieutenant arrived just in time to keep what little hair the popular bald-headed little officer had from being singed off by the leaping flames. Lieut. Ryan does not like to be kidded about it.
The morning of the seventeenth of October saw the American forces again on the advance. Good news had come of the successes on the railroad.
The Kodish force was in the strategic position now to force the Reds to give up Emtsa and Plesetskaya. But Trotsky’s northern army commander evidently well understood that situation, for he gave strict attention to this Kodish force of Americans and at the fifteenth verst pole on the main road his Red Guards held the Americans all day. Again the next day he made Donoghue’s Yanks strive all day. Just at night successful flanking movements caused the enemy to evacuate his formidable position. It was here that Sgt. Cromberger, one of Ballard’s machine gun men, distinguished himself by going single-handed into the Bolo lines to reconnoiter.
The converging advances upon Plesetskaya by the three columns, up the Onega Valley, on the railroad and on the Kodish-Plesetskaya-Petrograd highway now seemed about to succeed. Hard fighting by all three columns had broken the Bolshevik’s confidence somewhat.
Of course at this time of writing it can be seen better than it could then. He did not make a stand at Avda. He was found by our patrols way back at Kochmas, only a few miles from the railroad. Meanwhile the Russian Officers’ Training Corps which was armed with forty Lewis guns and acted rather independently, together with the Royal Scot platoon and a large number of “partisans,” anti-Bolshevik volunteers of the area, effected the capture of Shred Makhrenga, Taresevo and other villages, which added to the threat of the Kodish force on Plesetskaya.