Plesetskaya at that moment was indeed of immense value to the Reds. It was the railroad base of their four columns that were holding up the left front of their Northern Army. But they were discouraged. Our patrols and spies sent into Plesetskaya vicinity reported and stories of deserters and wounded men all indicated that the Reds were getting ready to evacuate Plesetskaya. A determined smash of the three Allied columns would have won the coveted position. But the Kodish force now received the same strange order from far-off Archangel that was received on the other fronts:
“To hold on and dig in.” No further advances were to be made. Thinking of their eleven comrades killed in this advance and of the thirty-one wounded and of the many sick from exposure, the Americans on the Kodish force as well as the English marines and Scots who also had lost severely, were loath to stop with so easy a victory in sight.
Of course General Ironside’s main idea was right, but its application at that time and place seemed to work hardship on the Kodish force. And the sequel proves it. To add to their discomfort, the very size of this force which had struggled so valiantly this little distance, was now reduced by the withdrawal of the English marines and of “L” Company, and by the ordering of the Canadian artillery guns to the Dvina front. The remaining force with Captain Donoghue totalled one hundred and eighty men, which seemed very small to them, in view of the fact that a mere reconnoitering patrol from the Bolos now returning to activity always showed anywhere from seventy-five to one hundred rifles and a machine gun or two. However, they made the best of their remaining days in October to fortify the Kodish-Avda front sector of the road. The Yanks were to be prepared for the worst. And they got it. Let us take a look at the position held by these Americans. It is typical of the positions in which many of the far-flung detachments found themselves.
At the seventeenth verst pole was a four-man outpost. At the sixteenth verst pole Lieut. Ballard had two of his machine guns, a Lewis gun crew and some forty-six men from “K” Company. Four versts behind him on the densely wooded road Lieut. Gardner with forty men and a Vickers gun was occupying the old Bolo dugouts. One verst further back in the big clearing was Kodish village, a place which by all the rules of field strategy was absolutely untenable. Here with four Vickers guns were the remainder of “K” Company along with the sick and the lame and the halt, scarce forty men really able to do active duty, but obliged to stay on to support their comrades. The nearest friendly troops, including their artillery, were back at Seletskoe, thirty versts away. On October 29th the Reds returned to Avda. The noise from that village and reports brought by patrols indicated that this enemy who erstwhile was on the run, and whom our high command now held lightly, was determined to regain Kodish. And while striking heavily at their enemy on the railroad as we have seen, the Red Guards now fell upon this single company of Americans strung out along the Kodish-Avda road.
In the afternoon of November 1st the enemy drove in our cossack post of “K” men at verst seventeen, began shelling us with his artillery and for several days kept raiding Ballard heavier and heavier. Meanwhile Captain Donoghue sent out from Kodish every available man to strengthen the line. Night and day the men labored to erect additional defenses, with scarcely time to close an eye in sleep, patrolling all the trails on their flanks. On the fourth of November, the day the Reds were massed in such numbers on the railroad, they succeeded in forcing Ballard from his trenches at the sixteenth verst pole. He fell back to the new defenses at the fifteenth verst. It is related by his men that he passed between Bolo forces who lined the road but permitted the Americans to escape.
Lieut. Gardner was now reinforced at the twelfth verst pole, for a patrol had lost a man somewhere on the river flank and it was thought that the enemy was preparing to pass by the flank and bag this body of American fighters by taking the newly constructed bridge on the Emtsa in the rear of Donoghue’s small force. This bridge was their “only way home.”
Their worst fears came true. On the morning of the fifth of November these Yanks way out at front of Kodish, holding the enemy off desperately from the frontal attack, and endeavoring vainly to frustrate the flank attacks of their enemy in greatly superior numbers, suddenly heard great bursts of machine gun fire way towards the rear in the vicinity of Kodish. Instantly they knew that Reds had worked down the river by the flank from Avda or even from Emtsa on the railroad and were attacking in force three miles to their rear. That made the situation desperate. But the Yanks who had in the beginning of the campaign been looked down upon by the Red Capped British High Command because of their greenness, now showed their fineness of fighting stuff by fighting on with undiminished vigor and effectiveness. Nowhere did they give way. Day and night they were on the alert. Attacks from the front, sly raids from the woods on each side of the road, heart chilling assaults upon the cluster of houses in Kodish way in their rear, and steady progress of the Red Guards toward the bridge on the Emtsa, their only way out of the bag in which the worn and depleted company was being trapped, brought the prolonged struggle to a crisis in the middle of the afternoon of the eighth of November.
It came as follows: Colonel Hazelden, survivor of the disaster earlier in the fall, as already related, had returned to command the Kodish-Shred Makhrenga fronts, when Col. Gavin was sent to command the railroad front where Colonel Sutherland had fizzled.
This gallant officer was on his way to the perilous front to see Ballard. Just as he passed Gardner at the twelfth verst pole, he found himself and the two detachments of Americans at last completely cut off by a whole battalion of Red Guards fresh from the south of Russia, sent up by Trotsky to brace his Northern Army. For half an hour there raged a fight as intense as was the bitter reality of the emergency to the forty Americans with Gardner in those dugouts. By almost miraculous luck in directing their fire through the screen of trees that shielded the Reds from view, Sgt. Cromberger’s Vickers gun and Cpl. Wilkie’s Lewis gun inflicted terrible losses upon this fresh battalion just getting into action against the Americanskis. It was massed preparatory to the final dispositions of its commander to overwhelm the Americans. But with the hail of bullets tearing through their heavy ranks, the Bolos were unable long to stand it, and at last broke from control, yelling and screaming, to suffer still more from the well-handled guns when they left their cover and ran for the woods. And so the little force was saved. But so loud and prolonged were the yells of the frightened and wounded Reds that Captain Donoghue, a verst in the rear at his field headquarters, he related afterwards, paced the floor of the log shack in an agony of certainty that his brave men were all gone. He had been sure that the howling of the scattered pack had been the fervent yells of a last bayonet charge wiping out the Yankees.
The Reds could not get themselves together for another attack at this point before dark but did drive Ballard back verst after verst that afternoon. It was a grim handful of “M. G.” and “K” men who looked at their own losses and counted the huge enemy losses of that desperate day and wondered how many such days would whittle them off to the point of annihilation. Col. Hazelden had gone back to headquarters. Captain Donoghue now acted with his usual decisiveness.