Then, except by the Vologda railway, the only method of transportation between Archangel and the interior is by sledges, drawn over the snow by little shaggy ponies that can perform miracles of labor and seem impervious to the terrible, cold winds. These ponies are the embodiment of the moujik temperament, docile and mild mannered, very patient and long suffering, and never resentful of the most severe chastisement.
The whole province is a plain of low, gentle slopes, covered with small fir trees and several varieties of dwarfed pine. A long, dormant season and the severity of winter preclude any luxuriant, ligneous growth. Even the underbrush is sparse and thinly scattered, and commercially, about the only value of the Archangel forests is for the manufacture of pulp. The bottom of this spindly pine woods is covered with a tundra. Sometimes, there are patches of waist deep water, and in other places, a morass that seems bottomless.
Such is the character of all the North Russian forests. The natives tell stories of men, unfamiliar with the country, who have lost their way and floundered in these treacherous marshes until they passed from sight without a sign of their passage.
During the rains of fall, and when summer bursts upon winter, in June, is the season of rasputitsa. The wagon roads then are sloughs of deep mire, and little travel is attempted. The first snow falls in November and gradually mounts, until in January it has a uniform height of three feet, except in the open places where there are great drifts much higher. No thaw comes until late February, and so moving for any distance on foot is impossible without skis or snowshoes. Cold follows the snow, gradually increasing in intensity until there are January days of forty-five and fifty degrees below zero Fahrenheit.
When the wind is high and the air filled with great, white blasts, this cold of Russia presses on the diaphragm like a ponderous weight and breathing becomes a gasping effort. In the depth of winter, the sun is banished, and during the latter part of December, only a few hours of pale, anemic glimmering separates the black Arctic night; a shadowy gloaming, like shortlived, desert twilight.
Splendid, fighting men were made weak cowards by the cumulative depression of the unbroken, Russian night and its crushing influence on the spirit; for the severest battles of the campaign were fought during the cold, black months of winter time.
Preparations for opening hostilities in the war with Russia were made in April, 1918. The Allied Supreme War Council had been alert to the presence of German troops in Finland and their fanciful menace to the Murman railway; and in the quiet harbor of Murmansk, British and French battleships had been idling purposelessly since early spring. In April, one hundred fifty Royal Marines landed from the British ships and were followed in a few weeks by four hundred more, also a landing party of French sailors. On 10th June, the United States warship, Olympia, appeared at Murmansk, and one hundred American bluejackets disembarked. These Allied forces penetrated down the Murman railway to Klandalaksh, some two hundred fifty miles south, and, in addition to holding Murmansk, seized the port of Petchenga on the coast of Finland.
Then the scene of intervention shifted southward, and on the 1st August, General Poole, with a party of five hundred fifty French, British and a few American marines, escorted by a British cruiser, a French cruiser and a trawler fleet, attacked Archangel, which, after a bombardment, was surrendered next day by the weak Bolshevik rear guard.
The main body of the enemy had carried with them far up the river to Kotlas and down the railway to Vologda, rations, rifles, guns and ammunitions, American manufactured. Likewise, they had seized and carried off nearly all available means of transportation; and when the Allied troops examined the vast storehouses in the harbor and at Bakaritza, they found that the Bolsheviks deliberately, systematically and with great thoroughness had stripped the shelves of every conceivable thing of value. If the object of the Archangel Expedition was to safeguard the vast munitions and stores there, it had failed signally and at the outset.
Still the enemy had fled, for, by some occult form of necromancy the Bolsheviki had now become "the enemy," and it is a major premise of the military that a fleeing enemy must always be followed up. Small heed that little was known of the strength or disposition of the retiring army. They had fled. Two forces were immediately dispatched in pursuit, up the river and down the railway; and, to augment the strength of the invaders, new troops were sent from Europe.