The main Bolshevik stronghold north of Vologda was at Plesetskaya, some fifty miles south of the furthermost position of the Allies on the railway, from which an Imperial Government highway reached out through Archangel Province northeast as far as Emetskoe, on the Dvina, passing through the villages Kochmas, Avda, Kodish, and Seletskoe, near the Emtsa river. At Kochmas, another road branched east to Tarasovo, thence north through Gora and Shred Mekrenga.
From Shred Mekrenga and Seletskoe, the enemy could have access to the lower Dvina, head off all supply convoys for the Dvina and Vaga columns; and hold the Allies trapped far up stream. Therefore, two more auxiliary expeditions were organized, and, instead of two invading "Columns," the Allied forces, woefully insufficient at the outset, were operating in seven columns, separated detachments, advance parties, outguards, outposts, flanking forces, and all along the Dvina, from Kholmogora to Bereznik, a stretch of one hundred miles, were still other detached soldier groups watching the treacherous way from Archangel, a Cossack Post in one village, a squad in another, in still another a platoon, all without communication and completely undefended in case of real attack.
There was unlimited chance for rear movements along that tenuous, unprotected, communication line. General Ironside would have massacred the Bolsheviks had positions been reversed. The Germans would have annihilated the Allied North Russian Expedition with half the numbers that the Bolsheviks had.
During the winter, several circling movements were essayed, but never on a scale of comprehensive organization; at Morjagorskaya, in February, and at Shred Mekrenga, the enemy came closest to success, but at both places was stopped by the gallant British, and when spring came his chances vanished, the bogging quagmire precluded any further offensive. But while the Bolsheviks did not destroy the Expedition, they soon reduced the invasion to a series of desperate, detached, outguard actions, and the River and Railway Columns that were to have entered Kotlas and Vologda with the coming of the first snow, were flung far and broad over vast Archangel, as the effort "to stage a real show with two men and an orange" wilted with the first snow, a dismal, ghastly "washout."
Even when the Americans reached Archangel in September, the campaign had already assumed a defensive character. Indeed, so serious was the outlook that they were rushed from the troop-ships, shunted off to Russian box cars, and consigned with expeditious haste to the Railway Front.
Nothing of this was known to these new zealous soldiers off from a brief military training encampment to the very heart of war's purple, glamourous adventure. And it is doubtful whether they could have realized the significance of the military situation, even had it been communicated to them. In a few crowded weeks, so many stirring events had thronged their heretofore placid lives that these recruits from Michigan and Wisconsin were buried beneath a bewildering wilderness of amazing impressions through which confused, alien scenes and persons and places trooped in phantom and fantastic multicolored parade, until their minds were stunned beyond the power of further reception.
During the long voyage, a few still civilian in mind, had recovered sufficient equipoise to inquire about the connection between a war in Russia against Germany, but the inquiry was so unproductive, so futile, and there were so many eccentric twists and turns to this stupendous world madness that in most part they soon fell into that fatalistic philosophy of all soldiers; most of them were content to place their unbounded trust in those who sat in the high places and whose omniscience guided from afar. It was far more quieting, vastly more satisfactory.
Once, during that swaying night journey, from Archangel to the battle line, the decrepit Russian locomotive gasped convulsively and stood still by an old station of huge logs, and, under the lurid light of a flaming torch, was revealed a trainload of prisoners, passing north from the scene of hostilities somewhere below. They made an unheroic spectacle, with their shrinking countenances and unsoldierly, nondescript uniforms, so that some American wag, in a spirit of bantering patronage, called them "Bolo wild men," a name that clung to the enemy throughout all the days of the campaign.
But the shabby prisoners, first living sign of real battle, sent a thrill up and down the spines of these young men, who were so ardent for war and knew so little about it. They sniffed the air of conflict, yearned to give the "Bolos" a taste of their quality, and promised themselves that the folks back home would have nothing to be ashamed of when they came under fire.
The next morning the depressing aspect of the dirty, unkempt group of huts where the soldiers detrained almost passed unnoticed alongside the captivating spectacle that stood on the track nearby, a ferocious war monster, with massive plates of steel like dragon's scales, huge funneled naval guns, and locomotive set in rear of trucks which were piled with sand bag barricades where Lewis automatics poked out murderously, manned by a hodge-podge Polish-Russian crew, who were themselves manned by competent appearing, war-weathered British N.C.O's.