Archangel: The American War with Russia

by John Cudahy

The frontal assault would wait on these circling movements; a bivouac in the woods, and at dawn, timed together, the three parties would move to the three-quartered battle. The distance through the woods to the enemy rear was "estimated at from six to eight miles."

But, in execution, the plan failed dismally, like many an operation that carries through flawlessly around the military council table, for "estimates" are of little use in the service of battle conduct, where time is reckoned in seconds, and victory measured in minutely fluctuating scales.

The contemplated operation was to approach the enemy flank through one of those lofty, forest aisles, which were cut with masterful, precise woodcraft by the engineers of Peter the Great, entirely transverse Archangel Province. Regularly, narrow lanes intersect these forest aisles, and it seemed to the officer planning this attack a simple thing to follow one of these lanes, and take the course of a north and south aisle until a point was reached opposite the enemy position. He did not know that those forest paths were deep with clinging, slimy morass, and bog that gave no footing, that frequently the main cuttings opened before shallow lakes of open water. There was no reliable map to show these things, and no native would admit that he knew the way.

So the attackers went forth over unknown ground, and soon were stumbling in a blackness so dense that one file could not see even the outline of the preceding file. The sinking bog made the march distressingly arduous, yet for hours the company kept resolutely on, when, without warning, the forest parted and the sodden way terminated in a wide sheet of open water.

It is impossible in the night blindness to know position or location, or how far the exhausting, laborious pace has made. Startlingly near comes the coughing exhaust of a locomotive, doubtless the armored train standing by the Bolshevik defenses on the tracks.

In their jaded and spent condition, the men are ill fit to engage in battle, yet there is nothing to do but have a go at it, so plowing through waist deep swamp and awful, oozing quagmire, they lurch on. Struggling forward, still forward, they are caught and tripped, and sprawl splashing in the cold water and the bog, but they get up and drag on until all are breathing with heavy, sobbing gasps; and under the strain of terrible exertion, all are weakened, some so done in, that they lie in the water like wounded animals on their haunches, and have to be helped forward by others of more physical strength or greater will.

In this agonizing way, perhaps a few hundred wallowing yards are made, but it is clear that the company cannot go on, and there is no hope of end to the miserable, sinking marsh; so the officers hold council, and decide, not without great reluctance, to abandon their mission, and the word is passed on to the scattered troops to follow back over the way they came.

In the darkness and the trackless morass, this is not easy, as through the endless black night the lost company struggles flounderingly and with little hope, until the heart of all is cold with despair; but more blighting than the knowledge of being lost in the wilderness of Russian swamps, and the depression of abject, physical exhaustion, is the mordant disappointment of failing the expectant French in the coming fight.

At dawn, two soldiers, who, in days of peace, had been timber cruisers in the pine woods of the Michigan Peninsula, led their comrades to ground firm enough for footing, and half dead from fatigue, brought them back to the railway, but too late, for hours before the tumult and shots of battle had reverberated from far advanced ground on the railway tracks; for, at the appointed hour, hoping that the cooperating actions would still develop, the French went in to the attack, supported by the American trench mortars and machine guns, and smashed the enemy from his foremost lines. Directly he rallied and returned in force to the counter-attack in which many French were killed, the trench mortar section was decimated and lost most of the guns, the machine gunners put out of action, and the whole little force was shoved back over much of the freshly won ground to the bridge at Verst Four Fifty Eight, where the Americans stood with braced backs and would not yield.

For two days, the Bolo armored train showered them with shrapnel, and upcasted tons of high explosives that tore glaring, wide wounds in the railway track, till theoretically they were hammered into submission, but when the Bolshevik infantry, in the gray hours of dawn and dusk, approached to take the crucial position, they were always driven to cover by a heroic defense that never failed. So the bridge was held under difficulties that would have shaken ordinary troops and caused them to fall back, but not in Russia, for that was the way of this queer little war. Priceless lives would be lost, much blood run, and stirring exploits of courage and noble sacrifices be performed, to safeguard a little bridge like Verst Four Fifty Eight, or a dirty village that objectively meant nothing. Yet what sacrilege to have breathed this to the soldiers who bled for them; for to those who risked their lives and yielded up their lives, rather than desert some little bridge or moujik village, these signified the shibboleth of North Russia.