And when winter came, the forty miles between Turchasova and Chekuevo, were a shadowy No Man's Acre along the twisting, snow highway of the river, where hostile patrols prowled, and life was held by uncertain tenure; but the disputed ground was narrowed by half when the Americans moved up part of their small number nearly midway to the Bolshevik village, and took station at Kyvalanda, in order to watch a southern trail inlet to the important Railway road, along which were regularly dispatched visiting patrols to the scattered villages of Bolshie Ozerki, that they might hearten and keep contact with the few pathetic Frenchmen and Allied Russians who made an audacious pretense of maintaining a post there, and far off on the snow, deserted many miles from the Railway, reminded one of a choice morsel of tenderloin, baited for puma.
The Onega detachment joined in the operation for Plesetskaya, which the new Commander-in-Chief, in furtherance of his defensive policy of consolidation, was anxious to take before the intense cold.
Plesetskaya was an important base, and had they lost it, the Bolsheviks would have encountered great, almost insurmountable obstacles, in bringing troops from Vologda, and concentrating them in an aggressive winter warfare, for this point was a junction of the principal highways leading from the Railway line to Onega, Kochmas, Tarasovo and Shenkurst.
But this Allied advance failed, primarily for the same cause that the whole Expedition failed, through ridiculous paucity of numbers, and in the second instance (although there were several more), because it was impossible to maintain any semblance of liaison over the difficult lateral terrain which separated the five Columns, theoretically converging in the push for Plesetskaya.
So on New Year's day, after they had met the enemy and soundly punished him in two sharp engagements, and standing to, were about to drive him from his Turchasova stronghold, the Onega Americans were given the disappointing order to fall back and resume post at Chekuevo, where long, black months followed, and life took on a grinding, monotonous, drab, depressing atmosphere, lifted only by an occasional, welcomed brush or "wind up," till lo, in March, the sun shone high and streamed in extravagant, effulgent light on the glaring snow fields, the days grew longer and still longer, in this eccentric, topsy-turvy, North world, and finally there were as few hours of darkness as there had been of light a few months before.
Late in the month, a patrol was driven off from Bolshie Ozerki by the shot from many rifles, and a combat party the next day ran counter machine gun emplacements, was extricated only by adroit leadership, and after worming a long distance through the piling drifts.
It was learned then that the little garrison at Bolshie Ozerki had been annihilated, but it was thought by a strong raiding party, bent upon capture of the ration and ammunition convoys between Onega and the Railway. Not yet was there a suspicion of the enemy's surprising, gigantic manoeuvre, which with incomparable, superior force, sought to turn the Allied flank at Obozerskaya, carry through to the Dvina, fuse with the Bolshevik Vaga army, then sweep on to Archangel and make good the Moscow boast to cast every foreigner in North Russia into the White Sea.
The British Colonel, irritated by the enemy resistance at Bolshie Ozerki, was determined to chastise "the raiders" thoroughly, and felt very confident when his seventy Americans were joined by the three companies of Murmansk Yorks, which had marched one hundred and seventy miles from Soroka on the Murman railway in the hope of reaching the hard pressed Vaga Column, before it was too late.
The only access to Bolshie Ozerki from the west is a wagon road, eighty feet wide, which cuts a swath through the ambient forest. Passing sleighs had packed this road so that it gave good going, but at either side among the trees was a hopeless, floundering snow bog nearly four feet, and two miles out from the village, the Bolsheviks had improvised an outguard, which swept this only approach with machine guns that had the concentrated fire of three battalions.
At dawn, on the twenty-fourth day of March, the Americans, supported by the Yorks on either flank, crept through the trees by the roadside to the attack on Bolshie Ozerki. At five hundred yards, the enemy opened fire, a murderous plunging storm of steel and lead that must completely quell all thought of further approach, still none turned back; dragging and pushing themselves through the snow by knees and feet and elbows, the men made four hundred yards; here the American officer was killed, two of the British officers were hit and went down as if struck by lightning, and it was seen by volume of the fire that the odds were hopeless, yet the little company, facing utter massacre, burrowed in the deep snow, and, in the stiffening cold, hung on to the last round, till the retirement order came at dusk; the sacrifice was a heavy one, but not in vain, for by this devoted stand the stupendous nature of the enemy operations to overwhelm the whole Expedition at Bolshie Ozerki was fully revealed, and every man at the rear position, vividly conscious of the desperate character of the fight, steeled himself for the grim business in hand.