Back in Archangel, General Ironside saw in a flash that the life of his army fluttered in the balance. He scoured the city for every available fighting man, collected the few he could, a varicolored assemblage of Americans, British, Allied Russians and a platoon of French mounted on skis—Le Legion Courier du Bois—all counted, five hundred eighty men, and rushed with them to the battle. There, this iron General, well knowing himself to be faced by great unknown numbers, tossed caution high to the four winds. He dragged his artillery over the snow from the railway at Obozerskaya, and set it twelve miles off in the woods, daring the enemy to capture it. He brought out his handful of divergent troops, and, smashing down trees, built up rough barricades, a cordon about his guns; then, cut off from all hope of accessible retreat, this fighting man, whose fighting stuff had been welded among the Northwest Mounted Police of the Canadian frontier, threw down the challenge of wild death battle to the Slavs.
Very close, not even a mile away, down the Bolshie Ozerki trail, the Bolsheviks had concentrated their artillery and thrown out their advance works, and now commenced a blasting duel between the opposing batteries that tossed skyward mountainous geysers of snow, made fragments of the trees, and, through every lighted hour, shook the forest end to end with a ceaseless, reverberating roar, that pounded upon the ear with the vindictive echoes of tortured damned souls.
Fortune is a fickle mistress, but she loves the strong and smiles her favor on the brave, and in this strange mad Arctic forest fight, the Briton gained her countenance by thus handsomely risking all at a throw, and by his dashing courage, his magnificent, irresistible, reckless courage.
The Slav, more cautious, and overestimating the strength opposing him (as the Bolsheviks did time after time), did not strike while the iron was hot, but held off until he had gathered together three regiments; the 2nd Moscow, the 96th Saratov, the 2nd Kasan and several companies of ski troops; and the road that paralleled the Railway line to the Bolshevik camp at Shelaxa, near Plesetskaya, became a pitiful trailing havoc of dead and dying horses, driven to exhaustion in hysterical haste to bring still more artillery, more supplies, more ammunition to the waiting assault.
But every day spent by the Bolshevik chief, in fortifying his attack, was bringing victory to Ironside. In this winter campaign, with lack of transportation and dwelling quarters, it was always impossible to concentrate overmastering numbers of troops without costly postponement of the striking assault. The most troops that could be assembled were assembled by the Bolsheviks at the Vaga and Bolshie Ozerki—probably eight thousand to ten thousand at each place, and these were brought together with enormous labor, incredible striving, heroic suffering in the cold, which plundered the soldiers' strength, so that they were weakened by privation and shaken by much exposure, and in the case of Bolshie Ozerki, came to the fight too late.
So this battle that might have taken the life of the Allied North Russian Expedition was lost, the fleeting opportunity for success sped away when after the first fell stroke the precious element of surprise was profligately squandered. And the Americans, bracing themselves for the storm, fell to under the engineers, and working night and day, erected a citadel in the woods, strengthened the barricades and actually finished two bullet proof blockhouses before the first battle shock. Immense stores of ammunition were stacked high about the guns, and as the men labored, their confident enthusiasm grew; every soldier, under the stimulating, mesmeric influence of his great chief, knew, with unwavering faith, that the fight was won, grew impatient in the blood lust, and whetting his bayonet, waited like a primitive savage, serene in the unshakable conviction "that one Allied soldier was the equal of twenty Bolsheviks." So, in truth, he had to be in the battles of Bolshie Ozerki.
It was a tactical custom of the enemy to attack the front and rear positions, sometimes he struck both simultaneously, but seldom the flanks. Therefore, General Ironside placed his Americans forward and back, where the gun emplacements were, and then stood poised for the onslaught. If the law of averages traversed its orbital course, all might be well, but if the Bolsheviks forsook their usual custom, these dispositions might well prove fatal; for although the Yorkmen were scattered among them as bolsters, the green, Russian, Archangel troops on the flank positions were as yet untried, and the presumption was against them in the pending death fight that would give no quarter.
But when the enemy came at last, on the seventh day, he came just as the General had speculated he would come in an attack on the rear guns; then in greater strength followed through at the front barricades. The next dawn, at three thirty o'clock, the full fury of the assault was uncovered, as three swaying rows of men hurled themselves forward like swelling, tidal waves, and when this forward attack was at its climax, a wild horde stormed the rear.
In such an encounter, the great chance of success is in overwhelming the weaker adversary by sheer preponderance of numbers, to palsy his intelligence by bearing down on him with an awesome multitude, and before he has recovered, sweep him off his feet. But with these Americans, there was no such terror wrought hiatus, for the very intensity of the situation seemed to electrify their fiber, and fire their brains with the steady, blue flame of coordinated intelligence; under these overwhelming tidal attacks these fighting men were never so alert, never so keenly and appraisingly aware of every event, never so thoroughly mindful of every tense situation as it transpired; for they knew that piling cumbersomely through those bogging snow depths, the oncoming Bolsheviks were shackled nearly as effectually as if bound with ankle ropes, and they were acutely conscious of the verity, that in the circumstances, one steady man behind a bullet proof barricade, deliberately directing a functioning machine gun, had the weight of three hundred rifles.
So now it was a glorious thing to be in the blockhouses and the log barriers and to witness those human multitudes surge on, then slacken, and falter and fail and shrivel as they came, while machine guns swept them line to line, and flank to flank, and piled the dead and left crumpled, moaning heaps of men, where red, ugly blotches widened on the snow.