Kodish was the epitome of North Russia. Bought with toiling effort, incredible privation and cruel losses, to be lost and won again time following time in the bitter-most winter days with moving heroism and a moral grandeur that at times reached a sublime estate—it was in the end abandoned as "of no especial military significance."
The village lay in the course of the Imperial road from Petrograd that parted from the Vologda railway at Plesetskaya and cut a diagonal lane through the province north-easterly to Emetskoe on the Dvina. Both Commands stressed its importance. In the early days of the campaign the Allied leaders, bent upon conquest, seized upon it as an opportune route to support the railway invasion by surprising the enemy in rear, while the Bolshevik Staff saw a chance to drive a wedge between the two advancing Columns and effectually deny the River forces all communications.
A typical polyglot group of French, British, friendly Russians, and a few American marines, some two hundred in all, had gone out from Archangel in the first days of the Expedition to Seletskoe on the Emtsa river determined to drive south from this subsidiary base along this Petrograd road to Plesetskaya. This group, designated "D Force" to distinguish it from "A Force" on the Railway and "C Force" on the Dvina, and the Vaga, had hardly commenced its daring operation when an urgent call for succor caused British, French and Americans to hurry across a trail through the swamps to Obozerskaya, leaving the loyal Russians as rear guard before Kodish. But the former never reached their goal. Days passed and nothing was heard from them until a relief contingent, out a day's journey from the Railway front in the forest swamps, found in the midst of scattered infantry gear and other signs of desperate encounter the soiled diary of an American sailor with the epitaph of this illfated "B Force" written on 30th August.
The rescue party continued east through the swamps to Seletskoe as the pursuing Bolsheviks closed in on that village, but the Americans, reinforced by a slender garrison, drove them south over the Emtsa, where they stood their ground behind a destroyed bridge. It was suicidal to attempt a passage of the open river in the face of machine guns, so the Americans dug in the cold sodden ground, and in the grim siege that followed the suffering was intense; no doctor was at hand to care for the many casualties who were given crude first aid (when they were reached), and bumped and jolted thirty torturing miles to Seletskoe, yet, in the face of all these things, none at Kodish knew thought of weakening or turning back.
On the ninth day, long awaited supports came up, a crossing was effected at an unexpected point below the Bolshevik position, and Kodish succumbed to a courage that would not be denied. Exposed baldly in a broad clearing and flanked by three dominating hills, this moujik village was helpless against modern artillery. The French colonel pronounced it "strategically untenable," but the worst feature was its opportunity for complete encirclement. This was brought vividly to the consciousness of the Americans soon after their occupation when great Bolshevik bands converged on them from villages to the south and the Shred-Mekrenga trail, and following a four days' battle, they fought for their lives in a night flight nearly two miles along the road back across the river.
There the old familiar siege tactics were resumed. The engineers with a genius of adaptitude built a fortress of blockhouses on the north Emtsa embankment, and in these, one company of Americans, augmented by a few British infantry and a section of Canadian Field Artillery, stood off the Bolsheviks from the crucial Petrograd road. In December, with Plesetskaya the objective of three Allied fronts, this little group, now 450 strong, led by the impetuous "Major Mike" Donaghue forced twenty-seven hundred Bolsheviks out of Kodish, but could make little progress on the road beyond. So the contested village was held as an advanced post for the main Allied force on the Emtsa, and exposed to unremitting bombardment from many superior guns, became an inferno of bursting shells.
Once on a black January night, it was abandoned by the little outpost and set aflame, but before dawn, Donaghue was back with his men to a chaos of charred ruins, like the skeleton of a beast of prey in a desert of snow, through which the bitter, chill winds wailed dolefully. In these deserted Kodish streets of abject desolation, the American soldier knew the uttermost depths of physical misery experienced during the whole winter campaign.
The Commander-in-Chief came to the Kodish front when British soldiers evinced a truant disposition and would not "carry on" unless certain interrogatories concerning this evasive war with Russia were answered. The interrogatories were addressed to Premier Lloyd George and were such as might arise from the mental consciousness of any men who still have well poised, wholesome regard for life and the pursuit of happiness as they understand it. These British soldiers had come from the winter murk of Murmansk, had emerged from four years' hell in France, and saw themselves the hapless forfeit in a confused international melee without wit or reason at a time when all were thoroughly sickened with war and thought they merited restoration to their homes. But when the soldier Ironside, six feet four, with "an eye like Mars to threaten and command" had spoken, the interrogatories were all forgotten and these disgruntled men, who had uttered mutiny, returned to the fight with a matchless valor; with a steadfastness that gave never ceasing wonderment that they could so freely offer all with every instinct and inclination opposed.
