During the fight the American lieutenant colonel "caught in a bracket" had stayed in the rearward village, Yakovlevskaya, but at dusk he emerged with the important Field Pieces which laid down an effective feu de barrage on Seltzo. Hardly had it lifted when the battalion arose and with splendid dash and gallantry stormed forward to the village, entered it and took possession. But the story of Seltzo is the story of the whole campaign. After the infantry, with inspiring display of courage and at great cost, had gained a position, its small forces would be drafted for some other distant hard-pressed front, or the position would be left to the mercy of the Bolshevik guns until no course was left except evacuation.
The monitor which had convoyed the battalion up the Dvina, fearful of being caught by the ice that was expected to creep upstream from Archangel at the beginning of October, but did not actually come until mid-November, went back before the battle and was gone for the duration of the winter. A few days after the battle, the artillery left and was seen no more at Seltzo. Also Headquarters ordered two of the companies to proceed to Shenkurst on the Vaga, the second city in the Province, where it was alleged a large number of Russians in sympathy with the Allied cause were anxious to have a garrison of American troops during the approaching winter.
So it came that there was no artillery to avenge the smashing havoc of the enemy heavy guns in this furthermost Dvina village where one infantry company of Scots, a like number of Americans, and a few Allied Russians held on under terrific shell fire that from river and forest racked and battered them.
The enemy had a complete battery of three inch pieces, which he was free to bring up to the edge of the woods beyond the village, and down the river on rafts and improvised gunboats he floated three six inch guns and two Nine Point Two naval pieces, and for days with this combined armament he smashed and blasted until many of the houses became a riot of shredded and splintered timbers, and it was only a question of time before the garrison would be decimated utterly.
On 14th October the Bolsheviks attacked the defensive positions with great vigor, but were thrown back in complete repulse with many killed; yet that night and in the first morning hours the defenders slipped away in the darkness, for under unhindered bombardment the place had become a death's trap where all must eventually perish.
After this escape in the night there was a heart-breaking drag through the mud, until late the next day the tired Allied soldiers found harbor in Toulgas some fifteen miles back. Toulgas is typical of the North Russian village, a group of bedraggled log houses huddled together on a hill, which bends down in a long easy slope to the plain, where, like Seltzo, a stream comes out of the forest and margins another cluster of huts on the flat ground which the moujiks call Upper Toulgas.
This stream is deep and numbingly cold, and has cut an abrupt channel through the yielding soil so that fording it is a difficult feat at best. For an enemy to make the attempt in daylight would be suicidal. In darkness, any considerable numbers cannot fail to give the alarm. A road comes down from the hill and crosses a wooden bridge to the forward village. Watching the bridge is the inevitable white church, and its gaudy minarets, consciously aloof and superior in the poverty of the scene. In the setting of dun barren ground the white edifice flashes in undefiled purity against a low shrouding sky, more black than gray, which rests upon the darker tufted forest.
The fighting Canadians