When the British Brigadier General R. G. Finlayson inspected the Toulgas area, on 10th November, apprehension of such a rear attack was expressed by some of the officers, but the general could see no real menace from that quarter, and said that it was a military impossibility for a large body of troops to successfully execute a flank movement through the heavy swamps of the woods.
The day following, Armistice Day, at dawn there was a crackling of rifles in Upper Toulgas, then the crash of guns from the river, as a great number of Bolsheviks swarmed from the forest, deployed in perfect order, and advancing in squad rushes, drove the little outpost back to our main lines. Timed, it seemed almost to the moment, came the roar of musketry far at rear, the staccato rattle of machine guns and dominating all the din and tumult, the ringing Cossack Hourra! Hourra!
Our surprise was complete. Hundreds of dark figures sprang from the woods and closed in on Lower Toulgas.
A Bolshevik scout
Had the Bolsheviks been Germans, they would have immediately rushed the Canadian guns, and the story of Toulgas would have been one of massacre. They did rush the guns, but not until it was too late. The march through the forest had been an exhausting one, and the Bolshevik soldiers were very tired and very hungry. A few critical moments were spent searching the houses of the captured village. One of the Commanders, Melochofski, a stalwart giant of a man, with a high, black fur hat, entered our hospital billet, and flourishing his arms, gave a loud-voiced order to kill the invalided soldiers. The British medical N.C.O., with rare tact and extraordinary presence of mind, placed rations and two jugs of rum before the big Bolshevik leader, who helped himself liberally to the spirits and under their benign influence momentarily forgot about the execution.
Probably in this way and in ransacking Lower Toulgas, not over three minutes were lost, but never were three minutes more costly, for during that time the Canadians swung round their guns, and, when the Russians rallied to renew the attack, they were met by muzzle bursts.
Nearly a hundred years before, at Wilma, the iron veterans of the Grand Army had been shaken by that blood chilling Hourra! Hourra! of charging Russians; but now it only made those leather faced men at the guns laugh with the wild, delirious delight that comes only to the born fighting man, then only when the fight is at its height. They swore fine, full chested, Canadian blasphemies that were a glory to hear, crammed shrapnel into their guns, and turned terrible blasts into the incoming masses that exploded among them and shattered them into ghastly dismembered corpses and hurled blood and human flesh wide in the air in sickening, splattering atoms. While all the time the American sergeant and his single squad kept up an incessant fire with his Lewis automatic, and those Canadians who were not hit, and were not needed at the guns, worked the bolts of their rifles with the energy of fiends, so that the crackling of small arms sounded like the bursts of machine gun fire from the emplacements, and deceived the Bolsheviks, who thought it was the fire of machine guns. These Canadians had used the rifle often in the untracked places of the Western World, were well schooled in marksmanship, and now when the target loomed big and at extremely short range, they covered the ground with dead.
The mere weight of those approaching great numbers would have shaken and turned ordinary troops, for the onslaught was not stopped until less than fifty yards from the guns; but the Canadians were not ordinary men and they gave not the slightest hope of being turned. They would have stood by with their bayonets to the last, and when the Bolsheviks saw the unyielding determination of these Western savages, to whom fear seemed unborn, and knew that more devastating death storms of shrapnel awaited further advance, their morale broke down, the front wave hesitated, panic spread with telepathic swiftness, and in the control of overpowering fear, the whole force bolted and scampered like rabbits to the covering trees. There they were rounded together by the remaining commissars, and from places of concealment directed a hot fire on the guns.