So quickly were they reorganized that fifteen minutes after the assault had been turned back, the Company of Royal Scots, hurrying across an open field to the support, were subjected to such a blighting fire that the ground was strewn with the huddled figures of their dead and wounded.
As the day advanced the chief commander of the Bolsheviks was killed and three other commissars were picked off and killed. The march through the marshy forests had been made at tremendous toll in vitality, the advantage of surprise had now passed, rations were running low, and, unless the attack could be pressed with renewed forces, there would be another bivouac in the wet and cold, for the Canadian devils watched Lower Toulgas, and, at the first sign of occupancy, hammered and pounded and shook the houses with high explosive until they were untenable utterly. During the afternoon an American force from the center village pushed back a band of riflemen that hung at the fringe of the woods, and, as evening fell, the enemy fire grew less sustained and it was evident that unless reinforcements arrived, the attack would fail. But hours passed and no reinforcements. The rifle reports sounded more and more erratic, and, as the night wore on, there was only the sporadic crack of a few snipers in the rear woods, who held on hopefully waiting for the supports that never came.
Prisoners said there were six hundred and fifty in this rear attack and an equal number had taken the upper village, where they kept up a steady volley fire, but seemed to wait upon success of the rear party before storming our fortifications. Therefore, far forward in the blackness of the night, the Canadians sent forth two salvos, to let this frontal attacking force know that the guns were intact and that a fight was waiting beside them.
So ended the first day of the battle of Armistice Day. There was firing all through the night from Upper Toulgas, and luminous flares burst startlingly from unexpected places in the blackness, but after the failure of the rear movement, no further sustained and determined attack was attempted.
When a patrol from the garrison entered Lower Toulgas the next morning, men nerved themselves for a fearful grewsome spectacle in the hospital billet; but lo, their comrades were unharmed, and a woman in the uniform of a Bolshevik soldier was caring for them as well as the enemy wounded. She had come with her sweetheart, Melochofski, the thirty miles from Seltzo—Lady Olga, as the soldiers called her—and had bivouacked the two cold nights with the soldiers in the woods and swamps. She saved the lives of our injured men by pleading with Melochofski. Later she ministered to him as he died in the same hospital room where he would have witnessed his helpless enemies die.
She was a member of the Battalion of Death, this extraordinary woman, of intelligent, almost beautiful appearance. Madame Botchkoreva also had been a member of the Battalion of Death, so named because it chose to die rather than betray Holy Russia. Madame Botchkoreva, who had come with the American soldiers on the transports from America, and had spoken to them on shipboard so eloquently and so movingly of her country and its sacred, unshakable loyalty to the Allied cause, was said to have interceded with President Wilson, urged the sending of American troops to succor afflicted Russia, and prevailed upon the President.
American soldiers had already witnessed grotesque inconsistencies in this strange campaign. After the first fight they picked up shell fragments with the letters "U.S.A.," and learned that all, or nearly all, the Bolshevik ammunition was manufactured in their own country. They were told that they had been commissioned to safeguard valuable war supplies, and, coming to Archangel, had seen the great warehouses there destitute of those supplies. Now they were mystified by Lady Olga, who fought against Madame Botchkoreva in this baffling Russian war. Who was the greater patriot? Each a soldier in the uniform of her country, each had plighted her heart to beloved Russia, each had taken solemn oath to defend her country until death; and both now thought they were offering their lives for the defense of that country!
In this rear attack, one hundred Soviets were killed, many more wounded, many taken prisoners, a few rejoined their comrades at Upper Toulgas, and the rest faded in the forest and were lost. Weeks afterwards, the villagers at Nitzni Kitsa, fifty miles to the west, told of three Bolshevik soldiers who came to their village in a crazed condition, clad in rags, and half starved, babbling an incoherent story of the frightful battle of Toulgas on Armistice Day, and of hundreds of their comrades, lost in the woods and perishing in the treacherous quagmire of the swamps.
Following Armistice Day, early the next morning there was a flash at the bend of the river beyond Upper Toulgas, then the screaming passage of a shell, and the dull, vibrating, smashing roar of high explosive as it struck near the bridge. Two enemy gunboats were seen mounted with three inch and six inch guns. Further up the river and beyond sight was still another craft with six inch guns. Concealed among the trees, just on the edge of the clearing before Upper Toulgas, was a complete Bolshevik Field Battery, and these combined cannon now concentrated on the blockhouse that guarded the bridge. Shells, tossing geysers of dirt and debris, struck all around, and ploughed a deep circular furrow within a radius of five yards of the death house, where seven Americans sat with blanched faces and set teeth, counting the seconds between the hideous successive whine of the plunging shells, and waiting silently for certain destruction. At the edge of Upper Toulgas, Bolshevik infantry stood crouched for the dash, watching for the strongpoint to collapse under the terrific pommeling bombardment.
A stack of hay was near the important post, where a shell smashed, scattered the hay to right and left, and clogged the loophole that outlooked to the enemy position. The American sergeant in command sprang from the blockhouse, snatched the obscuring hay, and was back again, while bullets from the amazed Bolsheviks spurted inches over his head.