Archangel: The American War with Russia

by John Cudahy

Again the same thing happened, and again the sergeant, Floyd A. Wallace, with as noble an exhibition of cool, deliberate courage as man is capable, went out to clear the covered loophole, and did clear it, but he crawled back with a hole in his tunic from a machine gun, and his drab coat was soaked deep red from a grievous wound.

It was noon when the blockhouse was hit. It crumpled like paper under the impact, and one man, drenched with a welter of blood, was seen to drag himself from the wreckage and crawl back to the priest's house. I saw this man on the deck of the transport when the Americans were leaving Archangel in June, every soldier radiant at the prospect of farewell to the army and Russia, and going home, but he had not yet learned to smile, and written on his face and deep in his eyes was the look of one who has gazed at hell.

When the bridge post was knocked out, one American, carrying a reserved Lewis gun, followed by two more each with panniers of ammunition, rushed from the house back of the church, and the three, dashing a few yards at a time, then throwing themselves flat on their faces, made the cover of a trench by the side of the priest's house, and, when the Bolsheviks came forward to the bridge, scattered them with a heavy fire.

In the emergency, a Vickers gun was hastily barricaded against a church window that looked down on the bridge. A platoon had come down the hill from the center village when it was seen that the blockhouse could not survive, and, using the skirmish tactics of the Indian, had passed through a tempest of rifle and machine gun bullets to the billet house, and reached the church. These were only a few instances of brilliant initiative. Nowhere than at Toulgas during the battle of Armistice Day was there better truth of that French saying during the war: "Every American private soldier is an officer."

Several times the Bolsheviks felt out the bridge, and the commissars in rear could be heard urging their men to the attack, but each time they drew back before the heavy, well directed fire of the Americans, and, although the artillery smashed the white church and made of the priest's house a rent and tattered ruin, the defense held at every point till with merciful darkness the gunboats ceased their cursed belching, the guns in the forward woods subsided to blessed silence, and, screened by the shielding night, the Americans were able to bring in their wounded and send relief to those who had stood at the most exposed posts without rations or water for many long hours.

On the third day of battle, the Bolshevik batteries were augmented by two six inch guns brought down river from Seltzo to Andreevskaya, and all guns as throughout the first two days stayed safely beyond the furthermost range of our feeble three inch pieces. Despairing of breaking down the obstinate defense of the bridge, the bombardment shifted to our fortifications on the forest flank of the center village, and here for hours high explosive projectiles and clouds of shrapnel fell at the rate of one shell every fifteen seconds, ranging from the strongpoints that guarded attack from the direction of the woods, to a row of huts on the side hill close by, where a platoon was quartered as a reserve for these outposts.

Hardly had the Americans withdrawn from one of these huts, when its roof was smashed with deafening explosion, and then bolts struck right and left with stunning rapidity like raging messages from hell, flinging debris and dirt and fragments of wood in wild disorder that fell down upon the prostrate men crouching in a nearby fold of ground. The houses on the hill were raked through and through and many became a chaos of splintered timbers; the air was stabbed by the sibilant, vindictive snarl of the shells, fluttered and throbbed with their violent passage, the ground trembled in quaking travail; shrapnel burst in gray clouds, fell rattling on the house roofs or plumped down to the wet ground with suggestive vicious thuds, and the cumulative effect of successive thunderclap detonations was like a physical pommeling on the brain.

But through it all the Americans held fast, clinging to sanity by sheer point of a desperate wilfulness and facing the Bolshevik infantry men with unwavering front, so that they dared not show themselves and were still back in the forest when night came to heal the hideous turmoil of the day and still the shaking salvos that stormed through every hour of light, and would be renewed at first dawn, for the Bolsheviks never relented in their determination to take the village Toulgas.

The great Trotsky himself directed the attack. Prisoners said that, stationed like Napoleon on one of the river craft, he watched the battle from afar. The Soviet leader made an address to his soldiers and told them that he intended to keep hammering at Toulgas if it took all winter to break down resistance of the garrison. The battle was fought on the first birthday anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution, and its objective was to sweep through the Allies' lines to Bereznik, where the soldiers were promised many gifts from the valuable stores there.

On the evening of this third day we took an appraisal of our fast failing resources and estimated the prospect of a further stand. If the attack had settled to a siege, it looked as if there was small hope ahead, for a quarter of the little company had been hit, and those who remained were hollow-eyed from fatigue, so weary that they staggered like drunken men. All night long, enemy patrols prowled about the defenses, sounding them for a weak point, rifles cracked and snapped and through the black sleepless hours, machine guns beat the devil's own tattoo.