There was a tacit understanding in the way each man eyed his mate that when the fortifications fell there would be a street fight in the center village and the Bolsheviks would take no prisoners. These men from Michigan and Wisconsin had come from Camp Custer, and, when the trial came, Custer's spirit would triumph over flesh and live again the glory of the Little Big Horn. Likewise in those fighting ranks were heirs of Cromwell's men and a host of sires whose imperishable battle deeds have risen to the heights of gods the strength of mother England's fighting men. So there was no thought of surrendering Toulgas, and evacuation was entirely out of the question. If the Bolsheviks were bent upon a determined siege, they could bring fresh levies of men and new guns from their Dvina Headquarters at Krasnoborsk, a short distance from Seltzo; but Toulgas had no new guns to draw upon, and there were no supports and no reserves for Toulgas.
Our Command decided that the only hope lay in a bold counterstroke. The Scots relieved the Americans at the outposts, and in the murk of early morning, on the fourth day of battle, the American company crept through the noiseless forest and surrounded an observation post in the woods on the flank off Upper Toulgas. Several Bolsheviks were killed and the rest fled to the enemy village in panic, with the report of a great force which had overwhelmed them. The observation post with many rounds of small arms ammunition was set afire, the explosions sounded like the musketry of a regiment, and the tired and discouraged Bolsheviks thought it was a fresh regiment firing unseen from the unknown depths of the forest.
Fortune plays a great part in war, and uncertainty accounts for many things that appear inexplicable reviewed from the comfortable distance of peace; perhaps the most important information that can come to a commanding officer is knowledge of enemy strength and his fighting morale, and the Bolsheviks had no such information. They had lost their Chief Commander Foukes in this forest counter-attack, and a message from him, found on the body of a runner who was trying to reach Upper Toulgas, read:
We are in the lowest village. One steamer coming up river—perhaps reinforcements. Attack more vigorously. Melochofski and Murafski are killed. If you do not attack I cannot hold on, and retreat is impossible, 11th November, 1918. 12:30 P.M.
FOUKES.
With Foukes, four of the five commissars had been killed, and now when the frightened survivors of the detached outpost spread the alarm of overwhelming numbers of Americanskis in the forest, the Bolsheviks were seen fleeing Upper Toulgas in skeltering disorder.
The Americans dared not pursue, for to do so would have revealed their true strength, and they were outnumbered four to one. Besides, they were too elated at being rid of the enemy to give him the chance to return to the attack. They contented themselves with taking prisoner those stragglers who could not keep pace with the leaderless rabble that dispersed into the forest.
A row of houses isolated near the stream at the edge of Upper Toulgas was suspected of being the dwelling place of unfriendly peasants. The Bolsheviks used these houses as vantage points for sharpshooters, and in the counter combat a number of prisoners were taken from them, so now, when we gained the upper hand, "sniper's row" of huts was condemned, the peasants were cast out with their scanty possessions, and as the first snow filled the air and spread an apron over the drab colored ground, the homes of their fathers became a sea of crackling flames, and the poor moujiks, women and children sobbing hysterically, and men with mute sadness and uncomprehending resignation on their bearded faces, set forth to begin life anew.
The prisoners taken in this battle of Armistice Day, all except one, expressed no martyr's devotion to the cause of the Soviets. Some spoke of being impressed in the Red army at the point of the bayonet, and being kept in the ranks by the same argument. Others said that they had joined to escape starvation, and there appeared to be something plausible in this assertion for as far as we had gone into the interior the people of the Archangel villages were in desperate want. The Bolsheviks had commandeered all available food supplies which at best were not bountiful, barely sufficient to sustain the life of the villages through the long cold winter; a few potatoes with a little wheat which the peasants had cached in forest dugouts sustained life in some manner. Later had not the Allies doled out rations of flour and other food stuffs from Archangel, many in the Province would have perished of slow starvation during that winter of 1919.
The ration of the Bolshevik army was ample enough; a portion that looked princely to the moujik: a funt (fourteen ounces) of meat, one and three-quarters funts of bread, with tea, sugar and tobacco for every soldier.