The intention had been to complete the evacuation just before the closing of navigation in late October, but now it was seen that this might be too late, and in the present urgency no time could be lost. "The disengaging blow" was delivered on the 10th August by Jackson's sterling brigade, a little beyond Seltzo, the furthermost south achieved on the Dvina by the little River Column almost a year before. Two thousand prisoners were captured, eighteen guns and many machine guns, and the rout was complete. With the enemy now safely at bay, the British turned the defenses over to the Archangel authorities, who persisted in staying, although they were advised that it was suicidal to do so, and "friendly intervention" was brought to an inglorious, albeit an unbloody, close on the 27th September, eleven months after the Armistice that had outlawed the rule of warring strife as the arbitrament of discordant nations.
When the last troop ships trailed off to drooping skies, a bearded moujik sat in the stern of a flat boat directing four broad backed women at the oars. The recumbent coxswain waved a languid gesture across Archangel Bay where tiny ships were bearing off to the north; and four oars poised in mid-air as the laboring crew turned with dull Slavic contemplation to regard the parting foreigners, and the end of their peculiar expedition. But only for a moment, there was more important business in hand than idle gazing at Englishskis, however queer they might be. A gruff command, and the freighted craft continued its slow toiling course to the market place, the overlord resumed his interrupted smoke of good Allied cigarettes and the Englishskis were dismissed from memory. This was the leave-taking.
On the evening of 12th October, 1919, the last of the Allied forces set sail from Murmansk for England; four months afterward, on the 20th February, the Bolsheviks recaptured Archangel.
Nearly four months earlier the last of the Americans set sail on the 26th day of June, 1919, and as the paling shores mingled with the distant sky line and faded from sight, so too the fever of this troublous, little war with Russia abated, yielding to the gentle ministrations of memory's cooling twilight.
With the Americans, at least, there remained no shred of illusion. When Winston Churchill told the Commons that Archangel, with one lone American regiment, the few battle retrieved soldiers of England, and a single battalion of disaffected Frenchmen, had kept many German divisions in the East, and played an important part in the last battles, he laid a flattering unction to the soul of British statescraft; but his insincere words did not deceive the American soldier, for the American soldier was mentally and emotionally paralyzed beyond deception, and a conviction of blunder was only strengthened by this and other clumsy explanations vouchsafed by Allied statesmen; by the guilt-laden silence of America.
Germany was never concerned with Archangel. There was no evidence of German participation in the campaign; no evidence that our petty hostilities with the Bolsheviks had ever benefited Foch on the Western theater.
We had waged war upon Russia. Whether willfully or unwillingly, our country had engaged in an unprovoked intensive, inglorious, little armed conflict which had ended in disaster and disgrace. Perhaps this was a laudable thing to do. Perhaps it is always idealistic and praiseworthy to intervene for self-conceived righteousness in the internal affairs of another nation, as England might have done in the case of the American Confederacy, and as we did in the case of this civil war among the Russians. It is easy enough to enter the battle lists, but, once in, it is not so easy to withdraw from the fight with self-respect unsullied and honor undefiled.
So Archangel proved, with its sullied record to blight forever the good name of America when soldiers gather to tell of the Great War, and, great as the cost of the campaign had been with 2,485 casualties[[1]] of killed and wounded and sickened men, its financial loss, over ten times the price paid Russia for the vast dominions of Alaska, there was not a man in the ranks who did not sense the disgrace in our ignoble desertion, there was not an American officer who would not have chosen to have left his bones bleaching white beneath Archangel snows, than been a living witness to the ignominious way in which his country quit and slunk away.
[[1]] Chief Surgeon's Report.
All felt a personal sense of poignant shame for the failure to see the game through to its uttermost bitter end, or else seek expiation by honest avowal of wrong and humble contrition. It was an inexorable dilemma, one that took the staunchest courage, no matter which course was followed. Perhaps the higher courage would have been the admission of culpable fault. But we took neither course. We merely wilted from Archangel and came away.