Fighting Without a War: An Account of Military Intervention in North Russia

by Ralph Albertson

KITSA

Kitsa is a church village of about fifty long, low Russian timber houses situated in a great bend of the Vaga River with only the outer curve of the river bank for a landscape and with a dense wall of pine woods in the rear. This level country is so painfully level that you always have a desire to look over the edge of the nearby horizon to see something—but you never can. When you first pass through Kitsa, which you never would have done in a million years had it not been for this war, you think it is the sorriest of all the sorry places on the river. It might at least have been located on the high bank and so gained the only thirty feet of vantage that nature had provided. Yet Kitsa has one striking distinction. The road makes a right angle in the midst of the houses, and the churches are in the angle and in the west. The West! Russia does not need landscapes because she has skies. Kitsa to me is that wonderful western sky cloven in the midst by the Byzantine spires in pea green and gold, and based flat on the black ridge of pine, and fixed forever in permanent and infinite pastels in my memory.

Kitsa was not a Bolshevist town nor Royalist. It was Constitutionalist Socialist Democratic. It was founded by refugees from Novgorod who had rebelled against certain imperial church decrees. There was still a little mound where these glorious ancestors had erected a hill of freedom. And the freedom itself had been retained intact, so the oldest inhabitant told me, it having been a matter of the text and type of the holy book read in the church.

I rode through Kitsa once when there was one platoon of American soldiers quartered there and the civilian population was about normally occupied with its own life. And then I came in with the refugees from Shenkursk on the night of January twenty-seventh. First it was Brackett Lewis and Ivan Taroslaftseff serving hot coffee and biscuits to the exhausted soldiers in the building that the people had built and used for a public school but the Allied military had commandeered, not to store whisky in, as at Bereznik, but to run a canteen in. Then it was caring for the ninety-seven wounded, then back to the men and civilian refugees, until the full daylight, and the column was all in. We took the three best houses in town for the hospital that night. Then the British officers took the next best. Then the American officers. And that following day we billeted troops in every house, and the Russian people made room for us, welcomed us, waited on us, made nothing of themselves, moved into their bath houses, then out again if we wanted them; gave us all the room there was, gladly, believed in us. I shall always remember a poor woman who came into an officer's room and opened a table drawer to look for two hundred silver roubles she had left there. The lock had been forced. The roubles were gone. Silver roubles were very precious. The woman's tearful face did not express so much grief as surprise. She had discovered something most unwelcome about our soldiers—perhaps officers. Other Russians were learning to hate the military for other reasons. In three days they were utterly bewildered. They do not take disillusionment in our offhand, familiar way. They are a serious people. Their illusions are genuine. No literature and no sophistication, but great sincerity. So completely did these Kitsaites give way to us that when the order for their evacuation went forth we gained no room for we already had it all.

One pretty girl came to us in despair one morning, because one of us could talk Russian, and told us that the Cossacks had broken into her stores in the night and stolen everything. We found they had left much. It is remarkable how effectively and cleverly these people can secrete their goods. But she knew that they would get the rest in time so she begged us to take it from her as a gift. We learned she was the daughter of the merchant who was presumably the richest man in the town. Her parents had gone to Archangel. She had refused to go. Her brothers were in Bolshevist territory. She had attended school in Moscow. She was now something of a socialist and utterly out of sympathy with her family. We bought all her goods. Some hand-woven skirt material. Some food stuff. Some oats and flour. She went to work at British headquarters as a scullery maid and was glad of the chance. And I do think she was irritated considerably by the attentions paid her because she was a pretty girl. They were of course most unartful and blatant as well as general.

A week after the peasants were evacuated the engineers who were cutting machine-gun holes in the bath houses found the frozen body of an old woman who had hidden herself in a bath house and died there rather than go away from the village where she had spent all her life. The body lay untouched for a week. Bodies froze like ice or iron when the temperature was below zero.

The Canadian artillery got there every time.
This Russian gun crew on the railroad front enjoys warmer weather.

One awful night when we had been horribly shelled and the evacuation of the town was hourly imminent there were nine frozen bodies laid side by side in the wood-shed behind the hospital. We should have to leave them there just as we had left others at Shenkursk and Shagavari. I had known all these boys—five Americans, two Englishmen and two Russians—and as I stood out there in the cold, dark, snowy night, I knew war. But there were other nights as bad. Nights when we sat by them as they were dying and waiting for the operating table. God! what nights! And we had to pack them off in the cold at once to a safer town to the north. Then there came a night that nearly made me forget all the others. Our forward position and only protection was demolished utterly. We were forced to abandon it, and our men and guns all crawled into Kitsa and across the river back of Kitsa to Ignatofskaya. We were done. We had put up such a fight however that the enemy was done too, but we did not know this. And the wounded came in that awful night, and the dead. We did not sleep a wink. When the sun rose on Kitsa, Kitsa too was dead. The order was for everybody to "stand to," and the streetful stood to all day long, waiting, and nothing happened. After the continuous thunder of the days before not a gun was fired. But Kitsa was dead. And the engineers were going about setting every house and building with kerosene inside and out for burning. Every kit was packed. Not a thing but cinders was to be left. Kitsa was a thing of the past. And although nothing did happen—and weary men could not stand to forever—and everybody crawled inside and slept—Kitsa was dead.

For weeks afterward we lived and worked most of the time in Kitsa. The Bolsheviki had come back, at first feebly, then with real guns. He had put up a show at fighting. His shells had burned some of our buildings. He had killed and wounded some of our men. But we had new men now. And they had the new point of view. But the piles of straw in the corners of buildings were kept soaked with kerosene. We were now holding Kitsa to keep the enemy on the east side of the river until after the ice should break up. And as I stood on the bluff and looked down on the snow-covered roofs of the town I imagined what the fire would look like—and wanted to see it.