One day I went to the cemetery where our men had been buried in unmarked graves, and for the most part identified the places; and then visited the little chapel which had been looted, and the churches. The Bibles were printed from hand-cut plates. The silver ornaments on the Bibles and the elaborate candelabra, were all hand made in every detail of construction and decoration. The soldiers had left them because of their size. All little things had been taken. All Kitsa was just like the cemetery and the churches. But the tragedy had passed over for the moment. It was peaceful death. Not even the paltry dozen shells sent over by the Bolsheviki to remind us that the war was still on made any difference to this peace.
During the very last days of our tenure of Kitsa the friction between the British command and the Americans at the front became quite serious. The command wanted certain risks taken and sacrifices made that in the judgment of the Americans were without sufficient purpose and justification. The American officers were unwilling to make what they deemed useless sacrifice of their men. So bitter did this feeling become that at one time the British commanding officer gave certain orders to the Canadian Field Artillery which the Canadians undoubtedly would not have obeyed. The British command had its troubles with them also. In spite of all this, however, Kitsa was held against the enemy until the river ice actually broke under the men as they came out, leaving more desolation and ruin to the slowly conquering Bolsheviki.
VII
FIGHTING WITHOUT A FLAG
The American soldier who was sent to Northern Russia for his part in the great war had an experience which in several respects was novel in the vast field of experience which the war imposed on Americans. One of these was that he had to fight without his flag. Not only was the flag absent from the front lines in accord with the best practices of modern warfare, but the flag as a symbol and the consciousness of what it symbolizes were equally absent for the most part from his billet, his conversation, his mess kit, and the whole campaign.
He was fed with foreign food, clothed in part with foreign clothes, invading a foreign country, given orders by foreign officers, and fighting a war that was foreign to all he had ever thought of America. He had gone into the army to fight Germany, and here he found himself after the armistice fighting an unknown foe with whom the United States was not at war, and quite as much out of sympathy with the officers of another nationality whom he had to obey, as with the men whom he was trying to kill.
His government had not told him why he was here, what grievances it had against his enemies, what arrangements it had with its allies in this expedition, nor what it hoped to accomplish if successful in the enterprise for which he daily must offer his life. His officers could not tell him. They had never been told. They wanted to know. What they did know was that at every turn, in every position, on every piece of work, in every detail of responsibility, an English officer stood over them telling them what to do. Sometimes he was a very young English officer. Sometimes a strain was necessary to get adequate rank to him. Sometimes he was utterly inexperienced.
The method of the British control of the Allied expedition to North Russia is a subject for study and an example for warning that the League of Nations may well heed. If thousands of Americans have gone home thoroughly detesting the name and memory of everything English and if other thousands of Englishmen are telling each other and being told that Americans are cowards and in the same breath that they are insolent and unmanageable, it is chiefly to be blamed on the British method of managing an allied campaign.
It might be supposed that the British, being appropriately and properly in supreme command, would have given their orders, as far as they applied solely to the operations of purely American units, to the responsible American officers, leaving these officers without petty interference to get the work accomplished. But it was not so. British colonels did not give their orders to American colonels to be passed down the line. In fact, they had very little use for American colonels. They went to the captains, the lieutenants, and even the sergeants and corporals and the men themselves. They ignored American officers most noticeably. They set their own petty officers upon the Americans in a manner that was most irritating to American national self-esteem and bitterly resented. And since all necessary things are reasonable to the military mind it was the greatest tact to explain that "the Americans know nothing about military matters, you know."
I do not feel that the Americans had a grievance necessarily because Old Glory did not wave above them in North Russia. I can imagine that they could have fought with excellent morale in France if they had not had their colors with them. The case consists of the aggravating circumstances. The men were made to feel most unnecessarily and quite contrary to the facts that they had been handed to England and forgotten, that their government was wholly unmindful of them, and that for the time at least they were deprived of the protection and divorced from the ideals of which the Stars and Stripes had always stood as a symbol in their minds.