Probably in this way and in ransacking Lower Toulgas, not over three minutes were lost, but never were three minutes more costly, for during that time the Canadians swung round their guns, and, when the Russians rallied to renew the attack, they were met by muzzle bursts.
Nearly a hundred years before, at Wilma, the iron veterans of the Grand Army had been shaken by that blood chillingHourra! Hourra!of charging Russians; but now it only made those leather faced men at the guns laugh with the wild, delirious delight that comes only to the born fighting man, then only when the fight is at its height. They swore fine, full chested, Canadian blasphemies that were a glory to hear, crammed shrapnel into their guns, and turned terrible blasts into the incoming masses that exploded among them and shattered them into ghastly dismembered corpses and hurled blood and human flesh wide in the air in sickening, splattering atoms. While all the time the American sergeant and his single squad kept up an incessant fire with his Lewis automatic, and those Canadians who were not hit, and were not needed at the guns, worked the bolts of their rifles with the energy of fiends, so that the crackling of small arms sounded like the bursts of machine gun fire from the emplacements, and deceived the Bolsheviks, who thought it was the fire of machine guns. These Canadians had used the rifle often in the untracked places of the Western World, were well schooled in marksmanship, and now when the target loomed big and at extremely short range, they covered the ground with dead.
The mere weight of those approaching great numbers would have shaken and turned ordinary troops, for the onslaught was not stopped until less than fifty yards from the guns; but the Canadians were not ordinary men and they gave not the slightest hope of being turned. They would have stood by with their bayonets to the last, and when the Bolsheviks saw the unyielding determination of these Western savages, to whom fear seemed unborn, and knew that more devastating death storms of shrapnel awaited further advance, their morale broke down, the front wave hesitated, panic spread with telepathic swiftness, and in the control of overpowering fear, the whole force bolted and scampered like rabbits to the covering trees. There they were rounded together by the remaining commissars, and from places of concealment directed a hot fire on the guns.
So quickly were they reorganized that fifteen minutes after the assault had been turned back, the Company of Royal Scots, hurrying across an open field to the support, were subjected to such a blighting fire that the ground was strewn with the huddled figures of their dead and wounded.
As the day advanced the chief commander of the Bolsheviks was killed and three other commissars were picked off and killed. The march through the marshy forests had been made at tremendous toll in vitality, the advantage of surprise had now passed, rations were running low, and, unless the attack could be pressed with renewed forces, there would be another bivouac in the wet and cold, for the Canadian devils watched Lower Toulgas, and, at the first sign of occupancy, hammered and pounded and shook the houses with high explosive until they were untenable utterly. During the afternoon an American force from the center village pushed back a band of riflemen that hung at the fringe of the woods, and, as evening fell, the enemy fire grew less sustained and it was evident that unless reinforcements arrived, the attack would fail. But hours passed and no reinforcements. The rifle reports sounded more and more erratic, and, as the night wore on, there was only the sporadic crack of a few snipers in the rear woods, who held on hopefully waiting for the supports that never came.
Prisoners said there were six hundred and fifty in this rear attack and an equal number had taken the upper village, where they kept up a steady volley fire, but seemed to wait upon success of the rear party before storming our fortifications. Therefore, far forward in the blackness of the night, the Canadians sent forth two salvos, to let this frontal attacking force know that the guns were intact and that a fight was waiting beside them.
So ended the first day of the battle of Armistice Day. There was firing all through the night from Upper Toulgas, and luminous flares burst startlingly from unexpected places in the blackness, but after the failure of the rear movement, no further sustained and determined attack was attempted.
When a patrol from the garrison entered Lower Toulgas the next morning, men nerved themselves for a fearful grewsome spectacle in the hospital billet; but lo, their comrades were unharmed, and a woman in the uniform of a Bolshevik soldier was caring for them as well as the enemy wounded. She had come with her sweetheart, Melochofski, the thirty miles from Seltzo—Lady Olga, as the soldiers called her—and had bivouacked the two cold nights with the soldiers in the woods and swamps. She saved the lives of our injured men by pleading with Melochofski. Later she ministered to him as he died in the same hospital room where he would have witnessed his helpless enemies die.
She was a member of the Battalion of Death, this extraordinary woman, of intelligent, almost beautiful appearance. Madame Botchkoreva also had been a member of the Battalion of Death, so named because it chose to die rather than betray Holy Russia. Madame Botchkoreva, who had come with the American soldiers on the transports from America, and had spoken to them on shipboard so eloquently and so movingly of her country and its sacred, unshakable loyalty to the Allied cause, was said to have interceded with President Wilson, urged the sending of American troops to succor afflicted Russia, and prevailed upon the President.
American soldiers had already witnessed grotesque inconsistencies in this strange campaign. After the first fight they picked up shell fragments with the letters "U.S.A.," and learned that all, or nearly all, the Bolshevik ammunition was manufactured in their own country. They were told that they had been commissioned to safeguard valuable war supplies, and, coming to Archangel, had seen the great warehouses there destitute of those supplies. Now they were mystified by Lady Olga, who fought against Madame Botchkoreva in this baffling Russian war. Who was the greater patriot? Each a soldier in the uniform of her country, each had plighted her heart to beloved Russia, each had taken solemn oath to defend her country until death; and both now thought they were offering their lives for the defense of that country!
In this rear attack, one hundred Soviets were killed, many more wounded, many taken prisoners, a few rejoined their comrades at Upper Toulgas, and the rest faded in the forest and were lost. Weeks afterwards, the villagers at Nitzni Kitsa, fifty miles to the west, told of three Bolshevik soldiers who came to their village in a crazed condition, clad in rags, and half starved, babbling an incoherent story of the frightful battle of Toulgas on Armistice Day, and of hundreds of their comrades, lost in the woods and perishing in the treacherous quagmire of the swamps.
Following Armistice Day, early the next morning there was a flash at the bend of the river beyond Upper Toulgas, then the screaming passage of a shell, and the dull, vibrating, smashing roar of high explosive as it struck near the bridge. Two enemy gunboats were seen mounted with three inch and six inch guns. Further up the river and beyond sight was still another craft with six inch guns. Concealed among the trees, just on the edge of the clearing before Upper Toulgas, was a complete Bolshevik Field Battery, and these combined cannon now concentrated on the blockhouse that guarded the bridge. Shells, tossing geysers of dirt and debris, struck all around, and ploughed a deep circular furrow within a radius of five yards of the death house, where seven Americans sat with blanched faces and set teeth, counting the seconds between the hideous successive whine of the plunging shells, and waiting silently for certain destruction. At the edge of Upper Toulgas, Bolshevik infantry stood crouched for the dash, watching for the strongpoint to collapse under the terrific pommeling bombardment.
A stack of hay was near the important post, where a shell smashed, scattered the hay to right and left, and clogged the loophole that outlooked to the enemy position. The American sergeant in command sprang from the blockhouse, snatched the obscuring hay, and was back again, while bullets from the amazed Bolsheviks spurted inches over his head.
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.
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: afunt(fourteen ounces) of meat, one and three-quartersfuntsof bread, with tea, sugar and tobacco for every soldier.
If the stories of the prisoners were true and not inspired by motives of gaining sympathy, one could believe those Russians of theintelligenciawho asserted that the Bolshevik party was a minority party of terrorism, and that very few Russians were ardent Soviets.
Even Lenine himself, once said that of every one hundred Bolsheviks fifty were knaves, forty fools, and probably only one a sincere follower.
Two highly cultivated artillery officers, who had held commissions in the Imperial Army, gave themselves up shortly after the battle of Armistice Day and told a tale of being forced into the Bolshevik army by the threat to kill their families if they refused. They said that all Bolshevik officers were ceaselessly observed by spies who were quick to report to Staff Headquarters the slightest symptom of a wayward disposition, or the suspicion of any gesture of mutiny.
Few of the prisoners wore any regulation military uniforms. In appearance there was nothing, except the carrying of firearms, to distinguish them from the moujiks of the villages. Both were clad in likevalenkas, or felt boots, dirty, gray, curled, high fur hats, shapeless dun-colored tunics. Many of the villagers were in sympathy with the Soviets, and despite all vigilance, there was an active system of espionage between many moujiks and the Bolshevik leaders with which it was impossible to cope. Our Intelligence received information that the rear attacking party had been conducted to our lines by a prominent resident of Toulgas, and sometimes the enemy showed amazing knowledge of our forces and the state of our fortifications that must have come from those in whose houses we dwelt as unwelcome guests.
There was but brief respite after the four days' battle of Armistice Day, for the American engineers set all hands vigorously to work on the winter defenses. Around the center village, blockhouses were built on the forest flank, and at front and rear at points distanced from two to three hundred yards one from the other. Coils of barbed wire were transported over the snow from Bereznik and strung in wire aprons between the strong points. Every blockhouse had an automatic rifle or a machine gun, and some at the more important posts had two, all targeted and trained to lay down a devastating, enfilade fire along the connecting wire barriers. A few Colt machine guns that were air cooled arrived, and helped the morale immensely, for they had no difficulty functioning in the very low temperatures. Then, when there was more time, the blockhouses were reconstructed with heavy timbers and piled high with sand so that they became bomb proof to anything except the explosion of a six inch shell, and even along the unfeared river bank there were placed two small blockhouses with machine guns.
When the snow mounted high and icy winds stung with the sting of wasps, Toulgas had become a fortress, well nigh impregnable, unless her defenses were penetrated from within, or the attack came in hopelessly overpowering numbers.
But scarce had all this preparation commenced, when came glorious news of the Armistice. The war was ended, and it was taken as a matter of course that the coming peace would extend to the war of the Arctic Circle.
From the outset the soldiers never had any rampant enthusiasm in this strange conflict with its motives of mystery, but while the struggle in France went on they stilled their questioning doubts and followed the work set out for them by their officers in the uncertain belief that somewhere back of the scenes at Paris or London or Washington those in the high places had charted a wise policy beyond the comprehension of a common soldier; and that in some devious, undisclosed way the campaign in Russia was necessary, was playing its inexplicable part in completing the defeat of the Germans. Even when weeks elapsed and no announcement of change in policy was forthcoming, the men were patient and did not complain. But when at the end of November, Consul General Poole sent word from Archangel that the Americans in North Russia would continue at their tasks to the end, knowledge came to the soldier with stunning reality that the great struggle in which he was prepared to die had no relation to the war with Russia, in which he probably would die, that he was engaged in a war which had no assignable reason for its being, in which many of his companions had already been killed, and the end was not in sight.
The uncertainty, the isolation of the distant snowbound fronts, the ever present prospect of being trapped by enemy occupation of the villages along the extended communication line, and now that the excitement of the fight had waned, the depressing monotony of the days ground down the spirit of the men. They commenced to lose heart. Life became a very stale, flat, drab thing in the vast stretches of cheerless snow reaching far across the river to the murky, brooding skies and the encompassing sheeted forests, so ghostly and so still, where death prowled in the shadows and the sinking realization came home of no supports or reserves along the two hundred miles of winding winter road to Archangel.
Week follows week, and November goes by, and December, and no word comes from the War Department. No reassuring message to the perplexed Commander-in-Chief, defining the purposes of the war, its duration, when relief will come. No word comes and the soldier is left to think that he has been abandoned by his country and left to rot on the barren snow wastes of Arctic Russia.
Men move about wintered Toulgas emitting great clouds of vapored breath, shuffling over the snow in the clumsy Shakleton Arctic boots, wrapped in great coats against the bitter, deadly cold; on their faces the condemned look of felons from whom all hope has fled.
In the dismal huts of the village soldiers are packed with the crowded moujik families like herded animals, where the atmosphere is dank and pestilent with an odor like stale fish. Filth is on the floor and vermin creep from the cracks and crevices of the log walls.
In December and January there are only a few hours of feeble shadowing light, then tragic blackness blots out the snows and the mournful woods and the skies of melodrama. With night the tiny windows are shrouded with board coverings, a candle flickers in the low ceiling room, unless the issue is exhausted, then a bully beef can is produced, filled with bacon grease and an improvised rag wick which flutters a hesitant glimmering through the heavy gloom.
There through the long dark unwholesome hours, the Americans sit and think thoughts more black than the outside night. Red, hateful, revolutionary thoughts like those of the maddened mob that rushed Louis Seize to the guillotine, and that would threaten the stability of any nation. Black thoughts of their country and the smug, pompous statesmen who with sonorous patriotic phrases had sent them to exile; of the casual people at home and their damned complacency and their outlook on war as a gorgeous heraldry of youth, a gay, romantic adventure.
Sometimes it almost seemed as if malignant Bolshevism had poisoned the air, for once in February when the situation looked worst and nothing seemed certain except annihilation for the whole garrison, the American soldiers at Toulgas threatened, unless promised early relief, to walk out like disgruntled factory hands. The same thing, but with a more serious aspect, occurred in an American company at Archangel; and the French on the Railway had, at first rumor of the Armistice, flatly deserted and returned to Archangel. At Kodish a company of British refused to fight further in this indefinite war, and among the first conscripted Russian troops there was serious mutiny resulting in much bloodshed.
But there was nothing mutinous in this expression of opinion at Toulgas. It seemed the only course to civilian soldiers who were schooled in strikes under an industrial system where the strike has always been the concerted expression of disapproval by those who toil in the ranks. When the nature of a mutiny was explained to these men, they felt a burning shame for what they had done so unwilfully, and never again, throughout the many discouraging, hopeless days that followed, was there the smallest hint of protest from these civilian American soldiers.
When the days were shortest, the commissary transport broke down, and for a time the principal ration was corned beef that was frozen in the tin, and a nauseating mixture of vegetables and stewed meat that had been alternately frozen and thawed in the tin, and when eaten, gave some loathsome skin diseases and others dysentery.
Cooking and eating were the only breaks in the melancholy monotony; there was no diversion, no relaxation, no recreation, and the divine gift of humor which was the salvation of the Western soldier, was denied to the soldier of North Russia, for humor springs from buoyant spirits, the wells of radiant health, and the Americans on the Dvina were so physically depleted that in February the medical officer of the First Battalion reported that one-third of all those on active duty should be committed to the hospital without delay. But these sickened soldiers could not be sent to the hospital without abandoning the undermanned posts that guarded the garrison.
Robbed of physical resistance and broken in spirit it was pitiful to see strong men and brave men become shrinking cowards, filled with a vague, sapping dread, under the uninterrupted strain and the depressing influence of the long nights. Fidgety sentinels were constantly seeing lurking Bolsheviks conjured by their morbid imagination from the menacing shadows of the woods, and there was an epidemic of accidental self-inflicted wounds, which always occurred at the ticklish, unsupported, advanced positions.
The doctors pronounced many as cases of neurasthenia induced by much loss of sleep, unbroken fatigue, and continual drain upon the nervous forces. They looked solemn and dubious and said it was demanding too much of human endurance to expect the defense to hold on without relief through the many winter days that stretched ahead.
One January night, terrible in the severity of its cold, all hands "stood to" and waited for the rush from the woods, for sentinels had heard the muttering of many voices and had caught the movement of bodies among the trees; but no attack developed, and in the morning the tracks of timber wolves were found approaching almost to our wire, where the pack had stopped to sniff the scent from these strange tenanted loghouses, standing apart on the snow, like outcasts of the village.
The few sentinels kept far in advance at the front village were always having jumping nerves, and robbing exhausted men of precious sleep; but once in truth they were nearly surrounded during the night and escaped by a miracle. So it was decided to burn the houses, as "sniper's row" had been burned in November. Some two hundred peasants were turned out in the snow, and Upper Toulgas became a dirty smudge on the whitened plain over which our range of visibility extended far to the forward woods, and our field of fire was increased comfortingly.
The High Command passed out word that Arctic conditions would preclude any active fighting, but the prisoners spoke differently. They said that the Bolshevik Staff expected the Allied soldiers to die like flies in the cold winter, that the enemy intended to strike when the cold was most bitter, the snow deepest, and so they did.
In January, with a temperature forty degrees below zero Fahrenheit, at midnight, Bolshevik batteries from across the Dvina commenced shelling Toulgas, and continued for fifteen minutes a bombardment that went wild in the dark and struck harmlessly far from our works.
Directly the last shell had been fired, enemy infantry advanced in the open and rushed our front posts. In the darkness there was frantic, wild fighting and struggling in the deep snow, shrill yells and a confused babble in a foreign language, the hideous moans of the wounded, the ringing commands of the commissars in rear, urging their men forward to sure death, and the prolonged explosions of machine guns spurting a rain of bullets over the heads of the attackers to warn them of a death that waited in rear if they turned back.
In two hours the force of the assault was spent, the last shot had been fired, and the snow before one of the blockhouses, where enfilading fire had cut up the attack, was covered with Bolshevik bodies. The fight was an uneven one, for the Americans in the blockhouses fired from bullet proof cover and were sheltered from the weather; but the Bolsheviks had to advance against barbed wire, struggle in the snow against targeted machine guns and had no protection from paralyzing cold. Many of the prisoners were so badly frostbitten that arms and feet were amputated to save their lives.
In February, acting in cooperation with the enemy offensive on the Vaga, a large force of fresh troops composed mainly of the Eighty-second Tarasovo regiment, who knew nothing of the reputation of Toulgas and the fate of other attacking parties, waded through the cold snow forests, clad in white smocks to blend with the color of the ground, floundered up to our lines in the impenetrable night, and were not discovered until they were engaged in cutting the wire between two blockhouses. They were fairly trapped then between the enfilading fire of two sets of machine guns and suffered fearful carnage before they fought their bloody way back wading ponderously through the deep snow to the forest.
Some of the dead came abruptly to life and gave themselves up when a search was made of the bodies next morning; horribly frozen by exposure, they said they preferred an uncertain chance of life at the hands of the Englishskis and Americanskis, to the certain chance of death in a further attempt to conquer Toulgas.
After this sanguinary fight, the Bolshevik soldiers met in a great assemblage, made bitter speeches against the Commander who had led them to disaster, and resolutions were passed which threatened death to any commissar who insisted on another assault of Toulgas and the fighting fiends who defended it.
So this village, far up the Dvina, was no longer the prey for wild midnight sorties and desperate melodramatic clashes in the deep snow, and there might have been comparative peace for the garrison were it not for adherence to those cardinal precepts of military orthodoxy that aggressive contact with the enemy must be always maintained and reconnaissance is vital to a successful combat campaign. It was to conform to these inflexible precepts of the military that patrols left Toulgas seeking for Bolsheviks. Sometimes they went forth on webfooted snow-shoes, and scouted the forest far on the threatening flank to discover whether the enemy had found some new method to approach our positions, and then they served a useful purpose. But the customary patrol party was the one that went out every day, a band of three or four, along a trail of padded snow just wide enough for a single file, that led through the front forest, five miles to the nearest enemy position at Zastrovia.
A hunter can understand this tracked snow trail. It was like a game runway that leads to a salt lick, fresh signs show that deer pass every day, and it is only a question of time until the hunter gets his chance for the fatal shot.
Sometimes, by the mere coincidence of fate, a patrol would turn about in the trail and start back towards friendly lines, when a machine gun would snap and crack and a rush of bullets sing harmlessly high, where another hundred yards meant death from the ambuscade; and often the scouts would come to the hidden waiting spot where imprints in the snow left the story of a large Bolshevik force that had stayed long, but, overcome by the cold, had been forced to quit the death hunt.
Often the Bolsheviks would leave bundles of propaganda on these patrol paths, much of it written in English, inciting British and American soldiers to mutiny, to kill their officers and join the Soviets in a revolution for the world wide supremacy of the proletariat.
Death walked these white runways. Death, and his romantic partner, Chance. But the color of youth had vanished before dour, wan reality with the soldier of North Russia, and the romance of Chance was lost on him. Yet it was strange how often men could walk these suicidal paths and escape unscathed. The goddess was kind, she visited them with benevolent mood, save a few times such as once in March, when from a party of seven, only one got back to tell of the fatal ambush.
When a platoon hurries out to pick up some sign of the others, it is caught in the open at Upper Toulgas, pocketed from the supporting fire of our own lines. There in the open snow, and denied all cover, the men are trapped like condemned animals. They flatten on the snow and fire at an unseen foe that pelts a withering fire from behind trees three hundred yards on a quartering forward flank; bullets whip the snow beside them and sweep by in such a storm that the air whimpers and cries aloud like a tortured living thing. At the end of three hours snow clogging in rifle breeches has frozen solid and they can shoot no more. Then, when it looks as if all were lost, the last man on the line gets back to the artillery, but is so winded and funked by his experience that his directions are a confused babble and the artillery opens up at risk of hitting our own men, shrapnel bursts in front of the platoon, the murdering fire from the clump of trees slackens, and the officer is able to withdraw his men to a God-given dip in the ground, all that are left of them, for out on the white snow still stretches a crumpled drab colored line; some lie very still, others writhe in the agony of grievous or fatal wounds.
Two days after this shambles of the snows, an officer and three men were met, on the forest runway to Zastrovia, by the fire of a large force of Bolsheviks, but until the day the Americans left Toulgas, there was no abatement of the perilous policy of patrols in this undefined war, where the loss of every life seemed sacrilegious sacrifice.
And this amazing campaign so prodigal of men's lives continued through the lengthening winter days.
At the end of March the sun had mounted high, and the snows were fields of myriad dazzling diamonds. A new fresh fragrance filled the air, and brought the promise of vague, perceptible hope. Spring was coming with the sun, and the renewal of youth would not be denied.
Then the Headquarters of the American Expeditionary Force took cognizance of the war with Russia and sent a general officer to command the forces from Archangel.
Then the Secretary of War announced that no more troops would be sent, and the units there withdrawn.
This was the end, but the Americans did not know it. The Royal Scots came to take over the defenses, the old Category Bs, with their wound stripes, their traditional, cockney jauntiness and just a hint of superiority in their eyes for the Yanks who were leaving the show.
It was strange how that night the winter's harshness relented in the gentle lulling wind, and in the luminous spell of the limpid moon, weary, war-worn Toulgas was at peace, sleeping, in unbroken white stillness.
Far up the sloping hill the rude silhouette of the center village is etched against a starlighted sky. Forward the church, shell gashed and mutilated, with its grotesque minarets, and the moon, a pendulous globe of living fire. Clear in the lucid light is the hard contested bridge, that means so little and yet so much; beyond, the charred ruins of the sacrificed village, and, still farther, the somber, gloomy forest. Vividly white gleams the church beneath the steely mystic moon, but whiter than the church or moon are the endless wastes of immaculate, unmarred snows that reach across the great river to the lurking darkness of the distant shore and abroad to the sinister shadows of crested trees.
This is Russia of the American soldier—a cluster of dirty huts, dominated by the severe white church, and, encircling all, fields and fields of spotless snows; Russia, terrible in the grasp of devastating Arctic cold; the squalor and fulsome filth of the villages; the moujik, his mild eyes, his patient bearded face—the gray drudgery and gaping ignorance of his starved life; the little shaggy pony, docile and uncomplaining in winds, icy as the breath of the sepulcher; Russia, her dread mystery, and that intangible quality of melodrama that throngs the air, and lingers in the air, persistently haunts the spirit, and is as consciously perceptible as the dirty villages, the white church, and the grief-laden skies.
It was not until nearly June the Americans were told that their bizarre service to their country was at an end. They were to go by slow stages back through the Dvina villages, always within call in case of dire need. But at last the purple day comes, and they are going home. A troop ship off among the ice floes of the White Sea toils westward, and upon its decks is a throng of soldiers who gaze with equivocal valediction upon the failing Russian coast, which mingles imperceptibly with the distant haze, and so passes like this shameful war to the bourne of memory's empire. The fairy rumor has come true, the Americans are going home.
27th Oct., '18
Dear Colonel Stewart:
I understand you have very little information of the situation up here. I have very little myself, and what I get is usually from rumors unless I go to British Hdqrs and ask for it which I do not care to do.
.... The commander of Force C has my Bn scattered so much there is only one company in a place. Have two companies under my orders Co A is up the river about 25 versts from here Co C is at this place and one Plt of Co A. Co B is over on the Dvina and Co D is with Force D about half way to Archangel between the river and the railroad.
.... Suppose part of us will winter here, but do not know yet....
Excerpts from letter written from Shenkurst on the Vaga, by Lieutenant Colonel John B. Corbley to Colonel George E. Stewart, Commanding Officer, 339th United States Infantry, Archangel, Russia.
"In North Russia, Shenkurst has been abandoned and the Allies are in a precarious position. The country is apt to hear much of these American battalions of North Russia, whether they live or die. If they live, it will be only after an heroic struggle with two fierce enemies—man and nature. If they die, it will only be after they have expended the last ounce of strength and the last cartridge."
The Washington Post, 28th January, 1919.
"Shenkurst has been evacuated and we are greatly outnumbered, but there is not the slightest reason for anxiety. New positions have been occupied a little further north. The Archangel expedition is quite safe, and always has been safe."
The London Times, 28th January, 1919.
IX
THE VAGA
The meagre numbers of the Railway had been irreparably spent by the establishment of the Onega force, on the west, and a like outguard at Seletskoe on the east, with its right and left wings, Kodish and Shred Mekrenga.
Now, as it followed up the Dvina, in the same manner, the dubious, striking power of the River Column was lost by the output along the tenuous, weaving waterway of many communicating posts, that like great drops of heart blood from a mortal hurt, wasted its vitality and drained its strength, until it could go no further.
These posts, like Indian blockhouses of frontier days, were strung along the river course nearly to far Archangel, and in them, insignificant detachments, with the grim, quiet resolution of the frontier men, and the steady, reliant nerve of the frontier men, safeguarded the backward way, where always silent, winter darkness held ceaseless, dire, ominous threats.
In the Shred Mekrenga offensive of January, when the enemy sought to cut off the River Column from its base, he launched a venomous attack at one of these river posts far back at Morjagorskaya, but the British garrison held without flinching and saved the communications by a narrow margin.
By this process of dispatching numerous, guarding detachments throughout the province, the Allied forces, utterly trivial at the outset, became so dispersed that the "offensive war" swiftly degenerated into a disjunctive, raiding excursion, and the invasion, instead of striking the Red Bolos with terror and chasing them like scurrying quail to cover, was regarded by the enemy with contempt, even derision. The Bolshevik soldiers, at first panicky, soon overcame their fear, and when their leaders saw that no reinforcements could come through the frozen north port, they assumed an attitude of aggressive defiance, and were ever conducting raids, ever menacing the long, basal lines, the flanks and rear of the far separated, uncoordinated, unsupported Allied fronts. On the Dvina, hardly had the detached American company taken over the defense of the costly stores at Bereznik, when friendly natives from Shenkurst directed the observation of our Command to the danger of a rear flanking movement from that quarter, so half of the garrison was detailed up the Vaga to take possession of this city of Shenkurst in the name of "friendly intervention."
It must be said that for the most part the city welcomed, with a genuine, welcoming spirit, the coming of the foreign liberators, for many people had fled north to Shenkurst from the violent Reds at Moscow and Petrograd, who hated theintelligenciaand everything else that was unproletarian, with a destructive, vehement hatred.
These people were the Russians of literature, cultivated and mannerly in appearance, soft spoken in approach, and accustomed to the niceties, the softer things of life. They wore shoes and stockings, and with a revealing hint of gawkiness, most of the rest of our unimaginative, Western habit; also they had a few of the simple delicacies on their tables that seemed like fairy gifts to the homesick, American soldiers.
The Vaga is noticeably smaller than the Dvina, and seldom exceeds a breadth of a half mile, more often it is five hundred yards, even less, and the soil through which it plows a tumid trail is soft, sandy loam, so that high, commanding bluffs have been eroded by its waters, where the villages group in almost neighborly proximity. On one of these bluff heights, stood effete Shenkurst, a generation removed from moujik poverty and enchaining ignorance, and consciously superior to the humble log huts that below north and south trailed the river. The dominating buildings, a monastery, a barracks of the Tsar, and five conspicuous churches were white as Russia's snows, and in the fall, made Shenkurst flaringly garish in its frame of tenebrious, surrounding forest.
Nearly a week of tranquillity passed with the Americans at Shenkurst, when the Staff, chafing at this prolonged unbelligerency, issued orders "to stir up the enemy," and some one hundred Americans, with fifty Allied Russian soldiers, embarked to reconnoitre the upper river.
All was uneventful, until ten miles out from Shenkurst, when suddenly an unseen fire poured from both high river embankments on the steamer bearing the unsuspecting, scouting party; there was no method of gauging the ambuscade, which judged by the volume of fire, most of which screeched harmlessly high, was far stronger than the Americans; but on the instant, the officer beached his craft on the nearest ground, the eager men scrambled over the side into the water waist deep, and engaged the enemy, who was so taken back by this unexpected action that he wilted into the forest; then, entirely undaunted, the little party moved on down the forest road, which wound south with the river, and into the sinister shadows of an unexplored, uncharted, alien country, where many signs pointed to certain, overpowering resistance, and the law of probabilities pointed to extinction.
The American in command, Captain Odjard, was more an antique Viking than a city-bred modern, and as the intrepid march continued, he never wavered in his purpose to penetrate the heart of the Bolshevik stronghold; for twenty days he kept on, despite distressing hardship, and short, iron rations, and most grievous of all, the utter absence of comforting tobacco. Reports came constantly that the enemy was intent upon the capture or destruction of the little band, Bolsheviks thronged the forward way through the forest, and every day information reached Captain Odjard that the villages in his rear were heavily garrisoned with enemy forces; most serious of all, the fast vanishing ration supplies would soon be all gone. Situations such as this search the innermost fiber of the stuff that makes for leadership. There are no precedents. A man of courage and valiant will would face about and fight his way back and perhaps die fighting. A coward would vacillate and falter in a mortal terror of indecision, and thus perish.
The only means of transportation after the rivers were closedThe only means of transportation after the rivers were closed
Stonewall Jackson and Forrest would do the genius born, unexpected thing. The Viking pressed onward, met the hostile Russians, forced them to a savage engagement, in which they lost in killed and wounded twice the number of the entire reconnoitering force, then turned about and backtracked the cleared way to the south, hastily abandoned by the Bolsheviks, in every reasonable fear of meeting the outnumbering reinforcements that surely must be coming up in support of such a bold and confident advance.
But at Ust Padenga, fifteen miles from Shenkurst, the party was stopped by a dispatch from Headquarters. It would go no farther downstream, but would act as an advanced outguard for the main Vaga position, a barricade to serve as a distant, delaying obstacle, and so render the inner post more easily defended.
For when the notion of an offensive war languished with the General Staff, and had nearly expired, it was revived a little by the theory of "an offensive defense," in which the six, widely scattered, battle fronts acted as protective tentacles, each of them in turn establishing an "offensive" outguard for Archangel, since once this virus of the "offensive defense" was inoculated in the Allied Command, it would not rest dormant, but persisted, assertive to the ultimate.
Meanwhile, Nature, flagrantly disrespectful of the military, swung the seasons in their immutable cycle. Fall made her parting courtesy, and winter with dread message and icy breath waited on the threshold.
The hope was not yet dead of the Railway Column gaining Plesetskaya, and the present objective of the Vaga force was to penetrate some eighty miles to Velsk, an important junction point of roads converging from the area of Plesetskaya, from the city of Vologda and from the Dvina.
The Railway got little further than Obozerskaya, and the little River Column, by the end of October, was at bay, fighting for life nearly two hundred miles from Kotlas, its first objective.
But before these forces had been halted, already the Vaga Expedition had gone too far, thrust out nearly one hundred miles from the Railway, and fifty miles further south than the River party, it presented inviting opportunity for enemy encirclement—a dangerous salient, projected midway between the two main Columns, and nearly three hundred miles from Archangel, by the tortuous course of the road.
The British are a bold people and it did not seem to weigh heavily with them that Shenkurst, the base of this Vaga Column, was flanked by hostile villages, where vain attempts had been made to drive out the Bolsheviks, that the city was garrisoned by locally recruited Russians, who had been tried and found wanting under fire, and whose loyalty might wane when the tide of Allied fortunes ebbed low, as soon it did.
Shenkurst must be held, and so the reconnaissance patrol, which had eluded doom only by the splendid dash of the men and brilliant leadership, stayed at Ust Padenga as an advanced outpost, and the theorists of the "offensive defense" were satisfied.
Captain Odjard took main station in a village on a precipitous cliff, that reared high from the river, and posted his Russian retainers in huts that clustered on the flat bank of the Vaga, nearly midway down the long valley that spread south to the forest.
Quartering from this second village, and much further down the valley was a third, conspicuous on another abrupt bluff, which when seen from the distance of the main post, the house tops had the picturesque appearance of toy roofs, sculptured on a pedestal.
The houses on the flat river bank stood out naked on the snow, and in case of attack, could be supported from the main position, for they were well within effective shooting range; but the other, the elevated village, was nearly a mile away, and beside it, on the west, the forest crowded perilously near; gullies were at the base of the bluff which made "dead ground" there, a series of natural trenches for an attacking party. It was a hazardous spot, the Russians would not stay in this distant, treacherous "Death's snare" on the heights; and they wagged their heads lugubriously over the few Americans who persisted in holding it. From the steep side of Headquarters' cliff, the usual wagon road descended, sent offshoots to the two south villages, and trailed off to the concealment of the lower forest.
Week succeeded week in lonely Ust Padenga, where the sad disgarnishment of this tragical, little war was seared vivid in the living consciousness of American soldiers. The Armistice came, but with it no word of enlightenment, until they were led to believe that in the general rejoicing, the stirring movement of momentous events, no heed could be given to the trifling performances of their fantastic, Arctic side show, long since forgotten in France.
Yet strange, the soldiers did not grow deeply embittered, a stoic calm came over all and they became worshippers of the Russian philosophy,nitchevoo, votaries of the Fates, burning frankincense at their shrine, praying favor, yet unmoved by their displeasure, indifferent to their whimsical caprice. They became atrophied men, asking nothing of the future and expecting nothing. The doctors said many were cases of neurotic disorder, and others suffered from enteritis and scabies, and ordered rest and the hospital, but the Staff waved the medical men brusquely aside and sarcastically asked who was to hold off the Bolsheviks.
During November, and shortly following the Armistice, two patrols "seeking contact," were waylaid in ambush, and from the first, only one man came back. The officer of the second might have escaped, but to do so he would have had to leave a detachment in distress, surrounded in the forest. He rather chose the hazard of death, and leading the fight, he laid down his life for his friends.
During the weeks of December and January, with their bitter cold and dismal, somber days, trees were felled about the defenses to widen the field of fire, and long, intersecting lanes were laid through the forest like swaths through a standing grain field, so that the machine guns and the automatics might hurl their spray of death at longer range, where skulked shadowed and grisly, white forms. When in the dead and quiet of the night, rockets burst from unknown quarters, flared with ghostly glare and faded in mystery behind inky, plumose silhouettes.
In the cold and the long darkness of winter, there was time for reflection for any one who would be so idle, on the defenselessness of the position, the remoteness from the base, the hordes that were massing on the road north to Shenkurst and meant soon to make "the big push."
Our Intelligence reported that in January the Sixth Bolshevik Army of the north numbered forty-five thousand seven hundred, and the dribbling replenishment of our forces that had come down the railway from open Murmansk, had far from kept pace with attrition by sickness and gunshot wounds. Disregarding our Russian Allies, we did not have six thousand men at all fronts.
By the middle of January, a blighting influence, a devastating, nether presence filled the air, like the spell of an evil spirit, and as capable of being finitely recorded as the testimony of eyes and ears. There was in the atmosphere something closely akin to that heavy, stifling calm, that in the summertime hangs over all, before the wind swoops down and the first, big, pelting raindrops fall from blackened thunder clouds, the advance guard of the drenching storm that descends to earth in howling, unrestrained fury.
All at lone Ust Padenga knew the storm was coming, it was only a question of where it would strike. On the 19th day of January, the dispositions were these: a platoon of Americans held the village on the pedestal, fifty-four allied Russians were in the village on the flat below, and the main body of Americans, some two hundred strong, two Field Pieces, one One Pounder of Russian design, one Pom Pom and forty Russian artillerymen (who funked in the first fight and were relieved by Canadians), were in the backward village on the high bluff.
At dawn, for one hour, enemy batteries from across the Vaga shelled the foremost position on the elevated ground, then suddenly ceased firing, and like grotesque Jacks in the Box, swarms of white-clad Bolsheviks arose by magic from the concealment of the ravines. A succession of long, white lines came from the close forest, and across the open snow of the Vaga came still more advancing, white-clothed men.
Against such bulked masses, resistance was impossible. Three machine guns, burst after burst, tore rending gaps in the coming lines, but they merely welded and kept on.
When the last pannier of ammunition was gone, word was given to blaze a path through to the rear—and double time! And now down the steep hillside the trapped company charged, tumbling and fighting like maddened, cornered animals, until they gained a foothold on the road which stretched out bleak and coverless eight hundred yards to the main village. Some tried to make a run of it over the bottomless, intervening snows, where they struggled piteously like hobbled animals and were killed. But in most part, they dashed in frantic relays down the open road, sprinting forward a score of yards, then flattening on the ground, and so on, rushing and sprawling flat, until the fatal course was run, while every rifle from the abandoned village on the height, and the flanking forest and across the Vaga spurted death, and machine guns rattled rasping death, and bullets lashed the air with the furious cracking of ten thousand whips, or sped fluttering through the snow, and went off whimpering into space, or felled men with sledgelike blows, until the doomed way was strewn, end to end, with the prostrate forms of the fallen ones, and a pitiful few, by some fluke of luck, had gained the shielding hill.
Not ten minutes had been taken in that terrible dash through that valley of Death's shadow, and of the forty-seven who began the journey, six reached the goal of the main village. In the fearful sub-zero temperature, all of the wounded would have perished by freezing, had not a volunteer party, braving the unspeakable, barbarous Bolos (who for some reason held their fire), gone out in the open snow and brought them to shelter. Fifteen were thus accounted for, and the rest lay somewhere beyond sight, "missing in action," that ambiguous, impersonal expression of the War Department, so fraught with mingled hope and dread, harrowing fear.
When the snow mounted high the fortifications had been made safe against any projectile save a six-inch shellWhen the snow mounted high the fortifications had been made safeagainst any projectile save a six-inch shell
When night screened the battle scene, the Allied Russians, upon their own inspiration, evacuated the village on the flat, and the next day, the unwitting Bolsheviks began the second phase of their investment of Ust Padenga. Again the artillery, even more violently than the first day, flung hurtling blasts at the deserted village, and late at day, the infantry, grotesque, bobbing objects out on the wide snow stretches, stormed the uncontested position. It was like rifle practice to shoot down those living targets, glaringly open on the white snow, and they were downed by tattering bursts of shrapnel, downed by musketry, downed by awful devastating bursts from machine guns, that moved them row upon row, until the last man had passed to the cover of this village of costly folly, and the snow was dotted with dead and wounded, which, from the distant hill, looked grotesquely like raisins stuck in an immense rice pudding.
On the third day, the surviving village, lying bare on the unsheltered top of the cliff, was the target of a barrage that searched it house to house, until many of the moujik homes were wrecks of smashed timbers, and the trail of human wreckage was a ghastly, unsightly thing. The American doctor went to death, a victim of the shells, because he would not have his wounds bound up while a single, private soldier was not relieved, but he lives with Vaga men as long as life endures, a symbol of moral grandeur and noblest self abnegation, that will ever inspire faith in the immortal, spiritual entity of man.
It was not the Viking Captain who ordered retreat from Ust Padenga. Half of his little company was gone, but he had no thought of yielding. He would have held on until the last dog was hung, if superior directions had not come from Shenkurst. He loved a fight, this antique Norseman, loved the wild, esoteric fury of it. Three times, his men threw back the Bolsheviks, and caught in a contagion of blood lust, they craved still more, maddened by battle, they took hilarious delight in seeing "the Bolos bite the snow banks."
They did not know that pitted against them was the vanguard of an army that by every objective rule of warfare should have crushed this rash, little group to utter destruction; but if Ust Padenga did not know, all at Shenkurst were fully alert to the gravity of the situation. This was the much proclaimed Bolshevik offensive, with its object, the annihilation of the Allied North Russian Expedition; and now as the full fury of the gigantic, impending assault unfolded, the "offensive defensive" theory found vindication, for at the Ust Padenga, little more than one company had stood off a regiment of the enemy.
There seemed small hope of escape for the valiant Vaga men who remained after the fourth night of the attack, when an incendiary shell fell upon the village, sending hungry, devouring flames athwart the curtain of the Russian night, till naught was left of the moujik homes save the gray ashes of "friendly intervention"; but in the confusion of concentration, the assemblage of large numbers and numerous troop movements, the retreating company glided in darkness down the center of the frozen, white covered Vaga, through the very midst of unsuspecting, enemy hosts, and two nights later, reported at Headquarters tired and half starved, the Viking leader among the casualties with a serious wound.
In Shenkurst, the beleaguered city, in point of numbers, the Slavic Battalion, nearly twelve hundred strong, was the mainstay of the garrison, but on trial in a previous attack for one of the two flanking villages, it had made a sorry showing, and in a last stand, was estimated as of uncertain, staying quality. Besides these Russians, there was one full company of American Infantry, the exhausted half company from Ust Padenga, one section of the Thirty-Eighth Canadian Field Artillery, four Two Point Nine mountain pieces, and three trench mortars.
The Bolsheviks had surrounded Shenkurst in an immense, unnumbered multitude. They had mounted one nine inch gun, two six inch guns, four Four Point Sevens and a Battery of Field Artillery, and from three-quarters of the forest commenced to batter down the buildings.
It could be only a brief time before the city would be in ruins, but even more serious was the question of provisions. They were already limited, and in case of siege, no new supply could be brought up until the breaking of the river in May.
The Bolsheviks, confident that the garrison would try to escape from Shenkurst, waited in great masses on the main north road, eager for the coming slaughter; but a native had informed the Allied Command of a secret path through the deep, snow covered swamps, and at midnight, along this unknown route, evacuation was silently effected.
Before the retreat, the Allied Russians were sent as a protective screen along a flanking trail, but scarce had the retiring movement begun, when what remained of them came rushing back in frantic haste, that was altogether unsoldierly, gasping an excited, incoherent story of how two entire companies had deserted to the enemy lines and the rest had fled in desperate fear for their lives.
Many civilians joined this bizarre, midnight march through the snow forest and swamps, and made the retreat a spectacle of wantonous disorder, as stoical men and wailing women strove heavily on, bent under the torturing weight of bundled treasures, which, under duress of fatigue, one by one were reluctantly abandoned, leaving a pathetic havoc of cluttering waste in the trail; and soldiers, weakened by much fasting and sleepless battle nights, lurched in the darkness, fell and lay in the cold snow, and had to be struck and urged on by violent means, so grateful was any surcease from further excruciating effort.
Late the next day, a merciful halt for the night was made at Shaguvari, where a rear detached outpost of Shenkurst had been maintained, and which outnumbering, advance enemy patrols had vainly striven to dislodge. But the disheartening march was resumed in the morning, when the Bolsheviks were reported collecting in force to cut off retreat downstream. So Shaguvari was added to the sum of Russian villages fed to fires of the Allied cause and became another charred ruin on the Vaga.
At villages outside of Kitsa, twenty miles further, trenches were dug in the snow, and barricades improvised of trees, in order that the driven troops might catch their breath. And on the Dvina, now only a few miles away, new positions were taken, where the imperiled River Column could be drawn back, and the consolidated Allied forces stand embattled in a desperate last defense of Bereznik, for if Bereznik fell, all knew it meant the beginning of the siege of unfortified Archangel.
But the delaying action was prolonged beyond the most sanguine dream of hope, and at Vistafka and Yeveevskaya, Maximofskaya and Ignatevskaya, the neighboring villages of Kitsa, the Americans held out, relieved in turns by British troops, and the remaining Slavic allies, who atoned for much by a heaven bestowed blunder that saved a surrounded post of the Americans.
These places, with their unpronounceable Slavic names, will be remembered always by the Vaga men, for here during Arctic February and March days, they fought savage, bloody fights in the mounting snowdrifts, and performed deeds of sublime sacrifice and courage, that will never be known save by those who were there.
They were still at Kitsa, and had not given ground, when the first redolence of spring softened the rasping, winter winds, and made the Bolshevik Commander draw back his artillery in fear of being mired in the yielding snow roads.
Not one of the Vaga men, in the innermost counsel of his heart, had ever expected to live through that winter onslaught, and when all with quiet courage stood ready for the end, lo, the enemy abandoned the field where victory awaited, and left the battle when it had been won. This petty, strange and inexplicable war was freighted deep with countless things of mystery, but none so beyond understanding as the failure of the Bolshevik Command to follow up the capture of Shenkurst.
The feeble, Allied remanent on the Vaga was reeling from the stunning blows of the massed attack, and thought of resistance all hung on the hope of saving Archangel and the life of the Expedition; but when all tensed themselves for the crucial shock, it did not come, the Bolshevik advance weakened and faltered and held back, so that the defenders, panting in terrible exhaustion, were able to suck in the air of reviving strength and hold on. When later the attacks of February and March came, they were sporadic, and lacked the fury, the sustained and vehement driving power of the first assault. Now in spring, it was too late, for Nature with sun and gentle breath had definitely won the battle for the Vaga men, and they crossed the river to safety, leaving in the black, despairing night, two villages flaming, a recessional of ill-will and destruction.
The first boast of "one Allied soldier against twenty Bolsheviks" had been made good, and the Expedition was saved, but by a precariously close margin. In no respect did the Allied Command so underestimate the enemy as in his power of military organization. The miserable "Bolo brigands" that were to have disbanded with the first punishment of Arctic cold, had raised an enormous army, which now, in late winter, exceeded one million soldiers, and the regiments that took Shenkurst must have laughed contemptuously at the undisciplined, untrained troops of the early days of the campaign.
Perhaps it will never be known why the Allies were not destroyed by these Vaga attacks. There were many villages capable of housing great numbers of soldiers south of Shenkurst, and probably in the January thrust, seven thousand five hundred to eight thousand hostile troops were quartered in them, a force that should have swept the Vaga Column before it like chaff in the storming wind, but it did not do so, and one may conjecture that the reason was because Trotsky did not care to hazard the risk of stirring the American people and the British people to an avenging and genuine war by the annihilation of the lone Allied battalions. Greater wars have been brought about by more trivial causes; but the stronger probability is that the Bolshevik soldiers revolted at the staggering slaughter of the attacks over the deep snows.
"Our losses are terrible," said one of the prisoners, "the commissars cannot understand your resistance. We are twenty to one and have many guns. Our Commander expected to take Bereznik in three days, but the soldiers will not attack any more over the snow against your awful machine guns."
The troops at the Vaga battles could not be compared with the unruly, Bolo rabble of the early days. They shot low and were well officered by officers, mostly Letts, who had been trained in Trotsky's military schools at Moscow.
Another explanation might have been in the story of some of the prisoners, but which was never confirmed, that the soldiers had met in a solemn, protest meeting, following the last costly, Vaga offensive, and shot their Commander for his persistence in pushing on, despite the heavy casualties. The fatal potion of Kerensky's Order still poisoned the blood of the Russian army, and although the Soviet soldiers gave exhibition of great bravery, and were well led, they were not great soldiers; they failed in the ultimate trial, and did not go through to victory when stamina and resilience for the last lap would have won.
As the Vaga men had gone furthest in fulfillment of a vain and futile mission, had parried the heart thrust, and beat back its violence, so were they the last to leave, and were still in battle at Malo Bereznik at the close of May, six months after the Armistice, that proclaimed Peace to an afflicted World, and poured cooling balm on a million wounds, so far from feverish, strife torn Russia.
Not until June did they meet their regimental comrades, coming from every compass point of the wide province, save the seabound, impassable north, to assemble at Economia for the homegoing. There the battles of Kodish and the Railway, Onega, the Vaga and Dvina and Pinega Valley were fought again, until the white, Russian snows were hued rose red with blood of recounted slain, until American soldiers sailed away, bewildered still at this gambling murder game, and sacred life—the most contemptible stake in the mad lottery.
Not the Vaga men to idly speculate on causes! They knew full well the colonel's words, and were exalted still by the fervor of their sacrificial avowal, the noblest of mankind—to lay down life for a friend.