Part 10

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: a _funt_ (fourteen ounces) of meat, one and three-quarters _funts_ of 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 the _intelligencia_ who 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 like _valenkas_, 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.