Part 11

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.

THE VAGA

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 the _intelligencia_ and 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.

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.