Part 3

At the time of the Bolshevik revolution, the national debt of Russia was 700,000,000,000 of rubles. The interest and sinking fund charge was 4,000,000,000 of rubles annually. There was a deficit in the annual budget of one milliard. Of this total debt, _15,500,000,000 of rubles were owing to France_, and France felt the prospective loss far more than any of the other creditor nations, for the French government had encouraged the purchase of rubles by her nationals, and these now nearly worthless securities were held by the peasants from Artois to Gascony.

Like the Prinkipos proposal, nothing came of a Soviet proposal for peace which was brought to the Paris Peace Conference by an emissary dispatched by the American commissioners to obtain from the Bolsheviks a statement of the terms upon which they were ready to stop fighting. This was in February, after the desperate situation of the troops near Archangel was brought to the attention of the Conference by the Allied Military commanders. These Soviet peace terms were approved by Colonel House at Paris, who referred them to the President, "but the President said he had a one track mind and was occupied with Germany at the time, and could not think about Russia, and that he left the Russian matter all to Colonel House."

The sessions at Versailles adjourned without day [delay?]. If we were at war with Russia in 1919, we are still at war with her. Peace was never made with Russia; and peace never will be made in the hearts of those plain people in the Vaga and Dvina villages, who saw their pitifully meager possessions confiscated in the cause of "friendly intervention," their lowly homes set ablaze and themselves turned adrift to find shelter in the cheerless snows.

Friendly intervention? All too vividly comes to mind a picture during the Allied occupation of Archangel Province while the statesmen at Paris pondered and deliberated in a futile attempt to find dignified escapement from this shameful illegitimate little war. Military necessity demanded that another village far up the Dvina be destroyed. As the soldiers, with no keen appetite for the heartless job, cast the peasants out of the homes where they had lived their uncouth, but not unhappy lives, the torch was set to their houses, and the first snow floated down from a dark, foreboding sky, dread announcer of the cruel Arctic winter. Within these crude, log walls, now flaming fire, had they lived, these gentle folk, as their fathers had lived before them, simple, unsophisticated lives, felicitously unmindful of petty vanities and corroding ambitions. Who can say theirs was not the course of profoundest wisdom? For had they not known in these humble homes those candid pleasures, the only genuine ones, those elemental joys, springing like hope and the unreasoning urge of life from the heart of humanity, oblivious of all artificial environment? Here in these mean abodes had they tasted the ecstasy of love, known the full poignancy of sorrow, wept in natural grief and laughed loud with boisterous, unrestrained, rustic laughter. In a corner hung the little ikon, where the lamp burned on holidays, and they worshipped their God with a devotion so genuine, so deep and reverent, that only a fool could scoff.

Outside now, some of the women ran about, aimlessly, like stampeded sheep; others sat upon hand fashioned crates, wherein they had hastily flung their most cherished treasures, and abandoned themselves to a paroxysm of weeping despair; while the children shrieked stridently, victims of all the visionary horrors that only childhood can conjure.

Most of the men looked on in spellbound silence, with a dumb, wounded look in their eyes. Poor moujiks! They did not understand, but they made no complaint. _Nitchevoo_, fate had decreed that they should suffer this burden.

Why had we come and why did we remain, invading Russia and destroying Russian homes? The American consul at Archangel sent us the Thanksgiving Day message of our President, rejoicing in the Armistice, and the end of the carnage of war. But the consul announced that we would remain steadfast to our task until the end. The end! What was the end?

The British General Finlayson of Dvina Force said: "There will be no faltering in our purpose to remove the stain of Bolshevism from Russia and civilization." Was this, then, our purpose through the dismal night of winter time, when we burned Russian homes and shot Russian people? And was this still our purpose when we quit in June with Bolshevism strengthened by our coming, and more than ever before the government of Russia?

The only stain was the stain of dishonor we left in our retreating path. But a deep, red, burning stain of shame is on the foreheads of those men who sit on cushioned seats in the high places, chart armed alliances in obscure international commitments, and, with careless gesture of their cigar, send other men to some remote forsaken quarter of earth, where there is misery and suffering, and hope dies, and the heart withers in cold, black days.

Now it was of small concern to Ivan whether the Allies or the Bolsheviks won this strange war of North Russia. What he heard was some vagary of "friendly intervention"; of bringing peace and order to his distracted country. What he saw was his village a torn battle ground of two contending armies, while the one that forced itself upon him, requisitioned his shaggy pony, took whatever it pleased to take, and burned the roof over his head.

He asked so little of life, this gentle moujik, with his boots and his shabby tunic, and his mild, bearded face, only to be left alone. In peace to follow his quiet ways, an unhurrying, unworrying disciple of the philosophy of _nitchevoo_.

THE PLAN OF CAMPAIGN

"I consider it my duty to inform you in plain language that unless considerable reinforcements are sent before the end of October, the military situation both at Archangel and the Murman Peninsula will, in my opinion, become very serious."

ADMIRAL KEMP, in command of British warships at Murmansk, to the Admiralty, 26th August, 1918.

IV

THE PLAN OF CAMPAIGN

The Province of Archangel stretches from the Norwegian frontier across the Arctic Ocean east of the Ural Mountains of Siberia. It includes the Kola Peninsula, which lies well north of the Arctic Circle, and the further-most point south is below sixty-two degrees latitude. The total area is six times that of the average American state.

It is a poverty distressed and cheerless, destitute region, which, during the reign of the Romanoffs, like Siberia, was often a place of exile and asylum for political dissidents. War accentuated the poverty of the province, and the only remanent sign of former industry is at the port of Archangel, where large timber mills, owned mostly by British capital, line both sides of the harbor.

The port was founded by Ivan the Terrible during the Sixteenth Century, and ever since then has been a British trading post. At Onega, Kem and Kamdalaksh on the White Sea, there is, or was, before the war, some small traffic in timber products, furs and flax. But this commerce is of small consequence. Prenatally, Archangel was destined for pauperism, for it lies in the far north, where life is poor and hard struggling, and there is little soft sunshine to woo riches from the earth. Nor are treasures concealed beneath its sear and barren surface. The curse of sterility taints the air, and it was never written in the Divine Plan that man should dwell in this fortuneless, forsaken region. He was banished there, or driven by the pitiless pursuit of his own misdeeds. For nearly half of the year, the White Sea is an impenetrable ice barrier, and then communication with the world beyond can be had only through the Murman railway to the far north port of Murmansk.

In the city, the East comes abruptly face to face with the West. The exotic colors of the great domed cathedral were brought from ancient Byzantium, when the Greek church was made the faith of his country by Vladamir; and bearded, sad-faced priests, with their black robes, glide through the streets like nether spirits, and the mysticism of the ancient, mystic East.

This is the native atmosphere of Archangel, and it will not be in a generation that the city will, without consciousness, take on the soft adornments and the practical utilities of Occidental civilization. The glaring electric lights, the incongruous, modern buildings and the noisy tramway that clangs down the street--these do not belong to Archangel. They are a profane encroachment on her ageless, dreaming tranquillity and eternal repose; her enigmatical, perhaps profound philosophy of _nitchevoo_.

Fundamentally, Archangel is a primitive center of primitive beings. Instinctively, it is a dirty hole. Hopelessly, it is a filthy place, where noxious stenches greet the nose and modern sanitation is unknown.

In the days of peace, there were perhaps three hundred fifty thousand people in the province, and sixty thousand of them dwelt in Archangel. The only other cities of importance are Pinega, with three thousand persons, some one hundred miles to the east, and Shenkurst, two hundred miles south on the Vaga River, where there were four thousand. But as a whole, the inhabitants are moujiks, dwelling in little villages of two or three hundred log huts, that in structure and design bear close resemblance to the cabins of our frontier civilization.

About these villages, the peasants have cleared the forest for a few hundred yards, and in the brief, hot months of the midnight sun, they raise meager crops of wheat and flax and potatoes. When winter comes, they are continually indoors, gathered about great ovens of fireplaces, and long through the dismal, cold, black days they sit and dream, or merely sit. They are unsophisticated folk, incredibly ignorant, but gentle, quiet mannered, sweet natured souls, despite a harsh, uncouth life; and very responsive to kind treatment.

Cholera visits them with recurrent, devastating plagues, and takes fearful toll, for they live in the midst of nauseating squalor, with total disregard to sanitation, and drink from surface wells, that in the sudden spring are reservoirs of sewage and all manner of obscene refuse.

All along the rivers and roads of the interior, at intervals of five to ten miles, are strung these moujik villages.

There is, among these people, no agriculture as we practice it in our country, with a set of prosperous looking farm buildings for the cultivation of two hundred and five hundred broad, fertile, American acres. In Russia, I never saw more than five hundred cleared acres for an entire village.

Yet, from these small, unfecund patches, the peasants, somehow, wrung the means of sustaining life, and those who toiled in the fields divided the scanty harvest with the aged and the weak, and the children who were fatherless: so that there was no mendicancy among the moujiks, and no affluence either.

There are two railways in Archangel Province, the Murman road, which begins at Murmansk on the Arctic Ocean, extends south to Kem through Petrozavodsk, and forms a juncture fifty miles east of Petrograd with the Trans-Siberian, nine hundred miles from the point of beginning; and the Archangel-Vologda railway, which reaches from Archangel four hundred miles south to Vologda, where the Siberian road comes in from Viatka on the east and leads to Petrograd. Both railways have the standard five feet gauge single track. During the winter of 1919, the Murman road, with a theoretical capacity of thirty-five hundred tons, had an actual hauling capacity of only five hundred tons a day, and its rail connections were in very poor condition and badly in need of repair. The Vologda road had a single track, but with sidings every five miles. Both roads had obsolete rolling stock, rickety, tumbled down cars and wood-burning locomotives of a type used in our country fifty years ago.

During the war with Russia, the Allies, with a medley force of friendly Russians, British, Canadians, French, a battalion of Serbians and a battalion of Italians, held the Murman railway as far south as sixty miles beyond Soroka, which is a little south of Archangel and two hundred miles to the east.

There were no Americans on this Murman railway front, except two companies of railway transportation troops, which reached Russia in April and were the last to leave in July, 1919.

Beyond the Murman and the Vologda railways, the only other highway to the interior is the Dvina, a dirty colored, broad spreading river, which from its beginning, as the Witchega, at the base of the Timan Range in Vologda province, follows a swift flowing course one thousand miles northwest to the sea at Archangel.

Sometimes, when its banks are low and it sprawls out in play, its waters glide noiselessly with a look of gentleness and peace, and the Dvina puts one in mind of our Mississippi; but usually its cold depths are freighted with grave mystery and melancholy foreboding, and then it is the spirit of Russia, hurrying by forested shores and high, desolate bluffs, where a mill, near a huddle of soiled log houses, flaps its clumsy, wooden wings, and a white church, with fantastic minaret, rears aloof, chaste and austere, in the midst of squalor.

During the period of navigable water, in the days of peace, the Dvina was plied by steamers and barges and watercraft of every description, but the freeze commences in early November, and then, until the last days of May, its waters have become a bed of thick ice.

Then, except by the Vologda railway, the only method of transportation between Archangel and the interior is by sledges, drawn over the snow by little shaggy ponies that can perform miracles of labor and seem impervious to the terrible, cold winds. These ponies are the embodiment of the moujik temperament, docile and mild mannered, very patient and long suffering, and never resentful of the most severe chastisement.

The whole province is a plain of low, gentle slopes, covered with small fir trees and several varieties of dwarfed pine. A long, dormant season and the severity of winter preclude any luxuriant, ligneous growth. Even the underbrush is sparse and thinly scattered, and commercially, about the only value of the Archangel forests is for the manufacture of pulp. The bottom of this spindly pine woods is covered with a tundra. Sometimes, there are patches of waist deep water, and in other places, a morass that seems bottomless.

Such is the character of all the North Russian forests. The natives tell stories of men, unfamiliar with the country, who have lost their way and floundered in these treacherous marshes until they passed from sight without a sign of their passage.

During the rains of fall, and when summer bursts upon winter, in June, is the season of _rasputitsa_. The wagon roads then are sloughs of deep mire, and little travel is attempted. The first snow falls in November and gradually mounts, until in January it has a uniform height of three feet, except in the open places where there are great drifts much higher. No thaw comes until late February, and so moving for any distance on foot is impossible without skis or snowshoes. Cold follows the snow, gradually increasing in intensity until there are January days of forty-five and fifty degrees below zero Fahrenheit.

When the wind is high and the air filled with great, white blasts, this cold of Russia presses on the diaphragm like a ponderous weight and breathing becomes a gasping effort. In the depth of winter, the sun is banished, and during the latter part of December, only a few hours of pale, anemic glimmering separates the black Arctic night; a shadowy gloaming, like shortlived, desert twilight.

Splendid, fighting men were made weak cowards by the cumulative depression of the unbroken, Russian night and its crushing influence on the spirit; for the severest battles of the campaign were fought during the cold, black months of winter time.

Preparations for opening hostilities in the war with Russia were made in April, 1918. The Allied Supreme War Council had been alert to the presence of German troops in Finland and their fanciful menace to the Murman railway; and in the quiet harbor of Murmansk, British and French battleships had been idling purposelessly since early spring. In April, one hundred fifty Royal Marines landed from the British ships and were followed in a few weeks by four hundred more, also a landing party of French sailors. On 10th June, the United States warship, _Olympia_, appeared at Murmansk, and one hundred American bluejackets disembarked. These Allied forces penetrated down the Murman railway to Klandalaksh, some two hundred fifty miles south, and, in addition to holding Murmansk, seized the port of Petchenga on the coast of Finland.

Then the scene of intervention shifted southward, and on the 1st August, General Poole, with a party of five hundred fifty French, British and a few American marines, escorted by a British cruiser, a French cruiser and a trawler fleet, attacked Archangel, which, after a bombardment, was surrendered next day by the weak Bolshevik rear guard.

The main body of the enemy had carried with them far up the river to Kotlas and down the railway to Vologda, rations, rifles, guns and ammunitions, American manufactured. Likewise, they had seized and carried off nearly all available means of transportation; and when the Allied troops examined the vast storehouses in the harbor and at Bakaritza, they found that the Bolsheviks deliberately, systematically and with great thoroughness had stripped the shelves of every conceivable thing of value. If the object of the Archangel Expedition was to safeguard the vast munitions and stores there, it had failed signally and at the outset.

Still the enemy had fled, for, by some occult form of necromancy the Bolsheviki had now become "the enemy," and it is a major premise of the military that a fleeing enemy must always be followed up. Small heed that little was known of the strength or disposition of the retiring army. They had fled. Two forces were immediately dispatched in pursuit, up the river and down the railway; and, to augment the strength of the invaders, new troops were sent from Europe.

The 339th American Infantry arrived at Archangel on 4th September, 1918. It was composed of Wisconsin and Michigan men, mostly the latter; men from our farms and from our cities, who had been drafted for war against Germany.

Like most of our civilian soldiers, they had no exuberant ecstasy for the grim business ahead, but still possessed a remarkable appreciation of the war and its deep significant issues. And they had a quiet courage that was good to see, and a quiet resolution shorn of sentimental heroics to give their lives for their country if the sacrifice was necessary. Not one of them was deeply agitated by the emotion of "Making the world safe for Democracy," which is the desiccated war cry of the academician and never could reach the heart depths of any people; but they did feel in some vague, yet definite way, that a soulless military system, which had trampled brutal, iron-clad boots through the gentle fields of Belgium, might some day carry its hateful spate to the Michigan village or green-hilled Wisconsin farm, where an old lady with spectacles sat behind the window of a white cottage, and near lilac bushes growing fragrant in the lane a wholesome faced girl waited.

These soldiers of Russia were of the same type as our men who fought in France--no better and no worse; another way of saying that they were the best soldiers in the world. They were all drawn from the Eighty-fifth Division of the National Army, and came from all the races and shades and grades and trades of our many colored American society.

Many of them had had only a few weeks of crowded military training, and were still civilians in physique and bearing. Most important of all, they were civilian in mental constitution.

With the 339th Infantry, came the 337th Field Hospital Company, the 337th Ambulance Company, and the 310th Engineers, a splendid, upstanding, competent battalion, that in the approaching ordeal upheld the best in our American traditions, showed extraordinary power of adaptitude, extraordinary resourcefulness, no matter the difficulties, were ever cheerful and undaunted, and altogether splendid.

Roughly, the entire force of the Americans aggregated forty-five hundred men. It was augmented about a month later by five hundred replacements, snatched here and there from the infantry companies of the Eighty-fifth Division in France.

That September day the Americans landed at Archangel, and the fagged engines of the troop ships _Somali_, _Tydeus_, and _Nagoya_ came to rest, those who looked from the decks breathed in the oppressive air a haunting presentiment of approaching evil.

Halfway from camp at Stoney Castle, England, five hundred of the little company had been stricken with the dreaded Spanish influenza. Eight days out at sea, all medical supplies were exhausted, and conditions became so congested in the ships' quarters that the sick, running high fever, were compelled to lie in the hold or on deck exposed to the chill winds.

At Archangel, there was little improvement. Soldiers were placed in old barracks, there they lay on pine boards. They had insufficient bedding, and for warmth had to keep on their clothing and boots. In this way many died and many more were enfeebled for many months, but "stuck it" with their companions and went to the front.

Had the Fates placed a curse on the Expedition from the beginning?

There was an air of inscrutable haunting sorrow in the lowering skies, glinted limpid with a sinister, bronzed light from a sun that flamed to crimson death among the dark trees over the bay.

Across the harbor projected the tiny red roofs of the city, the venerable cathedral, ghostly with great white dome, grotesque fantastic spires and minarets, garish in the fading light with startling pigments of green and gold. A mournful stillness brooded over a scene weird and alien to the men from far off Michigan and Wisconsin, who had a feeling that they had left behind forever the stage of tedious factory days and prosy farm life, and moved to another sphere, shrouded in mystery, filled with unparalleled, dread adventure.

Besides the American regiment, there was a British brigade of infantry nearly the same strength as the Americans, in the main composed of Companies of Royal Scots, most of them catalogued by the War Office as Category B2 men; unqualified for the arduous, exhausting tasks of an active field campaign, but fit enough to safeguard stores in Archangel, "light garrison duty."

Many wore the bronze wound stripe, and many had two and even three of these honorary decorations. These war-tired soldiers, wearied to the point of cruel exhaustion, had given freely and without stint of their body on the Western battlefields for King and Country; but the great Empire was backed to the wall and fighting for her life in an insatiable conflict, she exacted the last draining dregs of their gasping strength. That these "crocked" Category B men performed prodigies of fortitude and miracles of endurance, and acted deeds of stirring, spiritual courage in this war of the Far North is a permanent tribute to a manhood that England breeds, and imperishable glory to British arms.

The French sent eight hundred and forty-nine men and twenty-two officers, a battalion of the 21st Colonial Infantry, two machine gun sections and two sections of seventy-five millimetre artillery.