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.
[Illustration: The Murman and Vologda railways]
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.
[Illustration: Patrols with webfoot snowshoes went forth on the snow]
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.
On the railway front, there was an armored train, with one eighteen
pounder, one seventy-seven millimetre and one hundred fifty-five
millimetre Russian naval howitzer. Then came early in the campaign
the Sixteenth Brigade Canadian Field Artillery consisting of the 67th
and 68th Batteries, each with six eighteen pounders and tough gunners
seasoned and scarred by four years of barrages and bombardments in
France, rather keen for the adventure of North Russia while the
fighting was on, and thoroughly "fed up" when there was a lull in the
excitement.