the frontal attack, but their location was determined by the enemy
batteries, and his infantry laid down such a withering fire, that the
battalion, exhausted from a day of fighting and a heart-breaking
march, without rations and with no cover from the cold and the
drizzling rain, was compelled to bivouac that night in the soaking
morass, hopeful that with next morning would come promised artillery
support, for without it further advance was unthinkable.
All through the night the Bolshevik guns searched for the Americans
who were new to combat, ignorant of the ground, and had not an
inkling of the enemy strength or his fortifications or dispositions.
And at dawn a reconnaissance patrol stumbled into a large enemy
force, was scattered and came back with no information, save that the
Bolsheviks had assembled in superior numbers and were well supplied
with ammunition. As daylight broadened, the shelling from the river
became so violent that the attackers had to choose between a further
advance or complete retirement; to stay where they were meant
destruction.
So with grave misgivings the attack was renewed, although there was
still no sign of promised artillery support; machine guns guarding a
trench system in the woods killed and wounded many Americans, but the
advance would not give ground, and supporting comrades at flank and
rear kept up such a sustained unfailing fire that the Bolsheviks were
led to believe that the attack had been replenished during the night.
During the fight the American lieutenant colonel "caught in a
bracket" had stayed in the rearward village, Yakovlevskaya, but at
dusk he emerged with the important Field Pieces which laid down an
effective _feu de barrage_ on Seltzo. Hardly had it lifted when the
battalion arose and with splendid dash and gallantry stormed forward
to the village, entered it and took possession. But the story of
Seltzo is the story of the whole campaign. After the infantry, with
inspiring display of courage and at great cost, had gained a
position, its small forces would be drafted for some other distant
hard-pressed front, or the position would be left to the mercy of the
Bolshevik guns until no course was left except evacuation.
The monitor which had convoyed the battalion up the Dvina, fearful of
being caught by the ice that was expected to creep upstream from
Archangel at the beginning of October, but did not actually come
until mid-November, went back before the battle and was gone for the
duration of the winter. A few days after the battle, the artillery
left and was seen no more at Seltzo. Also Headquarters ordered two
of the companies to proceed to Shenkurst on the Vaga, the second city
in the Province, where it was alleged a large number of Russians in
sympathy with the Allied cause were anxious to have a garrison of
American troops during the approaching winter.
So it came that there was no artillery to avenge the smashing havoc
of the enemy heavy guns in this furthermost Dvina village where one
infantry company of Scots, a like number of Americans, and a few
Allied Russians held on under terrific shell fire that from river and
forest racked and battered them.
The enemy had a complete battery of three inch pieces, which he was
free to bring up to the edge of the woods beyond the village, and
down the river on rafts and improvised gunboats he floated three six
inch guns and two Nine Point Two naval pieces, and for days with this
combined armament he smashed and blasted until many of the houses
became a riot of shredded and splintered timbers, and it was only a
question of time before the garrison would be decimated utterly.
On 14th October the Bolsheviks attacked the defensive positions with
great vigor, but were thrown back in complete repulse with many
killed; yet that night and in the first morning hours the defenders
slipped away in the darkness, for under unhindered bombardment the
place had become a death's trap where all must eventually perish.
After this escape in the night there was a heart-breaking drag
through the mud, until late the next day the tired Allied soldiers
found harbor in Toulgas some fifteen miles back. Toulgas is typical
of the North Russian village, a group of bedraggled log houses
huddled together on a hill, which bends down in a long easy slope to
the plain, where, like Seltzo, a stream comes out of the forest and
margins another cluster of huts on the flat ground which the moujiks
call Upper Toulgas.
This stream is deep and numbingly cold, and has cut an abrupt channel
through the yielding soil so that fording it is a difficult feat at
best. For an enemy to make the attempt in daylight would be
suicidal. In darkness, any considerable numbers cannot fail to give
the alarm. A road comes down from the hill and crosses a wooden
bridge to the forward village. Watching the bridge is the inevitable
white church, and its gaudy minarets, consciously aloof and superior
in the poverty of the scene. In the setting of dun barren ground the
white edifice flashes in undefiled purity against a low shrouding
sky, more black than gray, which rests upon the darker tufted forest.
[Illustration: The fighting Canadians]
Across the road is the priest's house, like the others of bark
stripped logs, differing from the others only in its greater size.
With a little barricading the walls of the priest's house were secure
against the lead of small guns, but it was death to stay there during
the avalanche of high explosive shells that was poured out by the
Bolshevik gunboats.
After the battle of Armistice Day, the bearded priest of Toulgas
Church was found amid the hideous battle litter of his wrecked home,
the crown of his head cut clean as with a scalpel, exposing the naked
brains. Near him were two children, a boy and a girl, sleeping by
the guardian who from infancy had taught them of a Providence who
watched over the good of earth, and surely would not desert them
through this malignant turmoil that had descended to the quiet moujik
country with terrible death and indescribable misery like the
recurrent plagues. So sleeping, a shell had found the unconscious
children, and lulled them to that everlasting sleep. The big shells
had a way thus, of stealthily sniping their victim's life away with
no mark of their dread approach, as if disdaining the brutality of
violence. But again they would pounce down with the atrocity of a
fiend, smash head from trunk, and members from the torso, and leave
great gaping wounds gushing black blood with unspeakable, horrible
ghastliness.
Back of the church, on the same side of the road, is a moujik house
with the customary stable attached in rear. A platoon used this as
billeting quarters. It was shielded by the church forward, and gave
shelter to the little reserve that would replenish the blockhouse at
the bridge with men and ammunition, and, if the blockhouse was
knocked out, would stand off the Bolsheviks from crossing the bridge.
From the billet house to the church is about thirty yards. The
priest's house is nearly opposite the church across the road. The
blockhouse was built just before the Armistice fight and stands on
the bank of the stream guarding the bridge about twenty yards forward
of the priest's house. It is thirty yards over the bridge, and in
front of the first line of Upper Toulgas houses, a field, shorn of
all cover, stretches one hundred yards to the stream.
Back of the center village on the hilltop the ground undulates almost
unnoticeably in a series of folds and reaches a shallow draw. A
little beyond this, perhaps two hundred fifty yards, is still another
clump of huts known as Lower Toulgas. In this draw, the Canadians
built emplacements for their two Field Pieces, which during the first
battles were the only artillery for the defense of Toulgas.
The forest gives way for nearly a half a mile before Upper Toulgas.
From Upper Toulgas to Lower Toulgas is an ample two miles. From
Toulgas, itself, the center village, to Lower Toulgas is a scant
three-quarters of a mile.
On the forest flank the ground has been cleared for a space, varying
from three hundred to less than sixty yards. This clearance is
greatest opposite the upper village. In the lower village it
narrows, until in rear the trees close in on the road that leads back
to Bereznik and Archangel, affording excellent opportunity of
concealment and surprise attack for an enemy that would have the
endurance and the hardihood and the courageous daring to march
through the deep swamps of the woods.
On the left the Dvina spreads out in a wide expanse, two miles.
Opposite the rear and center villages the river banks are high and
steep, nearly precipitous, but at the forward village on the flat
ground the level is only a few feet above that of the water. Across
the river there is not the slightest sign of cover as far as the
distant embankment on the opposite shore. The chances for surprise
from this quarter are practically none, and without surprise,
infantry advancing over the waist-deep snow against machine guns,
would have to be possessed of fanatical courage and be in
overwhelming strength. The river could be nearly neglected as a
source of danger.
To defend the three Toulgas villages we had: One company of American
infantry; one company of Royal Scots infantry, and one section of
Field Artillery, manned by fifty-seven Canadians.
In command of this force was Robert P. Boyd, an American civilian,
who, scarcely a year before, had graduated with the rank of captain
of infantry from a three months' officers' training school at Fort
Sheridan, Illinois.
Shortly after occupation of Toulgas, ice choked off navigation of the
lower river, and replenishments of supplies and ammunition had to be
brought by small one pony sleighs from Bereznik. The distance was
some fifty miles, and the journey by Russian pony was usually two
days, but when the snow was deepest, the weather bitterly cold, and
the days had but few hours of light, it took three days.
There was a field hospital at Bereznik, vicariously supplied, and
attended by a medical personnel of changing nationality, British,
Russian and American by turns.
We converted one of the huts of Lower Toulgas village into a dressing
station, where first aid was given the wounded; but we had no
facilities, no operating equipment, or surgeons, or surgical
instruments to care for the serious cases. If a soldier was hard hit
and lived, he had to be brought to Bereznik.
Following the retreat down river from Seltzo, there was hardly time
for a tactical survey of the situation, for the construction of
temporary redoubts on the forest flank and at the crucial bridge,
when enemy gunboats opened fire on our positions and for three days
kept up a determined bombardment. When dusk came on the third day,
the shelling lifted, and when the night grew black there was a roar
of many rifles and a mad yelling from the woods as a horde of
Bolsheviks fell on the center village. In the darkness and wild
confusion, the tumult of battle made by the roar of musketry, the
shouting and screaming of many foreign voices sounded like the
onslaught of a Division.
But, even with the advantage of overpowering numbers, a night attack
to succeed, demands most accurate knowledge of the enemy position,
and most rigid control by a leader of his men. The Bolsheviks were
not thoroughly trained in these early days, although later they
displayed impressive military skill and the utmost cooperation
between officers and men; now their lead went high and shrieked
through air several feet above the heads of the unscathed Americans,
who had concealed Lewis guns in a dugout at the point of the enemy
rush and turned these loose upon the massed Bolsheviks, felling them
like cattle in a slaughter pen. One American private, swinging an
automatic rifle from his hip, shot until there was a semi-circle of
prostrate forms before him, some of them fifteen yards away; and once
a few of the enemy came so close that they were spitted at the end of
the bayonet.
At the height of the fight the Canadians opened up their guns and
rained the woods with shrapnel which threw the wavering Bolsheviks
into worse commotion and disorder, for while the Lewis guns scattered
death in front, rattling shrapnel bullets threatened death in rear,
and thus, huddled together in the darkness like stampeded sheep, they
were shot down until the fierce exulting battle yells were changed to
moans of the wounded and appealing cries for mercy.
At a signal, the Canadian guns ceased firing, the Royal Scots,
shooting low and true, went into the counter, and the disorganized
Bolsheviks, seized with blind animal terror, lost all semblance of
order and fled in violent flight, each man for himself, to the
sheltering recesses of the forest.
After this night attack there was nearly a fortnight of quiet on the
Dvina, with no outward sign to show the enemy intentions. Patrols
went out into the woods and came back with the report that Zastrovia,
the nearest village upstream, was clear of hostile troops; but, while
the Allied Command took under advisement the opposing contentions of
retirement and holding on, the Bolsheviks were assembling large fresh
forces of infantry, and bringing heavy guns from Krasnoborsk,
preparatory to striking the most ambitious blow yet attempted.
All at Toulgas were aware that the lull was ominous. All knew that
this phase of security was a very transient one, and directed by the
American engineers, every man who was not on guard duty, worked
building log blockhouses, at tactical strong points about the center
village, one of them to guard the bridge over the stream to the upper
village, where there was a small outpost, which in case of frontal
attack was to give the alarm, then retire to the defenses.
The defense centered around the middle village. There were no
fortifications to protect Lower Toulgas, and the Canadians in the
draw in front of Lower Toulgas had for their protection only a squad
of Americans under a sergeant, with a Lewis gun. The great danger in
the situation lay in the threat of the capture of the rear village by
an attack from the close-edging forest. If this lower position was
taken, the garrison would be trapped, starved and cut off from all
communication with Bereznik and Archangel. Customarily, there were
kept on hand rations sufficient to last from two to three weeks.
When the British Brigadier General R. G. Finlayson inspected the
Toulgas area, on 10th November, apprehension of such a rear attack
was expressed by some of the officers, but the general could see no
real menace from that quarter, and said that it was a military
impossibility for a large body of troops to successfully execute a
flank movement through the heavy swamps of the woods.
The day following, Armistice Day, at dawn there was a crackling of
rifles in Upper Toulgas, then the crash of guns from the river, as a
great number of Bolsheviks swarmed from the forest, deployed in
perfect order, and advancing in squad rushes, drove the little
outpost back to our main lines. Timed, it seemed almost to the
moment, came the roar of musketry far at rear, the staccato rattle of
machine guns and dominating all the din and tumult, the ringing
Cossack _Hourra! Hourra!_
Our surprise was complete. Hundreds of dark figures sprang from the
woods and closed in on Lower Toulgas.
[Illustration: A Bolshevik scout]
Had the Bolsheviks been Germans, they would have immediately rushed
the Canadian guns, and the story of Toulgas would have been one of
massacre. They did rush the guns, but not until it was too late.
The march through the forest had been an exhausting one, and the
Bolshevik soldiers were very tired and very hungry. A few critical
moments were spent searching the houses of the captured village. One
of the Commanders, Melochofski, a stalwart giant of a man, with a
high, black fur hat, entered our hospital billet, and flourishing his
arms, gave a loud-voiced order to kill the invalided soldiers. The
British medical N.C.O., with rare tact and extraordinary presence of
mind, placed rations and two jugs of rum before the big Bolshevik
leader, who helped himself liberally to the spirits and under their
benign influence momentarily forgot about the execution.
Probably in this way and in ransacking Lower Toulgas, not over three
minutes were lost, but never were three minutes more costly, for
during that time the Canadians swung round their guns, and, when the
Russians rallied to renew the attack, they were met by muzzle bursts.
Nearly a hundred years before, at Wilma, the iron veterans of the
Grand Army had been shaken by that blood chilling _Hourra! Hourra!_
of charging Russians; but now it only made those leather faced men at
the guns laugh with the wild, delirious delight that comes only to
the born fighting man, then only when the fight is at its height.
They swore fine, full chested, Canadian blasphemies that were a glory
to hear, crammed shrapnel into their guns, and turned terrible blasts
into the incoming masses that exploded among them and shattered them
into ghastly dismembered corpses and hurled blood and human flesh
wide in the air in sickening, splattering atoms. While all the time
the American sergeant and his single squad kept up an incessant fire
with his Lewis automatic, and those Canadians who were not hit, and
were not needed at the guns, worked the bolts of their rifles with
the energy of fiends, so that the crackling of small arms sounded
like the bursts of machine gun fire from the emplacements, and
deceived the Bolsheviks, who thought it was the fire of machine guns.
These Canadians had used the rifle often in the untracked places of
the Western World, were well schooled in marksmanship, and now when
the target loomed big and at extremely short range, they covered the
ground with dead.
The mere weight of those approaching great numbers would have shaken
and turned ordinary troops, for the onslaught was not stopped until
less than fifty yards from the guns; but the Canadians were not
ordinary men and they gave not the slightest hope of being turned.
They would have stood by with their bayonets to the last, and when
the Bolsheviks saw the unyielding determination of these Western
savages, to whom fear seemed unborn, and knew that more devastating
death storms of shrapnel awaited further advance, their morale broke
down, the front wave hesitated, panic spread with telepathic
swiftness, and in the control of overpowering fear, the whole force
bolted and scampered like rabbits to the covering trees. There they
were rounded together by the remaining commissars, and from places of
concealment directed a hot fire on the guns.
So quickly were they reorganized that fifteen minutes after the
assault had been turned back, the Company of Royal Scots, hurrying
across an open field to the support, were subjected to such a
blighting fire that the ground was strewn with the huddled figures of
their dead and wounded.
As the day advanced the chief commander of the Bolsheviks was killed
and three other commissars were picked off and killed. The march
through the marshy forests had been made at tremendous toll in
vitality, the advantage of surprise had now passed, rations were
running low, and, unless the attack could be pressed with renewed
forces, there would be another bivouac in the wet and cold, for the
Canadian devils watched Lower Toulgas, and, at the first sign of
occupancy, hammered and pounded and shook the houses with high
explosive until they were untenable utterly. During the afternoon an
American force from the center village pushed back a band of riflemen
that hung at the fringe of the woods, and, as evening fell, the enemy
fire grew less sustained and it was evident that unless
reinforcements arrived, the attack would fail. But hours passed and
no reinforcements. The rifle reports sounded more and more erratic,
and, as the night wore on, there was only the sporadic crack of a few
snipers in the rear woods, who held on hopefully waiting for the
supports that never came.
Prisoners said there were six hundred and fifty in this rear attack
and an equal number had taken the upper village, where they kept up a
steady volley fire, but seemed to wait upon success of the rear party
before storming our fortifications. Therefore, far forward in the
blackness of the night, the Canadians sent forth two salvos, to let
this frontal attacking force know that the guns were intact and that
a fight was waiting beside them.
So ended the first day of the battle of Armistice Day. There was
firing all through the night from Upper Toulgas, and luminous flares
burst startlingly from unexpected places in the blackness, but after
the failure of the rear movement, no further sustained and determined
attack was attempted.
When a patrol from the garrison entered Lower Toulgas the next
morning, men nerved themselves for a fearful grewsome spectacle in
the hospital billet; but lo, their comrades were unharmed, and a
woman in the uniform of a Bolshevik soldier was caring for them as
well as the enemy wounded. She had come with her sweetheart,
Melochofski, the thirty miles from Seltzo--Lady Olga, as the soldiers
called her--and had bivouacked the two cold nights with the soldiers
in the woods and swamps. She saved the lives of our injured men by
pleading with Melochofski. Later she ministered to him as he died in
the same hospital room where he would have witnessed his helpless
enemies die.
She was a member of the Battalion of Death, this extraordinary woman,
of intelligent, almost beautiful appearance. Madame Botchkoreva also
had been a member of the Battalion of Death, so named because it
chose to die rather than betray Holy Russia. Madame Botchkoreva, who
had come with the American soldiers on the transports from America,
and had spoken to them on shipboard so eloquently and so movingly of
her country and its sacred, unshakable loyalty to the Allied cause,
was said to have interceded with President Wilson, urged the sending
of American troops to succor afflicted Russia, and prevailed upon the
President.
American soldiers had already witnessed grotesque inconsistencies in
this strange campaign. After the first fight they picked up shell
fragments with the letters "U.S.A.," and learned that all, or nearly
all, the Bolshevik ammunition was manufactured in their own country.
They were told that they had been commissioned to safeguard valuable
war supplies, and, coming to Archangel, had seen the great warehouses
there destitute of those supplies. Now they were mystified by Lady
Olga, who fought against Madame Botchkoreva in this baffling Russian
war. Who was the greater patriot? Each a soldier in the uniform of
her country, each had plighted her heart to beloved Russia, each had
taken solemn oath to defend her country until death; and both now
thought they were offering their lives for the defense of that
country!
In this rear attack, one hundred Soviets were killed, many more
wounded, many taken prisoners, a few rejoined their comrades at Upper
Toulgas, and the rest faded in the forest and were lost. Weeks
afterwards, the villagers at Nitzni Kitsa, fifty miles to the west,
told of three Bolshevik soldiers who came to their village in a
crazed condition, clad in rags, and half starved, babbling an
incoherent story of the frightful battle of Toulgas on Armistice Day,
and of hundreds of their comrades, lost in the woods and perishing in
the treacherous quagmire of the swamps.