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.
[Illustration: The only means of transportation after the rivers were
closed]
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.
Quartering from this second village, and much further down the valley
was a third, conspicuous on another abrupt bluff, which when seen
from the distance of the main post, the house tops had the
picturesque appearance of toy roofs, sculptured on a pedestal.
The houses on the flat river bank stood out naked on the snow, and in
case of attack, could be supported from the main position, for they
were well within effective shooting range; but the other, the
elevated village, was nearly a mile away, and beside it, on the west,
the forest crowded perilously near; gullies were at the base of the
bluff which made "dead ground" there, a series of natural trenches
for an attacking party. It was a hazardous spot, the Russians would
not stay in this distant, treacherous "Death's snare" on the heights;
and they wagged their heads lugubriously over the few Americans who
persisted in holding it. From the steep side of Headquarters' cliff,
the usual wagon road descended, sent offshoots to the two south
villages, and trailed off to the concealment of the lower forest.
Week succeeded week in lonely Ust Padenga, where the sad
disgarnishment of this tragical, little war was seared vivid in the
living consciousness of American soldiers. The Armistice came, but
with it no word of enlightenment, until they were led to believe that
in the general rejoicing, the stirring movement of momentous events,
no heed could be given to the trifling performances of their
fantastic, Arctic side show, long since forgotten in France.
Yet strange, the soldiers did not grow deeply embittered, a stoic
calm came over all and they became worshippers of the Russian
philosophy, _nitchevoo_, votaries of the Fates, burning frankincense
at their shrine, praying favor, yet unmoved by their displeasure,
indifferent to their whimsical caprice. They became atrophied men,
asking nothing of the future and expecting nothing. The doctors said
many were cases of neurotic disorder, and others suffered from
enteritis and scabies, and ordered rest and the hospital, but the
Staff waved the medical men brusquely aside and sarcastically asked
who was to hold off the Bolsheviks.
During November, and shortly following the Armistice, two patrols
"seeking contact," were waylaid in ambush, and from the first, only
one man came back. The officer of the second might have escaped, but
to do so he would have had to leave a detachment in distress,
surrounded in the forest. He rather chose the hazard of death, and
leading the fight, he laid down his life for his friends.
During the weeks of December and January, with their bitter cold and
dismal, somber days, trees were felled about the defenses to widen
the field of fire, and long, intersecting lanes were laid through the
forest like swaths through a standing grain field, so that the
machine guns and the automatics might hurl their spray of death at
longer range, where skulked shadowed and grisly, white forms. When
in the dead and quiet of the night, rockets burst from unknown
quarters, flared with ghostly glare and faded in mystery behind inky,
plumose silhouettes.
In the cold and the long darkness of winter, there was time for
reflection for any one who would be so idle, on the defenselessness
of the position, the remoteness from the base, the hordes that were
massing on the road north to Shenkurst and meant soon to make "the
big push."
Our Intelligence reported that in January the Sixth Bolshevik Army of
the north numbered forty-five thousand seven hundred, and the
dribbling replenishment of our forces that had come down the railway
from open Murmansk, had far from kept pace with attrition by sickness
and gunshot wounds. Disregarding our Russian Allies, we did not have
six thousand men at all fronts.
By the middle of January, a blighting influence, a devastating,
nether presence filled the air, like the spell of an evil spirit, and
as capable of being finitely recorded as the testimony of eyes and
ears. There was in the atmosphere something closely akin to that
heavy, stifling calm, that in the summertime hangs over all, before
the wind swoops down and the first, big, pelting raindrops fall from
blackened thunder clouds, the advance guard of the drenching storm
that descends to earth in howling, unrestrained fury.