regiment of White Russians, who were the defenders of their own
towns, and the "Allied Legion" of no nation. Likewise there were two
field guns with a Russian personnel of artillery, a unit of Russian
machine gunners, carefully trained in the service of these rapid,
death-dealing instruments of specialized modern war, and all these
soldiers of Russia raised their heads high and proud as eagles,
wearing no man's collar.
So it came that the Americans were free to take their leave for more
pressing fronts and were given "Farewell and come again" from the
hearts of the Pinega people, with generous, overflowing good will,
abounding grateful acknowledgment of their genuine, upbuilding
service. Perhaps this was more the conceived purpose of the
Expedition to sustain the foundling democracy of Russia, to
strengthen and instill solidarity and faith in the hearts and
counsels of the Russian people, and to achieve such end by
unsanguinary means. Perhaps the means might have been different and
the melodrama never enacted if a college professor, with methods of
applied humanity, had directed from the outset. But it is to offend
the military to consider thus, and to be guilty of shameful
heterodoxy.
RETREAT
"There is no use people raising prejudice against this expedition.
Every one knows why it was sent. It was sent as part of our
operations against Germany. It was vitally necessary to take every
measure in regard to Russia during the war which would keep as many
German troops as possible on the Russian front, and reduce that
formidable movement of the German armies which carried more than a
million men to the Western Front, and which culminated in that
immense series of battles which began on the 21st March last year
(1918)."
WINSTON CHURCHILL, _Secretary of State for War_, in the House of
Commons, 3rd March, 1919.
XI
RETREAT
When the appeal to patriotism failed, Archangel Province, under
British direction, invoked conscription, and by the middle of June,
twenty-two thousand Russian soldiers had been assembled by coercive
means.
They thronged the backward villages through which the Americans
passed on their way to disembarkation, and looked very fresh, like
college youths, as they sauntered up and down to an eternal serenade
of wheezing accordions, or with sacerdotal, marching chants, went
swinging by in platoons and companies, these young conscripts, who
knew so little of war and its harrowing disillusionment.
For the moment all breasts were filled with that contagious ardor
that springs from every massed effort, no matter its end, but not one
in a hundred knew or felt the call of patriotism for the coming
conflict of Russian against Russian.
There was cause enough for the fight had it only been revealed to
these pliant, guileless, peasant folk. For their country, weakened,
helpless and faint from many war wounds, was being debased by vile
and vicious poltroons who had stamped out the holy fires of the
Revolution, nullified the Constituent Assembly, and stifled every
voice of liberty with hands more remorseless than the cruel manacles
of the Tsars.
The cause was there, but if their mentors sensed it, they manifested
almost incredible obtuseness in failure to impart these moving
eloquent reasons for the fight. They were silent about the odious
exploitation of the masses under the crafty, artful guise of
proletarianism; they said nothing of the wicked violation of sacred
property rights, the unprincipled plundering, the trampling down by
power maddened feet on all revolutionary enlightenment, the
desecration of all things spiritual, the wanton derision of the
church which had been the faith of the people and of their venerated,
sainted fathers.
Here was reason enough for any Russian with exalted, holy devotion to
lay down his life for his stricken country. But instead of such
scathing and unequivocal indictment, the British dwelt upon the
conduct of the Bolsheviks, shameful and faithless towards the
Czecho-Slovaks, and gave out, with venomous vituperation, highly
colored stories of enemy atrocities and cruel treatment of prisoners
so patently over-extended that they failed to make a convincing
impression even on the moujik mind.
So soon as navigation opened, there commenced an exodus of Russian
officers to Archangel, sent by the British Command to lead the newly
formed native legions. These officers came from the old Imperial
Army, many were titled, proud of their high birth, and by every
thought and training, and by every instinct, irreconcilably opposed
to every notion of social equality; in short, irredentists of that
heartless, arrogant, military class which a worn afflicted world had
cast off in a travail of four years' agony and afflicting grief, and
long suffering Russia had driven forever from her temples.
So the fresh formed conscript ranks were made conveniently vulnerable
for Bolshevik propaganda, this new weapon of warfare, invisible and
treacherous, that on the Eastern Front had scored such havoc with the
boasted discipline of the Germans. Soviet agents were everywhere,
mingling with the people on the streets of Archangel, wearing the
khaki of the newly organized soldiers, living with them, going
through their drills, and fatigue and exercises, and ever with the
passionate zeal of fanatics, feeding them the poisonous doctrines of
Reddest Moscow, ceaselessly, night and day.
Now the innuendo was very plausible that these aristocrats of the Old
School had returned to restore the Romanoffs, and that the British
capitalists were leagued with them for the conquest of Russia and the
enslavement of the common people. It was easy to argue that the
British, always interested in the trading possibilities of Archangel,
had come to exploit its resources. Otherwise why should they be so
vitally concerned in this civil war of Russians? British officers
were freely mingled with these Imperial officers, British
Intelligence supervising the staff work and dispositions, and a
liberal spreading of reliable British N.C.O.'s among the ranks, to
keep a watchful eye on things and bolster the recruits in the stern
trial of first battle.
The great majority of the British officers had no appetite for the
business ahead. They were tired and homesick, weary and fed up with
war for all time after four racking years of it. Moreover, they
disliked everything Russian with a withering aversion, and in their
forced association with the Russians, treated them with a disdainful
condescension and that impersonal, inhuman lack of tolerance which is
British beyond all imitation. Openly they distrusted their allied
comrades, and sometimes when tired and irritable and nerve frayed,
they said so, which did not make towards the establishment of an
enthusiastic and permanent entente, for the educated Slav is an
accomplished linguist, and sometimes he understood and did not easily
forget when he was abused in English, and vehemently cursed as a
"bloody Bolo."
It had been determined before the opening of navigation that all
American forces should be withdrawn and the campaign abandoned. The
reason for this was not revealed to the troops just as the cause of
the Expedition had never been mentioned, and every man in American
uniform sensed a gaping moral void on the part of his Country.
Certain death from the Bolsheviks awaited those loyal Russians who
had placed their trust in the promised salvation of the Allied
leaders and the American authorities at least seemed blind to their
manifest duty to the Archangel government. It was an awkward
situation for the statesmen, but unavoidable under the
circumstances--and Archangel was a long distance removed from
Washington. Anyway, the British held on--they would have to attend
to uncomfortable details. We were going to clear out, and clear out
we did.
The problem of evacuation was a disturbing one. There was a clamor
in England as insistent as that which echoed from America to get out
of Russia and get out without delay. This might have been done, and
the British might have abandoned these thousands of Russian people
who, trusting in the courage, the steadfastness, and the honor of the
Allies, had cast their lot with them for better or for worse. But,
instead of deserting the country without ceremony as we did, a frank
disclosure of the situation was made to the press in England, and a
call was issued for volunteers to rescue British soldiers at
Archangel. A mixed brigade of venturesome men who were wearied by
peace time tedium and longed again for the thrill of war, and others
who were out of work and could get no other employment, was raised by
this method, but to muster the full quota for relief it was necessary
to add a like number of Regulars, in all approximately eight thousand
men. Each brigade had two infantry battalions, units of artillery,
airplanes, machine gun corps and engineers, and the first echelon,
commanded by Brigadier General G. W. Grogan, Victoria Cross, reached
Archangel at the end of May. The rest, under Brigadier L. W. Sadleir
Jackson, came on the 10th June, and the ships that brought them
carried away the Americans.
To the civil mind an evacuation, especially by sea, seems a simple
matter. The civilian thinks of it merely as a packing off to the
ships, disregarding the losses involved to make short shift and get
away. But in complicated, modern war, there are countless perplexing
details in the final movement of an army. Massive, ponderous
ordnance and munitions and supplies must be assembled with prodigious
labor, transported or destroyed. And it is necessary to hold the
enemy off till the last retreating file has mounted the gang plank
and put off far to sea. Also, in the case of Archangel, it was an
involved problem to attend to the civilian population.
The British government laid open the offer to transport every
Archangel resident apprehensive of the Bolsheviks, and to provide
employment for them in other lands. It was expected that vast
numbers would avail themselves of this opportunity and would flee
from the approaching reign of horrors, but when the time came only
sixty-five hundred and thirty-five came forward for expatriation, and
these were all sent to South Russia and the Baltic States.
When all was in readiness, General Ironside planned to safeguard the
retreat by administering a sharp "disengaging blow," like Sir John
Moore dealt the French at Corunna one hundred years before, which
would shake the enemy's morale and disabuse him of any notion of
following the retreating troops to the waterside.
The Czechs had fused with Admiral Kolchak's armies. Under the
leadership of General Gaida, they formed his right wing and were
beyond Perm, some three hundred miles east of Viatka. It was thought
that these friendly Siberian forces could take Viatka, advance up the
railway to Kotlas, and join there with the Archangel Russians.
Thereupon the British, leisurely and in security, could return down
the river to the waiting transports and sail homeward.
So Kotlas, which had been the original objective of the River Column,
became the objective once more. The Admiralty dispatched to
Archangel a flotilla of gunboats, monitors, mine sweepers and many
other craft for the transportation of troops and supplies to act as
auxiliaries for the infantry, and again the Dvina became a scene of
skeltering preparations for war.
On the 20th June, the disengaging offensive began; the British and
Archangel troops attacked across the river from the Allied position
at Toulgas, and gained complete victory, capturing two hundred
prisoners, many machine guns and three field guns. But now word came
from the south that the Bolsheviks there had concentrated in great
forces against Kolchak and had utterly routed him, that he was
fleeing east, had already retired as far as Yetakerinburg, and all
hope would have to be given up of effecting a junction with the
Siberian army.
So the importance of taking Kotlas waned, but even if Kolchak had not
failed the advance could have gone little further, for it was found
that due to the light snowfall of the previous winter, the waters of
Dvina were low, beyond all precedent, and the British flotilla could
follow no farther upstream.
Most discouraging of all, treachery broke out in all quarters from
the allied Russian troops. On the 7th July a battalion held in
reserve on the river mutinied in the night and murdered three British
and four Russian officers as they slept; four other officers were
seriously wounded. On the 22nd July the whole Onega detachment went
over to the Bolsheviks, and the safety of Archangel became seriously
jeopardized from this west port. Nearly at the same time British
firing squads suppressed a revolt on the Railway front before the
Russian mutineers gained the upper hand.
Many of the British officers had passed through all the harrowing
fires of France, but here was a form of peril new in the experience
of the most hardened ones--base betrayal by the sentinel who kept the
black watches of the night, and treachery in the heart of the citadel
from hands stretched forth in friendship. The brave man, standing on
his feet and facing the end, does not fear advancing death; but now
it lurked in hiding, it descended in the night and struck from the
dark upon unconscious sleep, so that tired soldiers dared not rest,
and the strain snapped nerves of steel.
A few weeks before these outrages, Toulgas was given over to a
defense that was entirely Russian. Shortly afterward, in the
uncertain light of early morning, on the 25th April, there was a wild
commotion, and, following interminable confused firing that sounded
from all quarters of the village streets, a lamp message flashed
across the Dvina to the Allied position at Kurgoman: "We are
completely surrounded; the Bolos are attacking in five places."
Shortly thereafter, through a fusillade of bullets, a Russian
officer, with two men, effected a passage of the river in a small
boat, and told the shameful story of how nine officers had been
murdered as they slept and bloody Toulgas delivered by faithless
Russian soldiers to the waiting Bolsheviks in the woods. Through a
prodigy of bravery by a handful of loyal artillery men, the guns were
pulled back to Shusiga, ten miles downstream, but it was not until
the middle of May that Toulgas was retaken, and while it stayed in
enemy hands, the Allied position was alarmingly critical with the
right flank over the Dvina completely turned.
[Illustration: Major-General Sir William E. Ironside]
Thus, with mutiny breaking out in all quarters, the virulent
propaganda of the Bolsheviks bore malignant fruit beyond their most
sanguine hopes, and the situation was menacing enough to alarm the
most conservative in Allied Councils. Had it not been for the two
splendid reinforcing brigades, the often imperiled life of the
Expedition would have been destroyed at last. The British War Office
for once became thoroughly apprehensive. General, Lord Rawlinson was
sent to preside over the leavetaking, and fresh reinforcements, two
battalions of infantry, two machine gun companies, two batteries of
Royal Field Artillery, one engineer company, and five tanks were
rushed to Archangel from England.
The intention had been to complete the evacuation just before the
closing of navigation in late October, but now it was seen that this
might be too late, and in the present urgency no time could be lost.
"The disengaging blow" was delivered on the 10th August by Jackson's
sterling brigade, a little beyond Seltzo, the furthermost south
achieved on the Dvina by the little River Column almost a year
before. Two thousand prisoners were captured, eighteen guns and many
machine guns, and the rout was complete. With the enemy now safely
at bay, the British turned the defenses over to the Archangel
authorities, who persisted in staying, although they were advised
that it was suicidal to do so, and "friendly intervention" was
brought to an inglorious, albeit an unbloody, close on the 27th
September, eleven months after the Armistice that had outlawed the
rule of warring strife as the arbitrament of discordant nations.
When the last troop ships trailed off to drooping skies, a bearded
moujik sat in the stern of a flat boat directing four broad backed
women at the oars. The recumbent coxswain waved a languid gesture
across Archangel Bay where tiny ships were bearing off to the north;
and four oars poised in mid-air as the laboring crew turned with dull
Slavic contemplation to regard the parting foreigners, and the end of
their peculiar expedition. But only for a moment, there was more
important business in hand than idle gazing at Englishskis, however
queer they might be. A gruff command, and the freighted craft
continued its slow toiling course to the market place, the overlord
resumed his interrupted smoke of good Allied cigarettes and the
Englishskis were dismissed from memory. This was the leave-taking.
On the evening of 12th October, 1919, the last of the Allied forces
set sail from Murmansk for England; four months afterward, on the
20th February, the Bolsheviks recaptured Archangel.
Nearly four months earlier the last of the Americans set sail on the
26th day of June, 1919, and as the paling shores mingled with the
distant sky line and faded from sight, so too the fever of this
troublous, little war with Russia abated, yielding to the gentle
ministrations of memory's cooling twilight.
With the Americans, at least, there remained no shred of illusion.
When Winston Churchill told the Commons that Archangel, with one lone
American regiment, the few battle retrieved soldiers of England, and
a single battalion of disaffected Frenchmen, had kept many German
divisions in the East, and played an important part in the last
battles, he laid a flattering unction to the soul of British
statescraft; but his insincere words did not deceive the American
soldier, for the American soldier was mentally and emotionally
paralyzed beyond deception, and a conviction of blunder was only
strengthened by this and other clumsy explanations vouchsafed by
Allied statesmen; by the guilt-laden silence of America.
Germany was never concerned with Archangel. There was no evidence of
German participation in the campaign; no evidence that our petty
hostilities with the Bolsheviks had ever benefited Foch on the
Western theater.
We had waged war upon Russia. Whether willfully or unwillingly, our
country had engaged in an unprovoked intensive, inglorious, little
armed conflict which had ended in disaster and disgrace. Perhaps
this was a laudable thing to do. Perhaps it is always idealistic and
praiseworthy to intervene for self-conceived righteousness in the
internal affairs of another nation, as England might have done in the
case of the American Confederacy, and as we did in the case of this
civil war among the Russians. It is easy enough to enter the battle
lists, but, once in, it is not so easy to withdraw from the fight
with self-respect unsullied and honor undefiled.
So Archangel proved, with its sullied record to blight forever the
good name of America when soldiers gather to tell of the Great War,
and, great as the cost of the campaign had been with 2,485
casualties[1] of killed and wounded and sickened men, its financial
loss, over ten times the price paid Russia for the vast dominions of
Alaska, there was not a man in the ranks who did not sense the
disgrace in our ignoble desertion, there was not an American officer
who would not have chosen to have left his bones bleaching white
beneath Archangel snows, than been a living witness to the
ignominious way in which his country quit and slunk away.
[1] Chief Surgeon's Report.
All felt a personal sense of poignant shame for the failure to see
the game through to its uttermost bitter end, or else seek expiation
by honest avowal of wrong and humble contrition. It was an
inexorable dilemma, one that took the staunchest courage, no matter
which course was followed. Perhaps the higher courage would have
been the admission of culpable fault. But we took neither course.
We merely wilted from Archangel and came away.
On the homeward troopships, among the ice floes of the White Sea, the
taunting unspoken reproach galled most bitterly of all, for we left
our British allies to extricate themselves from the miserable mess as
best they could, and with no explanation and never a sustaining word
we left them.
Many trying things in the campaign had aroused the Americans to
intemperate speech, which now to recall they would have surrendered
all they possessed. Incompetence and tactlessness, and seeming lack
of understanding and sympathy by those in power, to which the
soldiers of England appeared indifferent, never failed to draw the
intense, iconoclastic fire of the Americans. The difference lay in
the national atmosphere of the two countries, the divergence in
character and traditions, born and nurtured under the republican and
the older order. They are a different people from us, the British,
though the blood strain be the same. The glory of baseball is lost
on them; they play the tedious cricket; but, when the fight is on,
the quality of the bulldog, once at grips to hang on with set teeth
till death, is British; blinded to all save the solid grimness of the
task in hand, their brains seem dull to those imaginative flights
which are the curse of the Western soldier.
Thus ended America's share of the war with Russia. At Brest the
"mutinous" regiment was shunted in fragments over the seas to
America, and in the homeland, these soldiers who had borne arms in
conflict six months after the Armistice, were shooed off to civilian
life, and the whole embarrassing matter was expunged from the war
record.
All inquiry concerning the Expedition has been met by specious pleas
in evasive avoidance. No peace was ever made with Russia, as no
state of war had ever been recognized, and the legalists might well
contend that all who engaged in it are open to indictment for
manslaughter, for the enterprise will always remain a depraved one
with status of a freebooters' excursion.
At Corbela sat an aged woman with ghastly face, gray as the dirty
_platok_ that framed it, her gaunt chin resting on a hand, bony and
hideous from relentless toil. With failing despairing eyes, she saw
in the dwindling snows only the dissolution of winter, quite blinded
to buoyant spring that with tufts of brown turf bursts boisterously
through the southern hill slopes, like heedless youth that with
surging, eager, passionate desire presses on the reluctant heels of
death to life's fulfillment.
Outside the hut a young moujik, with the handsome physique of first
unsullied manhood, and the credulous eyes of a child, curiously
watching the north marching Americans; a giant of masked strength,
needing only the key of trained intelligence to unloose immeasurable
dynamic force that might some day rule the world.
Kindle the liberating torch of enlightenment in the nether regions of
the Slavs, strike from the millions the shackles of serfdom
ignorance, and from the pestilential ashes of present degrading
Bolshevism, Russia, the giant, in stupendous power, rises phoenixlike
to Jupiter.
To the Russian people we owe a debt that can never be paid except in
deepest and very humble gratitude; for, when those gray hosts swept
over Belgium and Northern France, Russia invaded Prussia, threatened
the gates of Koenigsberg, routed the Austrians in a smashing blow at
Lemberg, and, when the German aggressive movement was at its
culminating height, drew off to the east two Army Corps and a Cavalry
Division from von Kluck's right wing, a fatal diversion of the German
forces which enabled Joffre, closing in the breach at the Marne, to
save Paris and turn the advance into a complete retirement.
This great battle of the Marne marked the initial phase of the war,
and completely frustrated the cherished Berlin plan of gaining quick
victory by tactics of overwhelming surprise.