Part 2

On May first, the international labor holiday, he opened up on every front, making the supreme effort of the year. His heaviest blow fell on Malobereznik. The ice had begun to run out of the Vaga and the upper Dvina enabling him to mount guns on barges while our gunboats were still frozen in at Archangel. When he had put five thousand shells into Malobereznik and burned down every house, his infantry came on only to be fearfully cut up and sent back, again and again. He was deeply disappointed. The thing was inexplicable. So on May fifth he came again. This time with eight thousand shells as a prelude. And when the last futile wave of his infantry had gone to pieces under our fire and we had taken prisoner hundreds of his men who had been sent to surround us, we knew that he had done his worst, and the winter campaign was practically at an end.

*VI*

*KITSA*

Kitsa is a church village of about fifty long, low Russian timber houses situated in a great bend of the Vaga River with only the outer curve of the river bank for a landscape and with a dense wall of pine woods in the rear. This level country is so painfully level that you always have a desire to look over the edge of the nearby horizon to see something--but you never can. When you first pass through Kitsa, which you never would have done in a million years had it not been for this war, you think it is the sorriest of all the sorry places on the river. It might at least have been located on the high bank and so gained the only thirty feet of vantage that nature had provided. Yet Kitsa has one striking distinction. The road makes a right angle in the midst of the houses, and the churches are in the angle and in the west. The West! Russia does not need landscapes because she has skies. Kitsa to me is that wonderful western sky cloven in the midst by the Byzantine spires in pea green and gold, and based flat on the black ridge of pine, and fixed forever in permanent and infinite pastels in my memory.

Kitsa was not a Bolshevist town nor Royalist. It was Constitutionalist Socialist Democratic. It was founded by refugees from Novgorod who had rebelled against certain imperial church decrees. There was still a little mound where these glorious ancestors had erected a hill of freedom. And the freedom itself had been retained intact, so the oldest inhabitant told me, it having been a matter of the text and type of the holy book read in the church.

I rode through Kitsa once when there was one platoon of American soldiers quartered there and the civilian population was about normally occupied with its own life. And then I came in with the refugees from Shenkursk on the night of January twenty-seventh. First it was Brackett Lewis and Ivan Taroslaftseff serving hot coffee and biscuits to the exhausted soldiers in the building that the people had built and used for a public school but the Allied military had commandeered, not to store whisky in, as at Bereznik, but to run a canteen in. Then it was caring for the ninety-seven wounded, then back to the men and civilian refugees, until the full daylight, and the column was all in. We took the three best houses in town for the hospital that night. Then the British officers took the next best. Then the American officers. And that following day we billeted troops in every house, and the Russian people made room for us, welcomed us, waited on us, made nothing of themselves, moved into their bath houses, then out again if we wanted them; gave us all the room there was, gladly, believed in us. I shall always remember a poor woman who came into an officer's room and opened a table drawer to look for two hundred silver roubles she had left there. The lock had been forced. The roubles were gone. Silver roubles were very precious. The woman's tearful face did not express so much grief as surprise. She had discovered something most unwelcome about our soldiers--perhaps officers. Other Russians were learning to hate the military for other reasons. In three days they were utterly bewildered. They do not take disillusionment in our offhand, familiar way. They are a serious people. Their illusions are genuine. No literature and no sophistication, but great sincerity. So completely did these Kitsaites give way to us that when the order for their evacuation went forth we gained no room for we already had it all.

One pretty girl came to us in despair one morning, because one of us could talk Russian, and told us that the Cossacks had broken into her stores in the night and stolen everything. We found they had left much. It is remarkable how effectively and cleverly these people can secrete their goods. But she knew that they would get the rest in time so she begged us to take it from her as a gift. We learned she was the daughter of the merchant who was presumably the richest man in the town. Her parents had gone to Archangel. She had refused to go. Her brothers were in Bolshevist territory. She had attended school in Moscow. She was now something of a socialist and utterly out of sympathy with her family. We bought all her goods. Some hand-woven skirt material. Some food stuff. Some oats and flour. She went to work at British headquarters as a scullery maid and was glad of the chance. And I do think she was irritated considerably by the attentions paid her because she was a pretty girl. They were of course most unartful and blatant as well as general.

A week after the peasants were evacuated the engineers who were cutting machine-gun holes in the bath houses found the frozen body of an old woman who had hidden herself in a bath house and died there rather than go away from the village where she had spent all her life. The body lay untouched for a week. Bodies froze like ice or iron when the temperature was below zero.

[Illustration: The Canadian artillery got there every time. This Russian gun crew on the railroad front enjoys warmer weather.]

One awful night when we had been horribly shelled and the evacuation of the town was hourly imminent there were nine frozen bodies laid side by side in the wood-shed behind the hospital. We should have to leave them there just as we had left others at Shenkursk and Shagavari. I had known all these boys--five Americans, two Englishmen and two Russians--and as I stood out there in the cold, dark, snowy night, I knew war. But there were other nights as bad. Nights when we sat by them as they were dying and waiting for the operating table. God! what nights! And we had to pack them off in the cold at once to a safer town to the north. Then there came a night that nearly made me forget all the others. Our forward position and only protection was demolished utterly. We were forced to abandon it, and our men and guns all crawled into Kitsa and across the river back of Kitsa to Ignatofskaya. We were done. We had put up such a fight however that the enemy was done too, but we did not know this. And the wounded came in that awful night, and the dead. We did not sleep a wink. When the sun rose on Kitsa, Kitsa too was dead. The order was for everybody to "stand to," and the streetful stood to all day long, waiting, and nothing happened. After the continuous thunder of the days before not a gun was fired. But Kitsa was dead. And the engineers were going about setting every house and building with kerosene inside and out for burning. Every kit was packed. Not a thing but cinders was to be left. Kitsa was a thing of the past. And although nothing did happen--and weary men could not stand to forever--and everybody crawled inside and slept--Kitsa was dead.

For weeks afterward we lived and worked most of the time in Kitsa. The Bolsheviki had come back, at first feebly, then with real guns. He had put up a show at fighting. His shells had burned some of our buildings. He had killed and wounded some of our men. But we had new men now. And they had the new point of view. But the piles of straw in the corners of buildings were kept soaked with kerosene. We were now holding Kitsa to keep the enemy on the east side of the river until after the ice should break up. And as I stood on the bluff and looked down on the snow-covered roofs of the town I imagined what the fire would look like--and wanted to see it.

One day I went to the cemetery where our men had been buried in unmarked graves, and for the most part identified the places; and then visited the little chapel which had been looted, and the churches. The Bibles were printed from hand-cut plates. The silver ornaments on the Bibles and the elaborate candelabra, were all hand made in every detail of construction and decoration. The soldiers had left them because of their size. All little things had been taken. All Kitsa was just like the cemetery and the churches. But the tragedy had passed over for the moment. It was peaceful death. Not even the paltry dozen shells sent over by the Bolsheviki to remind us that the war was still on made any difference to this peace.

During the very last days of our tenure of Kitsa the friction between the British command and the Americans at the front became quite serious. The command wanted certain risks taken and sacrifices made that in the judgment of the Americans were without sufficient purpose and justification. The American officers were unwilling to make what they deemed useless sacrifice of their men. So bitter did this feeling become that at one time the British commanding officer gave certain orders to the Canadian Field Artillery which the Canadians undoubtedly would not have obeyed. The British command had its troubles with them also. In spite of all this, however, Kitsa was held against the enemy until the river ice actually broke under the men as they came out, leaving more desolation and ruin to the slowly conquering Bolsheviki.

*VII*

*FIGHTING WITHOUT A FLAG*

The American soldier who was sent to Northern Russia for his part in the great war had an experience which in several respects was novel in the vast field of experience which the war imposed on Americans. One of these was that he had to fight without his flag. Not only was the flag absent from the front lines in accord with the best practices of modern warfare, but the flag as a symbol and the consciousness of what it symbolizes were equally absent for the most part from his billet, his conversation, his mess kit, and the whole campaign.

He was fed with foreign food, clothed in part with foreign clothes, invading a foreign country, given orders by foreign officers, and fighting a war that was foreign to all he had ever thought of America. He had gone into the army to fight Germany, and here he found himself after the armistice fighting an unknown foe with whom the United States was not at war, and quite as much out of sympathy with the officers of another nationality whom he had to obey, as with the men whom he was trying to kill.

His government had not told him why he was here, what grievances it had against his enemies, what arrangements it had with its allies in this expedition, nor what it hoped to accomplish if successful in the enterprise for which he daily must offer his life. His officers could not tell him. They had never been told. They wanted to know. What they did know was that at every turn, in every position, on every piece of work, in every detail of responsibility, an English officer stood over them telling them what to do. Sometimes he was a very young English officer. Sometimes a strain was necessary to get adequate rank to him. Sometimes he was utterly inexperienced.

The method of the British control of the Allied expedition to North Russia is a subject for study and an example for warning that the League of Nations may well heed. If thousands of Americans have gone home thoroughly detesting the name and memory of everything English and if other thousands of Englishmen are telling each other and being told that Americans are cowards and in the same breath that they are insolent and unmanageable, it is chiefly to be blamed on the British method of managing an allied campaign.

It might be supposed that the British, being appropriately and properly in supreme command, would have given their orders, as far as they applied solely to the operations of purely American units, to the responsible American officers, leaving these officers without petty interference to get the work accomplished. But it was not so. British colonels did not give their orders to American colonels to be passed down the line. In fact, they had very little use for American colonels. They went to the captains, the lieutenants, and even the sergeants and corporals and the men themselves. They ignored American officers most noticeably. They set their own petty officers upon the Americans in a manner that was most irritating to American national self-esteem and bitterly resented. And since all necessary things are reasonable to the military mind it was the greatest tact to explain that "the Americans know nothing about military matters, you know."

I do not feel that the Americans had a grievance necessarily because Old Glory did not wave above them in North Russia. I can imagine that they could have fought with excellent morale in France if they had not had their colors with them. The case consists of the aggravating circumstances. The men were made to feel most unnecessarily and quite contrary to the facts that they had been handed to England and forgotten, that their government was wholly unmindful of them, and that for the time at least they were deprived of the protection and divorced from the ideals of which the Stars and Stripes had always stood as a symbol in their minds.

I did see the flag once in American headquarters at Shenkursk, but it was inside and inconspicuous, and few soldiers go in at headquarters. I saw one flying on a Y.M.C.A. building, but it was of course ordered down for perfectly good and adequate reasons. I read in a soldier's letter to his sweetheart once: "For God's sake send me a little flag in your next letter. I haven't seen one since I came to this awful country." One soldier had a barishna make him a little flag from old bunting with embroidered stars. And I have seen more than one lonely American pull a little flag out of his pocket and kiss it.

At Shenkursk we were invited to hold our Christmas exercises in the monastery church. This was probably the greatest innovation ever ventured by the ecclesiastical establishment of that town. Seats were provided, the icons covered, the Abbess and nuns safely ensconced in the gallery to appease their curiosity, and the forces marched in--American soldiers and officers, a few Canadian artillerists, and British headquarters staff. Americans greatly predominated in numbers. A British chaplain read the service, concluding naturally with "God save the King." As we filed out an American private was heard to remark: "Who ever heard of the Star Spangled Banner anyhow?"

I shall not hope that academicians, business men, politicians, and sensible people generally will see anything in this but a thin sentimentalism. I should not have appreciated it had I not lived with men who were daily facing death for a cause unknown, without patriotic background or personal interest, and under the insistent domination of officers of another nation who looked down upon them, and talked about them discreditably.

"If we had British soldiers here we should drive the Bolos out in short order. But what can be done with these miserable Americans and Russians!"

The antipathy that British officers felt toward Yankees was acquired early in the campaign and increased in intensity toward the end. In some measure it was the Yankees' fault and to some extent the product of facts and forces that are beyond the control of individuals. There was disapproval and jealousy of the over-prominence America had too easily acquired in the great war. There was resentment of the favoritism of the Russians for the Americans. There was the inheritance of pride in the military achievements of the Empire. There was utter ignorance of the motives and purposes of the present English government. But there was also the independence and "insolence" of the Yankees, their free and easy attitude toward British official dignity, their insistence upon reasons why, and their assumption of knowledge and ability quite beyond anything their experience in military matters justified.

And these little irritations grew and were magnified in little minds until the manner of the Yankee salute itself became a mote in the British eye.

I have heard the most caustic and untrue criticism of American soldiers from the lips of English officers whose rank should in itself have been guaranty that they would not descend to this. I have heard it hinted at a score of times by petty officers who out of consideration for my presence did not pursue the subject to its commonplace ends. And repeatedly members of the new British army that had never seen the Yanks at all said to me in all friendliness: "What a pity that your men out here were not real Americans, that they were foreigners, and that they gave America such a black eye by their conduct."

This was a direct echo of the campaign of vilification of the American soldier which was carried on within their own circles by certain British officers of the North Russian Expeditionary Force.

I overheard some English soldiers singing a parody of "Over There," of which I can only remember "The Yanks are running, the Yanks are running everywhere," and the last line "And they didn't do a damn thing about it over there." This was in Archangel. There were no Yankee soldiers about. They were at the front. The singing which had been in a subdued tone was stopped immediately when my presence was observed and when we had finished a little conversation the Tommies sang "Over There," and they sang it straight. There was no anti-Yank feeling in these men. They had genuine admiration for the Yankee soldiers. They had picked up the little seeds of antipathy from some of their officers.

As a matter of fact the American soldier in North Russia fought well. He drove the Bolsheviki 427 versts south of Archangel before winter set in, and then took up winter quarters and prepared for defense. Constant patrolling had to be done, and expeditions had to be made against the Bolshevik villages that flanked us on both sides and constantly threatened our rear. All this was for the most part true of seven fronts between which there was no connection or communication except by going back to the base.

Captain Odyard of Company A was decorated by the British government, and the company was praised for its gallant work at Ustpadenga and Vistafka, and yet the British Tommies of the new army asked me in July: "Why was it that the Yanks turned tail at Ustpadenga?"

The charges made by the British that the American soldiers were unreliable and mutinous were founded correctly on the mental attitude of the American soldier and upon the things he said. He hated the expedition and its management. But those charges were not fairly founded upon anything that the American soldier did. There was an instance of one company refusing at one time to go to the front. It was but a temporary refusal. They went. There were several parallel instances when British and Canadian and French soldiers resorted to similar semi-mutiny. It was always momentary. They always eventually went forward with the unequal fight despite the inhuman conditions. The dissatisfied and unhappy soldier was not yellow. He may have had some sympathy for the Bolsheviki whose country he was unwillingly invading. He certainly felt that the invasion was a crime. But he was not yellow.[#] He obeyed orders. He fought splendidly. He went to his death. He held his post. He cursed the British and did his duty. He killed Bolsheviki, plenty of them, not knowing why.

[#] The report of the Judge Advocate General gives a number of cases of American soldiers who were convicted by court-martial of having been guilty of self-inflicted wounds. The number accused of this was lamentably large. Even if larger in proportion, however, than in any other army in the world war, the reflective mind is forced to ask the question: Why?

*VIII*

*"AMERICA DOBRA"*

There was one thing in North Russia that touched every American where every normal man is sentimental. There was a passion for America. In every log house there was love for America. In the hearts of the people in every village there was moving what Benjamin Kidd calls "the emotion of the ideal."

We could not understand it at first. Every peasant greeted us with "America dobra," which is not good Russian, but a sort of slang phrase meaning that America is all right. And now and then one would step up a little nearer and in a more subdued tone say that some other country was not all right.

We suspected at first that he was playing a double game. We remembered the man who walks like a bear. We smiled cynically and handed him a cigarette. But we did him an injustice.

[Illustration: The church at Yemetskoye is visible for many miles up the Dvina. Shenkursk is a quiet and romantic spot on the Vaga River.]

One heavily whiskered old peasant of Kitsa made me see this injustice. We had crawled into Kitsa on the second night after the evacuation of Shenkursk, with the weather about twenty below zero and bringing with us ninety-seven wounded on sleds. The senior medical officer had selected the best houses in Kitsa for hospital purposes, and one could never forget how cheerfully on ten minutes' notice those peasant people got themselves and their things out of the way and helped to get the patients in and warm and fed. Two of these houses belonged to my bewhiskered friend. He was something of a magnate in Kitsa. And it turned out that we were to use his houses for hospital purposes for months after that night, sending him and his on their northward way, for safety in the company of refugees from seven other villages. His property interests in Kitsa, however, were too important in his old life to be ignored and in a few days he was back with a sled convoy as a common driver, a labor which he persisted in as long as the fortunes of war permitted for the sake of the opportunity it gave him to look things over. Knowing that the hospital was an American affair the old man was quite delighted that his houses had been chosen for this purpose.

"America dobra," he said to me exultantly.