  Produced by Al Haines. [image] The Area of the Archangel Campaign. FIGHTING WITHOUT An Account of Military Intervention BY RALPH ALBERTSON ILLUSTRATED FROM PHOTOGRAPHS NEW YORK COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY THE QUINN & BODEN COMPANY TO THE AMERICAN, BRITISH AND PREFACE The writer of this book went to North Russia as a Y.M.C.A. secretary assigned to work with the army, landing at Murmansk just before Thanksgiving, 1918. I reached Archangel December first and was sent at once to Shenkursk and Ustpadenga, the southernmost points of the expedition. I was in charge of the Y.M.C.A. work for the Vaga column until June first when I went to Yemetskoye and later to Archangel with the departing American troops. As the British Y.M.C.A. was not prepared to take over all the work at that time several Americans remained with the British and Russian armies. As one of these I returned south to Berezniki July first. On August first I was made responsible for the evacuation of the entire Allied Y.M.C.A. personnel, supplies, and equipment from the forward Dvina and Vaga areas. This enabled me to be the last American to leave. I returned to Archangel August thirtieth and sailed with the last of the embassies, consulates, military missions, etc., on September second. This book does not assume to tell the whole story of that expedition. I did not see all of it. No man did. In addition to what I saw, however, I had the advantage of meeting constantly men who had seen and been in the various other fights and locations. Under the overstimulating circumstances of army life the very air seems full of wild rumors. This was particularly true in the isolations of the Russian fighting. I have felt the necessity therefore of exercising great care not to accept as true uncorroborated army rumors. The matters of chief interest in this book, moreover, are matters of my own personal observation and knowledge. The various censorships imposed by the American and British governments have prevented the publication of so much important and significant news of this expedition that no number of books that may be published now could cover the whole story. Most of it, moreover, has ceased to be news. However, those censorships accompanied by the official propaganda have left the country in a state of gross misinformation regarding the expedition. Mistakes were made, abuses suffered, heroisms performed, and tragedies enacted which it is the right of the American and British people to know about. In respect of the mistakes and abuses the publication of this account has devolved upon me as a not altogether pleasant duty. While I have been compelled to criticize the attitude and actions of British officers as a class in order to tell the truth of what happened in North Russia I should regret to have my words taken as applying equally to all of them. I wish also to say that some who fall most squarely under the criticisms of this book were among my warmest friends and I cherish for them a genuine personal regard. To certain British and Canadian officers I undoubtedly owe my life and they gave me (especially the Canadians) the utmost coÖperation and courtesy throughout the entire campaign. As to the Yanks, God bless them, it wasn't their show. E.A. CONTENTS CHAPTER
ILLUSTRATIONS FIGHTING WITHOUT A WAR I THE EXPEDITION The North Russian Expeditionary Force consisted of men from America, England, Canada, France, Italy, and Serbia. England sent the largest number of men, America the second largest, the other countries being represented by only a few companies each. The expedition was under the command of the British War Office, which sent out a large number of unattached British officers to take charge of the Russian armies that were to be formed and to supervise all American and other officers that had been attached to the expedition. The first landing of troops of the North Russian Expeditionary Force was in August, 1918. The German armistice was signed November 11. Fighting continued all winter. The American troops were withdrawn in June, 1919. A much larger British army landed in June. Our Russian conscripts mutinied against the English in July, making it impossible for the English to remain. The last man of the North Russian Expeditionary Force was withdrawn in September, 1919. The "washout" was complete. England had spent five hundred million dollars and lost thousands of men. The cost to America and the other countries had been less in men and money, but considerable in other ways. The cost to Russia in every way had been incalculable. When this expedition was sent to Russia the Allies were at war with Germany. Russia was not. She had signed the Brest-Litovsk treaty. We did not declare war on Russia, nor on any section of Russians. We went, it was reasonable to suppose, to guard the military stores we had shipped to Archangel and save them from falling into German hands, and to prevent the Germans from establishing a submarine base at Murmansk. When we got there, however, the Bolshevik Russians, viewing the expedition as one of enmity to them, had removed practically all of the millions of dollars' worth of stores to points far south of Archangel and had themselves left for points of from one to two hundred miles south. We pursued them and war began,—war with the de facto government of Russia, whom indeed we had not recognized and against whom we had made no declaration. There was no war technically speaking in North Russia. There surely was no legal basis of war. But there was plenty of fighting. News of this fighting does not seem to have reached America very freely. The double English and American censorship was very effective. First we had declared we would not engage in a military intervention in Russia, then having gotten into it we declared we were not doing it, then we depended on the censorship. No mention was made of this expedition in the armistice of November. Hence it had in some subtle way ceased to be a part of our war against Germany. It had become a new war, a war against Bolshevik Russia, an unlegalized war, and this it continued to be as long as the expedition lasted. Yet no declaration was forthcoming, either of war or of peace. Particularly wanting was a declaration of purpose. Weary months of stubborn fighting for our men were unrelieved by any single word of definition of the fight from their government. There consequently was antagonism to the campaign on the part of the soldiers. I do not say loss of morale, because the term would be misunderstood. Our men fought. Our infantry never lost a foot of ground. But they hated the fight, they resented fighting without a cause. I made a trip in December, speaking to the men in their billets and the Y.M.C.A. huts over a stretch of five hundred versts. Everywhere, on every occasion, I was asked persistently and importunately, "What are we here for?" "The armistice is signed. Why are we fighting?" "Did they forget about us in Paris?" "We don't want Russia. What have we against the Bolsheviki?" Of course I tried to answer these questions, but I found it easier to convince myself than I did to convince these men. They were not convinced that I knew. The American and Canadian troops were particularly outspoken in their resentment at being at war in a futile fight against nobody and for nothing in particular when the rest of the world had stopped fighting. A real cause of this grand dÉbÂcle therefore was the silence of our governments. I could not answer their questions. Nobody who came to them could answer their questions. Their governments would not. II THE ARCHANGEL GOVERNMENT When our governments sent out this expedition the government of Archangel as of all Russia was Bolshevik. It was not a strong government, that is, it did not have a strong and dependable army and navy. It had not been regularly instituted by the people, nor had it been recognized by other governments than those with whom we were at war. We had no dealings with it, except the undeclared war of this expedition. We negotiated with certain individual Russians in London, took them to Archangel with us, and there set up a government to our own taste. [image] Archangel has many excellent and substantial buildings. The Archangel water-front has miles of good docking facilities. This was a military job. Even the military, however, find it necessary to consider popular opinion to some extent. So this new government was composed of democratic men. Tschaikowsky was made President. The people knew him and trusted him. His government failed to realize at first that it was only the creature of foreign military authority and began to function sincerely. It was kidnaped for discipline and put on an island for a few days of meditation. The allied military did not come to Archangel to set up a pure democracy nor to encourage socialism nor to listen to theories. They came to fight the plans of Germany, to fight the Bolsheviki, to guard stores, to teach Russia to fight. Beyond this the military mind goeth not. So the venerable Tschaikowsky was gradually put aside and ignored and before long sent to London on an important mission, never to return, but still a valuable figurehead, while a Russian military government grew up under the aegis of the British army, composed of monarchists and military men of the old school. The head of this government was General Miller (Mueller) a militarist and monarchist who is without popular Russian support and whose position is entirely due to his standing with the British military establishment. III MANAGEMENT It was a British show. The British were in absolute command. Whole shiploads of British officers were sent there to perform all possible functions of management and to cover all possible needs. The Americans, Russians, French, Italians, and Serbians all obeyed the British officers, and found British officers duplicating their own at every juncture. Even at that there was a surplus, and I have had several of them, from a colonel down, tell me that they were hanging around Archangel waiting for something to do. It was British responsibility to decide where we should stand, when we should move, and who should do what. They never neglected this responsibility in any detail. If they could avoid it, they never delegated any detail of authority to any officer of any other nationality. If they took counsel with their associates of other nationalities it was never heard of in the ranks. I have heard an American officer of high rank speak very bitterly of the fact that the British never consulted him except to give him orders, and made him feel quite useless. IV THE FALL CAMPAIGN As our ships rode into the mouth of the Dvina River with the first troops of the expedition, and the last train pulled out of Archangel Preestyn bearing the last of the Bolsheviki away to the south, the people of Archangel came out to the river bank and the docks to see the incoming fleet and to welcome their deliverers from Bolshevist proletariat tyranny and prolonged political and industrial unrest. The Russians were tired of war, and as they lined up on the river banks in front of the hundreds of peasant villages bordering a thousand versts of rivers to express their welcome it was Peace and Prosperity that they thought they were welcoming. In fact, however, it was war, war such as that part of Russia had never known before, and most expensive war. The expedition had been sent "to guard stores at Archangel." Since these stores had been taken by those whom we assumed to be friends of Germany we must pursue them. We did. We took guns along. We found them, with guns also, at several points about a hundred miles from the city. Their forces were weak. So were ours. But we drove them, or they led us, down the Murmansk railroad past Kem, down the Vologda railroad beyond Obozerskaya, up the Onega River to Chekuevo, up the Pinega River, up the Emtza River, up the Dvina River past Toulgas, and up the Vaga River to Ustpadenga. We did not capture our enemy nor the stores we had come to guard. The early Russian winter came and found us thrown out to seven points in a form that was like a seven-fingered hand with one finger three hundred miles long and with no lateral communication between the fingers. In driving these lines out there was some fighting, mostly of a guerrilla type. We lost a number of men, but our casualties were comparatively small. We had been on the offensive and had followed lines of not very great resistance. The positions in which winter found us may not have been planned by the Bolsheviki, but I doubt if any English record exists of such a plan or if any officer will confess to having made such a plan. We just happened to be there. We were scattered as far as possible. Each position was practically isolated from all the others. Our lines of communication were weak and inefficient. The only protection to our flanks and our rears was the hoped-for snow which came early and abundantly. V THE WINTER CAMPAIGN The winter was spent on the defensive. The Bolsheviki at first attempted to cut us off at Yemetskoye by using his excellent communication on the Vologda railroad and attacked Kodish and Shredn Makrenga. He was held here by the Americans and Canadians, who did not know when they were defeated and who now fully realized the desperate character of the fight that they were launched upon. He also attacked on the Murmansk railroad, where he was met by seasoned Serbians against whom he shattered himself in vain. He attacked at Pinega and at Chekuevo also without success. We were fighting at Toulgas on Armistice Day, and with Kotlas as his base the Bolshevik managed to keep up his attack here practically all winter while Co. B, 339th Infantry, U.S.A., took the brunt of the work of holding him off. [image] The American Engineers built scores of block houses like this. This was our only possible communication with Archangel, 300 miles to the north. The most serious fighting of the winter, however, was on the Vaga River. Our forward position at Ustpadenga was held by one company of American infantry, one platoon of American engineers, three eighteen-pounder guns manned by Canadians, and occasional units of Russian conscripts. The position had no peculiar advantages, and all the disadvantages of isolation and exposure that could make it a bad choice. It is doubtful whether it had been chosen. We got there and we stayed there. We were there because we were there. So we entrenched and built block houses and strung wire and chopped away a clearing a few hundred feet from our billets and laid in such stores and ammunition as a few ponies could pull down, and waited. This was twenty-seven versts south of Shenkursk, and Shenkursk was one hundred versts south of Bereznik, and Bereznik was three hundred versts south of Archangel. Shenkursk was our advanced base. Here we had one company of American infantry, one platoon of American engineers, one section of Canadian artillery, American headquarters for 1st battalion, 339th, British headquarters for the Vaga column with all the attendant service units, an American hospital, and miscellaneous units of Russians numbering about a thousand, poorly organized, badly officered, and of doubtful morale. Shenkursk is the second largest city in the Archangel government, having a normal population of about three thousand people, a cathedral, a monastery with two churches, and three other churches. It was something of an educational center and summer resort. We found a number of Petrograd and Moscow people here whose summer vacations had been prolonged by the exigencies of Russian politics. There were many excellent houses here, some mansions, some interesting people, a most comfortable place to spend the winter. Here we fortified, quite thoroughly, better perhaps than anywhere else in North Russia. To be sure we were outflanked by Kodema, a Bolshevik village on our left and Tarniya, a Bolshevik village on our right, a little to the rear. But otherwise we were quite comfortable. We made several attacks on these villages, but always found it necessary to retire. On January 19, 1919, the big fight began. The Bolsheviki five thousand strong attacked Ustpadenga. They had three or four times as many guns as we had, including some long-range artillery that was far beyond the reach of our guns. They had perfect observation on our positions and telephone wires clear around to our rear. They picked off every billet, up one side of the street and down the other. We had no secrets. And their infantry came up in excellent form and spirit, covered with perfect white camouflage and supported with machine-guns and pompoms. Our men drove them back and held them off for days until the British command ordered them to fall back to Shenkursk. One platoon of forty men had thirty-two casualties, and every man in that small force had to do the work of ten men throughout that terrible week. Fighting all the way back, Company A, 339th American Infantry, and the Center Section 38th Battery, Canadian Field Artillery, dragged themselves minus two guns into Shenkursk on the night of the 25th. During that day Shenkursk had been bombarded from four sides and we knew that we were completely surrounded, although no Bolshevik infantry had attacked here. There were no reinforcements to be had. Some of our Russian conscripts had gone over to the enemy. There was no hope of relief from the north in case we should be besieged. There was nothing to prevent his big guns reducing Shenkursk to ruins. We had Company C here as well as Company A and felt confident of our ability to hold off the Bolshevik infantry in any numbers, but his artillery had us beaten, because outranged, from the start. So it was decided to evacuate that night by an unused road that we hoped the Bolsheviki had overlooked. By very clever and efficient work on the part of the British command the evacuation of Shenkursk was successfully carried out without the loss of a man, and we were followed by hundreds of civilians, who discovered our movement in the night. The next morning when we were well to the north we heard his guns open up on Shenkursk. He did not know we had escaped him. He had yet to learn that we had left behind for him one hundred days' rations for two thousand men, great stores of ammunition and ordinance, all our personal kits, and several spiked guns. By night of the 26th we reached Shagavari, having made forty versts on a single track sled road, walking two abreast and stretched out for miles. Here nearly every one snatched a little sleep, as we found two platoons of Company D who held off the vanguard of the pursuit which had begun to catch up to us. The civilian column, swelled now to thousands, poured out into the road ahead of us, a long winding snake-like trail of black in a white world, making for somewhere north. We evacuated Shagavari on the afternoon of the 27th and stood for our new front at Vistafka, sixteen versts north, with Kitsa seven versts to the rear as headquarters. During this retreat the temperature had been from thirty-six to ten below zero. We had brought out ninety-seven wounded and sick and these were sent on to Bereznik and Archangel—three hundred miles on pony sleds traveling day and night. The civilian refugees were partly Russians who had conspicuously identified themselves with us and so were afraid of the Bolsheviki, partly those who felt that they would be surer of food behind our lines, there were some personal friends of soldiers, and yet they were mostly peasants whom we had been compelled to put out of their houses for military reasons. Our new front consisted in all of eight villages. At first a barricade of pine branches and snow, then some logs, then some block houses, then some wire, after a while a dug-out or two. The fighting here at Vistafka was the hardest and most continuous of the winter. Every day there was some shelling, and five major attacks were made before March first when we were forced to make Kitsa our forward position. The fighting at Vistafka was done by companies A, C, D, and F, by Royal Scots and Kings Liverpools, by Russians, and by the splendid Canadian artillery units who were fortunately reinforced by a 4.5 howitzer E.F.A. The old artillery supremacy of the Bolsheviki remained unchanged, however, and while seven thousand infantry, having surrounded Vistafka could not take it, the guns did finally reduce it to untenability. From March 1 to April 20, Kitsa was the front line, with Maximofskaya for support on our right, and our guns at Ignatofskaya. These villages lay only one and two versts apart. We were preparing Malobereznik, seven versts in the rear, for defense, and fell back here on Easter Sunday. This stubborn resistance on our part was important because it was absolutely necessary to hold the enemy here or he would cut off the whole Dvina column and take Bereznik where we had accumulated great stores of supplies and munitions. Bereznik was his goal and the Vaga River was his road. He hammered away daily at Toulgas, our Dvina River front, but that was to keep Company B and our other forces there. He could not hope to take it. [image] The "Y" was always on the job. These Canadians fought in France before they went to Russia. 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. [image] 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. |
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