, we
had come out top-dog in the business, so we left it at that.

It must not be supposed that things never went wrong in spite of the
elaborate system that we were adopting for transferring war material
to Archangel under our control. Late in the autumn of 1916 I extracted
out of von Donop a 9.2-inch howitzer and mounting all complete--he did
not part readily with his goods--so as to send them on ahead and to
afford the Russians an opportunity of learning the points of this
ordnance, in anticipation of the arrival of a regular consignment of
the weapons which had been promised for a later date. But part of the
concern somehow found its way into one ship and the rest of it into
another ship, and one of the ships managed to get rid of her propeller
in the North Sea, drifted aimlessly for a whole month, was believed to
have foundered, and was eventually discovered and towed ignominiously
back to one of our northern ports. She was lucky not to meet with a
U-boat during her wanderings. The result was that the Russians
received either a howitzer and no mounting or a mounting and no
howitzer, I forget which, and the whole bag of tricks was not
assembled at its destination until after part of the regular
consignment of 9.2-inch howitzers had arrived in Petrograd about
April.

In connection with this business of shipping goods to our eastern
Ally, it should be mentioned that the sealing up of the port of
Archangel and of the White Sea in general from about mid-November
until well on in May--the exact period varied in different seasons,
and depended to some extent upon the direction of the wind--complicated
the problem. Some forty of our ships had been embedded in ice for
months in these waters in the winter of 1915-16, and the Admiralty
were taking no risks this time. It was not a question merely of
getting a vessel to its destination, but also a question of getting
her discharged and out of the trap before it snapped-to. That a
railway had not been constructed to Murmansk years before, illustrates
the torpor and lack of enterprise of the ruling classes in Russia.
Although Archangel is icebound somewhat longer, the Gulfs of Finland
and Bothnia likewise become impassable for navigation during the
winter; so that for some months of the year maritime communication
between northern portions of the empire and the outer world was almost
necessarily to a great extent cut off. And yet all the time there
existed a fine natural harbo