, go with General Finlayson
whom General Poole had ordered to take Vologda, four hundred miles to
the south. His first battalion, under Lieutenant Colonel Corbley he had
seen hurried off up the Dvina River under another British
Brigadier-General to take Kotlas hundreds of miles up the river. His
second battalion under Major J. Brooks Nichols was on duty in Archangel
and the nearby suburbs. These forces, and his 310th Engineer Battalion
and his Ambulance and Hospital Units were shifted about by the British
Generals and Colonels and Majors often without any information whatever
to Colonel Stewart, the American commanding officer. He lost touch with
his battalion and company commanders.

He had a discouraging time even in getting his few general orders
distributed to the American troops. No wonder that often an American
officer or soldier reporting in from a front by order or permission of a
British field officer, did not feel that American Headquarters was his
real headquarters and in pure ignorance was guilty of omitting some duty
or of failure to comply with some Archangel restriction that had been
ordered by American Headquarters. As to general orders from American
Headquarters dealing with the action of troops in the field, those were
so few and of so little impressiveness that they have been forgotten. We
must say candidly that the doughboy came to look upon American
Headquarters in Archangel as of very trifling importance in the strange
game he was up against. He knew that the strategy was all planned at
British G. H. Q., that the battle orders were written in the British
field officer's headquarters, that the transportation and supplies of
food were under control of the British that altogether too much of the
hospital service was under control of the British. Somehow the doughboy
felt that the very limited and much complained about service of his own
American Supply Unit, that lived for the most part on the fat of the
land in Bakaritza, should have been corrected by his commanding officer
who sat in American Headquarters. And they felt, whether correctly or
not, that the court-martial sentences of Major C. G. Young, who acted as
summary court officer at Smolny after he was relieved of his command in
the field, were unnecessarily harsh. And they blamed their commanding
officer, Colonel Stewart, for not taking note of that fact when he
reviewed and approved them. The writers of this history of the
expedition think th