age up the delta of the Dvina
River and the actual landing while exciting to the jackies met with
little opposition. Truth to tell, the wily Bolsheviks had for many weeks
seen the trend of affairs, and, expecting a very much larger expedition,
had sent or prepared for hasty sending south by rail toward Vologda or
by river to Kotlas of all the military supplies and munitions and
movable equipment as well as large stores of loot and plunder from the
city of Archangel and suburbs. Count von Mirbach, the German ambassador
at Moscow, threatened Lenine and Trotsky that the German army then
glowering in Finland, across the way, would march on Petrograd unless
the military stores were brought out of Archangel.

The rearguard of the Bolshevik armed forces was disappearing over the
horizon when the American jackies seized engines and cars at Archangel
Preestin and Bakaritza, which had been saved by the hindering activities
of anti-Bolshevik trainmen, and dashed south in pursuit. There is a
heroic little tale of an American Naval Reserve lieutenant who with a
few sailors took a lame locomotive and two cars with a few rifles and
two machine guns, mounted on a flat car, and hotly gave chase to the
retreating Red Guards, routing them in their stand at Issaka Gorka where
they were trying to destroy or run off locomotives and cars, and then
keeping their rear train moving southward at such a rate that the Reds
never had time to blow the rails or burn a bridge till he had chased
them seventy-five miles. There a hot box on his improvised armored train
stopped his pursuit. He tore loose his machine guns and on foot reached
the bridge in time to see the Reds burn it and exchange fire with them,
receiving at the end a wound in the leg for his great gallantry.

The Red Guards were able to throw up defenses and to bring up supporting
troops. A few days later the French battalion fought a spirited, but
indecisive, engagement with the Reds. It was seen that he intended to
fight the Allies. He retreated southward a few miles at a time, and
during the latter part of August succeeded in severely punishing a force
of British and French and American sailors, who had sought to attack the
Reds in flank. And it was this episode in the early fighting that caused
the frantic radiogram to reach us on the Arctic Ocean urging the
American ships to speed on to Archangel to save the handful of Allied
men threatened with annihilation on the railroad and up the