track
next to the British Headquarters car, the Blue Car with the Union Jack
flying over it and the whole Allied force. Secretly, he itched to get
his armored train into point-blank engagement with the Bolshevik armored
train.

"All patrols must be aggressive," directed a secret order of Col. Guard,
the British officer commanding this "A" Force on the railroad, "and it
must be impressed on all ranks that we are fighting an offensive war,
and not a defensive one, although for the time being it is the duty of
everybody to get the present area in a sound state of defense. All posts
must be held to the last as we do not intend to give up any ground which
we have made good."

And within a week after landing in Russia the American soldier was
indeed making head on an offensive campaign, for on September 11th two
platoons of "M" Company reconnoitering in force met a heavy force of
Bolos on similar mission and fought the first engagement with the Red
Guards, driving the Reds from the station at Verst 466 and taking
possession of the bridge at Verst 464.

We had ridden out past the outguard on the armored train, left it and
proceeded along the railway. Remember that first Bolo shell? Well, yes.
That thing far down the straight track three miles away Col. Guard,
before going to the rear, derisively told Lieut. Danley could not be a
Bolo armored train but was a sawmill smoke stack. Suddenly it flashed.
Then came the distant boom. Came then the whining, twist-whistling shell
that passed over us and showered shrapnel near the trenches where lay
our reserves. He shortened his range but we hurried on and closed with
his infantry with the decision in the American doughboy's favor in his
first fight. He had learned that it takes many shrapnel shells and
bullets to hit one man, that to be hit is not necessarily to be killed.

A few days later "L" Company supported in the nick of time by two
platoons of "I" Company repulsed a savage counter-attack staged by the
Red Guards, September 16th, on a morning that followed the capture of a
crashing Red bombing plane in the evening and the midnight conflagration
in "L" Company's fortified camp that might have been misinterpreted as
an evacuation by the Bolo. In this engagement Lieut. Gordon B. Reese and
his platoon of "I" Company marked themselves with distinction by
charging the Reds as a last resort when ammunition had been exhausted in
a vain attempt to gain fire superiority against the ove