When night screened the battle scene, the Allied Russians, upon their own inspiration, evacuated the village on the flat, and the next day, the unwitting Bolsheviks began the second phase of their investment of Ust Padenga. Again the artillery, even more violently than the first day, flung hurtling blasts at the deserted village, and late at day, the infantry, grotesque, bobbing objects out on the wide snow stretches, stormed the uncontested position. It was like rifle practice to shoot down those living targets, glaringly open on the white snow, and they were downed by tattering bursts of shrapnel, downed by musketry, downed by awful devastating bursts from machine guns, that moved them row upon row, until the last man had passed to the cover of this village of costly folly, and the snow was dotted with dead and wounded, which, from the distant hill, looked grotesquely like raisins stuck in an immense rice pudding. On the third day, the surviving village, lying bare on the unsheltered top of the cliff, was the target of a barrage that searched it house to house, until many of the moujik homes were wrecks of smashed timbers, and the trail of human wreckage was a ghastly, unsightly thing. The American doctor went to death, a victim of the shells, because he would not have his wounds bound up while a single, private soldier was not relieved, but he lives with Vaga men as long as life endures, a symbol of moral grandeur and noblest self abnegation, that will ever inspire faith in the immortal, spiritual entity of man. It was not the Viking Captain who ordered retreat from Ust Padenga. Half of his little company was gone, but he had no thought of yielding. He would have held on until the last dog was hung, if superior directions had not come from Shenkurst. He loved a fight, this antique Norseman, loved the wild, esoteric fury of it. Three times, his men threw back the Bolsheviks, and caught in a contagion of blood lust, they craved still more, maddened by battle, they took hilarious delight in seeing "the Bolos bite the snow banks." They did not know that pitted against them was the vanguard of an army that by every objective rule of warfare should have crushed this rash, little group to utter destruction; but if Ust Padenga did not know, all at Shenkurst were fully alert to the gravity of the situation. This was the much proclaimed Bolshevik offensive, with its object, the annihilation of the Allied North Russian Expedition; and now as the full fury of the gigantic, impending assault unfolded, the "offensive defensive" theory found vindication, for at the Ust Padenga, little more than one company had stood off a regiment of the enemy.