The Czechs had fused with Admiral Kolchak's armies. Under the leadership of General Gaida, they formed his right wing and were beyond Perm, some three hundred miles east of Viatka. It was thought that these friendly Siberian forces could take Viatka, advance up the railway to Kotlas, and join there with the Archangel Russians. Thereupon the British, leisurely and in security, could return down the river to the waiting transports and sail homeward. So Kotlas, which had been the original objective of the River Column, became the objective once more. The Admiralty dispatched to Archangel a flotilla of gunboats, monitors, mine sweepers and many other craft for the transportation of troops and supplies to act as auxiliaries for the infantry, and again the Dvina became a scene of skeltering preparations for war. On the 20th June, the disengaging offensive began; the British and Archangel troops attacked across the river from the Allied position at Toulgas, and gained complete victory, capturing two hundred prisoners, many machine guns and three field guns. But now word came from the south that the Bolsheviks there had concentrated in great forces against Kolchak and had utterly routed him, that he was fleeing east, had already retired as far as Yetakerinburg, and all hope would have to be given up of effecting a junction with the Siberian army. So the importance of taking Kotlas waned, but even if Kolchak had not failed the advance could have gone little further, for it was found that due to the light snowfall of the previous winter, the waters of Dvina were low, beyond all precedent, and the British flotilla could follow no farther upstream. Most discouraging of all, treachery broke out in all quarters from the allied Russian troops. On the 7th July a battalion held in reserve on the river mutinied in the night and murdered three British and four Russian officers as they slept; four other officers were seriously wounded. On the 22nd July the whole Onega detachment went over to the Bolsheviks, and the safety of Archangel became seriously jeopardized from this west port. Nearly at the same time British firing squads suppressed a revolt on the Railway front before the Russian mutineers gained the upper hand. Many of the British officers had passed through all the harrowing fires of France, but here was a form of peril new in the experience of the most hardened ones--base betrayal by the sentinel who kept the black watches of the night, and treachery in the heart of the citadel from hands stretched forth in friendship. The brave man, standing on his feet and facing the end, does not fear advancing death; but now it lurked in hiding, it descended in the night and struck from the dark upon unconscious sleep, so that tired soldiers dared not rest, and the strain snapped nerves of steel.