When the last troop ships trailed off to drooping skies, a bearded moujik sat in the stern of a flat boat directing four broad backed women at the oars. The recumbent coxswain waved a languid gesture across Archangel Bay where tiny ships were bearing off to the north; and four oars poised in mid-air as the laboring crew turned with dull Slavic contemplation to regard the parting foreigners, and the end of their peculiar expedition. But only for a moment, there was more important business in hand than idle gazing at Englishskis, however queer they might be. A gruff command, and the freighted craft continued its slow toiling course to the market place, the overlord resumed his interrupted smoke of good Allied cigarettes and the Englishskis were dismissed from memory. This was the leave-taking. On the evening of 12th October, 1919, the last of the Allied forces set sail from Murmansk for England; four months afterward, on the 20th February, the Bolsheviks recaptured Archangel. Nearly four months earlier the last of the Americans set sail on the 26th day of June, 1919, and as the paling shores mingled with the distant sky line and faded from sight, so too the fever of this troublous, little war with Russia abated, yielding to the gentle ministrations of memory's cooling twilight. With the Americans, at least, there remained no shred of illusion. When Winston Churchill told the Commons that Archangel, with one lone American regiment, the few battle retrieved soldiers of England, and a single battalion of disaffected Frenchmen, had kept many German divisions in the East, and played an important part in the last battles, he laid a flattering unction to the soul of British statescraft; but his insincere words did not deceive the American soldier, for the American soldier was mentally and emotionally paralyzed beyond deception, and a conviction of blunder was only strengthened by this and other clumsy explanations vouchsafed by Allied statesmen; by the guilt-laden silence of America. Germany was never concerned with Archangel. There was no evidence of German participation in the campaign; no evidence that our petty hostilities with the Bolsheviks had ever benefited Foch on the Western theater. We had waged war upon Russia. Whether willfully or unwillingly, our country had engaged in an unprovoked intensive, inglorious, little armed conflict which had ended in disaster and disgrace. Perhaps this was a laudable thing to do. Perhaps it is always idealistic and praiseworthy to intervene for self-conceived righteousness in the internal affairs of another nation, as England might have done in the case of the American Confederacy, and as we did in the case of this civil war among the Russians. It is easy enough to enter the battle lists, but, once in, it is not so easy to withdraw from the fight with self-respect unsullied and honor undefiled.