To effect this object and gain access to the interior of Russia, the Murman railway, therefore, assumed a momentous significance; but in truth the "Eastern Front" remained a figment of the military imagination. Russia had poured out the life blood of her sons in the Allied defense till she staggered weak and exhausted, so spent that she swayed in a moral lethargy from which nothing on earth could arouse her, and those Russian soldiers who survived returned to their villages or else were conscripted for the Red army by the amazingly effective methods of Trotsky. Still, in the spring of the year 1918, the situation in Finland appeared so fraught with grave potentialities of decisive consequence, that on 27th May, the Allied military attaches of Italy, France, England and the United States met at Moscow and unanimously agreed that these nations should intervene in the affairs of Russia. Shortly after this, the Supreme War Council at Versailles decided in favor of intervention in the northern Russian ports, and the United States gave its consent. Brigadier General F. C. Poole had been in Petrograd in command of the technical war mission of the British in Russia. Thoroughly familiar with Russian character and Russian conditions, he was chosen to command the Northern Expedition. The advance party of the Americans landed in Archangel on 3rd August, 1918. On the same day, this statement was cabled to the Russian Ambassador from the State Department at Washington: In the judgment of the government of the United States, a judgment arrived at after repeated and very searching considerations of the whole situation, military intervention in Russia would be more likely to add to the present sad confusion there than to cure it, and would confuse rather than help her out of her distresses, as the government of the United States sees the present circumstances, therefore military action is admissible in Russia now only to render such protection and help as is possible to the Czecho-Slovaks against the armed Austrian and German prisoners who are attacking them, and to steady any efforts at self-government or self-defense in which Russians themselves may be willing to accept assistance. Whether from Vladivostok or from Murmansk and Archangel, the _only present object for which American troops will be employed will be to guard military stores_ which may be subsequently needed by Russian forces, and to render such aid as may be acceptable to the Russians in the organization of their own defense. The importance of guarding the Arctic ports from the Germans passed with the signing of the Armistice, but armed intervention continued, and the most sanguinary battles in North Russia were fought in the dark winter months that followed.