The main body of the enemy had carried with them far up the river to Kotlas and down the railway to Vologda, rations, rifles, guns and ammunitions, American manufactured. Likewise, they had seized and carried off nearly all available means of transportation; and when the Allied troops examined the vast storehouses in the harbor and at Bakaritza, they found that the Bolsheviks deliberately, systematically and with great thoroughness had stripped the shelves of every conceivable thing of value. If the object of the Archangel Expedition was to safeguard the vast munitions and stores there, it had failed signally and at the outset. Still the enemy had fled, for, by some occult form of necromancy the Bolsheviki had now become "the enemy," and it is a major premise of the military that a fleeing enemy must always be followed up. Small heed that little was known of the strength or disposition of the retiring army. They had fled. Two forces were immediately dispatched in pursuit, up the river and down the railway; and, to augment the strength of the invaders, new troops were sent from Europe. The 339th American Infantry arrived at Archangel on 4th September, 1918. It was composed of Wisconsin and Michigan men, mostly the latter; men from our farms and from our cities, who had been drafted for war against Germany. Like most of our civilian soldiers, they had no exuberant ecstasy for the grim business ahead, but still possessed a remarkable appreciation of the war and its deep significant issues. And they had a quiet courage that was good to see, and a quiet resolution shorn of sentimental heroics to give their lives for their country if the sacrifice was necessary. Not one of them was deeply agitated by the emotion of "Making the world safe for Democracy," which is the desiccated war cry of the academician and never could reach the heart depths of any people; but they did feel in some vague, yet definite way, that a soulless military system, which had trampled brutal, iron-clad boots through the gentle fields of Belgium, might some day carry its hateful spate to the Michigan village or green-hilled Wisconsin farm, where an old lady with spectacles sat behind the window of a white cottage, and near lilac bushes growing fragrant in the lane a wholesome faced girl waited. These soldiers of Russia were of the same type as our men who fought in France--no better and no worse; another way of saying that they were the best soldiers in the world. They were all drawn from the Eighty-fifth Division of the National Army, and came from all the races and shades and grades and trades of our many colored American society. Many of them had had only a few weeks of crowded military training, and were still civilians in physique and bearing. Most important of all, they were civilian in mental constitution.