With the 339th Infantry, came the 337th Field Hospital Company, the 337th Ambulance Company, and the 310th Engineers, a splendid, upstanding, competent battalion, that in the approaching ordeal upheld the best in our American traditions, showed extraordinary power of adaptitude, extraordinary resourcefulness, no matter the difficulties, were ever cheerful and undaunted, and altogether splendid. Roughly, the entire force of the Americans aggregated forty-five hundred men. It was augmented about a month later by five hundred replacements, snatched here and there from the infantry companies of the Eighty-fifth Division in France. That September day the Americans landed at Archangel, and the fagged engines of the troop ships _Somali_, _Tydeus_, and _Nagoya_ came to rest, those who looked from the decks breathed in the oppressive air a haunting presentiment of approaching evil. Halfway from camp at Stoney Castle, England, five hundred of the little company had been stricken with the dreaded Spanish influenza. Eight days out at sea, all medical supplies were exhausted, and conditions became so congested in the ships' quarters that the sick, running high fever, were compelled to lie in the hold or on deck exposed to the chill winds. At Archangel, there was little improvement. Soldiers were placed in old barracks, there they lay on pine boards. They had insufficient bedding, and for warmth had to keep on their clothing and boots. In this way many died and many more were enfeebled for many months, but "stuck it" with their companions and went to the front. Had the Fates placed a curse on the Expedition from the beginning? There was an air of inscrutable haunting sorrow in the lowering skies, glinted limpid with a sinister, bronzed light from a sun that flamed to crimson death among the dark trees over the bay. Across the harbor projected the tiny red roofs of the city, the venerable cathedral, ghostly with great white dome, grotesque fantastic spires and minarets, garish in the fading light with startling pigments of green and gold. A mournful stillness brooded over a scene weird and alien to the men from far off Michigan and Wisconsin, who had a feeling that they had left behind forever the stage of tedious factory days and prosy farm life, and moved to another sphere, shrouded in mystery, filled with unparalleled, dread adventure. Besides the American regiment, there was a British brigade of infantry nearly the same strength as the Americans, in the main composed of Companies of Royal Scots, most of them catalogued by the War Office as Category B2 men; unqualified for the arduous, exhausting tasks of an active field campaign, but fit enough to safeguard stores in Archangel, "light garrison duty."