British G.H.Q. brought six hundred surplus officers and forty thousand cases of good Scotch whiskey. Some of the officers had come frankly in search of a "cushy job" in a zone they thought safely removed from poison gases and bombardments and all the hideous muck of the trenches. Others, much to their disgust, had been sent to the polar regions because some one in Headquarters had thought they possessed some peculiar qualification to command or "get on" with imaginary Russian regiments that were to spring to the Allied Standard. So it was that Archangel became a city of many colors, as gallant, uniformed gentlemen strode down the Troitsky Prospect, whipping the air with their walking sticks, and looking very stern and commanding, as they answered many salutes, in a bored, absent-minded way. There were officers of the Imperial Army, weighed down with glittering, ponderous honor medals, and dark Cossacks with high gray hats, and gaudy tunics, and murderous noisy sabers. Handsome gentlemen of war from England, from Serbia, Italy, Finland, France, and Bohemia, and many other countries, all arrayed in brilliant plumage, and shining boots, and bright spurs, and every other kind of "eye wash." And, of course, there were large numbers of batmen to shine the boots and burnish the spurs, and keep all in fine order, and other batmen to look after the appointments of the officers' club, and serve the whiskey and soda. In the afternoons there were teas, and receptions and matinees, and dances in the evening, when the band played and every one was flushed with pleasure and excitement. Such flirtations with the pretty _barishnas_, such whispered gossip and intrigue and scandal in light-hearted Archangel! At Kodish, at Onega on the Vaga, and at Toulgas, far off across the haunting snows, sick men and broken men, men faint from lack of nutrition, and men sickened in soul, were doing sentry through the numbing, cold nights, because there were none to take their places in the blockhouses, and no supports to come to their relief, no reserves to hearten them and give them courage. The blockhouses so far away, where men were maimed and crippled and shell shocked, and the black hopelessness that crept into men's hearts, and strangled men's hearts, and overcame their soldier spirit--in the blockhouses--far, so far off from gala Archangel. THE RAILWAY "We are not declaring war, nor making war on the Lenine and Trotsky government, because it is not our affair." SENATOR HITCHCOCK, Chairman of _Foreign Relations Committee_ in the Senate of the United States. 13th February, 1919. V THE RAILWAY When the troops of Poole's first expedition divided at Archangel, and one group was sent up the Dvina; another which was a part of the French Colonial battalion was told off for pursuit of the Bolsheviks down the Archangel-Vologda railway.