During the winter, several circling movements were essayed, but never on a scale of comprehensive organization; at Morjagorskaya, in February, and at Shred Mekrenga, the enemy came closest to success, but at both places was stopped by the gallant British, and when spring came his chances vanished, the bogging quagmire precluded any further offensive. But while the Bolsheviks did not destroy the Expedition, they soon reduced the invasion to a series of desperate, detached, outguard actions, and the River and Railway Columns that were to have entered Kotlas and Vologda with the coming of the first snow, were flung far and broad over vast Archangel, as the effort "to stage a real show with two men and an orange" wilted with the first snow, a dismal, ghastly "washout." Even when the Americans reached Archangel in September, the campaign had already assumed a defensive character. Indeed, so serious was the outlook that they were rushed from the troop-ships, shunted off to Russian box cars, and consigned with expeditious haste to the Railway Front. Nothing of this was known to these new zealous soldiers off from a brief military training encampment to the very heart of war's purple, glamourous adventure. And it is doubtful whether they could have realized the significance of the military situation, even had it been communicated to them. In a few crowded weeks, so many stirring events had thronged their heretofore placid lives that these recruits from Michigan and Wisconsin were buried beneath a bewildering wilderness of amazing impressions through which confused, alien scenes and persons and places trooped in phantom and fantastic multicolored parade, until their minds were stunned beyond the power of further reception. During the long voyage, a few still civilian in mind, had recovered sufficient equipoise to inquire about the connection between a war in Russia against Germany, but the inquiry was so unproductive, so futile, and there were so many eccentric twists and turns to this stupendous world madness that in most part they soon fell into that fatalistic philosophy of all soldiers; most of them were content to place their unbounded trust in those who sat in the high places and whose omniscience guided from afar. It was far more quieting, vastly more satisfactory. Once, during that swaying night journey, from Archangel to the battle line, the decrepit Russian locomotive gasped convulsively and stood still by an old station of huge logs, and, under the lurid light of a flaming torch, was revealed a trainload of prisoners, passing north from the scene of hostilities somewhere below. They made an unheroic spectacle, with their shrinking countenances and unsoldierly, nondescript uniforms, so that some American wag, in a spirit of bantering patronage, called them "Bolo wild men," a name that clung to the enemy throughout all the days of the campaign.