The contemplated operation was to approach the enemy flank through one of those lofty, forest aisles, which were cut with masterful, precise woodcraft by the engineers of Peter the Great, entirely transverse Archangel Province. Regularly, narrow lanes intersect these forest aisles, and it seemed to the officer planning this attack a simple thing to follow one of these lanes, and take the course of a north and south aisle until a point was reached opposite the enemy position. He did not know that those forest paths were deep with clinging, slimy morass, and bog that gave no footing, that frequently the main cuttings opened before shallow lakes of open water. There was no reliable map to show these things, and no native would admit that he knew the way. So the attackers went forth over unknown ground, and soon were stumbling in a blackness so dense that one file could not see even the outline of the preceding file. The sinking bog made the march distressingly arduous, yet for hours the company kept resolutely on, when, without warning, the forest parted and the sodden way terminated in a wide sheet of open water. It is impossible in the night blindness to know position or location, or how far the exhausting, laborious pace has made. Startlingly near comes the coughing exhaust of a locomotive, doubtless the armored train standing by the Bolshevik defenses on the tracks. In their jaded and spent condition, the men are ill fit to engage in battle, yet there is nothing to do but have a go at it, so plowing through waist deep swamp and awful, oozing quagmire, they lurch on. Struggling forward, still forward, they are caught and tripped, and sprawl splashing in the cold water and the bog, but they get up and drag on until all are breathing with heavy, sobbing gasps; and under the strain of terrible exertion, all are weakened, some so done in, that they lie in the water like wounded animals on their haunches, and have to be helped forward by others of more physical strength or greater will. In this agonizing way, perhaps a few hundred wallowing yards are made, but it is clear that the company cannot go on, and there is no hope of end to the miserable, sinking marsh; so the officers hold council, and decide, not without great reluctance, to abandon their mission, and the word is passed on to the scattered troops to follow back over the way they came. In the darkness and the trackless morass, this is not easy, as through the endless black night the lost company struggles flounderingly and with little hope, until the heart of all is cold with despair; but more blighting than the knowledge of being lost in the wilderness of Russian swamps, and the depression of abject, physical exhaustion, is the mordant disappointment of failing the expectant French in the coming fight.