At dawn, two soldiers, who, in days of peace, had been timber cruisers in the pine woods of the Michigan Peninsula, led their comrades to ground firm enough for footing, and half dead from fatigue, brought them back to the railway, but too late, for hours before the tumult and shots of battle had reverberated from far advanced ground on the railway tracks; for, at the appointed hour, hoping that the cooperating actions would still develop, the French went in to the attack, supported by the American trench mortars and machine guns, and smashed the enemy from his foremost lines. Directly he rallied and returned in force to the counter-attack in which many French were killed, the trench mortar section was decimated and lost most of the guns, the machine gunners put out of action, and the whole little force was shoved back over much of the freshly won ground to the bridge at Verst Four Fifty Eight, where the Americans stood with braced backs and would not yield. For two days, the Bolo armored train showered them with shrapnel, and upcasted tons of high explosives that tore glaring, wide wounds in the railway track, till theoretically they were hammered into submission, but when the Bolshevik infantry, in the gray hours of dawn and dusk, approached to take the crucial position, they were always driven to cover by a heroic defense that never failed. So the bridge was held under difficulties that would have shaken ordinary troops and caused them to fall back, but not in Russia, for that was the way of this queer little war. Priceless lives would be lost, much blood run, and stirring exploits of courage and noble sacrifices be performed, to safeguard a little bridge like Verst Four Fifty Eight, or a dirty village that objectively meant nothing. Yet what sacrilege to have breathed this to the soldiers who bled for them; for to those who risked their lives and yielded up their lives, rather than desert some little bridge or moujik village, these signified the shibboleth of North Russia. For inordinate stress was placed upon these inconsequential, hard contended spots; they became graphic in the imagination, cardinal precepts in some strange soldier creed, altars upon which friends had given all as proof of a comradeship triumphant over self and self desire. Indeed, with the fresh recollection of courageous comrades now dead, their abiding faith in him, and the thought of those far back at home, whose eyes watched from afar with undimmed loyalty, did he not stamp himself as a craven if he failed, a mongrel thing unfaithful to his breeding?