So on New Year's day, after they had met the enemy and soundly punished him in two sharp engagements, and standing to, were about to drive him from his Turchasova stronghold, the Onega Americans were given the disappointing order to fall back and resume post at Chekuevo, where long, black months followed, and life took on a grinding, monotonous, drab, depressing atmosphere, lifted only by an occasional, welcomed brush or "wind up," till lo, in March, the sun shone high and streamed in extravagant, effulgent light on the glaring snow fields, the days grew longer and still longer, in this eccentric, topsy-turvy, North world, and finally there were as few hours of darkness as there had been of light a few months before. Late in the month, a patrol was driven off from Bolshie Ozerki by the shot from many rifles, and a combat party the next day ran counter machine gun emplacements, was extricated only by adroit leadership, and after worming a long distance through the piling drifts. It was learned then that the little garrison at Bolshie Ozerki had been annihilated, but it was thought by a strong raiding party, bent upon capture of the ration and ammunition convoys between Onega and the Railway. Not yet was there a suspicion of the enemy's surprising, gigantic manoeuvre, which with incomparable, superior force, sought to turn the Allied flank at Obozerskaya, carry through to the Dvina, fuse with the Bolshevik Vaga army, then sweep on to Archangel and make good the Moscow boast to cast every foreigner in North Russia into the White Sea. The British Colonel, irritated by the enemy resistance at Bolshie Ozerki, was determined to chastise "the raiders" thoroughly, and felt very confident when his seventy Americans were joined by the three companies of Murmansk Yorks, which had marched one hundred and seventy miles from Soroka on the Murman railway in the hope of reaching the hard pressed Vaga Column, before it was too late. The only access to Bolshie Ozerki from the west is a wagon road, eighty feet wide, which cuts a swath through the ambient forest. Passing sleighs had packed this road so that it gave good going, but at either side among the trees was a hopeless, floundering snow bog nearly four feet, and two miles out from the village, the Bolsheviks had improvised an outguard, which swept this only approach with machine guns that had the concentrated fire of three battalions.