At dawn, on the twenty-fourth day of March, the Americans, supported by the Yorks on either flank, crept through the trees by the roadside to the attack on Bolshie Ozerki. At five hundred yards, the enemy opened fire, a murderous plunging storm of steel and lead that must completely quell all thought of further approach, still none turned back; dragging and pushing themselves through the snow by knees and feet and elbows, the men made four hundred yards; here the American officer was killed, two of the British officers were hit and went down as if struck by lightning, and it was seen by volume of the fire that the odds were hopeless, yet the little company, facing utter massacre, burrowed in the deep snow, and, in the stiffening cold, hung on to the last round, till the retirement order came at dusk; the sacrifice was a heavy one, but not in vain, for by this devoted stand the stupendous nature of the enemy operations to overwhelm the whole Expedition at Bolshie Ozerki was fully revealed, and every man at the rear position, vividly conscious of the desperate character of the fight, steeled himself for the grim business in hand. Back in Archangel, General Ironside saw in a flash that the life of his army fluttered in the balance. He scoured the city for every available fighting man, collected the few he could, a varicolored assemblage of Americans, British, Allied Russians and a platoon of French mounted on skis--Le Legion Courier du Bois--all counted, five hundred eighty men, and rushed with them to the battle. There, this iron General, well knowing himself to be faced by great unknown numbers, tossed caution high to the four winds. He dragged his artillery over the snow from the railway at Obozerskaya, and set it twelve miles off in the woods, daring the enemy to capture it. He brought out his handful of divergent troops, and, smashing down trees, built up rough barricades, a cordon about his guns; then, cut off from all hope of accessible retreat, this fighting man, whose fighting stuff had been welded among the Northwest Mounted Police of the Canadian frontier, threw down the challenge of wild death battle to the Slavs. Very close, not even a mile away, down the Bolshie Ozerki trail, the Bolsheviks had concentrated their artillery and thrown out their advance works, and now commenced a blasting duel between the opposing batteries that tossed skyward mountainous geysers of snow, made fragments of the trees, and, through every lighted hour, shook the forest end to end with a ceaseless, reverberating roar, that pounded upon the ear with the vindictive echoes of tortured damned souls. Fortune is a fickle mistress, but she loves the strong and smiles her favor on the brave, and in this strange mad Arctic forest fight, the Briton gained her countenance by thus handsomely risking all at a throw, and by his dashing courage, his magnificent, irresistible, reckless courage.