It was a tactical custom of the enemy to attack the front and rear positions, sometimes he struck both simultaneously, but seldom the flanks. Therefore, General Ironside placed his Americans forward and back, where the gun emplacements were, and then stood poised for the onslaught. If the law of averages traversed its orbital course, all might be well, but if the Bolsheviks forsook their usual custom, these dispositions might well prove fatal; for although the Yorkmen were scattered among them as bolsters, the green, Russian, Archangel troops on the flank positions were as yet untried, and the presumption was against them in the pending death fight that would give no quarter. But when the enemy came at last, on the seventh day, he came just as the General had speculated he would come in an attack on the rear guns; then in greater strength followed through at the front barricades. The next dawn, at three thirty o'clock, the full fury of the assault was uncovered, as three swaying rows of men hurled themselves forward like swelling, tidal waves, and when this forward attack was at its climax, a wild horde stormed the rear. In such an encounter, the great chance of success is in overwhelming the weaker adversary by sheer preponderance of numbers, to palsy his intelligence by bearing down on him with an awesome multitude, and before he has recovered, sweep him off his feet. But with these Americans, there was no such terror wrought hiatus, for the very intensity of the situation seemed to electrify their fiber, and fire their brains with the steady, blue flame of coordinated intelligence; under these overwhelming tidal attacks these fighting men were never so alert, never so keenly and appraisingly aware of every event, never so thoroughly mindful of every tense situation as it transpired; for they knew that piling cumbersomely through those bogging snow depths, the oncoming Bolsheviks were shackled nearly as effectually as if bound with ankle ropes, and they were acutely conscious of the verity, that in the circumstances, one steady man behind a bullet proof barricade, deliberately directing a functioning machine gun, had the weight of three hundred rifles. So now it was a glorious thing to be in the blockhouses and the log barriers and to witness those human multitudes surge on, then slacken, and falter and fail and shrivel as they came, while machine guns swept them line to line, and flank to flank, and piled the dead and left crumpled, moaning heaps of men, where red, ugly blotches widened on the snow. [Illustration: The blockhouses where men were crippled and maimed and shell-shocked, far away from gala Archangel.]