Sometimes it almost seemed as if malignant Bolshevism had poisoned the air, for once in February when the situation looked worst and nothing seemed certain except annihilation for the whole garrison, the American soldiers at Toulgas threatened, unless promised early relief, to walk out like disgruntled factory hands. The same thing, but with a more serious aspect, occurred in an American company at Archangel; and the French on the Railway had, at first rumor of the Armistice, flatly deserted and returned to Archangel. At Kodish a company of British refused to fight further in this indefinite war, and among the first conscripted Russian troops there was serious mutiny resulting in much bloodshed. But there was nothing mutinous in this expression of opinion at Toulgas. It seemed the only course to civilian soldiers who were schooled in strikes under an industrial system where the strike has always been the concerted expression of disapproval by those who toil in the ranks. When the nature of a mutiny was explained to these men, they felt a burning shame for what they had done so unwilfully, and never again, throughout the many discouraging, hopeless days that followed, was there the smallest hint of protest from these civilian American soldiers. When the days were shortest, the commissary transport broke down, and for a time the principal ration was corned beef that was frozen in the tin, and a nauseating mixture of vegetables and stewed meat that had been alternately frozen and thawed in the tin, and when eaten, gave some loathsome skin diseases and others dysentery. Cooking and eating were the only breaks in the melancholy monotony; there was no diversion, no relaxation, no recreation, and the divine gift of humor which was the salvation of the Western soldier, was denied to the soldier of North Russia, for humor springs from buoyant spirits, the wells of radiant health, and the Americans on the Dvina were so physically depleted that in February the medical officer of the First Battalion reported that one-third of all those on active duty should be committed to the hospital without delay. But these sickened soldiers could not be sent to the hospital without abandoning the undermanned posts that guarded the garrison. Robbed of physical resistance and broken in spirit it was pitiful to see strong men and brave men become shrinking cowards, filled with a vague, sapping dread, under the uninterrupted strain and the depressing influence of the long nights. Fidgety sentinels were constantly seeing lurking Bolsheviks conjured by their morbid imagination from the menacing shadows of the woods, and there was an epidemic of accidental self-inflicted wounds, which always occurred at the ticklish, unsupported, advanced positions.