The doctors pronounced many as cases of neurasthenia induced by much loss of sleep, unbroken fatigue, and continual drain upon the nervous forces. They looked solemn and dubious and said it was demanding too much of human endurance to expect the defense to hold on without relief through the many winter days that stretched ahead. One January night, terrible in the severity of its cold, all hands "stood to" and waited for the rush from the woods, for sentinels had heard the muttering of many voices and had caught the movement of bodies among the trees; but no attack developed, and in the morning the tracks of timber wolves were found approaching almost to our wire, where the pack had stopped to sniff the scent from these strange tenanted loghouses, standing apart on the snow, like outcasts of the village. The few sentinels kept far in advance at the front village were always having jumping nerves, and robbing exhausted men of precious sleep; but once in truth they were nearly surrounded during the night and escaped by a miracle. So it was decided to burn the houses, as "sniper's row" had been burned in November. Some two hundred peasants were turned out in the snow, and Upper Toulgas became a dirty smudge on the whitened plain over which our range of visibility extended far to the forward woods, and our field of fire was increased comfortingly. The High Command passed out word that Arctic conditions would preclude any active fighting, but the prisoners spoke differently. They said that the Bolshevik Staff expected the Allied soldiers to die like flies in the cold winter, that the enemy intended to strike when the cold was most bitter, the snow deepest, and so they did. In January, with a temperature forty degrees below zero Fahrenheit, at midnight, Bolshevik batteries from across the Dvina commenced shelling Toulgas, and continued for fifteen minutes a bombardment that went wild in the dark and struck harmlessly far from our works. Directly the last shell had been fired, enemy infantry advanced in the open and rushed our front posts. In the darkness there was frantic, wild fighting and struggling in the deep snow, shrill yells and a confused babble in a foreign language, the hideous moans of the wounded, the ringing commands of the commissars in rear, urging their men forward to sure death, and the prolonged explosions of machine guns spurting a rain of bullets over the heads of the attackers to warn them of a death that waited in rear if they turned back.