In two hours the force of the assault was spent, the last shot had been fired, and the snow before one of the blockhouses, where enfilading fire had cut up the attack, was covered with Bolshevik bodies. The fight was an uneven one, for the Americans in the blockhouses fired from bullet proof cover and were sheltered from the weather; but the Bolsheviks had to advance against barbed wire, struggle in the snow against targeted machine guns and had no protection from paralyzing cold. Many of the prisoners were so badly frostbitten that arms and feet were amputated to save their lives. In February, acting in cooperation with the enemy offensive on the Vaga, a large force of fresh troops composed mainly of the Eighty-second Tarasovo regiment, who knew nothing of the reputation of Toulgas and the fate of other attacking parties, waded through the cold snow forests, clad in white smocks to blend with the color of the ground, floundered up to our lines in the impenetrable night, and were not discovered until they were engaged in cutting the wire between two blockhouses. They were fairly trapped then between the enfilading fire of two sets of machine guns and suffered fearful carnage before they fought their bloody way back wading ponderously through the deep snow to the forest. Some of the dead came abruptly to life and gave themselves up when a search was made of the bodies next morning; horribly frozen by exposure, they said they preferred an uncertain chance of life at the hands of the Englishskis and Americanskis, to the certain chance of death in a further attempt to conquer Toulgas. After this sanguinary fight, the Bolshevik soldiers met in a great assemblage, made bitter speeches against the Commander who had led them to disaster, and resolutions were passed which threatened death to any commissar who insisted on another assault of Toulgas and the fighting fiends who defended it. So this village, far up the Dvina, was no longer the prey for wild midnight sorties and desperate melodramatic clashes in the deep snow, and there might have been comparative peace for the garrison were it not for adherence to those cardinal precepts of military orthodoxy that aggressive contact with the enemy must be always maintained and reconnaissance is vital to a successful combat campaign. It was to conform to these inflexible precepts of the military that patrols left Toulgas seeking for Bolsheviks. Sometimes they went forth on webfooted snow-shoes, and scouted the forest far on the threatening flank to discover whether the enemy had found some new method to approach our positions, and then they served a useful purpose. But the customary patrol party was the one that went out every day, a band of three or four, along a trail of padded snow just wide enough for a single file, that led through the front forest, five miles to the nearest enemy position at Zastrovia.