These posts, like Indian blockhouses of frontier days, were strung along the river course nearly to far Archangel, and in them, insignificant detachments, with the grim, quiet resolution of the frontier men, and the steady, reliant nerve of the frontier men, safeguarded the backward way, where always silent, winter darkness held ceaseless, dire, ominous threats. In the Shred Mekrenga offensive of January, when the enemy sought to cut off the River Column from its base, he launched a venomous attack at one of these river posts far back at Morjagorskaya, but the British garrison held without flinching and saved the communications by a narrow margin. By this process of dispatching numerous, guarding detachments throughout the province, the Allied forces, utterly trivial at the outset, became so dispersed that the "offensive war" swiftly degenerated into a disjunctive, raiding excursion, and the invasion, instead of striking the Red Bolos with terror and chasing them like scurrying quail to cover, was regarded by the enemy with contempt, even derision. The Bolshevik soldiers, at first panicky, soon overcame their fear, and when their leaders saw that no reinforcements could come through the frozen north port, they assumed an attitude of aggressive defiance, and were ever conducting raids, ever menacing the long, basal lines, the flanks and rear of the far separated, uncoordinated, unsupported Allied fronts. On the Dvina, hardly had the detached American company taken over the defense of the costly stores at Bereznik, when friendly natives from Shenkurst directed the observation of our Command to the danger of a rear flanking movement from that quarter, so half of the garrison was detailed up the Vaga to take possession of this city of Shenkurst in the name of "friendly intervention." It must be said that for the most part the city welcomed, with a genuine, welcoming spirit, the coming of the foreign liberators, for many people had fled north to Shenkurst from the violent Reds at Moscow and Petrograd, who hated the _intelligencia_ and everything else that was unproletarian, with a destructive, vehement hatred. These people were the Russians of literature, cultivated and mannerly in appearance, soft spoken in approach, and accustomed to the niceties, the softer things of life. They wore shoes and stockings, and with a revealing hint of gawkiness, most of the rest of our unimaginative, Western habit; also they had a few of the simple delicacies on their tables that seemed like fairy gifts to the homesick, American soldiers.