[Illustration: The only means of transportation after the rivers were closed] Stonewall Jackson and Forrest would do the genius born, unexpected thing. The Viking pressed onward, met the hostile Russians, forced them to a savage engagement, in which they lost in killed and wounded twice the number of the entire reconnoitering force, then turned about and backtracked the cleared way to the south, hastily abandoned by the Bolsheviks, in every reasonable fear of meeting the outnumbering reinforcements that surely must be coming up in support of such a bold and confident advance. But at Ust Padenga, fifteen miles from Shenkurst, the party was stopped by a dispatch from Headquarters. It would go no farther downstream, but would act as an advanced outguard for the main Vaga position, a barricade to serve as a distant, delaying obstacle, and so render the inner post more easily defended. For when the notion of an offensive war languished with the General Staff, and had nearly expired, it was revived a little by the theory of "an offensive defense," in which the six, widely scattered, battle fronts acted as protective tentacles, each of them in turn establishing an "offensive" outguard for Archangel, since once this virus of the "offensive defense" was inoculated in the Allied Command, it would not rest dormant, but persisted, assertive to the ultimate. Meanwhile, Nature, flagrantly disrespectful of the military, swung the seasons in their immutable cycle. Fall made her parting courtesy, and winter with dread message and icy breath waited on the threshold. The hope was not yet dead of the Railway Column gaining Plesetskaya, and the present objective of the Vaga force was to penetrate some eighty miles to Velsk, an important junction point of roads converging from the area of Plesetskaya, from the city of Vologda and from the Dvina. The Railway got little further than Obozerskaya, and the little River Column, by the end of October, was at bay, fighting for life nearly two hundred miles from Kotlas, its first objective. But before these forces had been halted, already the Vaga Expedition had gone too far, thrust out nearly one hundred miles from the Railway, and fifty miles further south than the River party, it presented inviting opportunity for enemy encirclement--a dangerous salient, projected midway between the two main Columns, and nearly three hundred miles from Archangel, by the tortuous course of the road. The British are a bold people and it did not seem to weigh heavily with them that Shenkurst, the base of this Vaga Column, was flanked by hostile villages, where vain attempts had been made to drive out the Bolsheviks, that the city was garrisoned by locally recruited Russians, who had been tried and found wanting under fire, and whose loyalty might wane when the tide of Allied fortunes ebbed low, as soon it did.