During November, and shortly following the Armistice, two patrols "seeking contact," were waylaid in ambush, and from the first, only one man came back. The officer of the second might have escaped, but to do so he would have had to leave a detachment in distress, surrounded in the forest. He rather chose the hazard of death, and leading the fight, he laid down his life for his friends. During the weeks of December and January, with their bitter cold and dismal, somber days, trees were felled about the defenses to widen the field of fire, and long, intersecting lanes were laid through the forest like swaths through a standing grain field, so that the machine guns and the automatics might hurl their spray of death at longer range, where skulked shadowed and grisly, white forms. When in the dead and quiet of the night, rockets burst from unknown quarters, flared with ghostly glare and faded in mystery behind inky, plumose silhouettes. In the cold and the long darkness of winter, there was time for reflection for any one who would be so idle, on the defenselessness of the position, the remoteness from the base, the hordes that were massing on the road north to Shenkurst and meant soon to make "the big push." Our Intelligence reported that in January the Sixth Bolshevik Army of the north numbered forty-five thousand seven hundred, and the dribbling replenishment of our forces that had come down the railway from open Murmansk, had far from kept pace with attrition by sickness and gunshot wounds. Disregarding our Russian Allies, we did not have six thousand men at all fronts. By the middle of January, a blighting influence, a devastating, nether presence filled the air, like the spell of an evil spirit, and as capable of being finitely recorded as the testimony of eyes and ears. There was in the atmosphere something closely akin to that heavy, stifling calm, that in the summertime hangs over all, before the wind swoops down and the first, big, pelting raindrops fall from blackened thunder clouds, the advance guard of the drenching storm that descends to earth in howling, unrestrained fury. All at lone Ust Padenga knew the storm was coming, it was only a question of where it would strike. On the 19th day of January, the dispositions were these: a platoon of Americans held the village on the pedestal, fifty-four allied Russians were in the village on the flat below, and the main body of Americans, some two hundred strong, two Field Pieces, one One Pounder of Russian design, one Pom Pom and forty Russian artillerymen (who funked in the first fight and were relieved by Canadians), were in the backward village on the high bluff.