One day I went to the cemetery where our men had been buried in unmarked graves, and for the most part identified the places; and then visited the little chapel which had been looted, and the churches. The Bibles were printed from hand-cut plates. The silver ornaments on the Bibles and the elaborate candelabra, were all hand made in every detail of construction and decoration. The soldiers had left them because of their size. All little things had been taken. All Kitsa was just like the cemetery and the churches. But the tragedy had passed over for the moment. It was peaceful death. Not even the paltry dozen shells sent over by the Bolsheviki to remind us that the war was still on made any difference to this peace. During the very last days of our tenure of Kitsa the friction between the British command and the Americans at the front became quite serious. The command wanted certain risks taken and sacrifices made that in the judgment of the Americans were without sufficient purpose and justification. The American officers were unwilling to make what they deemed useless sacrifice of their men. So bitter did this feeling become that at one time the British commanding officer gave certain orders to the Canadian Field Artillery which the Canadians undoubtedly would not have obeyed. The British command had its troubles with them also. In spite of all this, however, Kitsa was held against the enemy until the river ice actually broke under the men as they came out, leaving more desolation and ruin to the slowly conquering Bolsheviki. *VII* *FIGHTING WITHOUT A FLAG* The American soldier who was sent to Northern Russia for his part in the great war had an experience which in several respects was novel in the vast field of experience which the war imposed on Americans. One of these was that he had to fight without his flag. Not only was the flag absent from the front lines in accord with the best practices of modern warfare, but the flag as a symbol and the consciousness of what it symbolizes were equally absent for the most part from his billet, his conversation, his mess kit, and the whole campaign. He was fed with foreign food, clothed in part with foreign clothes, invading a foreign country, given orders by foreign officers, and fighting a war that was foreign to all he had ever thought of America. He had gone into the army to fight Germany, and here he found himself after the armistice fighting an unknown foe with whom the United States was not at war, and quite as much out of sympathy with the officers of another nationality whom he had to obey, as with the men whom he was trying to kill.