ey of the military resources of the European Allies
had disclosed their utter lack of men for such an expedition and it was
found that the only hope lay in drawing the bulk of the needed troops
from the United States forces, and when the statement of the cases in
the usual polite arguments brought from President Wilson a positive
refusal to allow American troops to go into Russia, it was only by the
emphasis, it is said, of the pathetic appeal of the North Russian
anti-Bolshevists, coupled with the stirring appeals of such famous
characters as the one-time leader of the Russian Women's Battalion of
Death and the direct request of General Foch himself for the use of the
American troops there in Russia as a military necessity to win the war,
that the will of President Wilson was moved and he dubiously consented
to the use of American troops in the expedition.

Even this concession of President Wilson was limited to the one regiment
of infantry with the needed accompaniments of engineer and medical
troops. The bitter irony of this limitation is apparent in the fact that
while it allowed the Supreme War Council to carry out its scheme of an
Allied Expedition with the publicly announced purposes before outlined,
committing America and the other Allies to the guarding of supplies at
Murmansk and Archangel and frustrating the plans of Germany in North
Russia, it did not permit the Allied War Council sufficient forces to
carry out its ultimate and of course secret purpose of reorganizing the
Eastern Front, which naturally was not to be advertised in advance
either to Russians or to anyone. The vital aim was thus thwarted and the
expedition destined to weakness and to future political and diplomatic
troubles both in North Russia and in Europe and America.

During the months spent in winning the participation of the United
States in an Allied Expedition to North Russia, England took some
preliminary steps which safeguarded the Murmansk Railway as far south
toward Petrograd as Kandalaksha.

Royal Engineers and Marines, together with a few officers and men from
French and American Military Missions, who had worked north with the
diplomatic corps, were thus for a dangerously long period the sole
bulwark of the Allies against complete pro-German domination of the
north of Russia. Some interesting stories could be told of the clever
secret work of the American officers in ferreting out the evidences in
black and white, of the co-ope