stifiable the ultimate turn of
events may prove the British military action to have been. We say that
this prejudice should have been taken into account when the American
doughboy was sent to Russia to fight under British command. It might not
be out of order to point out that the North Russian shared with his
American allies in that campaign the same prejudice, unreasonable at
times without doubt, but none the less painful prejudice against the
British command of the expedition. And all this in spite of the fact
that most of the British officers were personally above reproach, and
General Ironside, who soon succeeded the failing Poole, was every inch
of his six foot-four a man and a soldier, par excellence.

The French were able to send only part of a regiment, one battalion of
Colonial troops and a machine gun company, who reached the Murmansk late
in July about the time the Americans were sailing from England. They
were soon sent on to Archangel, where political things were now come to
a head.

The Serbian battalion which had left Odessa at the time of the summer
collapse of the Russian armies in 1917 had gradually worked its way
northward from Petrograd on the Petrograd-Kola Railroad with the
intention of shipping for the Western fighting front by way of England.
They had been of potential aid to the Allied military missions during
the summer and now were permitted by the Serbian government to be joined
to the Allied expedition. They were accordingly put into position along
the Kola Railroad. These troops, of course, as well as thousands of
British troops which were stationed in the Murmansk and by the British
War Office were numbered in the North Russian Expeditionary forces, were
of no account whatever in the military activities of that long fall and
winter and spring campaign in the far away Archangel area where the
American doughboys for months, supported here and there by a few British
and French and Russians, stood at bay before the swarming Bolos and
battled for their lives in snow and ice.

The battalion of Italian troops with its company of skii troops which
sailed from England with the American convoy also went to the Murmansk
and all the American doughboy saw of Italians in the fighting area of
Archangel, North Russia, was the little handful of well dressed Italian
officers and batmen in the city of Archangel. Of course, we had plenty
of representation of Italian fighting blood right in our own ranks. T