Dvina River.
And we were to go into it wholehearted to save them, and later find
ourselves split up into many detachments and cornered up in many another
just such perilous position but with no forces coming to support us.

The inability of the Allied Supreme War Council to furnish sufficient
troops for the North Russian expedition, and the delay of the United
States to furnish the part of troops asked of her, very nearly condemned
the undertaking to failure before it was fairly under way. However, as
the ultimate success of the expedition depended in any event on the
success of the Allied operations in far off Siberia in getting the
Czecho-Slovak veterans and Siberian Russian allies through to Kotlas,
toward which they were apparently fighting their way under their gallant
leader and with the aid of Admiral Kolchak, and because there was a
strong hope that General Poole's prediction of a hearty rallying of
North Russians to the standards of the Allies to fight the Germans and
Bolsheviki at one and the same time, the decision of the Supreme War
Council was, in spite of President Wilson's opposition to the plan, to
continue the expedition and strengthen it as fast as possible. To the
American soldier at this distance it looks as though the French and
British, perhaps in all good faith, planned to muddle along till the
American authorities could be shown the fitness or the necessity of
supporting the expedition with proper forces. But this was playing with
a handful of Americans and other Allied troops a great game of hazard.
Only those who went through it can appreciate the peril and the hazard.

To the credit of the American doughboys and Tommies and Poilus and
others who went into North Russia in the fall of 1918 let it be said
that they smashed in with vim and gallant action, thinking that they
were going to do a small bit away up there in the north to frustrate the
military and political plans of the Germans. And although they were not
all interested in the Russian civil war at the beginning, they did learn
that the North Russian people's ideal of government was the
representative government of the Americans, while the Red Guards whom
they were fighting stood for a government which on paper at its own face
value represented only one class and offered hatred to all other
classes. When it tried to put into effect its so-called constitution
that had been dreamed out of a nightmare of oppression and hate, it
failed com