ck to find the lieutenant
arrived just in time to keep what little hair the popular bald-headed
little officer had from being singed off by the leaping flames. Lieut.
Ryan does not like to be kidded about it.

The morning of the seventeenth of October saw the American forces again
on the advance. Good news had come of the successes on the railroad.

The Kodish force was in the strategic position now to force the Reds to
give up Emtsa and Plesetskaya. But Trotsky's northern army commander
evidently well understood that situation, for he gave strict attention
to this Kodish force of Americans and at the fifteenth verst pole on the
main road his Red Guards held the Americans all day. Again the next day
he made Donoghue's Yanks strive all day. Just at night successful
flanking movements caused the enemy to evacuate his formidable position.
It was here that Sgt. Cromberger, one of Ballard's machine gun men,
distinguished himself by going single-handed into the Bolo lines to
reconnoiter.

The converging advances upon Plesetskaya by the three columns, up the
Onega Valley, on the railroad and on the Kodish-Plesetskaya-Petrograd
highway now seemed about to succeed. Hard fighting by all three columns
had broken the Bolshevik's confidence somewhat.

Of course at this time of writing it can be seen better than it could
then. He did not make a stand at Avda. He was found by our patrols way
back at Kochmas, only a few miles from the railroad. Meanwhile the
Russian Officers' Training Corps which was armed with forty Lewis guns
and acted rather independently, together with the Royal Scot platoon and
a large number of "partisans," anti-Bolshevik volunteers of the area,
effected the capture of Shred Makhrenga, Taresevo and other villages,
which added to the threat of the Kodish force on Plesetskaya.

Plesetskaya at that moment was indeed of immense value to the Reds. It
was the railroad base of their four columns that were holding up the
left front of their Northern Army. But they were discouraged. Our
patrols and spies sent into Plesetskaya vicinity reported and stories of
deserters and wounded men all indicated that the Reds were getting ready
to evacuate Plesetskaya. A determined smash of the three Allied columns
would have won the coveted position. But the Kodish force now received
the same strange order from far-off Archangel that was received on the
other fronts:

"To hold on and dig in." No further advances were to be made.