ot. Once we
were hurried out into the cold darkness by the report of a great
multitude of muttering voices approaching from the forest, but not a
shot answered our challenge and the next morning there in the snow were
the fresh tracks of timber wolves--a pack had come to the end of the
woods--no wonder the Detroit fruit salesman on guard thought the Bolos
were upon us.

But not long afterwards the Bolos did come and more cunningly and
stealthily than the wolf pack, for in the black night they crept up and
were engaged in the act of cutting the barbed wire between the
blockhouses, when a sentinel felt--there was no sound--something
suspicious, and sped a series of machine gun bullets in the direction he
suspected. There was a fight lasting for hours, and in the morning many
dead Bolos were lying in the deep snow beyond the wire defenses. They
wore white smocks which, at any distance, in the dim daylight, blended
distinctly with the snow and at night were perfectly invisible. We were
grateful to the sentinel with the intuitive sense of impending danger.
Some soldiers have this intuition. It is beyond explanation but it
exists. You have only to ask a soldier who has been in battle combat to
verify the truth of this assertion.

Still we decided not to rely entirely upon this remarkable faculty of
intuition, some man might be on watch not so gifted; and so we tramped
down a path inside the wire encompassing the center village. During the
long periods between the light we kept up an ever vigilant patrol.

The Bolos came again at a time when the night was blackest, but they
could not surprise us, and they lost a great many men, trying to wade
through waist deep snow, across barbed wire, with machine guns working
from behind blockhouses two hundred yards apart. It took courage to run
up against such obstacles and still keep going on. When we opened fire
there was always a great deal of yelling from the Bolos--commands from
the officers to go forward, so our interpreters said, protests from the
devils, even as they protested, many were hit; but it is to be noted
that the officers stayed in the background of the picture. There was no
Soviet leader who said "follow me" through the floundering snow against
those death scattering machine guns--it did not take a great deal of
intelligence to see what the chances were.

So weeks passed and we held on, wondering what the end would be. We did
not fear that we should lose Toulgas. Wi