anks before the tall station
building, with their battalion commander holding officers call at
command of the bugle. An excited little French officer popped out of his
dugout and pointed at the shell holes in the ground and in the station
and spoke a terse phrase in French to the British field staff officer
who was gnawing his mustache. The latter overcame his embarrassment
enough to tell Major Young that the French officer feared the Bolo any
minute would reopen artillery fire. Then we realized we were in the
fighting zone. The major shouted orders out and shooed the platoons off
into the woods.

Later into the woods the French officers led the Americans who relieved
them of their circle of fortified outposts. Some few in the vicinity of
the scattered village made use of buildings, but most of the men stood
guard in the drizzly rain in water up to their knees and between
listening post tricks labored to cut branches enough to build up a dry
platform for rest. The veteran French soldier had built him a fire at
each post to dry his socks and breeches legs, but "the strict old
disciplinarian," Major Young, ordered "No fires on the outpost."

And this was war. Far up the railroad track "at the military crest" an
outpost trench was dug in strict accordance with army book plans. The
first night we had a casualty, a painful wound in a doughboy's leg from
the rifle of a sentry who cried halt and fired at the same time. An
officer and party on a handcar had been rattling in from a visit to the
front outguard. All the surrounding roads and trails were patrolled.

Armed escorts went with British intelligence officers to outlying
villages to assemble the peasants and tell them why the soldiers were
coming into North Russia and enlist their civil co-operation and inspire
them to enlist their young men in the Slavo-British Allied Legion, that
is to put on brass buttoned khaki, eat British army rations, and drill
for the day when they should go with the Allies to clear the country of
the detested Bolsheviki. To the American doughboys it did not seem as
though the peasants' wearied-of-war countenances showed much elation
nor much inclination to join up.

The inhabitants of Obozerskaya had fled for the most part before the
Reds. Some of the men and women had been forced to go with the Red
Guards. They now crept back into their villages, stolidly accepted the
occupancy of their homes by the Americans, hunted up their horses which
th