Bath House--Festivals--Honesty Of
Peasants.

To the doughboy penetrating rapidly into the interior of North Russia,
whether by railroad or by barge or by more slow-going cart transport,
his first impression was that of an endless expanse of forest and swamp
with here and there an area of higher land. One of them said that the
state of Archangel was 700 miles long by 350 wide and as tall as the
50-foot pine trees that cover it. Winding up the broad deep rivers he
passed numerous villages with patches of clearings surrounding the
villages, and where fishing nets, or piles of wood, numerous hay stacks
and cows, and occasionally a richer area where high drying-racks held
the flax, told him that the people were occupied chiefly in fishing,
trapping, wood-cutting, flax raising, small dairying, and raising of
limited amounts of grain and vegetables. He was to learn later that this
north country raised all kinds of garden and field products during the
short but hot and perpetually daylight summer.

Between villages the forest was broken only by the hunter or the
woodchopper or the haymaker's trails. The barge might pass along beside
towering bluffs or pass by long sandy flats. Never a lone peasant's
house on the trail was seen. They lived in villages. Few were the
improved roads. The Seletskoe-Kodish-Plesetskaya-Petrograd highway on
which our troops fought so long was not much of a road. These roads ran
from village to village through the pine woods, crossing streams and
wide rivers by wooden bridges and crossing swamps, where it was too much
to circuit them, by corduroy. North Russia's rich soil areas, her rich
ores, her timber, her dairying possibilities have been held back by the
lack of roads. The soldier saw a people struggling with nature as he had
heard of his grandfathers struggling in pioneer days in America.

To many people, the mention of North Russia brings vision of wonderful
furs in great quantity. In normal times such visions would not be far
wrong. But under the conditions following the assumption of central
control by the Bolsheviks and the over-running of large sections of the
north country by their ravenous troops, few furs have been brought to
market in the ordinary places. In order to find the fur-catches of the
winters of 1917, 1918 and 1919 before the peaceful security of the
settled sections of Russia has been restored, it will be necessary to
travel by unusual routes into the country far to the north