led information regarding the roads,
trails and villages of the north country which filtered down as far as
the English officers who controlled the various field operations of the
Expedition turned out to be nil or erroneous. Thereby hang many tales
which will be told over and over wherever veterans of that campaign are
to be found.

The lack of transportation within this great hinterland of Archangel, as
can be verified by any doughboy who marched and rassled his supplies
into the interior, is an immediate reason for the comparative
non-development of this region. It has not been so many years since the
first railroad was run from central Russia to Archangel. At first a
narrow-gauge line, it was widened to the full five-foot standard Russian
gauge after the beginning of the great war. It is a single-track road
with half-mile sidings at intervals of about seven miles. At these
sidings are great piles of wood for the locomotives, and at some of them
are water-tanks. While this railroad is used during the entire year, it
suffers the disadvantage of having its northern terminal port closed by
ice during the winter. After the opening of the great war a parallel
line was built from Petrograd north to Murmansk, a much longer line
through more unsettled region but having the advantage of a northern
port terminal open the year around. These two lines are so far apart as
to have no present relation to each other except through the problem of
getting supplies into central Russia from the north. They are
unconnected throughout their entire length.

Similarly, there is a paucity of wagon-roads in the Archangel district,
and those that are passable in the summer are many miles apart, with
infrequent cross-roads. Roads which are good for "narrow-gauge" Russian
sleds in the winter when frozen and packed with several feet of snow,
are often impassable even on foot in the summer. And dirt or corduroy
roads which are good in dry summer or frozen winter are impassable or
hub-deep in mud in the spring and in the fall rainy season. For
verification ask any "H" company man who pulled his army field shoes out
of the sticky soil of the Onega Valley mile after mile in the fall of
1918 while pressing the Bolsheviki southward. Good roads are possible in
North Russia, but no one will ever build them until industrial
development demands them or the area becomes thickly populated; that is,
disregarding the possibility of future road-building for mi