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This was the last fight for the Americans on the Kodish Front. "K" Company had already looked for the last time on the old battle scenes and at the wooden crosses which marked the graves of their heroic dead, and had gone to Archangel to rest, later to duty on the lines of communication at Kholmogori and Yemetskoe.
The Red success in pushing our forces out of Shenkursk and down the Vaga made the upper Dvina and Vaga roads constantly subject to raiding parties of the Bolsheviki. Early in February "K" Company came up from Archangel and took station at Yemetskoe, one platoon being left at Kholmogori.
On January 19th and 20th they found themselves under shell fire but suffered no casualties. In the latter part of February this "B" Company of Engineers responded to the great needs for new defenses on the Vaga front, travelling by way of Kholmogorskaya, Yemetskoe and Beresnik to reinforce the hard-working engineers then assisting the hard-pressed doughboys fighting their bitter retreat action.
In all, he took care of over three hundred sick and wounded Americans and Russians that passed back from the fighting lines through Yemetskoe. Doughboys at Seletskoe tell of equally heartless treatment. There at 20 degrees below zero they were required one day to form sick call line outside of the British medical officer's nice warm office.
He is the officer whom the Bolshevik artillery tried to snipe with three-inch shells, as he passed from post to post during a quiet time at Verst 445. At Yemetskoe in February, one night just after the terrible retreat from Shenkursk, forty wounded American, British, and Russian soldiers lay on stretchers on the floor in British field hospital.
Many a doughboy in Archangel, Kholmogora, Yemetskoe, Onega or Pinega, at one time or another during the long winter, got a chance to ride with the Russian Eskimo and his reindeer.
It is the unit that after doing tedious guard duty in Archangel and its suburbs for a couple of months, all the while listening impatiently to stories of adventure and hardship and heroism filtering in from the fronts and the highly imaginative stories of impending enemy smashes and atrocities rumoring in from those same fronts and gaining color and tragic proportions in the mouth-to-mouth transit, that unit "F" Company, the prize drill company of Camp Custer in its young life, now on October 30th found itself on a slow-going barge en route to Yemetskoe, one hundred and twenty-five versts, as the side wheeler wheezed up the meandering old Dvina River.
Winter blizzards found the outfit broken into trusty detachments scattered all the way from Kholmogori, ninety versts north of Yemetskoe, to Morjegorskaya, fifty-five versts south of company headquarters in Yemetskoe. And it was common occurrence for a sergeant of "F" Company with a "handful of doughboys" to escort a mob of Bolshevik prisoners of war to distant Archangel.
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