Dan Steele - Snow Trenches

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SNOW TRENCHES

An American Soldier in Russia

DAN STEELE

Snow Trenches was originally published in 1931 by A. C. McClurg & Company, Inc., Chicago.

Contents

Table of Contents

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER

The World War, to most of those who fought in it, is a memory of long, white, wet roads bounded by a horses ears, gray landscapes sodden with rain and the dismal slime of trenches and emplacements cut in clay. When one speaks of the exploits of the American troops he envisions the France of Vauquois Hill, Chteau Thierry, Chemin des Dames, the Argonne and St. Mihiel. And excusably he considers the picture of human suffering complete in this scene. Here was the war of What Price Glory and Journeys End. What need to consider its endless sameness in a different setting?

Dan Steeles book brought to this reader a distinct sense of shock. There were other fields beside France, other deserts of barbed wire, other forced marches to a slaughter which had the merit only of a novel stage. There was the little contingent that fought in North Russia in a bitter campaign which had little reason to begin with, and was doomed to be forgotten in the end. The men went out. The men came home, most of them to remain silent amid discussions of a war that was beyond their own experiencemany of them to minimize their own efforts and to feel that they had somehow been cheated.

Thus it is that Snow Trenches, coming after all these years, is as new as if it had been presented the year of the armistice. It tells, virtually for the first time, what happened in that Russian campaign and will surprise a good fifty per cent of the war-wise populace who probably do not remember that a Russian campaign was ever fought.

Only one who as a soldier faced the foreordained hopelessness of that operation could have written this book. Only one whose blood froze in the white desolation of North Russia could have recreated in words such an atmosphere of bitter cold. The story itself is simple, the motivation made powerful by the inevitable suggestion that not one man but thousands fought this fight. There is an air of unmistakable truth about it that any soldier who ever heard a shell will recognize at once.

One learns here that brass hats may blunder just as stupidly amid hummocks of snow and mountains of ice as in the wine cellars of a French chateau and that men will go to senseless death just as readily on a frozen tundra as in a dusty wheatfield or a steamy morass. One puts the book down with the amazed realization that the limit of human endurance is something that no tactician has yet calculated.

Robert J. Casey

Publishers Note:

Mr. Casey, himself the author of many best sellers, served in France with the American Expeditionary Forces as Private, Second Lieutenant, First Lieutenant and Captain, receiving three citations for bravery. Since the close of the war he has been a staff correspondent of the Chicago Daily News, his duties taking him from Chicago to Cambodia and from Easter Island to Esthonia. We consider his opinion that of an expert.

IN THE CAFE of the men-from-the-barges, Efim Grigorivich Skverny was buying vodka for two deserters. His arrogance and affectations were such clumsy imitations of the mannerisms of the officers he had seen in the Czars army, that he was obviously removed from the cruel, beaten, hopeless mob by his showy uniform alone. His instincts were the same as theirs, his lusts as vicious, too. His companions were much impressed by the glitter of his trappings, which bore a vague resemblance to the uniforms of the old order.

I tell you, comrades, he said familiarly, theres never been anything like it! Money, vodka, rations, women,whatever you like. And the Colonel has bulging trunks full of gold roubles. Gold roubles!

The man opposite him drew a grimy forefinger through a puddle of liquor and scrawled a row of circles on the table-top.

Sounds good, little officer, but weve heard big talk before. Eh, Mikhail? He nudged his friend.

Yes. Thats what the Red Ossipenko told us; and where is he now, and his hundred men? He lies at the foot of the big wall of the Cathedralor did yesterday. And his men, the fools that believed him?...God knows! Perhaps some of them have his boots and tunic...fine boots...

Archangel seethed. It had become as an anthill, crowded, disturbed, impermanent...an ant-hill across which lay an injured serpent. The writhing and tail-lashing of the tortured thing could not drag its body clear of the gritty earth-heap. It scored and furrowed the surface, but the ant-hordes buried it under the swarm of their millions.

Anarchy writhed across Archangel, a city now swollen by refugees to a population of half a million. Normally it was a gaunt, dirty, impoverished port, sprawling along the east bank of the Dvina River where it empties into a waste of tawny swamp and leaden water at the White Sea. But the war and revolution had magnified its every aspect. Its squalor and want were thrown into sharper relief by the opulence of limitless military stores which the Allies had shipped into Russia through this doorway. Cruisers and paint-streaked freighters came and went from quays where trawlers and barges had discharged their fish and lumber. In the plain chambers of the Archangel Provisional Government now were housed the fugitive ambassadors and diplomatic corps of all the nations still friendly to Russia. Deserters from the vast debris of Russias armies had sifted back into the city, without rations, without money, without billets. And through the streets trooped armed bands of them, their fickle loyalty claimed first by the White Russians, then by the Bolsheviki, then by their own instincts to kill and to rob. A delirium of riots and senseless bloodshed gripped the city.

What side is this colonels company on? inquired Ivan tentatively. Ive no thirst for facing a firing-squad.

Nor I! Weve had a bellyful of fighting. Besides Mikhail spat on the floor.

We all have! broke in Skverny, filling their glasses again. But this is different. Im not sticking my neck into any rope, either. Were leaving Archangel tonight. Were not on any side. The British claim that transports are on the way with troops enough to chase the Bolsheviki back to Vologda. Colonel Eristoff is going to lay low till he sees which way the cat jumps. Hes no fool...As for pay,youll get the same as sergeants in the old army.

Kerenski money?

No! Nikolai roubles!

Mikhail, and the other had their heads together when he finished. A stolid grunt of indecision; a thick lisp of persuasion. The pinched stub of Mikhails cigarette scorched his flat thumb. He squeezed the light out, separated the few crumbs of unburned tobacco, and stowed them away in a small sack.