OCR Text |
Show lALUEO EXPEDITfOnl SAVEDBYA 'BLUFF' Young Russian Naval Officer Of-ficer Performs Coup by Exercising Quick Wit. Drives Bolshevik Steamers Back in Confusion With a Disabled Gun. ARCHANGEL, April CO. (Correspondence (Correspon-dence of the Associated Press.) It was largely duu to the "bluff of a young Russian naval officer in command of one of the little allied steamers on the ,Dvina river that the original allied expedition ex-pedition up that river from Archangel i was not wfped out by tho Bolshevik! in !the early phases of the northern Rus-: Rus-: cia campaign. 1 The Dvina expedition, 133 strong, went poking its way nonchalantly up the broad river aboard two or three funny looking river steamers, on which field pieces and machine guns had been mounted. The Boltheyiki had taken the best boats, Mis-, Mis-, cissippi type of paddle-wheelers, with ; them in their flight. ! The famous 133 reached Beresniki, nearly 100 miles south of .Archangel, at , the junction of the Vaga river with the ; Dvina, without firing a shot. One night, ; all of a sudden, three or four Bolshevik side-wheelers mounting big guns came around a bend in the river and started trouble. "When we fired our cannon, I they fell through the thin decks into I the staterooms of our steamers. ' Ruse Is Successful. A young Russian naval officer, in command com-mand of one of our little ships, with his own guu out of action, stood pat, w;th the useless muzzle turned toward the biggest big-gest of tho enemy's ships, and barred the channel while our other ships retreated. re-treated. - Then our river expedition got the glad news that a British monitor, sent all the way from the Belgian coast, was on the way to help them. The monitor crawled along the sandbars and got to Beresniki. The colonel in command of the river land forces told me about it a few weeks later, when I went up to his sector of the front. It was something of a tragedy, this first episode of the monitor, but the colonel couldn't help laughing about it. "The monitor steamed up," the colonel said, "and its captain was rowed over to my headquarters ship. The navy was 011 the job, and so, naturally, all was over. He, didn't want to stop a minute. " 'Where,' he shouted, 'is the enemy fleet, and which is the way to Kotlass'.' Out of Commission. "And then the monitor chugged off in the direction of the Bolshevik ship around the bend in the river. "It didn't find the enemy fleet, and it certainly was a long way from Kotlass, when a Bolshevik land battery, masked in the woods on the river bank, dropped a big shell into the monitor, putting it out of commission and sending it back to Beresniki." It was in this episode of the monitor that a young British naval surgeon performed per-formed one of the feats of bravery and self-denial that are continually taking place in this war. "With one eye shot out and with blood nearly blinding the other, this young surgeon calmly and successfully suc-cessfully attended to the monitor's wounded until he fell exhausted. On the river our forces had reached Beresniki, on the railroad a little command com-mand of French had battled its way nearly one hundred miles to Oboser-skaya. Oboser-skaya. and, in the swampy tundra between be-tween the railroad and the river another an-other "party, including some of the American Amer-ican sailors, was lost in the mud, when reinforcements in the shape of three transports loaded with American infantrymen infan-trymen and engineers steamed into Archangel harbor. |