ANZACs in Arkhangel Read online

  American policy was—and still is—to repatriate fallen soldiers from foreign soil. But when they withdrew from North Russia, the Americans left behind about a hundred graves scattered across areas the Bolsheviks now occupied. They were especially anxious to retrieve their dead from the atheistic communists and in 1929 the US Congress voted $200,000— a huge sum then—to do so.

  The United States still had no diplomatic relations with the Soviet government so the mission had to be negotiated through a private agency. America’s federal government financed the group’s first four members, while an extra five were funded by the state of Michigan, the home of the 339th Infantry Regiment. Arriving in Arkhangel, the search party found conditions there even more miserable than they had been ten years earlier.

  To avoid attracting attention, the nine Americans outfitted themselves like Russian peasants. They then split into two groups, one heading down the railway, the other buying a boat to search along the Dvina. The local people did not receive them well and the expedition didn’t go smoothly. Those on the boat soon got on each other’s nerves. One turned out to be a religious crank who sang hymns all night; another disappeared, apparently with a Russian lady, to suddenly resurface weeks later.

  After two months of searching, the remains of eighty-six men were found and dug up. Their bones were washed, wrapped in linen and placed into boxes. On the way home, the bones were transferred into full-size coffins and the empty spaces stuffed with blankets. The coffins arrived in New Jersey to a seventeen-gun salute.

  In Arkhangel the British dead remained undisturbed. The original burial ground is now the Arkhangel Commonwealth War Cemetery. It contains eighty-four British graves from the Intervention, plus three merchant seamen from earlier in World War I and a handful of British dead from the Arctic convoys of World War II. The headstones are arranged in rows but with many grassed-over gaps, the result of the American disinterments and the later removal of twenty French and six Polish dead.

  For more than seventy years North Russia was pretty well out of bounds to foreigners. By 2005, when I first reach Arkhangel, visitors are welcome but few. The river and estuary make for an attractive setting but the climate is less than ideal and the city, now of 400,000, is a typical Soviet creation of shabby, eight-storey tenements. Troitsky Prospect has resumed its original name (in Soviet times it was Vinogradov Prospect, after a Bolshevik commander in the civil war), but the tram line has gone. A few of the remaining timber buildings have been restored but the city still rather lacks charm. The Soviets levelled its central area to create a stark monumental square, dominated by a gigantic statue of Lenin.

  The Commonwealth War Cemetery in Arkhangel contains the graves of 84 British and Dominion troops who died during the Intervention. The cemetery was originally shared by all the Allies but the Americans exhumed the remains of their men for reburial in America, leaving many grassed-over gaps. (Michael Challinger)

  There are several monuments to the Intervention. An obelisk inscribed ‘To the Victims of the Intervention’ stands on the waterfront, a statue of Vinogradov outside the closed-down ‘Peace’ cinema. One of two British tanks left behind in 1919 stood till recently outside a shopping arcade. It was called the ‘Memorial to Churchill’, very much a two-edged compliment, for while Churchill sent the Arctic convoys to help the Soviets in World War II, he had sent the tank itself to oppose the Revolution. It is now under wraps in a navy depot, they say, being restored.

  While Arkhangel no longer resembles the city of 1919, the region’s smaller towns and villages have changed much less. The buildings are still of rough, unpainted timber, the roads are still muddy and the atmosphere still one of quiet stagnation. Though Obozerskaya is a busy railway junction, its amenities are poor. From time to time a medical train arrives and parks itself on a railway siding. Its carriages are equipped as clinics and pensioners and former railway workers queue to have an X-ray or get a blood test done.

  One of three Mark V heavy tanks the British brought to North Russia (together with three medium tanks and the mascot dog ‘Nell’). The tanks were useless in the forests and swamps of North Russia but came in handy for a show of force against the disaffected citizens of Arkhangel. This one stood until 2006 outside a shopping centre in Arkhangel. (Michael Challinger)

  While the Allies held Obozerskaya they used the station building as their hospital. Those beyond help were buried in the military burial ground, the place where Pearse, too, was finally laid to rest. His grave, with its wooden cross and white-painted railing was intact into the 1920s and I have a photograph of it dating from then. But the Americans didn’t find their search easy eighty years ago and now in 2005 nobody in Obozerskaya knows anything of Pearse or his grave.

  An old cemetery stands on the edge of town. Russian cemeteries often seem like forests, with trees growing at random among the graves. This one, though, has completely reverted to nature. In the tangled undergrowth there are some broken metal railings, but otherwise the forest has taken over.

  I’m not even sure this is where the soldiers were buried; there was talk in Arkhangel of a cemetery closer to the railway line. Still, I think I can make out a row of dead trees which might be the line of conifers in the background of my photo.

  Back in 1986 Pearse’s daughter Vicky tried to arrange a visit to North Russia. Soviet officialdom did nothing to smooth the way and she never came. She won’t be making the trip now. This spot in the long grass and mottled shade is the best I can do. I take out the small posy I’ve brought from her garden in Sydney. On her behalf I lay the crumpled flowers at the foot of a birch tree.

  Pearse, of course, was actually killed near the village of Yemtsa, an hour south. In Obozerskaya they warn me not to go there.

  ‘They’re all drunks in Yemtsa,’ one man tells me.

  ‘And there’s no police post!’ adds another.

  But when I get to Yemtsa I find it not rowdy, but moribund. It’s a tiny place with a single village shop. The timber houses are down at heel and some seem abandoned. There are no traces of Bolshevik blockhouses and no-one I meet has even the slightest clue about the events of ninety years ago.

  I walk along the railway track. It is electrified now, but apart from the power gantries, the place must look much the same as it did to Pearse and his mates in 1919. All I see are forests of pine and birch, unkempt fields and a sense of distance and emptiness.

  The former Dvina Front is less easy to reach. As in 1919, links between the railway and the river are poor. So I travel north from Kotlas, the city where Ironside had hoped to link up with Admiral Kolchak.

  Much of the road to Bereznik is unsealed and all of it is potholed. It follows the course of the river and gives occasional glimpses of the dark blue, mirror-flat water a kilometre or more wide. With its wooded islands and its banks lined with pine and fir trees, the Dvina in sunshine presents a picture of austere beauty. But now, in late September, the weather is very changeable and once it starts to rain the landscape turns grey and gloomy and inhospitable.

  In the 500 kilometres between Kotlas and Arkhangel the only hotel is at Bereznik. It is shabby, run-down and has no hot water—which doesn’t matter because there is no bath or shower. Guests are meant to use the public bathhouse, which seems to have closed down.

  Bereznik’s local museum is housed in a log cabin and features a display of stuffed animals and folk embroidery. When I press the director, he lets me climb a ladder into the loft where there are spent .303 cartridges, Allied helmets, artillery shells and a British ammunition box. But there are no signs or captions in any language. It is as if you are not really expected to look at these exhibits—and if you do, as if no explanation is called for.

  Surprisingly, Bereznik has its own weekly newspaper and the editor lays on a Russian four-wheel-drive Lada for me. I’m also given a guide, Sergei, who knows nothing of the Intervention and whose main qualification is that he rode around the world on a bicycle and nearly got his name in the Guinness Book of Records!
He arrives carrying a backpack filled with photos of himself cycling across Canada. I had been told he speaks English, but it proves to be Estonian.

  We also have a driver and a Russian journalist, and we pick up a few other hangers-on en route. Before setting out we assemble a repair kit, which fortunately includes a bucket and some empty drink bottles. The Lada’s radiator is full of holes and during the course of the day the driver refills it at least thirty times from puddles, of which there are many.

  We visit the line of villages which figured in the offensive of August 1919. The houses are built of interlocked logs, with ramshackle outbuildings and huge, untidy piles of firewood. Vegetable gardens are still bursting with cucumbers, tomatoes, cabbages and capsicums, but it has been a wet summer, I’m told, and bad for potatoes.

  We need to engage four-wheel drive to reach these places. The roads are scarcely more than muddy tracks. Access will improve once it snows and upturned sleds are waiting in readiness for winter. In their isolation, the people here are virtually subsistence farmers.

  At Seltso, the former Bolo strong point, we are invited into what seems at first to be a dilapidated log hut. Inside, though, it is rustic and comfortable and the huge stove which will burn all winter is already alight. The table is spread and we are fed fish, cakes, redcurrants, mushrooms and boiled potatoes—in that order. Toasts are drunk in home-made wine.

  Our elderly host is Gregori, formerly a surgeon. He lends us all gumboots and leads us through the sodden fields to inspect a memorial to the Russian defenders. A copse of trees, he says, is where seven Bolsheviks lie buried. Gregori remembers his parents speaking of the British. ‘Relations with the British were very good. They didn’t drink, they were polite. Yes, the British were no trouble.’

  ‘And the Australians?’ I ask hopefully.

  ‘What Australians?’ he asks back.

  Arkhangel province is dotted with memorials—many rather neglected—to the Russians who died fighting the ‘foreign Interventionists’. This obelisk faces the river at Bereznik and commemorates the men of the Soviet river fleet. (Michael Challinger)

  The hospitality is repeated at other villages: Tulgas, Sluda, Topsa. In between, we look for Lipovets, the village from which Sullivan’s party retreated. It isn’t marked on any current maps and there’s no direction sign from the main road. We take a track and the Lada churns through the long grass and knee-deep mud. Just as it becomes impassable, we see the ruins of huts in the distance. Lipovets is no more.

  I don’t discuss the politics of the Intervention with the Russians. In the years since, they have endured a civil war, survived Stalin’s terror, defeated a German invasion and lived through Perestroika. Now they are coping with the return of capitalism. To them the events of 1919 are ancient history. They have enough trouble making sense of the present and they are more interested in talking about the price of food.

  Back in Arkhangel I visit the war cemetery. The grass needs cutting but the Russians with me admire the cemetery’s neatness; by comparison the adjoining Russian one is neglected and overgrown. As well as the headstones, there are granite plaques set into the perimeter wall. They commemorate 160 other men buried elsewhere in North Russia or whose graves are now unknown. Only one plaque mentions Australia: that of Captain Allan Brown of Elope, who died in Onega at the hands of his own Russian troops.

  The stone for Sam Pearse doesn’t record that he was an Australian. In fact, it’s hard to make out the weathered lettering at all. Of all the stones, the patina of age obscures his the most. I step back three paces and the inscription becomes almost illegible. It seems to symbolise our own faint memory of this small part of Australia’s history—which time and distance have almost erased. Indeed, I start to think that nothing else remains of this military adventure and that there is nothing more to find. But I’m wrong.

  A year later, in 2008, I make contact with Alexey Suhanovsky, the editor of Arkhangel’s only glossy magazine. He is a war buff, and almost manic in his enthusiasm and single-mindedness. He has explored along both the railway and the river and found many relics of the fighting. What human memory has lost, it seems, the cold northern earth has preserved.

  My son and I stay with him in his comfortable apartment in Arkhangel. He has a lovely family and a budgerigar whose favourite phrase is ‘Give me vodka’. He has set up a camp at Verst 445 and erected some timber crosses as a memorial to the soldiers on both sides.

  To reach the camp we have to take the train which picks up and drops off railway workers. Inconveniently, it leaves Arkhangel at ten o’clock at night and doesn’t reach our stop till three in the morning. Our stop is simply that, a stop. It doesn’t even have a number on a post, much less a name; it is just a pile of sleepers by the track. In 1919 it would at least have had a verst post, marking its distance from Vologda.

  When the train comes to a halt, we climb down three rungs on the side of the carriage and jump the last metre. We stand clear while the train moves off into the darkness. The night is cold and foggy and the forest presses in on both sides. We seem to be in the middle of nowhere. We head off along the line. Twice Alexey gives a yell as a faint glow in the fog materialises into a freight train which bears down on us and thunders deafeningly past, fifty wagons long.

  There are four of us: my son and I, plus Alexey and an old mate of his, Alexandr. The Russians carry enormous packs. Among much else the packs hold an axe, two tents, eight cans of condensed milk, a metal detector, a large shifting spanner and a samovar. Alexey’s pack even contains a chainsaw, though we don’t learn this till the second day when we are startled by the noise as he starts it up and furiously sets about felling trees. In winter, he tells us, he uses the metal detector to sweep the surface of frozen swamps and the chainsaw to cut through the ice to retrieve any treasures.

  After 2 or 3 kilometres, we leave the train line and follow a short track to the camp. It’s four in the morning. We are at Verst 445, once the forward line on the Railway Front. At different times it was held by Americans, French, British, Russian Whites and Australians. It is where Yeaman and his mates manned a blockhouse before the offensive of August 1919.

  The front line was established here in September 1918 by a combined French and American force.3 They had tried to reach the Bolo base at Yemtsa but only got this far. They dug in, working to erect blockhouses for the winter, while the Bolos did exactly the same a few kilometres to their south. Each could hear the sound of the others’ axes echoing across no-man’s land.

  The place then would have been more open, with the trees cut down to give clear fields of fire. Today the forest has grown back, mixed birch and pine, and very quiet. There is no bird life and, apart from the unmistakeable tracks of a bear, no sign of animals. Moss and lichen cover the ground like a vast, green, bumpy carpet. It is soft and yielding to walk on, but there are many fallen trees poking through and plenty to snag us. Autumn is well advanced and any puff of wind causes the birch trees to shed a sprinkling of yellow leaves. We’re lucky with the weather, though: when the rain starts in earnest the ground between the train line and our camp turns into a river.

  Verst 445 was the forward line for the offensive of August 1919. Though the forest has grown back, the course of the old trenches can be easily followed. (Michael Challinger)

  The blockhouses themselves have rotted away but there are mounds which were formerly breastworks and hollows which were foxholes. The trenches themselves are easy to find. They are grown over and half-filled with debris, but are clearly not just watercourses. They zig-zag 200–300 metres into the forest, then peter out. I understand what Attiwill wrote about the endless forest. There are no landmarks and the sun is hidden by the canopy of foliage. Without the railway line as a guide I would lose my way completely.

  One day we walk a few kilometres south. We reach the point where the Bolo guns were, the ones that Newbould’s and Yeaman’s parties took. At first there is nothing here to indicate it was the Bolo line, though Alexey has his GPS and
I accept him at his word. Some distance east, he tells us, he’s discovered a Red Army dugout. It is not very far off the railway line but not even the track maintenance workers, the only other people who come this way, know anything of it. When we reach it, we see just an opening in what appears to be a natural declivity in the ground.

  Strongly roofed with logs, a dugout like this could survive most things except a direct hit by high explosive. Alexey Suhanovsky (left, with the author) discovered it in mid-2008. It seems to have been undisturbed for almost 90 years. (Alexandr Orlov)

  In fact, it is roofed over with logs and now covered with turf. Inside, it is dark and damp and the roof is very low. But a shelter like this could withstand almost everything except a direct hit from high explosive.

  Wherever we go, Alexey is busy with his metal detector. When it starts to sing, he kneels down and peels back the thick, matted layer of moss. We have no shovel, but none is needed. The moss is soft and so is the dark, damp, humus-rich soil. We dig it away with our bare hands.

  The forest, it turns out, is full of relics. We find empty cans, wire cable, nails and cleats, the tops and hinges from ammunition boxes, part of a gas mask. Some barbed wire protrudes from the ground and I tug at it. Whole lengths of coiled wire come to light. Yeaman himself may have pegged this out, or Sam Pearse. It’s a strange feeling to be the first Australians here in ninety years.

  There are many shell fragments. They are jagged, heavy hunks of steel and some weigh easily 5 kilograms. We find the nose of one shell and, once the brass fuse is cleaned, the calibrations on the setting ring are easily legible. We find clips of .303 cartridges and two Mills bombs, the British grenades that look like small pineapples.