Photograph: Glasshouse Images/Alamy
On 11 November 1918, as the first world war ended, Pte Scheu of the US army found himself in a battle. Its location was the remote frozen village of Tulgas, 200 miles south of the Russian port of Arkhangelsk. Early that morning the enemy attacked. By lunchtime two men next to Scheu had been killed. The next day was worse. “Shells were just raining about. We knew we were in for a hit,” he wrote in his diary.
The soldiers bombarding Scheu’s platoon were Bolsheviks. The American crawled out and hid in a nearby building. Inside he found a wounded girl, her dead family and a decapitated priest. Canadian reinforcements scattered the attackers. Scheu heard about the armistice two months later. “It doesn’t mean a damn thing over here,” he observed bitterly. Also, he was having a good time back at base and met three “buxom lassies” at a “Russkie party”.
