30,000 Miles From Moscow to Marseille

In late 1915, it was hit on an idea for the soldier-rich but equipment-poor Imperial Russian Army– which had lost immense supplies of pre-war arms and ordnance in their series of sweeping defeats delivered by the Germans in the 12 months from Tannenberg in August 1914 to the capture of Warsaw in August 1915– that one of the best ways to help its allies in France was to send men there to fight with French-supplied arms. While the French asked for a 400,000-strong Russian Expeditionary Force, the REF led to the piecemeal dispatch of ultimately five picked two-regiment brigades, plus an artillery brigade and an engineer battalion, some 44,319 volunteers in all. The 1st Russian Special Brigade, 180 officers and 8,762 enlisted under Maj. Gen. Nikolai Aleksandrovich Lokhvitsky, left Moscow on 3 February 1916 and, during the coldest stretch of the Russian winter, set out East across the Trans-Siberian Railway to board four waiting French ships that would take them to the Western Front via…