March 1918. In the extreme conditions of Northern Russia, men deemed unfit for service on the Western Front, outnumbered ten to one by the steamroller, meat-grinding Red Army, fought a purposeless undeclared war against a brutal and increasingly effective enemy. Many who had survived Gallipoli, the Somme and Passchendaele, would perish forgotten in Russia's snowy wastes.
The intervention sowed the seeds of generations of mistrust of the West in Russia. Although largely forgotten in Britain and the United States, it was a staple of Soviet-era school textbooks, and now rears its ugly head again.