"Don't be so touchy, Mikhail-Grigorevich.... What's this about sending in your papers? Can't you see, Mikhail Grigorevich, that by shooting prisoners we are stiffening the enemy's resistance? Rumours of these shootings will spread everywhere.
Why should we do harm to our own army?
I'm sure you see I am right... you do, don't you?" (Drozdovsky said nothing.) "Tell your officers what I say, and let there be no more of these incidents...."
"Very good, Sir!"
Drozdovsky went out banging the door after him.
Shaking his head, Denikin sat meditating over his glass of tea for a long time.
The last volley rang out in the darkness, and all was silence and darkness.
The operation against Tikhoretskaya was part of a plan for extending the army over a front nearly forty miles in width.
It was necessary to clear the terrain of isolated enemy detachments and guerrilla units, a task entrusted to the youthful General Borovsky, who, covering over sixty miles in the course of two days, fighting most of the way, had occupied a number of villages.
This was the first so-called raid into the enemy's rear in the history of the Civil War.
The Volunteer Army could now deploy over an unencumbered terrain.
On the thirtieth of June Denikin issued a brief order:
"Tomorrow, the 1st of July, the station of Tikhoretskaya to be captured, and enemy ranks grouping in the Ternovskaya-Tikhoretskaya district to be broken up...." The columns moved by night, surrounding Tikhoretskaya in a wide pincer movement.
After brief skirmishing the Bolsheviks began retreating to fortified positions.
This was no longer the desperate resistance of a week-ago.
The fall of Belaya Glina had had a depressing effect on the troops.
Sorokin's offensive was halted.
The losses— the thousands who had fallen in bloody conflict—had all been in vain.
The enemy moved on with machinelike precision.
Men's imaginations exaggerated tenfold the forces of the Volunteers.
It was rumoured that officers were flocking to Denikin from all over Russia, that the cadets were showing mercy to none, that as soon, as they cleared a district, the Germans would come in.
Kalnin, who was in command of the Tikhoretskaya group, was sitting motionless in his train at the station of Tikhoretskaya, as if paralysed.
When he learned that the Denikin hordes were approaching at all points, he lost heart completely, and ordered a retreat.
By nine in the morning the battle was dying down, and the Red troops retreated to a fortified position extending, behind Tikhoretskaya in a semicircle.
Kalnin locked himself up in his compartment, and lay down for a nap, convinced that there would be no more fighting that day.
Meanwhile the Volunteers were continuing their wide encirclement of the enemy, moving through fields of densely growing wheat.
By noon the ends of the pincer movement met, and advanced south towards the enemy's rear.
The Korralov Regiment stormed the railway station, capturing it without sustaining any losses.
The railway employees went into hiding.
Kalnin disappeared —his cap and high boots were found lying about the floor of the carriage.
In the next compartment his chief of staff Zverev, a former officer of the tsarist General Staff, was found lying on the floor with his skull staved in.
Prone on the seat, her head covered with a shawl, lay his wife, with a bullet through her breast, but still alive.
It now only remained for the Volunteer columns to close in on the Red Army units, which had lost their command and were cut off from their supply bases and lines of communication.
They bombarded it from cannon and machine guns till nightfall.
Caught within the pincer movement, men flung themselves backwards and forwards in distraction, beneath a hurricane of lead from all directions.
They climbed frantically out of the trenches, rushing into a bayonet attack, and meeting death on every side.
Towards evening Kutepov had cut off the only path still open—that to the north—annihilating with fire and cold steel the groups of Reds making for the railway line.
In the twilight, both Reds and Whites became inextricably entangled in the dense wheat.
The commanders, running hither and thither in the wheat like quails, rallied their officers and went again and again to the attack.
Handkerchiefs were hoisted on bayonets from somewhere in the trenches.
Kutepov and his officers galloped up, only to be met with a volley of fire and a stream of obscenities.
Kutepov galloped away, bending low over his horse's neck.
The Commander in Chief had given orders that prisoners were not to be shot, but no one had said that there were to be any prisoners taken.
j The next morning Denikin rode at a footpace all over the field of battle.
As far as the eye could see the wheat was trampled and beaten down.
Vultures were sailing across the exquisite blue sky.
Denikin scrutinized the lines of trenches winding across the fields over ancient barrows and ravines. Hands, feet, and heads protruded from them, and dead bodies hung over the top like sacks.
He was in a sentimental frame of mind and said thoughtfully, half turning, as a sign for his aide to gallop up to him:
"To think they're all Russians!
Terrible!