Our joy is not unsullied, Vasili Vasilevich!"
The victory was complete.
Kalnin's army, thirty thousand strong, was defeated, its ranks destroyed and scattered.
Only seven Red troop trains had succeeded in slipping through to Ekaterinodar.
Sorokin's army had been cut off.
The eastern group in the Armavir District, and the Taman coastal army were thus irrevocably separated.
Denikin's army secured vast stores of booty—three armoured trains, armoured cars, fifty guns, an airplane, vans full of rifles, machine guns, shells, abundant supplies of all sorts.
The effect of the victory was overwhelming.
Ataman Krasnov ordered a thanksgiving service to be held in the cathedral at Novocherkassk, haranguing the troops afterwards' every bit as well as his friend the Kaiser could have done it.
Although Denikin lost one-fourth of his army in three weeks, its numbers were doubled by the beginning of July, thanks to the steady stream of volunteers from the Ukraine, the Novorossia region, and Central Russia. Units formed from Red-Army prisoners began to be used in the White Army for the first time.
After resting for two days, Denikin split up his army into three columns and began a large-scale offensive on three fronts: on the west, against Sorokin's army, on the east, against the Armavir groups, and on the south, against the remnants of Kalnin's army, which was covering Ekaterinodar.
His aim was to clean up the whole rear before storming Ekaterinodar.
All was thought out and planned according to the rules of the highest military science.
But there was one circumstance—and that an extremely important one—which Denikin left out of consideration: he did not realize that he was faced, not by an enemy whose strength and equipment he could weigh up and estimate, but by an armed population, an incalculable force.
He did not take into account the fact that every one of his victories resulted in a corresponding increase of hatred and solidarity in this army of the people; that the era of stormy meetings, at which unpopular commanders were discharged and campaigns were decided by vote, had passed, and was being replaced by a new civil war discipline, not very firm as yet, but growing stronger every day.
Everything seemed to promise easy and immediate victory.
Reconnaissance reported the panic-stricken retreat of Sorokin's army in the direction of Ekaterinodar beyond the Kuban.
But this was not the whole truth.
Reconnaissance was misled.
Those fleeing beyond the Kuban were deserters, small detachments, and cartloads of refugees.
Sorokin's army of thirty thousand had been cleared of mere hangers-on, and was now disciplined and ferocious.
The Bataisk front against the Germans was abandoned.
The Reds awaited an encounter in the open field with Denikin's army.
And it came to pass that the Volunteer Army, flushed with victory, almost within sight of its goal, very nearly perished to the last man in the ten days of bloody battle with Sorokin's troops which lay before them.
Sorokin replied to the enquiries of the Kuban-Black Sea Central Executive Committee with Napoleonic arrogance:
"I need no agitators.
Denikin's bands are making propaganda for me.
The legendary valour of my troops will overthrow all barriers raised by the counterrevolution."
Sorokin, who had succeeded, in the first days of Denikin's attack, in checking panic among his troops, seemed to have roused himself from a drunken stupor.
He ranged the front day and night, by train, by railway trolley, and on horseback.
He reviewed the troops, shot down two officers with his own hand in the sight of the army, for lack of revolutionary zeal; rising in his stirrups, his foaming lips savagely distorted, he castigated the enemies of the people in language so foully abusive that the Red Army men, like a herd of buffaloes maddened by gadflies, interrupted him with stentorian roars.
He tightened up the activities of the Military Tribunal and Special Departments, introduced the death penalty for neglect of rifles, and issued orders to the Army in which they were told:
"Soldiers!
The workers of the whole world are looking towards you with hope, are offering you their noblest feelings of gratitude—with open eyes and strong limbs you are marching to meet the bloody sunrise of a new historical epoch.
The parasites, the crawling vermin, the bands of Denikin, and the counterrevolutionary scum of the earth, must be wiped out by fire and lead.
Peace to the toilers, death to the exploiters, long live the world revolution!"
He drew up these orders himself in a sort of delirium.
They were read aloud in the companies.
Ukrainian peasants, Don miners, the veterans of the Caucasian army, Cossacks and outsiders—a motley, ragged, noisy, lawless clan—listened spellbound to the grandiloquent words.
Chief of Staff Belyakov, an intelligent and accomplished soldier, drew up a plan for the attack, or rather the break-through of the whole group, thirty thousand strong, and their retreat to the other side of the river Kuban.
This, at any rate, was the idea of the Chief of Staff, who cherished not the slightest illusions as to the outcome of an encounter with Denikin.
The break-through was to be made in the neighbourhood of the Korenovskaya railway station (between Tikhoretskaya and Ekaterinodar).
When Korenovskaya was occupied it would be an easy matter to cope with the columns of Drozdovsky and Kazanovich, once they were cut off from the main forces on the south, to move on Ekaterinodar—for the rest they must' trust to luck.... It was thus that the Chief-of Staff reasoned.
His position was one of extreme delicacy: with all his being, sleeping or waking, he detested the Reds, but an accursed fate had involved him with the Bolsheviks.
To fall into the hands of Denikin, whom he regarded with uneasy, envious admiration, would spell death!
To be suspected by Sorokin of lack of revolutionary zeal or of not hating Denikin enough, would no less certainly mean death.
His one hope, fantastic enough, as was everything in those fantastic times, was in the frenzied ambition of Sorokin.
Belyakov's game was to use all his powers to establish Sorokin as dictator. Then he would see what was to be done.
Whatever his inmost thoughts, he embarked upon the most active preparations for the attack: munitions and forage were accumulated at the Timashevskaya station, shells unloaded, long trains of carts sent into the steppe.
The army was deploying in the neighbourhood of Timashevskaya, its front facing southeast, with the idea of dealing a blow simultaneously on Korenovskaya, and, to the north, on Viselki.