In the early morning of July the fifteenth the field guns of the Reds opened a hurricane fire on Korenovskaya, and an hour later Cossack cavalry squadrons attacked the village and station by lava.
They slashed at the cadets with whistling blades, riding them down and only taking those prisoner who had discarded their rifles before the Reds could reach them.
Infantry units marched all night, beginning to entrench the moment they arrived at Korenovskaya, not in a semicircle this time, as at Belaya Glina, but in a complete ellipse.
The sun rose white in a mist of dust and heat.
The whole steppe seemed to be in motion: cavalry galloped about, infantry regiments crept up, batteries thundered by on rumbling wheels, and the air was filled with curses, blows, shots, the whinnying of horses, hoarse cries of command.
The supply columns stretched right up to the horizon.
The day was as hot as a furnace.
Sorokin broke away from his staff and whirled about on his foam-flecked horse in the midst of the troops.
Dispatch riders and aides, swift as greyhounds, flew about the field with his orders.
His hat had fallen off during his gallop, and he had discarded his Circassian tunic.
The sleeves of his crimson silk shirt were rolled high above his elbows, and his blue riding breeches were drawn tightly into a leather belt.
He seemed to be in several places at once, his bared teeth gleaming in his dust-grimed visage.
He was inspecting, on his third fresh horse, the positions of batteries, and of the trenches, where, like moles, the infantry divisions were digging themselves into the rich black soil. Next he galloped up to the listening posts, from there to watch the arrival and unloading of the supply columns; summoning commanders to his side with a flourish of his whip, and bending, heated and ferocious, from his saddle, he listened wild-eyed to their reports.
Like the conductor of some mammoth orchestra, he evoked music from the multitudinous elements of the coming battle.
He left his heavily-breathing horse at the station, made his way hastily to the telegraph room, kicking out of his way a dead body with officer's shoulder straps, and the skull laid open, lying across the threshold, and ran his eyes over the telegraph tape, seized with an intoxicated frenzy of excitement: the troops of Drozdovsky and Kazanovich (were approaching rapidly from the south, to enter battle —they had already left the station of Dinskaya.
Drozdovsky's troops were coming up in carts, jolting all day over the steppe, through clouds of torrid dust.
The troops of the late General Markov, now under the command of General Kazanovich, which had entrained together with the artillery, arrived before them, on the sixteenth at dawn, and dashed straight out of the railway trucks, to attack Korenovskaya.
General Kazanovich was standing on the rim of a well in front of a railway shed, calmly watching the able movements of the officers' lines, marching without firing a shot.
His refined, subtle countenance, with the long, grizzled moustache and clipped beard (just like His Majesty the Tsar's), bore an expression of smiling absorption and there was a cold smile of almost feminine ardour in his fine eyes.
He was so confident of the outcome of the battle that he had not even wished to wait for Drozdovsky's division to come up.
There was a constant rivalry between him and the morbidly vain, overcautious Drozdovsky, who was slow to a fault, often to the detriment of the matter in hand, whereas Kazanovich loved war for its broad scope, the music of battle, the sounding glory of victory.
The huge globe of the sun, promising the torrid heat of a July day, was rising from behind the distant barrows of the steppe, its dazzling light full in the eyes of the Bolsheviks.
Machine guns were emitting their rap-rap, and the sultry stillness was rent by constant salvoes.
The enemy could be seen clambering out of the trenches in serried ranks.
Markov's men, running forward, disregarding the bullets, were met by thousands of tiny crawling figures.
Kazanovich lifted his field glasses to his eyes.
Queer!
"Three rounds of shrapnel for the comrades!" he cried to the telephone operator, who was ensconced beside the well.
Two batteries, hidden behind the embankment, opened fire.
The woolly puffs of shrapnel burst low over the enemy's lines.
The tiny figures at first scattered in confusion, but soon formed lines and continued to advance.
The whole field was now resounding with reports.
At last the batteries of the Bolsheviks gave tongue.
Kazanovich smiled, puzzled, and the slim hand holding the field glasses trembled.
When he saw Markov's men throw themselves on to the ground, and begin hastily digging themselves in, his face paled beneath its tan.
Leaping down from the well, he squatted over the field telephone, and called General Timanovsky.
"The troops are lying prone," he shouted into the receiver.
"Break up the enemy's left flank at all costs.... Every second counts!"
Instantly some of Markov's men—Timanovsky's reserves—appeared from over the railway embankment.
In groups and batches, line after line, resolute, worked up to a high pitch of excitement, they disappeared into the high ripe wheat, which was already beginning to shed its grain.
Timanovsky, youthful, red-cheeked, jocose, his high cap perched over one ear, in a grimy linen shirt with black general's shoulder straps, came running after the lines, holding his dangling sword out of his way.
Something utterly incomprehensible was going on: the Bolsheviks were changed men—all the moments at which it had seemed inevitable for them to waver, had passed.
The entire steppe was now covered by their tiny advancing figures.
The machine guns of the Volunteer Army barked furiously—ever new waves of the enemy were taking the places of those who fell.
First one, then another of Timanovsky's companies were running with rifles atilt towards the outer rim of the wheat field. Kazanovich, taut as a fiddlestring, stood there on the top of the well.
He could see the fierce-looking backs of Markov's men in the narrow field of vision of his glasses.
What tenseness!
They were falling, falling!
He turned the glasses beyond the runners, and suddenly parted lips, broad faces, sailors' caps, bare, bronzed chests, swam into view.... Bolshevik sailors.... Next minute all were mixed up in an indistinguishable mass hand-to-hand fighting.
A sickly smile froze on Kazanovich's chiselled lips.... The Markov men were giving ground.