"He stole it, he got it from under my petticoats, the beast!
Give me back my money!"
Then she clutched at his cheeks, holding on like grim death.
The pale man jerked himself free, but the soldiers held him down.
The woman gave a squeal.
And then, pushing people out of his way, the peasant with the bearlike head made his appearance upon the scene, shoved the woman aside with his shoulder, struck the pale man neatly in the mouth, and gave a loud grunt.
The latter sank to the ground.
A man with long coat sleeves, perched on the nearest tree, bent down, shouting:
"Murder!"
The crowd immediately began to press forward.
People bent over the body and straightened themselves again, shaking their fists.
The window of the railway carriage floated past the crowd.
At last!
A suppressed cry seemed to stick in Katya's throat.
Roshchin frowned his disgust.
Krasilnikov shook his head. "
"Tchk! Tchk! And they killed him all for nothing, probably!" he said.
"Those women would drive anybody crazy.
They're worse than the men.
Nobody knows what's come over them these last four years.
We come back from the war, and what do we find—our women have quite changed.
You dare not so much as tickle them with, the reins—you have to look out for yourself.
Oh how uppish the women have become!"
At first sight it was difficult to understand why the "organizers of the salvation of Russia"—Commanders in Chief Alexeyev and Lavr Kornilov—should have led a handful of officers and cadets (five thousand in all), with the most wretched artillery, and practically no shells' or cartridges, to the south, to Ekaterinodar, into the very thick of the Bolshevik forces, which formed a semicircle around the capital of the Kuban Cossacks.
No strict strategical plan could be discerned in this.
The Volunteer Army had been violently ejected from Rostov, which they had been unable to hold.
It had been swept into the Kuban steppe by the wave of revolution.
But a political plan there was, and two months later this plan was justified.!
The rich Cossacks were inevitably bound to rise against the outsiders—by which was meant the new population, who rented Cossack lands, but enjoyed no rights or privileges whatever.
There were one million six hundred thousand "outsiders," as against one million four hundred thousand Cossacks.
The "outsiders" were inevitably bound to strive for land and power.
The Cossacks, just as inevitably—to rise in arms in defence of their privileges.
The "outsiders" were led by the Bolsheviks.
At first the Cossacks would recognize no authority over themselves. They would live as proprietors in their own villages—what could be better?
But in February, Golubov, a Cossack adventurer with twenty-seven Cossacks at his back, broke in upon a conference at the field headquarters of Ataman Nazarov in Novocherkassk, and, brandishing his rifle, shouted, amidst the click of gunlooks:
"Stand up, you blackguards! Soviet Ataman Golubov has come to take power!" The next day Ataman Nazarov and his staff were taken out and shot in a copse on the outskirts of the town, and Golubov, to secure for himself the ataman's mace, after having about two thousand Cossack officers shot, galloped into the steppe to get Mitrofan Boigayevsky, whom he then dragged about to meetings, to speechify on behalf of a free Don and his own leadership. But when Golubov himself was killed soon after, at a meeting held in the village of Zaplavskaya, in February, the Cossacks found themselves leaderless.
And from the north they were menaced by Great Russia—dishevelled, impatient, famished.
To direct the Cossack movement from Ekaterinodar, to mobilize a regular Cossack army, to cut off from Bolshevik Russia the Caucasus, and the Grozni and Baku oil fields, to emphasize their loyalty to the Allies, such were the initial plans of the command of the Volunteer Army, when embarking upon what was later known as the "Frost Campaign."
Seaman Semyon Krasilnikov (the brother of Alexei) lay with others like him, in a ploughed field on the edge of a ravine not far from the railway line.
Beside them a soldier, diligent as a mole, was digging with a spade.
When he had got himself entrenched he shoved his rifle in front of him, and turned to Semyon.
"Dig deeper, brother."
Semyon had difficulty in digging away the sticky clods from beneath him.
Bullets were whistling overhead.
The spade struck a brick.
Swearing, Semyon rose to his knees, and instantly received a stinging blow in the chest.
Gasping and choking, he fell face downwards into the hollow he had dug.
It was one of the innumerable brief battles to stop the advance of the Volunteer Army.
The Red forces, as almost always, were numerically stronger.
And, while perfectly capable of fighting, it was no great catastrophe for them to retreat. During the early period of the civil war, victory was not of the first importance to them.