Thus the army was suddenly trapped, when only a three days' march from the goal of the campaign.
And the hopes of a friendly welcome in Kuban were also thwarted.
The Cossacks apparently had decided to puzzle out the meaning of events without the help of the cadets, and the homesteads lying in the army's path were abandoned, there were ambushes in every village, and a machine gun behind the crest of every hill.
What was there for the Volunteer Army to hope for now?
Surely not for the Kuban Cossacks—Ukrainian settlers, Circassians, bred in traditional enmity to the Russians, or the remnants of the Caucasian army, held up in the rich Kuban, to join the dazzling officers and beardless cadets, in a cry of
"Three cheers for Kornilov, for our country, for our faith!"?
And this formula, as faded and inedible as tsarist pennies, was all the Volunteer Army had to offer both the rich Cossack villages, already on the alert ("Hasn't the time come for us to declare our own Cossack independent republic?"), and the emigrant population, rallying to the red banners, to fight for equality of rights to the Don and Kuban lands and fisheries, for village Soviets....
True, the army had in its train the famous agitator, the sailor Fedor Batkin, a bowlegged, swarthy fellow in a reefer jacket and seaman's cap adorned with the ribbon of St. George.
The officers had again and again tried to have him shot as a Yid and a Red son-of-a-bitch.
But Kornilov himself had protected him, considering that the famous sailor Batkin fully compensated for all the ideologically weak places in the army.
Whenever the Commander in Chief had to address the people (in the villages), he made Batkin begin, and the latter artfully explained to the villagers that it was Kornilov who was for the revolution, while the Bolsheviks, on the contrary, were counterrevolutionaries and hirelings of the Germans.
The Volunteer Army could not surrender, there was no such thing as taking prisoners at that time.
And if they dispersed they would be killed one by one.
There was a plan for crossing the Astrakhan steppe to the Volga, and getting into Siberia.
But Kornilov insisted: continue the campaign against Ekaterinodar and take the town by storm.
At Korenovskaya the army veered southwards, crossing the river Kuban, swollen and turbulent at this season, after heavy fighting at the village of Ust-Labinskaya.
It forged ahead without halting by the way, carrying in its train great numbers of wounded.
But it was still dangerous, and still capable of striking back with such painful effect that the ring of the Red troops broke to let it through at every encounter.
The Volunteer Army moved in the direction of Maikop, to throw dust in the enemy's eyes, but at the village of Filippovskaya it crossed the river Belaya, and turned sharply westwards, towards the rear of Ekaterinodar.
On the other side of the Belaya it was outflanked in the narrow pass by strong Red forces.
The situation appeared hopeless.
Rifles were distributed among the slightly wounded.... The fight continued all day.
The Reds fired their cannons from the heights above, peppering crossings and baggage trains from machine guns, and preventing the enemy from ascending.
When dusk fell, however, and the dishevelled Volunteer units made a last desperate effort at a counterattack, the Reds - retreated from the heights and let the Kornilov troops pass westwards.
History was repeating itself: military experience, and the consciousness that the issue of the battle was a matter of life or death, gained the day.
" All round, villages flamed through the night.
The weather had broken up, and a north wind was blowing.
The sky was blanketed with thick, impenetrable clouds.
Rain set in, pouring in torrents all night.
On the fifteenth of March, the Volunteer Army, moving on Novo-Dmitrovskaya was confronted by a boundless expanse of water and liquid ooze.
Infrequent hills threaded by narrow paths were lost in the mist enveloping the ground.
Men went knee-deep in waiter, carts and guns sank to the hub.
A wet snow was falling, gradually working up into a terrific blizzard.
Roshchin crawled out of the goods truck. Adjusting his rifle and knapsack, he looked about him.
A group of soldiers from the Varnav Regiment were shouting and clattering on the tracks. Some were in greatcoats, some in sheepskins, some in civilian overcoats, belted with string.
Many were carrying machine-gun belts, hand grenades, revolvers.
Some wore on their heads ordinary peaked caps, some, high conical fur caps, and some, bowler hats confiscated from speculators.
The sticky mud was churned by broken boots, felt boots, feet wrapped in rags.
Bayonets met and clashed, and confused cries mingled in the air:
"Off to the meeting with you, lads!
We'll work this out for ourselves!
Time we stopped being driven to the slaughter!"
The excitement arose owing to rumours, as always in such cases, exaggerated, of the defeat of the Red units at Filippovskaya.
There were shouts of:
"Kornilov has fifty thousand cadets, and our regiments are being sent one at a time against him to their death.... Treachery, lads!
Get the Commander."
The soldiers were running up to the station yard, which came to an end, just beyond the village, in the mist-veiled steppe.
The doors of the goods trucks clattered continually, as half-crazed men with rifles on their backs jumped to the ground, and ran eagerly towards a place where the wind was whistling through the bare branches of the Lombardy poplars, and rooks were cawing and circling overhead.
The speakers scrambled on to the roof of a turf-covered icehouse, shaking their fists and shouting:
"Comrades, why do the Kornilov bands beat us?