The wind increased, turning northwards.
The frost was gaining in intensity.
Roshchin, lying with a dislocated shoulder beneath the steep bank of the river, had long given up hope of being noticed.
Despite the pain, he managed to drag the straps from out of the breast of his tunic, to fix them roughly on to the shoulders of it with pins, and to tear the five-pointed star from his cap.
The river had long carried away the corpse of Kvashin.
There were wounded lying about everywhere—nobody had time for them now.
Once across, the army fought its way to Novodmitrovskaya without halting.
The clothing froze on men's bodies, and was covered with a layer of ice.
The frozen earth rang beneath hoofs and wheels, boots were broken and feet flayed by the mounds and ruts in the road.
Some of the wounded got up and crawled on to the steep bank, hanging on for dear life, and sometimes slipping back.
Roshchin felt his feet being frozen to the ground.
Setting his teeth (he had pain in his shoulder, and in the small of his back, and his kneecap was broken) , he, too, got up and staggered in the wake of the wounded.
Nobody paid any attention to him.
It cost him enormous trouble to get to the top of the bank.
Up there the blizzard howled, and bullets whistled.
A round-shouldered man just in front of him, in a frozen officer's greatcoat and peaked hood, suddenly stumbled aside and fell.
Roshchin merely bent lower, to get out of the teeth of the wind.
A horse's carcase lay covered with snow, one rigid hind leg protruding.
Two miserable hacks stood beside an abandoned gun, with drooping heads. Their sides were frozen to each other, their backs saddled with snow.
And the rapping of machine guns ahead was growing more insistent and ominous.
The Volunteer Army was fighting desperately in the hope of reaching warm huts by nightfall, and escaping death in the blizzards raging over the field.
The artillery from Grigoryevskaya were now firing upon the attackers.
But the rest of the Red forces, including the reserves from Afipskaya were not thrown into the battle.
The Second Caucasian Regiment had received the order to attack only after the Varnav Regiment was surrounded in Novodmitrovskaya, where it had fared badly in hand-to-hand street fighting.
The Second Caucasians marched six miles over unbroken swamp and flooded ground, losing a whole company by drowning and frostbite, and struck at the enemy's rear, thus enabling the remainder of the Varnav Regiment to break out of encirclement.
The same state of confusion and disorder prevailed among the Whites, too.
Pokrovsky's Kuban detachment, which was to have attacked the village from the south, refused point-blank to march through the swamps.
And Pokrovsky himself, who had received his general's epaulettes not from the tsar, but from the Kuban government, was violently offended with General Alexeyev, who had said to him with aristocratic scorn, at a military conference:
"That'll do, Colonel—sorry, I don't know what to call you now...." It was because of this "Colonel," that Pokrovsky had not led his detachment through the swamps.
The cavalry of General Erdeli, sent to surround the village from the north, were unable to wade through the flooded ravine, and returned towards nightfall to the ford.
The first White forces to arrive at Novodmitrovskaya was the regiment of officers.
Half frozen, and in a state of frenzy, the veteran officers, scenting the welcome odour of newly-baked bread, and seeing the warm glow from the windows, trampled through the squelching mass of snow and mud, and waded through sheets of water thinly crusted over with ice, without waiting for reinforcements.
They were espied at the very approach to the village, and machine-gun fire was opened on them.
The officers made a furious bayonet charge.
Each one of them knew what to do and how to do it at any given moment.
Markov's tall white hat was seen everywhere.
It was a battle between regular officers and a poorly-led, undisciplined mob of soldiers.
The officers broke into the village, and entered upon hand-to-hand combat with the Varnav men and the guerrilla fighters.
In the darkness and scuffle the machine gunners were bayoneted or blown up by grenades at their posts.
The Whites were continually receiving reinforcements.
The Reds were surrounded and began retreating to the town square where the Revolutionary Committee was quartered in the village council.
Shots came from every scrap of cover, fighting went on at every street corner.
A gun carriage, raising fountains of mud, came galloping up. Swinging round the square, the gun pointed its muzzle straight at the village council, sending a shell right into it.
People began jumping out of windows, yellow smoke billowed out—crates of cartridge cases inside the building had been touched off by the artillery fire.
The Second Caucasian Regiment was at that very moment firing on the attackers from the east.
The Varnav men heard the battle going on in the enemy's rear and took heart of grace again.
Sapozhkov, whose voice was almost gone from shouting and swearing, tore the banner from the standard-bearer's hands, rolled up as it was in oilcloth, and, shaking it free and waving it, ran across the square to the high, swaying poplars, where the Whites were most thickly concentrated.
The Varnav men dashed out from all directions with rifles atilt, broke through, and got out of the village on the western side.
Roshchin spent the night burrowed into the hay on an abandoned cart, from which he had first had to drag two frozen corpses.
All night, guns boomed and shrapnel burst over Novodmitrovskaya, and then, after having spent the night in Kaluzhskaya, the baggage carts and trains of wounded of the Volunteer Army proceeded at daybreak.