Both sides were preparing for a decisive struggle.
The Volunteers hoped to seize the main railway junctions, isolate the Caucasus, and, with the aid of the White Cossacks, clear the territory of Reds. The Central Executive Committee of the Kuban and Black Sea Republic were preparing for a struggle on three fronts: with the Germans, the White Cossacks, and the newly-resuscitated "Denikin bands."
The Red Caucasian Army, consisting in the overwhelming majority of war veterans from the former tsarist Transcaucasian Army, of settlers and landless Cossack youth, numbered as many as a hundred thousand.
Its Commander in Chief, Avtonomov, was suspected by the members of the Kuban-Black Sea Central Executive Committee of aspiring towards dictatorship, and was for ever quarrelling with the government.
At a huge meeting in Tikhoretskaya, he had called the Central Executive Committee German spies and agents provocateurs.
In reply, the Central Executive Committee "branded" Avtonomov and his closest adherent Sorokin, bandits and enemies of the people, cursing them, and holding them up to eternal obloquy.
All these squabbles were paralysing the army.
The Red Army, which should have conducted a converging attack by three units against the Volunteer Army, situated in their very midst, was in a ferment. Continual meetings were held, commanders were dismissed, and the army seemed to be fit, at the best, for nothing but heroic disaster.
At last the decrees from Moscow overcame the obstinacy of the local authorities.
Avtonomov was appointed inspector at the front, and the command of the Northern group of the Army was handed over to Colonel Kalnin, a morose Latvian.
Sorokin remained commander of the Western group.
It was then that Colonel Drozdovsky, with a detachment of three thousand picked officers, chosen for their ferocity, each of them worth ten rank-and-file soldiers in battle, joined up with the Volunteer Army. The mounted Cossacks from the villages began to come in gradually; officers, singly and in groups, inspirited by rumours of the fantastic "Frost Campaign," began to arrive from Petrograd, from Moscow, from all over Russia. Ataman Krasnov supplied them, somewhat charily, with arms and money.
From day to day the Volunteer Army gathered strength; thanks to the skilful propaganda of the generals and their agitators, the unskilful handling of the situation by the local Soviet power, and the stories brought from the north by eyewitnesses, its morale was at a high level.
By the end of May the local Red forces gave up the attempt to crush the Volunteer Army.
Assuming the offensive, the Volunteers struck a terrible blow to Kalnin's Northern group at Torgovaya.
"Why aren't you singing any more, lads?"
"We've sung ourselves hoarse."
"Let me get myself a coal to light my pipe," said Ivan Ilyich Telegin seating himself at the campfire, on which the planks from a railway snow fence were merrily burning; having lit his pipe he stayed to listen.
It was late in the night.
Almost all the fires along the railway lines had been put out.
The night air was chill and the sky was thickly studded with stars.
Puce-coloured, battered, broken-down freight vans stood out against the top of the embankment in the light cast by the flames.
They had come from the shores of the Pacific, from the Arctic swamps, from the sands of Turkestan, from the Volga, from the Ukraine.
Each van was marked "to be returned immediately."
But all terms had long expired.
These long-suffering cars, built for a life of peaceful toil, and now—their axle bars unoiled, their sides bashed in —resting beneath the stars, were destined for fantastic adventures.
Whole trains of them, with everything in them, would be derailed; some, crammed with Red Army prisoners, their windows and doors boarded up, would travel thousands of miles, the words: "nonperishable freight, by slow train" chalked on them.
Others would become graveyards for the victims of typhus, refrigerators for the transporting of frozen corpses.
Many would go up in pillars of fire and smoke.... In the forests of Siberia, their walls and doors would be used for fences and sheds.... Many months would pass before, charred and shattered, the few survivors among them would come to the place to which they were "to be returned immediately," there to await repairs on rusty sidings.
"What do they say in Moscow, Comrade Telegin—how soon will the Civil War be over?"
"As soon as we win it."
"You see... they believe in us...."
A handful of bearded men, with weather-beaten, sallow countenances, lay in languid poses around the campfire. No one wanted to sleep, but all were disinclined for serious conversation.
One of them asked Telegin for some home-grown tobacco.
"Comrade Telegin—who are these Czechs?
Where have they come from?
I don't remember hearing about them before...."
Ivan Ilyich explained that the Czechs were Austrian prisoners of war, and that the tsarist government had started forming an army corps from them, to send to France, but had failed to accomplish this.
"And now the Soviet government cannot let them leave the country, since they want to fight in the imperialist war.... We demand their disarming, and they are revolting against this...."
"Does it mean, Comrade Telegin, we'll have to fight them, too?"
"Nobody can say anything at present.... We have no positive information ... I, personally, don't think we will.... There are only forty thousand of them...."
"We'll be able to polish them off."
Again there was silence by the campfire.
The one who had asked for tobacco, glancing at Telegin, began talking again, obviously simply to make conversation.
"Under the tsar, we were sent to Sarakamysh.
Nobody told us why we were fighting the Turks, what we were dying for.
And the mountains there are terrible.
You look round, and tell yourself it was an evil hour when you were born.... And now everything's quite different; this war is our own war, war to the death.... And everything is clear—the how and the why...."
"Take me, for example—they call me Chertogonov," said another soldier, thickly. Supporting himself on one elbow he moved so near the flames that it seemed a miracle his beard didn't catch fire.
He was a ferocious-looking individual, with black hair falling over his forehead, and a pair of round eyes burning out of his tanned face.