'Hurrah!' echoed the woods and fields of Bely Hai.
The cry was taken up by the guns to the rear and on the left of the marching column.
Under cover of night the commander of the support troops, Colonel Toropets, had already moved two batteries into the forest around the City.
The guns were positioned in a half-circle amid the sea of snow and had started a bombardment at dawn.
The six-inch guns shook the snow-capped pine trees with waves of thundering explosions.
A couple of rounds fell short in the large village of Pushcha-Voditsa, shattering all the windows of four snowbound houses.
Several pine trees were reduced to splinters and the explosions threw up enormous fountains of snow.
Then all sound died in the village.
The forest reverted to its dreamy silence and only the frightened squirrels were left scuttling, with a rustle of paws, between the trunks of centuries-old trees.
After that the two batteries were withdrawn from Push-cha and switched to the right flank.
They crossed boundless acres of arable land, through the wood-girt village of Urochishche, wheeled on to a narrow country road, drove on to a fork in the road and there they deployed in sight of the City.
From early in the morning a high-bursting shrapnel bombardment began to fall on Podgorodnaya, Savskaya and on Kurenyovka, a suburb of the City itself.
In the overcast, snow-laden sky the shrapnel bursts made a rattling noise, as though someone were playing a game of dice.
The inhabitants of these villages had taken cover in their cellars since daybreak, and by the early morning half-light thin lines of cadets, frozen to the bone, could be seen conducting a skirmishing withdrawal towards the heart of the City.
Before long, however, the artillery stopped and gave way to the cheerful rattle of machine-gun fire somewhere on the northern outskirts of the City.
Then it too died down. #
The train carrying the headquarters of Colonel Toropets, commander of the support troops, stood deep in the vast forest at the junction about five miles from the village of Svyatoshino, lifeless, snowbound and deafened by the crash and thunder of gunfire.
All night the electric light had burned in the train's six cars, all night the telephone had rung in the signal-box and the field-telephones squealed in Colonel Toropets' grimy compartment.
As the glimmer of a snowy morning began to light up the surroundings, the guns were already thundering ahead up the line leading from Svyatoshino to Post-Volynsk, the bird-like calls of field-telephones in their yellow wooden boxes were growing more urgent and Colonel Toropets, a thin, nervous man, said to his executive officer Khudyakovsky:
'We've captured Svyatoshino.
Find out please, whether we can move the train up to Svyatoshino.'
Toropets' train moved slowly forward between the timber walls of the wintry forest and halted near the intersection of the railroad and a great highroad which thrust its way like an arrow to the very heart of the City.
Here, in the dining-car, Colonel Toropets started to put into operation the plan which he had worked out for two sleepless nights in that same bug-ridden dining-car No. 4173.
The City rose up in the mist, surrounded on all sides by a ring of advancing troops.
From the forests and farmland in the north, from the captured village of Svyatoshino in the west, from the ill-fated Post-Volynsk in the south-west, through the woods, the cemeteries, the open fields and the disused shooting-ranges ringed by the railroad line, the black lines of cavalry trotted and jingled inexorably forward along paths and tracks or simply cut across country, whilst the lumbering artillery creaked along behind and the ragged infantry of Petlyura's army trudged through the snow to tighten the noose that they had been drawing around the City for the past month.
The field-telephones shrilled ceaselessly in the saloon car, its carpeted floor trodden and crumpled, until Franko and Garas, the two signalmen, began to go mad.
Toropets' plan was a cunning one, as cunning as the tense, black-browed, clean-shaven colonel himself.
He had intentionally sited his two batteries behind the forest, intentionally blown up the streetcar lines in the shabby little village of Pushcha-Voditsa.
He had then purposely moved his machine-guns away from the farmlands, deploying them towards the left flank.
For Toropets wanted to fool the defenders of the City into thinking that he, Toropets, intended to assault the City from his left (the northern) flank, from the suburb of Kurenyovka, in order to draw the City's forces in that direction whilst the real attack on the City would be delivered frontally, straight along the Brest-Litovsk highway from Svyatoshino, timed to coincide with a simultaneous assault from the south, on his right flank, from the direction of the village of Demiyovka.
So, in accordance with Toropets' plan, Petlyura's regiments were moving across from the left to the right flank, and to the sound of cracking whips and accordion music, with a sergeant at the head of each troop marched the four squadrons of Kozyr-Leshko's regiment of horse.
'Hurrah!' echoed the woods around Bely Hai, 'Hurrah!'
Leaving Bely Hai, they crossed the railroad line by a wooden bridge and from there they caught their first glimpse of the City.
It lay in the distance, still warm from sleep, wrapped in a vapor that was half mist, half smoke.
Rising in his stirrups Kozyr stared through his Zeiss field-glasses at the innumerable roofs of many-storey houses and the domes of the ancient cathedral of Saint Sophia.
Fighting was already in progress on Kozyr's right.
From a mile or so away came the boom of gunfire and the stutter of machine-guns; waves of Petlyura's infantry were advancing on Post-Volynsk as the noticeably thinner and more ragged lines of the motley White Guard infantry, shattered by the heavy enemy fire, were retreating from the village. *
The City.
A heavy, lowering sky.
A street corner.
A few suburban bungalows, a scattering of army greatcoats.
'I've just heard - people are saying they've made an agreement with Petlyura to allow all Russian-manned units to keep their arms and to go and join Denikin on the Don. . . .'
'Well? So what?'
A rumbling burst of gunfire.
Then a machine-gun started to bark.
A cadet's voice, full of bewilderment and despair:
'But then that means we must cease resistance, doesn't it?'
Wearily, another cadet's voice:
'God alone knows . . .' *
Colonel Shchetkin had been missing from his headquarters since early morning, for the simple reason that the headquarters no longer existed.