Page:Albert Rhys Williams - Through the Russian Revolution (1921).djvu/339

Rh of Denikin at Tula, the smithy of Russia, "in whose red fires the red steel is welded into the bayonets of the invincible Red Army." Driven back to the Black Sea shores he escaped on a British cruiser.

Budenny's Cavalry racing day and night across the Ukrainian steppes flung themselves suddenly on the Polish flanks, turned the victorious advance of the legionaries into a disastrous retreat and harried them up to the gates of Warsaw. Wrangel was beaten and bottled up in the Crimea, and while the shock troops of the Soviet hurled themselves against his concrete forts, the main Red Army hurried across the frozen Sea of Azov and the Baron fled to Turkey. In the outskirts of Petrograd, under its very domes, Yudenich was cut to pieces, the armies of the Baltic States were beaten back behind their borders, and the Whites annihilated in Siberia. The Revolution triumphed all around the circle.

The Counter-Revolutionists were broken not only by the heavy battalions of the Soviet, but by the Idea incarnated in these armies of the Revolution.

They were armies with banners, red banners emblazoned with the watchwords of a new world. They advanced into battle singing the songs of justice and fraternity. They treated their captured enemies as misguided brothers. They fed them, bound up their wounds and sent them back to tell in their own ranks stories of Bolshevik hospitality. They bombarded the Allied Camp with questions: