Word: cossack
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...sultry, stifling day. A burning haze hovers over the dusty street of the stanitsa [Cossack village] of Starominskaya. Usually deserted at this hour, Starominskaya is filled with unaccustomed activity. Windows, doors and gates of all the cottages are flung wide open, and in each courtyard stands a wagon to which a pair of sturdy horses is harnessed. Villagers take only the most essential belongings; the rest will be buried under cover of darkness where the invaders will never discover it. The cattle were driven away several days ago. All that is left is the poultry, which the children...
From a Russian correspondent of the London Times last week came this typically Russian account of scorched-earth tactics in the Cossack country...
...Cossack took up his ax and called his 13-year-old grandson from a neighboring house: "Come here, grandson, and let us cut down the orchard and smash the beehives." Apple, pear and apricot trees laden with still unripe fruit fell one after another. "Pile it up in the street," the old man said. "Let anybody who wants take it, and what is left the armored tractors will crush to pulp when they come...
Tonight Red troops poured through en route to the front. The old man and all other Cossack cottagers retired, planning how nothing must be left for the enemy except a scorched waste. Such is the decision of the Kuban Cossacks, the glorious descendants of the Cossacks of Zaporozhye Sech, who also burned and destroyed everything...
...Mama, there are two Germans in our pigsty; they are breaking down the wall looking onto the street," cried a 13-year-old boy to his mother. The Cossack woman's husband had been killed at Rostov. She cautiously drew from under the floor an old scimitar wrapped in rags, drew it from its scabbard, tried its edge and resolutely made for the door. Creeping toward the pigsty, she stood crouching by the door awaiting a signal from her son. The boy squeaked softly like a mouse...