How The Steel Was Tempered

12/03/27  qiuyuhong

christian louboutinsLike a whirlwind the stupendous news broke into the small town: "The tsar's been overthrown!"
The townsfolk refused to believe it.
Then one stormy winter day a train crawled into the station: two students in army greatcoats, with rifles slung over their shoulders, and a detachment of revolutionary soldiers wearing red armbands jumped out onto the platform and arrested the station gendarmes, an old colonel and the chief of  the garrison. Now the townsfolk believed the news. Thousands streamed down the snowbound streets to the town square.
Eagerly they drank in the new words: liberty, equality and fraternity.
louboutin uk Turbulent days followed, days full of excitement and jubilation. Then a lull set in, and the red flag flying over the town hall where the Mensheviks and adherents of the Bund had ensconced themselves was the sole reminder of the change that had taken place. Everything else remained as before.
Towards the end of the winter a regiment of the cavalry guards was billeted in the town. In the mornings they sallied out in squadrons to hunt for deserters from the South-Western Front at the railway station.
The troopers were great, beefy fellows with well-fed faces. Most of their officers were counts and princes; they wore golden shoulder straps and silver piping on their breeches, just as they had in the tsar's time—for all the world as if there had been no revolution.louboutins men
For Pavel, Klimka and Sergei Bruzzhak nothing had changed. The bosses were still there. It was not until November that something out of the ordinary began to happen. People of a new kind had appeared at the station and were beginning to stir things up; a steadily increasing number of them were soldiers from the firing lines and they bore the strange name of "Bolsheviks".
Where that resounding, weighty name came from no one knew.
The guardsmen found it increasingly hard to detain the deserters. The crackle of rifles and the splintering of glass was heard more and more often down at the station. The men came from the front in groups and when stopped they fought back with bayonets. In the beginning of December they began pouring in by trainloads.christian louboutins uk
The guardsmen came down in force to the station with the intention of holding the soldiers, but they found themselves raked by machine-gun fire. The men who poured out of the railway carriages were inured to death.
The grey-coated frontliners drove the guards back into the town and then returned to the station to continue on their way, trainload after trainload.

One day in the spring of nineteen eighteen, three chums on their way from Sergei Bruzzhak's where they had been playing cards dropped into the Korchagins' garden and threw themselves on the grass. They were bored. All the customary occupations had begun to pall, and they were beginning to rack their brains for some more exciting way to spend the day when they heard the clatter of horses' hoofs behind them and saw a horseman come galloping down the road.christian louboutins men With one bound the horse cleared the ditch between the road and the low garden fence and the rider waved his whip at Pavel and Klim. "Hi there, my lads, come over here!" Pavel and Klim sprang to their feet and ran to the fence. The rider was covered with dust; it had settled in a heavy grey Layer on the cap which he wore pushed to the back of his head, and on his khaki tunic and breeches. A revolver and two German grenades dangled from his heavy soldier's belt.