For the second week, Nikolai Kulagin, an officer of the Kornilov Regiment, could not rise from his bed. He kept his pack, containing his pistol and a change of clothes, under his head and his rifle at his side. He covered himself with his cavalry cape, still damp from the front. Boiling water kept him warm; so, according to army tradition, did cigarettes. The squalid, ill-heated ward was full to overflowing with men wounded and frostbitten in recent fighting at Novocherkassk. The unsealed windows let in the fetid February damp. Kulagin’s bed was by the window. He could raise himself on his elbows and gaze for long moments at the street, then fall back on his crushed straw pillow and close his eyes and doze. His limp, peeling ears were black and swollen, and his frostbitten feet, suppurating in their bandages, exuded a sickening smell. Day and night the ache in his bones gave him no rest.

Rostov was in the last throes of revelry. In the city Duma, Constitutional Democrats, or Kadets, and Cossack generals were concluding their last speeches. In the evening the streets were packed with officers, carefree men-about-town and pure-bred blue-blooded belles. In the restaurants, the aristocracy of the capital and barons of high finance made merry. Political hustlers scurried about among them. Mingling with them, exploiting their resounding names, were members of the now-dissolved State Duma, sacked ministers, dignitaries of the Provisional Government, notorious terrorists, honoured heads of government departments disbanded by the revolution, minor country squires, prelates and card sharpers from exclusive gambling dens. All had hastened to the Don after the October coup with the intention of sitting out the bad times behind the Cossack lances. Those versed in the Okhrana's malodorous secrets and the ways of the Lord, learned scholars and socialists familiar with the nicest nuances of all possible social movements and forms of unrest vied with each other in predicting the speedy and inevitable downfall of the Bolsheviks. On wine-stained tables, proclamations of future governments were written and grand plans drafted for the restoration of Russia; ministerial portfolios were allocated and celebrated generals were appointed governors of regions where the suppression of insurrection was yet to begin.