"COME, GRANDSON, LET US CUT DOWN THE ORCHARD."

From a Russian correspondent of the London Times last week came this typically Russian account of scorched-earth tactics in the Cossack country.

It is a 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 are now chasing in the courtyards, while their mother, tears streaming down her cheeks, cuts the throats of cocks and hens, bitterly cursing the cause of it all. As the column leaves, the night sky is illuminated by the glare of burning villages and gunfire flashes. With the baggage go the old men and women, mothers and small children, the sick and crippled. The able-bodied will remain behind and fight side by side with the Red Army troops.

An old 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 by."

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.

Later in the quiet village the sound of plane engines presaged parachutists. The Cossacks dashed out from their huts, hastily arming themselves with shotguns, sabers, axes and even fire irons, and ran toward an assembly point. Scattering among the yards and orchards, concealing themselves behind fences and in ditches, they spied out the position of the enemy force and prepared to fall upon it. A report was dispatched to the commander of the nearest Red Army unit. "Kill wherever you can and any way you can," he ordered through quick-footed youngsters, and the Cossacks began operations. A German coming to a well for a drink was shot. Another got a brick on his skull when he went into an orchard without a helmet.

"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.

The Cossack woman dashed into the pigsty. The curved scimitar swung twice in the air and the Germans dropped without a sound into the still liquid manure. She had scarcely wiped the blood from the scimitar when the figure of a German sergeant rose before her. There was a short burst from an automatic rifle and the young woman fell silently to the floor like a flowering apple tree cut to the roots. With a cry of intolerable hatred, the boy hurled a stone with all his might at the German's ruddy face. It struck him in the eye, depriving him of sight, and it was some time before he dispatched the boy as he lay weeping over the body of his mother. When the Red Army regular troops reached the stanitsa, only about a score of German parachute men still survived. The rest had been annihilated by villagers.

The battle drew nearer to the village of Kanevskaya. The villagers burned down their own cottages and destroyed property accumulated by long years of industry. The first German detachments arrived at the stanitsa. Sixty-year-old Chepurko, collective-farm chairman, decided to start his own second front. He crawled, ax in hand, through stinging nettles, selected a tall, long-legged victim and crawled toward him on his stomach. Even Krupp's steel did not save the German from death. The grey-bearded Cossack threw himself on another German soldier. "Take that, in revenge for Kuban!" he cried, punctuating every blow of the ax. Then he fell, struck by a German bullet.

When the Red troops abandoned Kanevskaya, the Cossack men and women retired, leaving nothing behind. With them went young men and girls with sabers dangling at their sides and hand grenades stuck in their belts, their heads adorned with steel helmets picked up on the battlefield.

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