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General Voronzov

Russia's next move was a bold attack by ten thousand men on Shamyl's new capital of Dargo. The commander, General Vorontsov, drove through Chechenya and Central Daghestan, encountering little resistance, and finding that Shamyl had burnt the aouls rather than allow them to fall into his hands. Confident, and contemptuous of the Asiatic rabble, he decided to lunge through the final ten miles of forest that separated him from Dargo and Shamyl's warriors. But when the Russians arrived, again to find that Shamyl had fired the aoul, and turned to retrace their steps, disaster overtook them. Shamyl had watched their advance through his telescope, and calmly directed his Murids to take up positions from which to ambush and harry the Russians. Fighting alongside the Muslims were six hundred Russian and Polish deserters, who dismayed the Russian troopers by singing old army songs at night, their mocking voices rising eerily from the hidden depths of the forest.

Shamyl had positioned four cannon slightly above the devastated aoul, and the Russians charged these and took them with little difficulty. But their way back lay through cornfields that concealed dozens of Murids, who stood up to fire, hiding themselves again before the dazed Russians could shoot back. A hundred and eighty-seven men died before the remains of this column rejoined the main army. Not even the bayoneting of the Chechen prisoners could raise Russian spirits after this omen of impending disaster.

The Russians now began to retreat back through the forest. But the woods were now alive with unseen foes. Slippery barricades blocked their way, and forced them to leave the paths, slashing their way towards ambuscades and bloody confusion. Hundreds of Russians died, including two generals. Heavy rain turned the paths to mud, and made rifles useless, so that at times the two sides fought silently with stones and bare hands. To escape the invisible snipers, the terrified Vorontsov himself insisted on being carried inside an iron box on the shoulders of a colonel. Thus trapped, with over two thousand wounded, and with only sixty bullets left apiece, the desperate Russians sent messengers to General Freitag at Grozny, begging for reinforcements.

At this crucial moment, Imam Shamyl received news that his wife Fatima was dying. He immediately gave orders for the continuing of the battle, and left for the day-long journey to the aoul where she lay. After holding her in his arms as she died, he rode back, to discover, to his deep distress, that his men had disobeyed him. Melting away at the sight of Freitag's troops, they had allowed Vorontsov's column to limp out of the forest without further loss. Shamyl boiled with fury, and he fiercely denounced those who had shown faintheartedness instead of clinching the victory. But Russia had paid dearly, as the forest soil of Dargo folded around the bodies of three generals, two hundred officers, and almost four thousand infantrymen. Even today, Russian soldiers remember the Dargo catastrophe in a gloomy song:

In the heat of noonday, in the vale of Daghestan, With a bullet in my heart, I lie ...

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