THE TRIUMPH OF BOLSHEVISM
I returned to the front. The trains were frightfully crowded, but
fortunately I found accommodation in a first-class compartment. At
Molodechno I reported to General Valuyev, Commander of the Tenth Army,
and lunched with the staff. The General was painfully surprised to
learn of the punishment I had received at the hands of the soldiers.
“Did they really strike _you_?” he asked incredulously, as if he found
it hard to imagine the soldiers maltreating Yashka.
“Yes, General, they did,” I answered.
“But why?”
I told him of the German I had wounded as he came over with several
comrades.
“God, what has become of my once glorious army!” he cried out.
As I related to him the remaining phases of the episode, he punctuated
my story with exclamations of surprise.
At the end of the meal General Valuyev informed me that I had been
promoted to the rank of Captain. He pinned an extra star on my epaulets
and congratulated me.
I was provided with a car and driven to Corps Headquarters, where I
reported to my Commanding General. He and the officers of the Corps
Staff were anxious to know of the latest developments in the rear. I
told them the impression made upon me by Kerensky and Verkhovsky two
days before.
“Their appearance bears witness to the fact that all is lost,” I said.
“And how about the transfer?” the General asked. “The Battalion is
waiting for you to come and take it to a more sympathetic sector.”
I answered that orders would soon arrive for the transfer, and showed
the certificate authorizing me to command without a committee. The
General was glad for my sake.
Meanwhile, my girls learned of my arrival. They formed ranks, desiring
to give me a cheerful welcome. My presence seemed to put heart into
them. After thanking them for their welcome, I went with them to mess.
It was my custom to eat the same food as the girls. Only I seldom ate
with them. Before eating, I usually supervised the mess, satisfying
myself that there was plenty of food and that all was in good order. I
knew from experience that there is nothing like food for keeping up a
soldier’s heart.
Was it my promotion that was the cause of a happy mood, or my return
to the girls, to whom I had grown deeply attached? I don’t know. But
after dinner it occurred to me that it would be the right thing to let
the girls have some fun. So I suggested a game, and my soldiers took up
the idea with delight. As the game proceeded, many men gathered round
the circle in which it was going on. They watched longingly, clearly
desirous to play too, but not daring to join in for fear lest I should
order the girls away. It gave me pleasure to observe how these grown-up
children longed to take part in the sports. But I pretended not to
notice it.
Finally they sent several delegates to express their desire to me.
“Captain,” the men said bashfully, “we want to speak to you.”
“All right, speak out,” I answered, “only don’t address me as an
officer. Call me plain Yashka or Botchkareva.”
“May we be allowed to take part in the game?” they asked, encouraged by
my words.
“Yes, but only on condition that you do not molest my girls and
consider them as fellow-soldiers only,” I declared.
The men swore that they would behave, and the girls were not at all
displeased at the new arrangement. They played for two or three hours,
and the men kept their pledge. When the game ended they left with quite
a different feeling towards me. It was a feeling of respect and even
love, instead of their former one of hostility.
The Battalion remained in the reserve billets for several days. There
developed, as a result of that game, a new attitude on the part of many
soldiers toward us women. Companies of them would come over and join
the Battalion in sports or singing and various entertainments.
The expected order for a transfer did not come promptly. Meanwhile,
the time arrived to relieve the Corps in the trenches. I decided that
we had had enough rest, and upon our arrival at the fighting line
I put my Battalion on a regular war footing. I sent out scouting
parties, established observation posts, and swept No Man’s Land with
my machine guns and rifles. The Germans were very much agitated. Our
own soldiers became excited too, but because of the friendly relations
we had established in the rear, they contented themselves with sending
delegates and committees to argue the matter with me.
“We have freedom now, you say,” I argued. “You insist that you do not
want to fight. Very well. I will not ask you to fight the Germans. But
you have no right to ask me to act against my convictions. We came here
not to fraternize but to fight, to kill and get killed. I claim my
freedom to get killed if I want to. Then let me fight the Germans at my
sector. Let the Germans fight only against the Battalion. We will leave
you alone, and you leave us alone.”
The soldiers admitted that this was no more than fair and consented
to such an arrangement. When they asked me why I was so anxious to
kill Germans I told them that I wanted to avenge my husband who
was slain early in the war. For this invention I had only a slight
foundation--a rumour that had reached me of the death in battle of
Afanasi Botchkarev. Of course, it was an absurd excuse. But I had used
it before and I used it afterwards on a number of occasions, and it
finally became widely known and believed.
It was exhilarating to be able to do some real fighting again. It is
true, we were a mere handful, scarcely two hundred women. But we raised
quite a storm. Our machine guns rattled and No Man’s Land was turned
from a promenade for agitators and drunkards into a real No Man’s Land.
The news spread rapidly along the front of the activity of the Women’s
Battalion, and I believe that for hundreds of miles our little sector
was the only fighting part of the line. I was naturally very proud of
this distinction.
For several days this state of affairs continued. Finally the Germans
became so annoyed that they ordered their artillery to bombard my
position. There had not been any artillery fire at our sector for some
time, and the opening of the big guns caused tremendous excitement.
Many of the men were caught in the bombardment and were killed or
wounded. The Battalion’s casualties were four dead and fifteen wounded.
The whole Corps was roused to a high state of agitation, and a stormy
meeting took place immediately. The men demanded my instant execution.
“She wants war,” they cried, “and we want peace. Kill her and make an
end of it!”
But the members of the committee and my friends insisted that I acted
in accordance with an agreement. “She only engages her own Battalion
in fighting,” my defenders argued, “and leaves us alone. It is not her
fault that the German artillery could not find the range quickly and
killed some of our comrades.”
When word reached me of the indignation and threats of the men I
decided to organize an offensive of my own and die fighting. I
requested our artillery to answer in kind the enemy’s fire. The
engagement developed into a regular little battle. We were firing
furiously.
While this was going on and the soldiers in the rear were holding
the meeting the news arrived of the overthrow of Kerensky and the
Bolshevists’ victory in Petrograd. It was announced to the men by the
Chairman and was hailed with such an outburst of enthusiasm that the
shouts almost drowned the rattling of the machine guns.
“Peace! Peace!!” thundered through the air.
“We will leave the front now! We are going home! Hurrah for Lenin!
Hurrah for Trotzky! Hurrah for Kolontay!”
“Land and freedom! Bread! Down with the bourgeoisie!”
As the rejoicing was at its height, the ears of the multitude suddenly
caught the sound of the shooting at my sector. The men were roused to
fury.
“Kill her! Kill them all! We have peace now!” they roared as they
stampeded in our direction.
Several girls dashed up to me to tell me of the approach of the
bloodthirsty mob. Almost simultaneously the Commanding General rang up
on the field telephone.
“Run!” was his first word. “We are all lost. I am escaping myself. Go
to Krasnoye Selo!”
I ordered my girls to seize their rifles and whatever belongings they
could and run without stopping. To one of the men instructors I gave
the direction in which we were to go, asking him to transmit the
information to our supply detachment.
Meanwhile the mob was advancing. It encountered in the immediate rear
about twenty of my girls, who were engaged in the supporting line.
These twenty girls were lynched by the maddened mob.
Four of the instructors, who made an attempt to defend these innocent
women, were crushed under the heels of the savage crowd.
I and my remaining soldiers ran for ten miles. Although we could see no
sign of pursuers we ran no risks. We stopped in the woods beside the
road to Molodechno. It was dark. We drank tea for supper and prepared
sleeping quarters under the trees. Our supply train came up during the
night and was intercepted by one of the sentries.
We were up at four in the morning. I had a connection made with the
telephone wire running to Army Headquarters at Molodechno and talked
to the officer in charge, telling him of our approach and asking for
dugouts. The officer replied that Molodechno was overflowing with
deserters and that it was as dangerous a place for the Battalion as the
front itself.
But what could I do? I had to go somewhere. I could not very well
continue living in the forest. It was an awful situation. We had
escaped from one mob, leaving twenty victims in its hands, and
were running straight into the arms of another, perhaps even more
bloodthirsty. So we resumed our march. Within two miles of Molodechno I
led the Battalion far into the woods and left it there with the supply
detachment, comprising twenty-five men. I went to Molodechno alone,
having decided to make preliminary investigations and see what was to
be done.
Groups of soldiers here and there, in the streets of Molodechno,
stopped me with jeering remarks:
“Ha, there goes the Commander of the Women’s Battalion. She demands
iron discipline. Ha, ha!” they would laugh, turning to me, “What now?”
With smiles and conciliatory answers I managed to get to Headquarters.
I made a report to the Commandant and was assigned some dugouts for the
Battalion. There were crowds of soldiers everywhere as I walked to the
billets. They began to harangue me.
“You were late with your Battalion,” they said. “It’s peace now.”
“I am always with you, I am myself a common peasant soldier,” I
answered. “If you make peace now I will abide by your decision. I am
not going to fight against the people.”
“Yes, you are for the people now, but where were you before?” they
inquired. “You maintained the discipline of the old régime in your
Battalion.”
“If I had had no discipline,” I answered, “my Battalion would have
become a shameful thing. You would have sneered at it yourselves. Women
are not like men. It is not customary for women to fight. Imagine what
would have become of three hundred girls among thousands of men let
loose without supervision and restraint, and you will agree with me
that I was right.”
The men appreciated my argument.
“We think you are right about that,” they assented, and became more
sympathetic.
I requested their help in cleaning out the dugouts for my girls,
and they gave it cheerfully. I dispatched an instructor for the
Battalion, and by night my soldiers were comfortably quartered.
Under the protection of sentinels picked from the men attached to my
unit we passed a restful night. But our presence offered too good an
opportunity for the agitators to let it pass. So in the morning after
breakfast, as I started on my way to Headquarters, a small group of
insolent soldiers, not more than ten in number, blocked my path,
heaping insults upon me.
In a few minutes the ten ruffians were increased to twenty, thirty,
fifty, a hundred. I tried to parry their jeers and threats, but without
success. In ten minutes I was almost surrounded by several hundreds of
these ruffians in uniform.
“What do you want with me?” I cried out, losing patience.
“We want to disband your Battalion. We want you to surrender all the
rifles to us.”
Now there can hardly be a greater dishonour for a soldier than to
surrender his arms without a fight. However, my girls knew that I hated
the idea of perishing at the hands of a mob. When they heard of the
demand of the crowd they all came out, with rifles in hand.
I made a couple of attempts to argue, but it was apparent that the men
came with the purpose fixed in their minds by propagandists. They would
not give way and finally cut me short by giving me three minutes to
decide. One of the ringleaders stood there, watch in hand, counting the
time. Those were moments of indescribable agony.
“I would rather advance against an entire German army than surrender
arms to these Bolshevik scoundrels,” I thought. “But it is not my life
only that is at stake. Everything is lost, anyhow. They say that peace
has been declared already. Have I a right to play with the lives of my
girls? But, Holy Mother, how can I, a soldier true to my oath and loyal
to my country, order the surrender of my Battalion’s arms without a
fight?”
The three minutes were up. I had arrived at no decision. Still, I
mounted the speaker’s bench. There was complete silence. The crowd of
course expected my capitulation. My girls waited in great tension for
their Commander’s orders. My heart throbbed violently as my mind still
groped for a solution.
“Shoot!” I suddenly shouted at the top of my voice to the girls.
The men were so surprised that for a moment they remained petrified.
They were unarmed.
A volley from two hundred rifles went up into the air.
The crowd dispersed in all directions. My order almost drove the men
out of their senses with rage. They ran to their barracks for weapons,
threatening to return and do for us all.
The real crisis now arose. There was no question that the mob would
return, several times stronger, and tear us to pieces. A decision had
to be arrived at and carried out instantly. It would take not more
than ten minutes for the men to come back. If we did not escape it was
certain death.
“In five minutes the Battalion must be ready to march!” I thundered. I
sent one of my instructors to the barracks, to mix with the crowd, and
later report to me in the woods on the mob’s activity. Simultaneously I
directed the supply detachment to follow the road in the direction of
Krasnoye Selo. Then I called for a volunteer from among the instructors
to take care of our battle flag under oath that he would defend it to
his death. Accompanied by three other instructors he was sent ahead
with the flag.
All this was done in less than five minutes. It was no ordinary feat
for a military unit to form in full marching formation in that space
of time. But my girls did it. I sent one squad after another into the
woods, leaving with the last squad myself.
I had fixed as our destination a certain clearing in the woods, five
miles distant. This distance we covered at break-neck speed. I knew
that the infuriated men would follow the road in pursuing us, and I
ordered the Battalion to go into the heart of the woods. There were few
of us who did not trip on the way several times. Our uniforms were torn
by thorns and brambles, and many of us had cuts in our legs and arms.
There was little time for dressing the wounds.
A couple of hours later, after reaching the clearing, we heard a
distant whistle, the signal of the instructor I had left behind. He was
in high glee over his own experience, and in spite of our precarious
position we heartily enjoyed his story.
The mob, it appeared, had returned to our billets, as we had
anticipated, fully armed. The men were in a ferocious mood and rushed
into the dugouts. They were thunderstruck upon discovering that the
dugouts were deserted! They ran about like madmen, scouring the
neighbourhood, but there was no sign of us. They could not realize that
in such a brief space of time the Battalion had been marched away with
all the equipment.
“The witch!” they shouted. “She must have spirited them away.”
But this did not seem a plausible explanation to the cooler heads.
They telephoned to Headquarters, but received an answer of complete
astonishment. Nobody there knew of my sudden withdrawal. The mob
started along the road to Krasnoye Selo and soon overtook my supply
wagons, which were in charge of old soldiers. These said that they had
received orders to leave for Krasnoye, and that they knew nothing of
the movements of the Battalion. The mob decided that we were on the
same road and sent a couple of horsemen to overtake us. The horsemen,
of course, returned empty-handed.
“She is a witch!” many soldiers shook their heads with superstitious
awe.
“A witch, undoubtedly!” was repeated in tones of uneasiness by others.
The four men with our flag lost their way in the woods, and seeing that
they did not arrive, I sent out about twenty girls and instructors to
look for them. They were finally discovered. Next we had to get in
touch with the supply wagons, and managed to bring them to our camp.
Once this was accomplished we were fairly well established behind the
protection of the thickets. There was only one question confronting us:
How to get away in safety.
Molodechno was not to be thought of. Krasnoye Selo was also a
dangerous place, as our pursuers had warned the garrison there of our
approach and had requested that we should be dealt with summarily.
The prospects were far from cheerful. I decided to get into secret
communication with the Commandant through the instructors.
We camped in the forest for a couple of days, till the Commandant found
an opportunity to slip out and come to see us. We held a conference for
the purpose of finding a way out of the dilemma.
It was agreed that the career of the Battalion was ended and that
nothing remained but to disband it. The problem was, how? The
Commandant suggested that he should procure women’s garments for the
girls and let them return home.
The plan did not strike me as practical. It was hardly possible to
obtain nearly two hundred costumes for us in a day or two. It might,
therefore, take a couple of weeks to disband the Battalion, which would
not be advisable. I proposed a different scheme, namely, to discharge
the girls singly and dispatch them to a score of scattered stations
and villages. This plan was adopted, as it did not seem difficult for
individual members of the Battalion to board trains or obtain vehicles
in the neighbouring villages and get away.
It took a day or so for the Commandant to get ready the necessary
documents and funds for all the girls. Then the disbanding began. Every
ten or fifteen minutes a girl was sent away, now in one direction, now
in the opposite. It was a pitiful finale to an heroic chapter in the
history of Russian womanhood. The Battalion had struggled gallantly
to stem the tide of destruction and ignorance. But the tide was too
strong. It had swamped all that was good and noble in Russia. Russia
herself seemed wrecked for ever in that maelstrom of unbridled
passions. One did not want to live. There remained only the glory and
satisfaction of sharing the overthrow of all that had been honourable
in the country. Everything seemed upside down. There was no friendship,
only hatred. The unselfishness of the days when Tsarism was overthrown,
now, after the fall of Kerensky, had given place to a wave of greed and
revenge. Every soldier, every peasant and workman, saw red. They all
hunted phantom bourgeoisie, bloodsuckers, exploiters. When freedom was
first born there was universal brotherhood and joy. Now intolerance and
petty covetousness reigned supreme.
As I kissed my girls good-bye and we exchanged blessings, my heart
quivered with emotion. What had I not hoped from this Battalion! But as
I searched my soul I could find little to regret. I had done my duty by
my country. Perhaps I had been too rash when I had imagined that this
handful of women could save the army from ruin. And yet I was not alone
in that expectation. There was a time when even Rodzianko believed as I
did, and Brusilov and Kerensky had thought that the self-sacrifice of
the women would shame the men. But the men knew no shame.
My girls had departed. Of the whole Battalion there remained only
myself and a few of the instructors. In the evening I made my way
to the road where a motor-car was waiting to smuggle me away. The
Commandant had arranged for me to go to Petrograd under the personal
escort of two members of the Army Committee. They were to join me at
the train. The peril lay in the journey to the station. Hidden at the
bottom of the car, I was driven to the railway, where the two men took
me under their protection. I had decided to go home, to the village of
Tutalsk, near Tomsk, where my people had moved during the war.