THE WOMAN WITH THE GUN
The women soldiers of Russia, the most amazing development of the
revolution, if not of the world war itself, I am disposed to believe,
will, with the Cossacks, prove to be the element needed to lead, if it
can be led, the disorganized and demoralized Russian army back to its
duty on the firing line. It was with the object, the hope, of leading
them back that the women took up arms. Whatever else you may have heard
about them this is the truth. I know those women soldiers very well. I
know them in three regiments, one in Moscow and two in Petrograd, and I
went with one regiment as near to the fighting line as I was permitted.
I traveled from Petrograd to a military position “somewhere in Poland”
with the famous Botchkareva Battalion of Death. I left Petrograd in
the troop train with the women. I marched with them when they left the
train. I lived with them for nine days in their barrack, around which
thousands of men soldiers were encamped. I shared Botchkareva’s soup
and kasha, and drank hot tea out of her other tin cup. I slept beside
her on the plank bed. I saw her and her women off to the firing line,
and after the battle into which they led reluctant men, I sat beside
their hospital beds and heard their own stories of the fight. I want
to say right here that a country that can produce such women cannot
possibly be crushed forever. It may take time for it to recover its
present debauch of anarchism, but recover it surely will. And when it
does it will know how to honor the women who went out to fight when the
men ran home.
The Battalion of Death is not the name of one regiment, nor is it used
exclusively to designate the women’s battalions. It is a sort of order
which has spread through many regiments since the demoralization began,
and signifies that its members are loyal and mean to fight to the death
for Russia. Sometimes an entire regiment assumes the red and black
ribbon arrowhead which, sewed on the right sleeve of the blouse, marks
the order. Regiments have been made up of volunteers who are ready to
wear the insignia. Such a regiment is the Battalion of Death commanded
by Mareea Botchkareva (the spelling is phonetic), the extraordinary
peasant woman who has risen to be a commissioned officer in the Russian
army.
Botchkareva comes from a village near the Siberian border and is, I
should judge, about thirty years old. She was one of a large family of
children, and the family was very poor. They had a harder time than
ever after the father returned from the Japanese war minus one foot,
but that did not prevent their number from increasing, and merely
made the lot of Mareea, the oldest girl, a little more miserable. She
married young, fortunately a man with whom she was very happy. He
was the village butcher and she helped him in the shop, as they had
no children. When the war broke out in July, 1914, Mareea’s husband
marched away with the rest of the quota from their village, and she
never saw him again. He was killed in one of the first battles of the
war, and the only time I ever saw Botchkareva break down was when she
told me how she waited long months for the letter he had promised
to write her, and how at last a wounded comrade hobbled back to the
village and told her that the letter would never come. He was dead--out
there somewhere--and they had not even notified her.
“The soldiers have it hard,” she said, when her brief storm of tears
was over, “but not so hard as the women at home. The soldier has a gun
to fight death with. The women have nothing.”
For months Mareea Botchkareva watched the sufferings of the women and
children of her village grow worse and worse. Winter killed some of
them, winter and an unwonted scarcity of food. Typhus came along and
killed more. The village forgot that it had ever danced and sung and
was happy. Every family was in mourning for its dead. Mareea decided
that she could not endure it to sit in her empty hut and wait for
death. She would go out and meet it in the easier fashion permitted to
men. That was the way, she explained to me, she joined the regiment of
Siberian troops encamped near the village. The men did not want her,
but she sought and got permission, and when the regiment went to the
front she went along too.
[Illustration: Mareea Botchkareva, Mrs. Emmeline Pankhurst and Women of
“The Battalion of Death.”]
She fought in campaigns on several fronts, earned medals and finally
the coveted cross of St. George for valor under fire. She was three
times wounded, the last time in the autumn of 1916, so badly that she
lay in hospital for four months. She got back to her regiment, where
she was now popular, and I imagine something of a leader, just before
the revolution of February, 1917.
Botchkareva was an ardent revolutionist, and her regiment was one
of the first to go over to the people’s side. Her consternation and
despair were great when, shortly after the emancipation from czardom,
great masses of the people, and especially the soldiers at the front,
began to demonstrate by riots and desertions how little they were ready
for freedom. The men of her regiment deserted in numbers, and she went
to members of the Duma who were going up and down the front trying to
stay the tide, and said to them: “Give me leave to raise a regiment of
women. We will go wherever men refuse to go. We will fight when they
run. The women will lead the men back to the trenches.” This is the
history of Botchkareva’s Battalion of Death, or rather of how it came
to be organized. The Russian war ministry gave her leave to recruit the
women, gave her a barrack in a former school building, and promised her
equipment and a place at the front. Many women in Petrograd, women of
wealth and social position, took fire with the idea, raised money for
the regiment, helped in the recruiting, some of them joining.
In an odd copy of an American newspaper that reached me in Russia I
read a paragraph stating that the schoolgirls of Petrograd were forming
a regiment under a man named Butchkareff, a lieutenant in the army.
I don’t know who sent out that piece of news, but it lacked most of
the facts. The women soldiers are not schoolgirls, and Botchkareva’s
battalion has no men officers. Three drill sergeants, St. George cross
men all of them, did assist in the training of the battalion while
it remained in Petrograd. Other men drilled it behind the lines,
but Botchkareva, and another remarkable woman, Marie Skridlova, her
adjutant, commanded and led it in battle.
Marie Skridlova is the daughter of Admiral Skridloff, one of the most
distinguished men of the Russian navy. She is about twenty, very
attractive if not actually beautiful, and is an accomplished musician.
Her life up to the outbreak of the war was that of an ordinary
girl of the Russian aristocracy. She was educated abroad, taught
several languages, and expected to have a career no more exciting or
adventurous than that of any other woman of her class. When the war
broke out she went into the Red Cross, took the nurses’ training and
served in hospitals both at the front and in Petrograd. Then came
the revolution. She was working in a marine hospital in the capital.
She saw many of the horrors of those February days. She saw her own
father set upon by soldiers in the streets, and rescued from death only
because some of his own marines who loved him insisted that this one
officer was not to be killed.
Into the ward of the hospital where she was stationed there was borne
an old general, desperately wounded by a street mob. He had to be
operated on at once to save his life, and as he was carried from the
operating room to a private ward the men in the beds sat up and yelled,
“Kill him! Kill him!” It is unlikely that they knew who he was, but
it was death to all officers in those days of madness and frenzy. Half
unconscious from loss of blood, still under the spell of the ether, the
old man clung to his nurse as a child to his mother. “You won’t let
them kill me, will you?” he murmured. And Mlle. Skridlova assured him
that she would take care of him, that he was safe.
The door opened and a white faced doctor rushed into the room.
“Sister,” he gasped, “go for that medicine--go quickly.” Not
comprehending she asked, “What medicine?” But he only pushed her
towards the door. “Go, go!” he repeated.
She left the room, and then she saw and understood. Down the corridor
a mob was streaming, a wild, unkempt, blood-thirsty mob, the sweepings
of the streets and barracks. Quickly she threw herself across the door
of the old general’s room. “Get back,” she commanded. “The man in that
room is old and wounded and helpless. He is in my care, and if you harm
him it must be over my body.”
Incredible as it seems this girl of twenty was able for forty minutes
to hold the mob at bay. When guns were pointed at her she told the men
to fire through the red cross that covered her heart. They did not
shoot, but some of the most brutal struck her down, and then held her
helpless while others rushed into the room and hacked and beat the
old man to death. When the nurse fought her way to his side he was
breathing his last. She had time to whisper a prayer, and to make the
sign of the cross above his glazing eyes. Then she went home, took off
her Red Cross uniform, and said to her father: “Women have something
more to do for Russia than binding men’s wounds.”
When Botchkareva’s Battalion of Death was formed Marie Skridlova
determined to join it. Admiral Skridloff, veteran of two wars, iron
old patriot, went with her to the women’s barracks and with his own
hand enrolled her in the Russian army service. In the regiment of which
this girl was adjutant I found six Red Cross nurses who were through
with nursing and had gone out to die for their unhappy country. There
was a woman doctor who had seen service in base hospitals. There were
clerks and office women, factory girls, servants, farm women. Ten women
had fought in men’s regiments. Every woman had her own story. I did
not hear them all, but I heard many, each one a simple chronicle of
suffering or bereavement, or shame over Russia’s plight.
There was one girl of nineteen, a Cossack, a pretty, dark-eyed young
thing, left absolutely adrift after the death in battle of her father
and two brothers, and the still more tragic death of her mother when
the Germans shelled the hospital where she was nursing. To her a place
in Botchkareva’s regiment and a gun with which to defend herself
spelled safety.
“What was there left for me?” sighed a big Esthonian woman, showing me
a photograph she wore constantly on her heart. It was a photograph of a
lovely child of five years. “He died of want,” said the woman briefly.
“His father is a prisoner somewhere in Austria.”
There was a Japanese girl in the regiment, and when I asked her her
reason for joining she smiled, and in the evenly polite tone that
marks her race, replied: “There were so many reasons that I prefer
not to tell any of them.” One twilight I came on this girl sitting
outside with the little Polish Jewess with whom she bunked. The two sat
perfectly motionless on a fallen tree, watching a group of soldiers
gathered around a fire. In their silent gaze I read a malevolence, a
reminiscence so full of concentrated loathing that I turned away with
a shudder. I never asked another woman her reason for joining the
regiment. I was afraid it might be more personal than patriotic.
I do not believe, however, that this was the case with the majority.
Mostly the women were in arms because they feared and dreaded the
further demoralization of the troops, and they believed fervently
that they could rally their men to fight. “Our men,” they said, “are
suffering from a sickness of the soul. It is our duty to lead them back
to health.” Every woman in the regiment had seen war face to face, had
suffered bitterly through war, and finally had seen their men fail in
the fight. They had beheld their men desert in time of war, the most
dishonorable thing men can do, and they said, “Well then, there is
nothing left except for us to go in their places.”
Did the world ever witness a more sublime heroism than that? Women, in
the long years which history has recorded, have done everything for men
that they were called upon to do. It remained for Russian men, in the
twentieth century, to call upon women to fight and die for them. And
the women did it.