IN CAMP AND BATTLEFIELD
The women’s regiment did not have to fight its brothers in arms,
however. The woman commander took care of that. She just walked into
that mob of waiting soldiers and barked out a command in a voice I
had never before heard her use. It reminded me somewhat of that extra
awful motor car siren that infuriates the pedestrian, but lifts him
out of the road in one quick jump. Botchkareva’s command was spoken in
Russian, and a liberal translation of it might read: “You get to hell
out of here and let my regiment pass.”
It may not have been ladylike, but it had the proper effect on the
Russian army, which promptly backed up on both sides of the road,
leaving a clear lane between for the women. The women shouldered their
heavy kits and under a broiling sun marched the two miles which lay
between the railroad and the camp. The Russian army followed the whole
way, apparently deciding that the better part of valor was to laugh at
the women, not to fight them.
Botchkareva must also have decided that the first thing to be done was
to give those men to understand that whether the regiment was funny or
not it would have to be treated with respect. As soon as we reached
our barracks and disposed of the heavy loads, she made a little speech
in which she said that here we were, and while we would be obliged
to mingle with the men, relations would be kept formal. The men must
be shown that the women were entitled to the same camp privileges as
themselves, and were no more to be molested or annoyed than any other
soldiers. We had had a long, hot journey, she ended, and the first
thing we were going to do was to go down to the river and have a nice
swim. So with towels around their necks the 250 women made gayly for
the river. I trotted along on the commander’s arm. At least a thousand
men went along, too, but just before we reached the swimming pool under
a railroad bridge, Botchkareva turned around and delivered another of
those crisp little commands. The men stopped in their tracks as if she
had thrown some kind of freezing gas at them, and we went on.
It was a lovely swimming pool, clear and cold and fringed with
sheltering willows. The women peeled off their clothes like boys and
plunged in. As we dressed afterward I looked at them, heads shaved,
ugly clothes, coarse boots, no concealments, not a single aid to
beauty, but, in spite of it all, singularly attractive. Some of course
were homely, primitive types. Purple and fine linen would not have
improved them much. But some who would not have been especially pretty
as girls were almost handsome as boys. A few were strikingly beautiful
in spite of their shaved heads. You observed that they had good skulls,
nice ears, fine eyes, strong characters, whereas in ordinary clothes
they might have appeared as pleasingly commonplace as the girl on the
magazine cover.
Cool and refreshed, the battalion marched back to the barracks, which
consisted of two long, hastily constructed wooden buildings, exactly
like hundreds of others on all sides about as far as the eye could
reach. Some of the buildings were half underground, for warmth in
winter, and must have been rather stuffy. Our buildings were well
ventilated with many dormer windows in the sharply slanting roof, and
they were new and clean and free from the insects which in secret I
had been dreading. Inside was nothing at all except two long wooden
platforms running the length of the building, about ninety feet. They
were very roughly planed and full of bumps and knot holes, but they
were the only beds provided by a step-motherly government. Here the
women dumped their heavy loads, their guns, ammunition belts, gas
masks, dog tents, trench spades, food pails and other paraphernalia.
Here they unrolled their big overcoats for blankets, and here for the
next week, all of us, officers, soldiers and war correspondent, ate,
slept and lived. Two hundred and fifty women in the midst of an army
of men. Behind us a government too engrossed in fighting for its own
existence to concern itself about the safety of any group of women.
Before us the muttering guns of the German foe. Between us and all
that women have ever been taught to fear, a flimsy wooden door. But
sleeplessly guarding that door a woman with a gun.
In that first midnight in camp I woke on my plank bed to hear the
shuffling of men’s feet on the threshold, a loud knock at the door,
and from our sentry a sharp challenge: “Who goes there?”
“We want to come in,” said a man’s voice ingratiatingly.
“No one can come in at this hour,” answered the sentry. “Who are you
and what do you want?”
The man’s answer was brutally to the point. “Aren’t there girls here?”
he demanded.
“There are no girls here,” was the instant reply. “Only soldiers are
here.”
An angry fist crashed against the thin wood, to be answered by the
swift click of a rifle barrel on the other side. “Unless you leave at
once we shall fire on you,” said the sentry in a voice of portentous
calm.
Down the long plank platform I heard a succession of low chuckles, and
a sleepy comment or two which the retreating men outside would not
have found complimentary. That midnight encounter served the excellent
purpose of finally establishing the status of the regiment in camp.
From that time on we lived unmolested. We stood in line with the men
at the cookhouse for our daily rations of black bread, soup and kasha,
a sort of porridge made of buckwheat. We performed our simple morning
toilets in the open; we washed our clothes in improvised washtubs
behind the barracks; we strolled about between drills. The men followed
us around from morning until night. They watched us open eyed, hung in
curious groups before the doors. A few were openly friendly, and beyond
some disparaging remarks regarding our personal appearance none were
hostile.
The day after we arrived, Monday, it rained. It poured. The camp became
a swamp. The women stayed in their barrack, drilling as best they could
in the narrow aisles. Sitting on the edge of their plank beds, the
only place there was to sit, they listened with deep attention while
under-officers read aloud the army code and regulations. In the morning
a group of nurses from a hospital train in the neighborhood came to
call, and in the afternoon half a dozen officers came from the stavka,
two miles away. The commander, a charming man, seemed astonished and
deeply impressed with the regiment standing at attention to greet him.
“It is beautiful,” he said repeatedly, and he was good enough to say to
me, “How wonderful for an American woman to be with them. Thank you for
coming.”
Tuesday it cleared and the battalion had its first open field drills.
The rest of the Russian army stood around and pretended to be vastly
amused. Whenever a woman made a mistake in the manual, and better
still, when she fell down while charging, or splashed into a mud puddle
on a run, the men laughed loudly. Some of that laughter, I feel pretty
certain, hid hurt pride, for every decent soldier I talked to expressed
his sorrow and humiliation that the women had felt the necessity of
enlisting. Quite a number of men in that camp had been in America and
of course spoke English. They said, “Say, sister, what do you suppose
they think about this back in Illinois?” One man said, “Sister,” (I
still wore the nurse’s coif, having no other headgear) “back home
in the States they used to say women oughtn’t to vote because they
couldn’t fight. I’ll bet these women can fight.”
The officers in and around that army position were evidently of the
same opinion. They came to the drill field every day to inspect and
criticize the work, and they sent their best drill sergeants to
instruct the women, who worked hard and learned quickly. One day the
commander of the Tenth army, whose Russian name is too much for my
memory at this distance, came over with his whole staff, a brilliant
sight. The commander was plainly delighted, and shook hands with a
great many of the women. He even went out of his way to shake hands
with the American. Kerensky was in the neighborhood one day, but he
did not visit us. The Nachalnik saw him at staff headquarters and he
sent kind messages, promising the women that they should be sent to the
front as soon as they were ready.
The impatience of those women to go forward, to get into action, was
constant. They fretted and quarreled during the frequent rainy spells
which kept them housebound, and were really happy only when something
happened to promise an early start. One day it was the arrival of 250
pairs of new boots, great clumsy things which it would have crippled me
to wear, and in fact all the women who could afford it had boots made
to order. Another day it was the appearance of a camp cooking outfit
especially for the battalion. Four good horses were attached to the
outfit, and the country girls hailed them with delight as something to
pet and fuss over.
The women spent much time cleaning and learning their guns. They seemed
to love their firearms, one girl always alluding to her rifle as “my
sweetheart.”
“How can you love a gun?” I asked her.
“I love anything that brings death to the Germans,” she answered
grimly. This girl, a highly educated, wellbred young woman, was in
Germany when the war broke out. She was arrested and charged with
espionage, a charge which, for all I know, may have been true. It
was not proved, of course, or she would have been shot. On the mere
suspicion, however, she was kept in prison for a year and must have
suffered pretty severely. She looked forward to the coming fight with
keen zest. I asked her one day what she would do if she was taken
prisoner again. She pulled from under her blouse a slender gold chain
on the end of which was a capsule in a chamois bag. “I shall never be
taken prisoner,” she said. “None of us will.”
From Thursday on the weather improved and the regiment worked hard in
the field. I had felt the strain of confinement in barracks, and when
I was not watching the drill I was taking long walks down a highway
over which went a constant procession of troops and camp supply
wagons, moving on and on, nearer the horizon, from which came frequent
low mutterings like distant thunder, but which were heavy gunfire.
Sometimes I walked as far as a little settlement which the Nachalnik
told me was not unlike the village she found so unbearable after her
husband left it. The village consisted of two rows of log or roughly
timbered cottages along a winding, muddy road. Green moss grew on the
thatched roofs, and the whole place had a forlorn, neglected look, but
surrounding each cottage was a carefully tended garden with beets,
cabbages, onions, potatoes, and sunflowers grown for the seeds, which
are the Russian substitute for chewing gum. Often the cottages had
poppies growing in the rows of vegetables, the bright blooms giving
brilliance to the somber and lonely landscape.
Half a dozen miles on the other side of the railroad was another and
a larger village, equally dismal, but furnished with a church, a
wayside shrine, small shops and other improvements. My special friend
the Adjutant and I drove over there one day after supplies. We bought
chocolate, nuts, sardines and biscuits to relieve the deadly monotony
of our daily black bread, soup and kasha. The regiment bought some
supplies at little market stalls near the station. Here one bought
butter, sausages reeking with garlic, tinned fish and doubtful eggs.
At an officers’ store in the vicinity Botchkareva spent some of the
money donated in Petrograd for tea and sugar when they were needed,
and for a kind of white bread or biscuits. They were hard and shaped
like old-fashioned doughnuts, with a hole in the middle through which a
string was run. A yard or two of this bread went well with good butter
and hot, fragrant tea. As far as food was concerned I was better off
in the camp than I was a little later in Petrograd. There was even
a fairly good hot meal to be had at the station when we chose to go
there, which we did several times. But no amount of good food would
have kept our regiment happy in camp very long. The women fretted
and chafed and demanded to know why they were kept in that hole. The
Nachalnik coaxed and scolded them along, and Skridlova, who was easily
the most popular person in camp, reminded them that it took six months
to train ordinary soldiers and that they were being especially favored
by having the time shortened.
Those women went into battle after less than two months’ training, as
it turned out, for the evening of the ninth day the Nachalnik came back
from headquarters with orders to march the next morning at five. What
an uproar followed! Cheers, laughter, singing. You would have thought
they were going anywhere except to a battlefield where death waited for
some and cruel suffering for many. I wanted to go with them, and would
have insisted on going had I known that they were so soon to fight.
But orders were merely to advance for further drill under gunfire. I
would have been frightfully in the way in the new position, which had
no barracks, but only dog tents, just enough to go around. Nothing on
earth except the knowledge that I would be depriving some one of those
brave women from the comfort of a dry and sheltered bed persuaded me to
leave them.
Five days later in Petrograd I read in the dispatches that they had
been sent almost directly into action, leading men who had previously
refused to advance, and turning a defeat into a victory; a small one
to be sure, but Russia was thankful for even small victories those
days. A short note from Skridlova prepared me for the story of losses
which I knew was coming. She wrote in French, which she knows better
than English, “You have heard already perhaps that we have been in
action. I do not know yet how many were killed or have died of wounds,
but two of those you knew well were killed. Catherine and Olga, who
you remember had won three medals of St. George. Eighteen girls are
wounded badly, Nina among them.” Nina was the girl who called her gun
“sweetheart,” and who had been a prisoner in Germany. Skridlova was
badly contused in the head, shoulders and knees, but she remained
in command of the remnant of the battalion because the Nachalnik,
Botchkareva, had suffered so severely from shell shock that she had to
be sent to a hospital in Petrograd. She was nearly deaf when I saw her,
and her heart was badly affected.
“It was a good fight,” she whispered, smiling from her pillow. “Not a
woman faltered, not one. The Russian men hid in a little wood while the
officers swore at them and begged them to advance. Then they sent us
forward, and we called to the men that we would lead them if they would
only follow. Some of them said they would follow, and we went forward
on a run, still shouting to the men. About two-thirds of them went
with us, and we easily put the Germans to flight. We killed a lot of
Germans and took almost a hundred prisoners, including two officers.”
In another hospital I found more than twenty of the battalion, some
slightly and others seriously wounded. The worst cases were kept in
base hospitals, near the battle front, and I never saw Nina again.