THE BATTALION OF DEATH
News--even bad news--travels slowly in Russia.
When Sidor Petroff pushed open the door of Bachkarova’s forlorn little
meat-shop one frosty March morning in 1915, Bachkaroff had already been
dead three months.
Marie Bachkarova was slicing off a hunk of sausage for the boy Vashka,
whose father was killed in the first clash of Russian flesh and German
arms. She looked up and saw Petroff standing there, leaning on his
crutches.
Something colder than the chill wind from the snow-covered street
crept into the heart of Marie Bachkarova. The knife fell from her hand
and clattered heavily to the meat-block. Her gray eyes opened wide in
one flash of horror. They closed and opened again, dull and dumb with
misery.
The boy Vashka, who had seen news come to the village before on
crutches, slipped quietly out of the shop without his sausage.
When Sidor Petroff hobbled away a few minutes later to show his old
friends the Cross of St. George glistening on his trench-grimed soldier
blouse, he was unaware that Destiny had walked a bit of the way with
him that morning.
Destiny, marshaling her forces for a campaign against another group of
ancient fetishes and cherished ideals, had allotted him a small but
significant part in her project. Destiny, out in that desolate village
of weather-grayed log houses, was preparing a shock that would be felt
beyond the birch-wood forests and the Siberian steppes.
Destiny was preparing the most amazing single phenomenon of the
war--the _woman soldier_. Not the isolated individual woman who has
buckled on a sword and shouldered a gun through the pages of history,
but the woman soldier banded and fighting en masse--machine-gun
companies of her, battalions of her, scouting parties of her, whole
regiments of her.
From the anti-suffragist Destiny was going to take forever his ancient
and overworked formula: “Women can not bear arms! Therefore they
should not vote.”
From the feminist she was about to take her most triumphant retort:
“Women don’t need to bear arms--they bear soldiers.”
Against the fervid faith of the Pacifist--that “women, who pay such a
terrible price to give life will never be able to take it away”--she
was preparing to drive her saddest and bitterest blow.
Destiny, in short, was about to bring confusion upon the tidy
pigeonholes in which we keep our firm convictions ready for all
emergencies.
Marie Bachkarova, the crude, illiterate peasant woman whom Destiny
had chosen for the big part, was as ignorant as Sidor Petroff of the
importance of the moment.
She could barely write; but that night laboriously she penned a letter.
The desolation of her life must have crept into her crude appeal.
Somebody answered with permission to join a regiment of men forming in
the vicinity of Tomsk.
From that day, Marie Bachkarova became simply “Bachkarova.”
Her woman’s name and her long brown braids went first. She changed her
trailing skirt with the ruffle on the bottom for soldier’s breeches
tucked into the tops of high black boots. A vizored cap daringly
replaced her folded kerchief, and the transformation was complete.
The strength and breadth, and the deep, full-toned voice of a man, were
hers. Passing her on the street, you had to look three times to make
sure she was not a man. After the first few days of grumbling protest,
her comrades seldom remembered she was a woman.
In the two years that followed, Bachkarova was three times wounded,
still Destiny kept her deeper purposes concealed.
One spring day in 1917, when Bachkarova was lying on a cot in a
military hospital, a shrapnel bullet-hole as big as a man’s fist in her
back, some one brought news of desertions in the army.
“The men won’t fight,” said the Red Cross nurse, laying fresh gauze
upon the wound. “They are a pack of cowards. They are drunk with
freedom.”
It was not altogether the truth: for every deed of ignorance and
cowardice, the Russian front has registered one of heroism. But Destiny
does not stop for anything so complex as absolute truth. She lingered
at Bachkarova’s bedside that afternoon long enough to do her work.
“The men won’t fight,” said Bachkarova to herself. “The men won’t
fight!” she repeated. Then, suddenly forgetful of the hole in her back,
she raised herself quickly from the pillow.
“Women--women will fight!” she said.
Exhausted, she fell back on her pillow. She had her big idea. It was
the idea that produced one of the most pathetic and most dramatic facts
of the Russian summer of 1917.
On an afternoon in early June, two years and three months from the day
that Sidor Petroff hobbled on crutches into the meat-shop to tell Marie
Bachkarova that her husband was dead, Bachkarova, illiterate peasant
woman from an obscure Siberian village, knelt in the great square
in front of St. Isaac’s Cathedral in Petrograd, while the priests
sprinkled holy water, and thousands of necks craned for a glimpse of
her. On that day she became a full-fledged officer of the Russian
Army--the first woman officer in the world.
Her command, two hundred and fifty young soldier women, stood at
attention while three generals of high rank buckled on her sword, and,
after their fashion with brother officers, kissed her on both cheeks.
Into the keeping of Orlova they gave a proud gold-and-white banner.
It was a gift from Kerensky, and from its standards fluttered the
colors of the Battalion of Death. On each girl’s sleeve were the same
distinguishing marks--red “for the Revolution that must not die,” and
black “for a death that is preferable to dishonor for Russia.”
Everything in Russia begins with a proclamation. The women soldiers
fired three verbal volleys before they even saw their first round of
ammunition. The first was an appeal to Russian women.
“Come with us in the name of your fallen heroes,” they said. “Come with
us to dry the tears and heal the wounds of Russia. Protect her with
your lives.”
To the soldier they said:
“Our hearts are about to give up their last hope. We weak women are
turning into very tigresses to protect our children from a shameful
yoke--to protect the freedom of our country. Woe unto you when we shall
look upon you with contempt!”
To the deserters they said:
“Wake up and see clear, you who are selling the bread of your children
to the Germans. Soon, very soon, you will prefer to face ten German
bayonets to one tigress. We pour out our maledictions upon you. Enough
of words! It is time to take to arms. Only with a storm of fire will we
sweep the enemy off Russian soil. Only with bayonets will we obtain a
permanent peace. Forward against the enemy! We go to die with you!”
Equipped as infantry, fully armed, rolled blanket-coats swung across
their shoulders, the first woman’s regiment in the world left Petrograd.
At their head was Bachkarova, the peasant. Beside her marched Marya
Skridlova, the aristocrat, aide-de-camp, tall and patrician, daughter
of a famous Russian admiral and Minister of Marine.
Bearing the banner of white and gold came Orlova, big and strong, head
erect, and deep, serious gray eyes looking straight ahead at a vision
in which the cheering multitudes in the streets of Petrograd played no
part. Orlova’s eyes were fixed on death. She wanted to die for Holy
Russia. She had her wish. Three weeks later she carried her colors into
battle, and fell before the first shell that broke across the German
line.
Destiny permitted that for the better part of a week I might share the
wooden boards and soup and _kasha_ of these soldier women.
Late on a dreary, rainy night, I dropped off a troop-train at the
military station of Malodetchna, and prepared to wait for dawn to show
me the way to the headquarters of the Women’s Battalion. I had that
day plowed through miles of trenches, with the red mud oozing over
my shoe-tops, and I was taking into barracks with me some recently
acquired and very definite impressions of the horrors of war.
Many times in the days that followed, as I came to terms of friendship
with one and another of these soldier girls, I thought of the line of
barbed wire bounding No Man’s Land, and of the German steel waiting
behind to sink itself into the soft, warm flesh of my companions.
More often still, I shuddered at the idea that these girls with big
eyes and clear open hearts were going out to kill; for I was among
those whose pigeonholes held a fond faith in the coming of the day when
women would bear neither arms nor soldiers, but a race of human beings
gifted with the fine art of living together in peace and amity.
Here were women--two hundred and fifty of them--on their way to battle,
and just a fraction of the women’s army soon to be.
Destiny, dawn, and an occasional inquiry led me at six o’clock in
the morning to their door. They were housed in two pine-board sheds,
sandwiched between a dug-out full of Austrian prisoners and the
barracks of a battalion of Cossack cavalry.
I found myself in a building a hundred or more feet long, with steep
roofs sloping to the floor, and just enough width to allow for two
shelves eight feet deep and an aisle between. The shelves at the moment
were covered with brown bundles, and as I followed the sentry a hundred
close-cropped heads emerged from them.
Above my head, hanging from the rafters, was a jungle of gas-masks and
wet laundry, boots, water-bottles, and kit-bags. Beside each girl lay
her rifle. At the far end of the barracks we stopped before one of the
brown bundles, and the sentry announced, “Gaspadin Nachalnik.” The
man’s head and man’s shoulders of Bachkarova arose from the blanket.
Next to her, another bundle stirred, and Marya Skridlova, aide-de-camp,
moved over and invited me to come up.
In that spot, between the social poles of Russia, Rheta Childe Dorr and
I spent all the nights and most of the days in the week that followed.
Without delay I changed my too feminine dress for “overettes,” and
established myself as unobtrusively as possible in the life of the
barracks.
Soon the brown bundles were all up and shedding unbleached muslin
pajamas for their soldier uniforms. Once dressed, they tumbled out
into the rain, and lined up with their brother soldiers from the other
barracks to fill their pails with hot water from the common kitchen.
We ate our breakfast sitting on the edge of a bunk, slicing off hunks
of black bread, and washing it down with tea from tin cups. Bachkarova
sat next to me, eating sardines from a can and wiping her greasy
fingers on the front of her blouse. Orlova spent most of her time
washing these blouses, in a vain attempt to keep the Commander clean.
The routine of the day began with the reading of the army regulations.
The women soldiers had chosen to submit to the stern discipline of the
Russian army in the days before the Revolution. The ceaseless rain made
drilling in the field impossible, but within the narrow limits of the
barracks they marched back and forth, counting “Ras, dva, tri, chetiri;
ras, dva, tri, chetiri,” for several hours a day.
Very soon one soldier girl after another detached herself from the mass
and became to me an individual--a warm, personal human being. Bit by
bit I gathered their stories. Little by little I discovered some of the
forces that had pushed them out of their individual ruts into the mad
maelstrom of war.
There were stenographers and dressmakers among them, servants and
factory hands, university students and peasants, and a few who in
the days before the war had been merely parasites. Several were Red
Cross nurses, and one, the oldest member of the regiment, a woman of
forty-eight whose closely cropped hair was turning gray, had exchanged
a lucrative medical practice for a soldier’s uniform.
Many had joined the regiment because they sincerely believed that the
honor and even the existence of Russia were at stake, and nothing but
a great human sacrifice could save her. Some, like Bachkarova, in
the days of the Siberian village had simply come to the point where
anything was better than the dreary drudgery and the drearier waiting
of life as they lived it.
Personal sorrow had driven some of them out of their homes and on to
the battle-line. One girl, a Japanese, said tragically, when I asked
her reason for joining: “My reasons are so many that I would rather not
tell them.”
There was a Cossack girl from the Ural Mountains, fifteen years old,
with soft, brown, questioning eyes, and deep, rich color tinting her
dark cheeks. Her father and two brothers had been killed early in the
war. Soon after, her mother, who was a nurse, had died from the effects
of a German bomb thrown upon the hospital where she was working. The
girl was absolutely alone in the world.
“What else is left for me?” she asked, with a pathetic droop to her
strong young shoulders.
Two girls, Red Cross nurses, who had already been decorated four or
five times for service to their country, said they had seen too many
brave men suffer and die for Russia to be willing to see her sacrificed
now on the Kaiser’s altar.
There was a lonesome little girl, named Leana, whose big brown eyes,
wide and questioning, will always come back to me when I think of
women and war. She was a Pole, and had fled from Warsaw before the
advancing Germans. She was sixteen years old, and far more hungry for
love than for killing. She had the ways of a child, and, though we
had no common language but that of the heart, we became fast friends.
She used to slip her arm around me, and we would walk up and down the
barracks, never speaking, but understanding quite as well as if we had
many words. Sometimes, when I looked at her and realized that all her
potentialities would be wasted out there on the battlefield, my eyes
filled with tears.
They had come for many reasons, these women soldiers, but all of them
were walking out to meet death with grim confidence that it awaited
them there in the dark forests a few miles distant.
If there seemed to be any fear of them forgetting it,--if girlish
spirits ran too high in the barracks,--Bachkarova quickly recalled it.
“You may all be dead in three days,” she would say. And soon afterward
the Volga boat-song or the rollicking peasant tune they were singing
would change to a deep, melancholy mass, with all the tragedy of the
moment and of millions of other moments packed into it.
In a cord around each girl’s neck was a collection of sacred medals,
and a tiny cloth pouch whose contents I speculated upon.
“What will you do if you are made prisoner?” I asked Skridlova one day.
“No one of us will ever be taken alive,” she answered, and pulled out
the little gray pouch. “It is the strongest and surest kind there is,”
she said.
Orlova seldom spoke. From morning till night she went about the
barracks, doing something for some one. I had no soldier coat to wrap
about me at night, and Orlova spread a couple of tents over the hard
boards. When the black bread came from the commissary, Orlova saw to
it that we had our soldier ration--two pounds and a half a day, more
than any of us could eat; and just at the moment when I was most nearly
petrified with cold, she was sure to appear with a pail of hot tea.
At noon and at night, when two ragged little children from a near-by
village came to beg the “leavings,” Orlova always managed to have an
extra lump of sugar for each of them.
She was born for service, for mothering, for doing; but her solemn
face, almost grim in its crude strength, remained fixed on her vision
of death, and her thoughts were all for Holy Russia.
Nina was the comedy member of the Battalion. She would have been an
invaluable find for the “movies.” She was so big that she had to put
gussets in her soldier blouse to make it fit around the hips. She had
a wide mouth, an upturned nose, and blue eyes, alternately full of fun
and tears. She kept the Battalion laughing all of the time that it was
not busy putting comforting arms around her and drying her tears.
A bundle of strange incongruities was Nina--utterly unfathomable to an
American. Ever since the war began she had been jeopardizing her ample
neck in the service of her country. The bars of an Austrian prison held
her in check for six months, and she was considered such an important
catch that her captors demanded no less a person than a famous Austrian
general when terms of exchange of prisoners were discussed.
She spoke a very little English, much French, and a smattering of half
a dozen other languages. One day I looked up and found her kissing her
rifle ecstatically. She caught the bewilderment in my eyes.
“I love my gun,” she said almost defensively.
“But why?” I asked, trying to inquire into that strange back-country of
her mind and emotions.
“Because it carries death. I love my bayonet, too. I love all arms. I
love all things that carry death to the enemies of my country.”
One night I sat on the edge of the bunk, brushing my hair. She put her
hand out and touched it. Then she felt her own close-cropped head.
“Do you like short hair?” I asked her.
“For a woman, no. For a soldier, yes,” she answered.
It was a key-note. Nina spoke for the Battalion. Soldiers and women
were, for them, things apart. When they cut off their long braids and
soft curls, and pledged themselves to fight and die for their country,
they put aside all the superficial femininities.
Powder-puffs and cosmetics had remained at home. Just once I saw a tiny
mirror emerge from a kit-bag long enough to permit its owner to examine
critically a small red spot on the end of her nose.
But the essential womanliness in them cropped out in a thousand ways.
Day and night the rain pounded upon the low roof, and all that week
our feet and boots were soaked beyond all drying. It was bitterly cold
in the barracks, and the odors of cheese and sausage purchased at the
soldiers’ store mingled with the smell of wet clothes and greased
boots.
Marya Skridlova acquired a severe cough, and her cheeks were flushed
with fever.
“I am afraid I will never make a soldier,” she said one day, with a wry
little smile; “I am too demoiselle.”
I recalled the first time I saw her. It was in the barracks at
Petrograd, the day she joined the regiment. She still wore her Red
Cross nurse’s uniform, and the lovely oval of her face was framed
with braids of soft brown hair. She was twenty-five years old, spoke
five languages, was pretty, accomplished, and popular. Apparently she
had everything to live for, but she was quite certain that her hours
on earth were numbered, and briefly. Every girl in the barracks was
devoted to her, and they were continually coaxing her to eat just
another spoonful of the soup and _kasha_, which she loathed.
“Why did you come?” I asked her.
“Because I felt I had to,” she answered. “What else is there for us to
do? The soul of the army is sick, and we must heal it. I have come, and
I shall stay until they give me a cross--a metal one or a wooden one,”
she added.
Every night Bachkarova announced that to-morrow they would leave for
the trenches, and every night the announcement brought a cheer. In the
morning they packed their kit-bags and rolled up their blanket-coats;
at night they were still in the same place.
Always there was something lacking. First it was the boots. The army
shoemaker was not used to providing for such small feet, and the
commissariat was sorely taxed. When the boots arrived, the medical
supplies were missing. When the big metal soup kitchen on wheels had
come, there were no horses to pull it. A week went by, but gradually
the entire camp equipment was collected.
Late one Sunday afternoon Bachkarova and Skridlova were summoned to
staff headquarters. When they returned, they brought the news for which
every girl in the barracks was longing. The Battalion was ordered to
march at three o’clock next morning.
Neither the hardness of the plank beds nor the cold kept any one awake
that night. There was far too much excitement to think of sleep.
Gas-masks and wet laundry, water-bottles and boots, trench shovels and
kit-bags, came down from the rafters in one mad scramble.
Before the dawn had come everything was in place, and they trudged away
through the rain and mud of Malodetchana, singing a Cossack marching
song to lighten their packs and their spirits.
All the world knows how they went into battle shouting a challenge to
the deserting Russian troops. All the world knows that six of them
stayed behind in the forest, with wooden crosses to mark their soldier
graves. Ten were decorated for bravery in action with the Order of St.
George, and twenty others received medals. Twenty-one were seriously
wounded, and many more than that received contusions. Only fifty
remained to take their places with the men in the trenches when the
battle was over.
The battle lasted for two days. Among the pines and the birches of
the dusky forests they fought. With forty loyal men soldiers, they
became separated from the main body of the troops, and took four
rows of trenches before they were obliged to retreat for lack of
reinforcements.
I heard the story from the lips of twenty of the wounded women. No one
of them can tell exactly what happened.
“We were carried away in the madness of the moment,” one of them said.
“It was all so strange and exciting, we had no time to think about
being afraid.”
“No,” said Marya Skridlova; “I was not afraid. None of us were afraid.
We expected to die, so we had nothing to fear.”
Then the demoiselle came to the surface again. “It was hard, though. I
have a cousin--he is Russian in his heart, but his father is a German
citizen. He was drafted: he had to go. When I saw the Germans, I
thought of him. Suppose I should kill him? Yes, it is hard for a woman
to fight.”
Marya Skridlova got her Cross of St. George, and she came back to
Petrograd walking with a limp as a result of shell shock.
“There were wounded Germans in a hut,” she said. “We were ordered
to take them prisoners. They refused to be taken. We had to throw
hand-grenades in and destroy them. No; war is not easy for a woman.”
I asked about Leana.
“She was one of the six to stay behind,” Marya Skridlova answered. “She
was wounded in sixteen places, and died in the hospital after hours of
frightful suffering.”
On a stool beside a hospital cot in which one of the wounded girls lay
was a German helmet.
She pointed to it with pride.
“He was wounded,” she said. “He was sort of half kneeling, and I hit
him over the head with the butt of my rifle and took the helmet away.”
For a moment I could not speak. Then, reaching for a straw to save my
tottering world, I said: “He was still shooting, of course?”
“No, no. He was wounded.”
She had blue eyes, soft, kind blue eyes, and lips that curled up at
the corners. She was twenty-five years old, and had been a village
dressmaker before she became a soldier.
“But Russian women are different,” they say--they who have all their
cubby-holes still in order.
But they are not. I have talked with them, slept with them, played with
them, danced with them, wept with them. They are like women--like
humans--everywhere. A little more melancholy, perhaps, but in all their
potentialities essentially the same. Destiny has done her work well.
There were nearly five thousand women soldiers in Russia at the
beginning of the fall of 1917. All over the country--in Moscow, in
Kieff, in Odessa--they were learning to load, aim, and fire.
Bachkarova’s little band in its first mad charge was but the
advance-guard. The making of women soldiers became a business. People
no longer followed the uniformed woman about the streets of Petrograd.
They became a matter of course.
In Moscow I saw a thousand of them, representing all spheres of life
from the peasant to the princess. In the officers’ school, twenty girls
were being trained to take their command. They were sleeping on boards,
and getting used to soup and _kasha_, and all believed their day in the
trenches was close at hand.
Soon after the fall of Riga, Bachkarova left the hospital in Petrograd,
where she had been slowly recovering, and went to Moscow to lead a
fresh battalion of girls to the defense of the new front.
[Illustration: © Orrin S. Wightman Lining up for soup and kasha]
[Illustration: © Orrin S. Wightman Women soldiers at rest between
drills]
[Illustration: The crowd hugs the Nevsky to get out of range of the
machine-guns in the July riots]
[Illustration: The Cossacks bury their dead]
Out on the Finland road, not far from Petrograd, eleven hundred of
them, after a stiff course in training in barracks, had a month of
camp life to harden them for service in the trenches. These girls were
to see their only fighting in the defense of the Winter Palace in the
Bolshevik Revolution, and none was killed.
When the Cossack troops of General Korniloff prepared to march on
Petrograd, the Provisional Government took stock of the forces at its
command.
Prince Kudasheff, who had been drilling the women soldiers, reported
there was not a better disciplined or more thoroughly prepared unit in
the Russian army.
Bachkarova’s adventurous battalion took no thought of age or physical
condition; but these later soldiers submitted to a rigid examination,
conformed to all of the requirements of the men of the army, and were
asked to adhere to a rigid moral code.
They had their own transport and medical service, signal corps,
machine-gun company, mitrailleuses, and a scouting detachment of
twenty Cossack women. Such was the woman soldier as Destiny delivered
her into a startled world.
Her movement was a failure, not because of any shortcomings on the part
of the women, but because it was based upon a false premise. It assumed
that the Russian soldier left the trenches because he was a coward. He
was not: he was merely a disillusioned man who had lost all his old
gods, and had not yet found new ones worthy of his faith.
Women can fight. Women have the courage, the endurance, even the
strength, for fighting. Vera has demonstrated that, and if necessary
all the other women of the world can demonstrate it. The issue is no
longer a question of whether Vera can fight, but whether Vera should
fight. She will fight whenever and wherever she feels she must. She
is a potential soldier, and will continue to be until the muddled old
world is remade upon a basis of human freedom and safety.