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.