AMAZONS IN TRAINING
If the first battle of the first women soldiers in the world had been fought on American soil imagine what the newspapers would have made of the story. Especially if the women had gone into battle with the object of rallying a demoralized American army, and had succeeded in their object. And this is all the space Botchkareva’s victorious battalion was accorded in Novoe Vremya, one of the best newspapers in Russia. After describing briefly the engagement on the Smorgon-Krevo front, in which prisoners, guns and ammunition were taken, the account proceeded: “The women’s battalion made a counter attack, replacing deserters who ran away. This battalion captured almost a hundred prisoners including two officers. Botchkareva and Skridlova are wounded, the latter receiving contusions and shock from the explosion of a big shell. The battalion suffered some losses, but has won historic fame for the name of women. The best soldiers looked with consideration and esteem on their new fighting comrades, but the deserters were not touched by their example, and in this respect the aim was not reached. We must take care of these dear forces, and not give too much consideration to new formations of the kind.”
If the press of Russia had been wise, the fact that some of the slackers in the army were not touched by the women’s bravery would have been made less conspicuous than the more important fact that many soldiers were touched by it, and that the Russian army was thereby enabled to win a victory. Instead of discouraging new formations, the press should have called for more and more regiments of women to lead the men. They should have kept it up until people got so excited over the tragedy of women being torn to pieces by German shot and shrapnel that they would have risen in wrath, taken hold of their army and their government, and created conditions which would relieve women from the dreadful necessity of fighting.
It could have been done, the people were ready for it. They felt the tragedy. At a memorial service for the dead women, held in Kazan Cathedral the Sunday after the battle, the presiding priest said: “This is a terrible and yet a glorious hour for Russia. Sad it is, and terrible beyond expression that men have allowed women to die in their places for our unhappy country. But glorious it will ever be that Russian women have been ready and willing to do it.”
After the service, a Bolshevik soldier, standing in front of the cathedral, tried to turn the sympathies of the crowd by making insulting remarks about the dead women. He did not have time to say much before a group of working women, with howls of rage, rushed him, and I believe would have killed him if his friends had not got him away.
Of the women left alive but wounded, thirty were brought to a hospital not far from the Nikolai station, Petrograd, and there I saw them. When I went into the first hospital ward a wounded girl sat up in bed and, smiling like the sun, held out to me a German officer’s helmet, her prize of battle. She had killed him—that was her duty—and had taken his helmet as a man would have done. But when she told me that Orlova, big, dull, kind, unselfish Orlova, loved by everybody, was among the killed, she broke down and wept as any woman would have done.
From this girl and the others I learned that Botchkareva had spoken the exact truth when she said that no woman had faltered or shown fear. “We all expected to die, I think,” one girl said. “I know that I did. I said over the prayers for the dying while I was dressing that morning. We all prayed and kissed our holy pictures, and thought sadly about the ones at home. But we were not afraid. We were stationed between two little woods. They were full of men, some who openly refused to go forward, some who hesitated and didn’t quite know what they ought to do. We shouted at them, the commander shouted at them, called them cowards, traitors, everything we could think of. Then the commander called out: ‘Come on, brothers, we’ll go first if you’ll only follow.’
“‘All right then,’ some of them called back, and we ran forward as fast as we could, following Botchkareva. She was wonderful, and Skridlova was wonderful too. We would have followed them anywhere.”
“Did you really capture a hundred Germans?” I asked.
“I don’t believe we did it all by ourselves,” was the modest reply. “After we got into the fighting the men and the women were side by side. We fought together and we won the battle together.”
Every one of those wounded women soldiers wanted to go back to the front line. If fighting and dying were the price of Russia’s freedom, they wanted to fight and fight again. If they could rally unwilling men to fight, they wanted nothing in the world except more chances to do it. Wounds were nothing, death was nothing in the scale of Russia’s honor or dishonor. Then too, and this is a strange commentary on women’s “protected” position in life, the women soldiers said that fighting was not the most difficult or the most disagreeable work they had ever done. They said it was less arduous if a little more dangerous than working in a harvest field or a factory.
This point of view I have heard expressed by other Russian women soldiers, those who have fought in men’s regiments. There are many such women; I have met and talked with some of them. One girl I saw in a hospital, a bullet in her side and a broken hand in a plaster cast, assured me that fighting was the most congenial work she had ever done. This girl had gone to Petrograd from Riga to join Botchkareva’s battalion, but for some reason she had not been accepted. She met a young marine who told her of a new Battalion of Death which was being formed out of the remnants of several old regiments and of a number of marines. “Why not join us?” he asked. “We already have four girl comrades.” So she joined.
We were alone except for the interpreter, and I took occasion to ask this girl minutely how it fared with women who joined men’s regiments. Were the women treated with respect, let alone? How did they manage about their physical needs? Where did they bathe and change their clothes? Did not the officers object to their presence in the barracks? At first, my young soldier admitted, the men did not treat the women with respect, did not let them alone. She was obliged to give the men some severe lessons. But after a while they learned. They were considerate in certain respects, and arranged for the girls to have some privacy. Of course one lost foolish mock modesty when in camp.
The officers did not object to their enlisting, but were inclined to treat them with a lofty indifference. The men too seemed to assume that the girls could not endure the real hardships of war when they came. “The first thing we had to do in camp was to make a quick march of twelve versts. ‘Of course the girls can’t walk that far,’ the men said, ‘they can ride on the cook wagons.’ But we said, ‘Not much we don’t ride on the cook wagons. We didn’t come here to watch you do things. We came to be soldiers like yourselves.’ So they said, ‘Oh, very well! Harasho! March if you like.’ And we did. And when we got back to camp, it was so funny; sailors are not much used to walking, you know, and those men were completely tired out, exhausted. They lay around in their bunks and groaned and called on everybody to look at their feet and their blisters, while we weren’t tired at all. Why, any of us had walked as far and worked as hard in one day in the kitchen or the harvest field. So we laughed at the men and said, ‘You’re just a lot of old women. Look at us. We could do it all over again and not complain.’ After that I can tell you they didn’t patronize us quite such a lot.”
When the regiment got into camp near the trenches and the men were given the regulation uniform of the army, the officers decreed that the girls’ soldiering should come to an end. The real business of fighting was about to begin and women were not wanted. They could be sanitaries, said the commander. So they went back to women’s clothes and women’s historic job of waiting on men. This girl, however, objected, and finally confided to one of her men friends that the sanitary’s work was too distasteful for her to endure longer. “Why should I be obliged to patch up wounds?” she asked. “It is much easier to make them.” The soldier found some regimentals for her and she went out and fought in a skirmish line. When the commander heard of it he was terribly angry and to frighten her he put her on sentry duty in an exposed post. “He thought he’d cure me of my taste for fighting,” she chuckled, “but I wasn’t frightened a bit, and so he said, ‘Well, be a soldier if you are so bent on it. We need soldiers.’ And so, I fought.”
She described her first and only battle where she helped storm several lines of trenches and was one of thirty-seven survivors out of a thousand in her regiment who took part in the engagement. Her wounds, she said, did not hurt much at the time, but she was bleeding pretty badly and thought she ought to get to the hospital.
“Just then I saw our captain, and he was badly wounded, almost unconscious in fact, and I had to get him to the rear on my back. It was all that I could do, for about that time I felt that I was growing weak and would soon have to sit down. I managed to get him as far as the first line of Red Cross men, and then I went under. I had been hit in the side by a bullet or a piece of shrapnel and I was pretty sick for a while. By and by I felt better and somehow got back to the rear. The first thing I saw was one of our men who was weeping with his head in his hands. ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked, and when he looked up and saw me he gave a yell. ‘They said you had been killed,’ he shouted. And he began to dance a hornpipe. Poor chap, he had been wounded too and before he had danced more than a few steps he began to bleed and fell over in a faint.”
The ambulances were pretty full, so this plucky young creature thought she could walk the three or four versts to the hospital. She had to give up before long and a captain of another regiment, himself wounded, took her into his cart or whatever conveyance he had, and carried her to the hospital. “Our captain was there,” she finished, “quite out of his head with pain. He kept saying, ‘Don’t let that girl go back to the field. Don’t let her fight again. She is too young.’ He did not know then that I had carried him off on my back, and me wounded too.”
A great many women who had seen service in men’s regiments were leaving them and joining one or another of the women’s regiments which were forming all over Russia about that time. The largest of these regiments was being trained for action in Moscow. There were about two thousand women in this battalion, which was formed and recruited by a women’s committee, “The Society of Russian Women to Help the Country.” Among the women was Madame Morosova, before the war prominent socially, but since the war almost entirely occupied with relief work. She was a very gay and laughter-loving person, but she had fed and clothed and helped on their way thousands of refugees. She had turned her house into a maternity hospital at times, and she had given large sums of money for the relief of women and children. Finally the women soldiers appealed to her as the most important work to be assisted and her whole energies last summer were devoted to the battalion. Princess Kropotkin, a relative of the celebrated Prince Pierre Kropotkin, was another member of the society. She had a Red Cross hospital until the army desertions began, and then she closed the hospital and turned to recruiting women. Mme. Popova, vice-president of the society, is one more untiring worker. In August she obtained Kerensky’s consent to go to Tomsk, her old home, and organize a battalion there.
The Moscow regiment was being drilled by a colonel and half a dozen younger officers, all of whom seemed immensely proud of their command. Twenty picked women of the regiment were going daily to the officers’ school and when ready were to be given commissions in the regular army.
In Petrograd a regiment of 1,500 women was almost ready for the trenches when I saw them last in August. They too were to be officered by women, two score being a daily attendance at a military school. On August 20 I saw these 1,500 women march out of their barrack in the old Engineers’ Palace, to go into camp preparatory to going to the front. This palace was once the home of the mad Emperor Paul, son of Catherine the Great. He was assassinated there and his restless ghost is supposed to haunt the gusty corridors. I asked Captain Luskoff, commander of the regiment, if he had found out what the Emperor Paul thought of the women soldiers, and he laughed and promised to report later on that point.
It was not intended to raise many regiments of women, I was told. The intention was to enlist and train to the highest point of efficiency between ten and twenty thousand women, and to distribute the regiments over the various front lines to inspire and stimulate the disorganized army. They would lead the men in battle when necessary, as Botchkareva’s brave band led them, and they would appear as a sign and symbol that the women of the country were not willing that the revolution, which generations of Russian men and women have died for, and have endured in the snows of Siberia sufferings worse than death, should end in chaos and national disintegration.