Chapter V: 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.

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.