CHAPTER VI THE WOMAN WITH THE GUN
The women soldiers of Russia, the most amazing development of the revolution, if not of the world war itself, I am disposed to believe, will, with the Cossacks, prove to be the element needed to lead, if it can be led, the disorganized and demoralized Russian army back to its duty on the firing line. It was with the object, the hope, of leading them back that the women took up arms. Whatever else you may have heard about them this is the truth. I know those women soldiers very well. I know them in three regiments, one in Moscow and two in Petrograd, and I went with one regiment as near to the fighting line as I was permitted. I traveled from Petrograd to a military position “somewhere in Poland” with the famous Botchkareva Battalion of Death. I left Petrograd in the troop train with the women. I marched with them when they left the train. I lived with them for nine days in their barrack, around which thousands of men soldiers were encamped. I shared Botchkareva’s soup and kasha, and drank hot tea out of her other tin cup. I slept beside her on the plank bed. I saw her and her women off to the firing line, and after the battle into which they led reluctant men, I sat beside their hospital beds and heard their own stories of the fight. I want to say right here that a country that can produce such women cannot possibly be crushed forever. It may take time for it to recover its present debauch of anarchism, but recover it surely will. And when it does it will know how to honor the women who went out to fight when the men ran home.
The Battalion of Death is not the name of one regiment, nor is it used exclusively to designate the women’s battalions. It is a sort of order which has spread through many regiments since the demoralization began, and signifies that its members are loyal and mean to fight to the death for Russia. Sometimes an entire regiment assumes the red and black ribbon arrowhead which, sewed on the right sleeve of the blouse, marks the order. Regiments have been made up of volunteers who are ready to wear the insignia. Such a regiment is the Battalion of Death commanded by Mareea Botchkareva (the spelling is phonetic), the extraordinary peasant woman who has risen to be a commissioned officer in the Russian army.
Botchkareva comes from a village near the Siberian border and is, I should judge, about thirty years old. She was one of a large family of children, and the family was very poor. They had a harder time than ever after the father returned from the Japanese war minus one foot, but that did not prevent their number from increasing, and merely made the lot of Mareea, the oldest girl, a little more miserable. She married young, fortunately a man with whom she was very happy. He was the village butcher and she helped him in the shop, as they had no children. When the war broke out in July, 1914, Mareea’s husband marched away with the rest of the quota from their village, and she never saw him again. He was killed in one of the first battles of the war, and the only time I ever saw Botchkareva break down was when she told me how she waited long months for the letter he had promised to write her, and how at last a wounded comrade hobbled back to the village and told her that the letter would never come. He was dead—out there somewhere—and they had not even notified her.
“The soldiers have it hard,” she said, when her brief storm of tears was over, “but not so hard as the women at home. The soldier has a gun to fight death with. The women have nothing.”
For months Mareea Botchkareva watched the sufferings of the women and children of her village grow worse and worse. Winter killed some of them, winter and an unwonted scarcity of food. Typhus came along and killed more. The village forgot that it had ever danced and sung and was happy. Every family was in mourning for its dead. Mareea decided that she could not endure it to sit in her empty hut and wait for death. She would go out and meet it in the easier fashion permitted to men. That was the way, she explained to me, she joined the regiment of Siberian troops encamped near the village. The men did not want her, but she sought and got permission, and when the regiment went to the front she went along too.
