Inside the Russian Revolution

by Rheta Childe Dorr

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.