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.
CHAPTER X THE HOMING EXILES—TWO KINDS
In a great, bare room, furnished with rows of narrow cots like a hospital, but with none of the crisp whiteness of the hospital, nor any of its promise of relief and restoration, a young man, propped with pillows, played on a concertina. He was white, emaciated, near the end of his young life. His eyes were like banked fires. He sat up in bed and in the intervals of coughing made the most wonderful music on that concertina, much more wonderful than I had ever dreamed the humble instrument could produce. The man was a true musician, and he had had many years of practice on his concertina, for it had been the one friend and solace of a solitary confinement which lasted nearly a dozen years. All around him in that bare room men lay in bed and listened to him. Some, however, were asleep. Even music could not break their weary rest. All were sick. Some were as near death as was the musician. Siberia had done its work with them. They had come home to die.
On a soap box, or its equivalent on a corner of the Nevski Prospect near the Alexander Theater, another young man stood and poured out a passionate speech to the crowd of soldiers, workmen and workwomen and idle boys who had paused to listen. The man was about thirty years old, and his clothes, it was plain to see, had never been purchased in Russia. They were American clothes of fair quality, and of that stylish cut possible to buy for twenty-five dollars in almost any department store. He wore a derby hat, tipped back on his head, a soft collar and a flowing tie. He talked rapidly and with many gestures, and the crowd listened with rapt interest to his speech. I, too, stopped to listen. “What is he saying?” I asked my interpreter.
“I don’t like to tell you,” she replied.
I insisted, and this is an almost literal translation of what that man said, on that Petrograd street corner, on an August day, 1917:
“You people over here in Russia don’t want to make a mistake of setting up the kind of a republic, of the kind of phony democracy like what they’ve got in the United States. I lived in the United States for ten years, and you take it from me, it’s the worst government in the world. They have a president who is worse than the Czar. The police are worse than Cossacks. The capitalist class is on top there just like they were in the old days in Russia. The working class is fighting them, and they are going to win. We are going to put the capitalists out just like you put them out here, and don’t you let any American capitalists come over here and help fasten on you a government like that one they still have in America. It’s the capitalists that plunged America into war. The working class never wanted it.”
These are two types of exiles which Russia has called back to her bosom since the revolution, both of which constitute another grave problem with which the distracted people are struggling. The sick ones, of whom there are thousands, came back and more of them are coming from Siberia at a time when food suitable for the sick is impossible to obtain. There was almost no milk. Eggs were hard to get and were not very fresh. Food of all kinds was getting scarcer every day. There was a fuel shortage that threatened to make all Russia spend a shivering winter, and what was to become of the sick was and still is a grave question. There is a great shortage of many medicines. If fighting is resumed the hospitals will be overcrowded. Doctors and nurses will be scarce. Yet the exiles continue to come back, the long stream from the remote villages continues to hold out its longing hands to the people back home, who cannot deny them. And nearly all the exiles come back sick and homeless and penniless. Russia must take care of those freed Siberian exiles, and I don’t quite see how she is going to do it, unless the miracle happens and they find a way of restoring peace and order in the land. In that case they can do anything. They can even deal with the kind of exile I heard talking on the Nevski.