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THE RED HEART OF RUSSIA
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Every wave of revolution in Petrograd broke over the cobbles of the great Wintc " Palace Square — The Dvortsovaya ' ;
THE RED HEART OF RUSSIA
BY BESSIE BEATTY
War Correspondent of San Francisco Bulletin
ILLUSTRATED BY PHOTOGRAPHS
NEW YORK THE CENTURY CO.
1918
Copyright, 1918, by THE CENTUBY Co.
Published, October, 1918
TO FOUR WHO SAW THE SUNRISE
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I THREE GOOD SAMARITANS .... 3
II DIPLOMATS — OFFICIAL AND OTHERWISE 26
III IRRECONCILABLE BED-FELLOWS ... 46
IV SPECKS ON THE HORIZON 65
V THE BATTALION OF DEATH .... 90
VI IN THE HOLLOW OF THEIR HAND . . 115
VII OLD RIVERS AND NEW DOCTRINES . . 132
VIII THE MAN ON HORSEBACK .... 146
IX THE CENTRABALT MAKES AN EXCEPTION 164
X THE RISE OF THE PROLETARIAT . . . 178
XI THE FALL OF THE WINTER PALACE . . 201
XII THE DAY OF SHAME 225
XIII THE GRAVE OF HOPE 244
XIV MOTHER Moscow WEEPS .... 259
XV BLASTING AT THE ESTABLISHED ORDER . 271
XVI IN PLACE OF THE GUILLOTINE . . . 292
XVII THE GREAT GRAY WOLF 312
XVIII TSARS AND PEASANTS 335
XIX WOMEN IN THE REVOLUTION .... 357
XX REVOLUTION TAKES A HOLIDAY . . . 386
XXI ON THE ROCKS OF UNCOMPROMISE . . 407
XXII THE INTELLIGENTZIA OBJECTS . . . 430
XXIII THE GREAT BETRAYAL 446
A MESSAGE TO MARS 475
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Every wave of revolution in Petrograd broke over the cobbles of the great Winter Palace Square — The Dvortsovaya .... Frontispiece
FACING
PAGE
Around the statue of Alexander III, symbol of old
Russia, the talking multitudes surged . . 32 First Soviet of Workmen's and Soldiers' and Depu- ties 32
Alexander Kerensky in the study of the Tzar . . 33 The great stucco Winter Palace in which the
American guests were housed 33
Bessie Beatty in the "dark forests at the front" 80
A soldiers' shrine behind the lines 80
Lake Narach — a part of No Man's Land ... 80 Captured barbed wire entanglement — Peter at the
left 80
Blessing of the banners of the Battalion of Death 81 The Woman's Regiment on review before its de- parture for the trenches 81
Lining up for soup and kasha 112
Women soldiers at rest between drills . . . .112 The crowd hugs the Nevsky to get out of range of
the machine guns in the July riots . . .113
The Cossacks bury their dead 113
A typical street scene in the Volga river towns . 136
ILLUSTRATIONS
FACING PAGE
Barges of wood on the Neva 137
The Volga — the great highway of Russia from Pet-
rograd to the Caspian Sea 144
To Zizhni Novgorod, where the Oka and the Volga rivers meet, the commerce of the world comes flowing 145
Korniloff, his staff and Cossack bodyguard from
the "Wild Division" 172
Bicycle troops to the rescue of Kerensky . . . 172
Baltic sailors' bayonets speak for the Soviet . . 173
A dining room in the Matrosski Klub (Sailors'
Club), Helsingfors 173
The proclamation of the Military Revolutionary Committee announcing the fall of the Keren- sky government 208
IVomen soldiers in their last stand before the Win- ter Palace 209
The pass which permitted the author safe conduct
through the Bolshevist lines 209
The Winter Palace from the Red Arch . . . 240 Russian soldiers at home in the Palace of a Grand
Duke 240
Soldiers and factory workers took the place of
striking telephone operators 241
Red Guards on duty before Trotzky's door . . 241 The Minister of Rumania and his staff just before his incarceration in the Fortress of Peter and
Paul 256
Old Ivan Veliki high up in the heavens faithfully thundered the hours above the citadel of church and state ... ... 257
ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
Mother Moscow sat serene arnid the domes of her
churches 272
After the Moscow battle 273
The Grave of the Brotherhood beside the old Krem- lin wall . 273
Marie Spiridonova 288
Lunarcharsky 288
Leon Trotzky . 288
Nikolai Lenin 288
Krylenko 288
Alexandria Kolontai . 288
Kamineff 288
Yesterday and to-day on the Marsovaya Pola. Priests with lifted ikons and gorgeous robes and Red Guards with bayonets and crimson banners 289
A peasant milkman and his customers. Milk was sold only on card to mothers with babies and for invalids 320
In open-air bazars where there is little to sell but
many to buy, Russia does her marketing . . 321
Under the thatched roofs in villages like this, one hundred and twenty million Russian peasants make their home 352
Katherine Breshkovskaya and her two aged com- rades, Lazareff and Nicholas Tchaikowsky with her American friends, Col. Wm. B. Thompson and Col. Raymond Robins . . 353
Soldiers' wives on the Nevsky demonstrating for in- creased allowance , . 353
ILLUSTRATIONS
FACING PAGB
It was a dangerous partnership, for when the state
fell the church tottered also 400
New Russia votes for the Constituent Assembly . 401
Young Russia makes revolutionary demonstration
at school 401
Meeting in the library of the Tauride Palace De- cember 11 where in defiance of the People's Commissaries the Constituent Assembly was declared open 448
The Constituent Assembly as it finally convened in
the Tauride Palace January 18 .... 448
The Russian delegation arrives at Brest-Litovsk . 449
The photographs copyrighted by Orrin S. Wight- man are published through the courtesy of Colonel W. B. Thompson of the Red Cross Mission to Russia.
THE RED HEART OF RUSSIA
THE RED HEART OF RUSSIA
CHAPTER I
THREE GOOD SAMARITANS
PETROGRAD!
Out there in the silver twilight of the white night she lay, a forest of flaming church steeples and giant factory chimneys, rising vaguely from the marshes. I pressed my face closer to the dust-crusted windowpane and searched the flying landscape.
There on the edge of the East she waited for us, strange, mysterious, inscrutable, compelling — a candle drawing us on from the ends of the earth like so many fluttering moths.
Twelve long, hot, dusty days the Trans-Si- berian Express had been crawling toward her, — crawling like a snake across flower-strewn steppe and velvet forest, — the one unclean thing upon this new-born world of spring.
I glanced at my wrist-watch — it was twenty
THE RED HEART OF RUSSIA
minutes past two on a morning in early June of the year 1917. Here we were, despite war and revolution, peeping into Peter's "Window" only four hours behind schedule.
Involuntarily I breathed a tiny sigh of disap- pointment. Nothing, nothing, had happened. Even the dreary, desolate Siberian wastes had failed to live up to their promise. Six thousand versts of emerald meadows, cut with shimmering china-blue waterways, stretched behind us. Six thousand versts of meadows, covered with a mist of wild flowers — pink, mauve, and flaming yel- low— and broken frequently with deep woods, where silver birches played like sunshine against the shadowed background of dusky pines — that was Siberia.
At every log station, with its red flags and its row of poplars, a crowd of front -bound soldiers, in worn, dun-colored uniforms, tried to board the train, only to settle peacefully back to more in- terminable hours of waiting when the Committee of Workmen's and Soldiers' Deputies, traveling with us, had explained the necessity.
Occasionally in the night we were suddenly awakened, when the door of our compartment was
4
THREE GOOD SAMARITANS
thrown open by a guard searching for an escaped Austrian prisoner. Otherwise, the monotony of our journey had remained unbroken.
Well, it was done. Ten minutes more, and Petrograd would open the door of a new world to us. I glanced down the car at a row of passion- ate faces flattened against the windows, while hungry eyes drank deep of once familiar scenes. They were home-bound exiles, these companions of mine, going back to a land whose door had long been closed in their faces. Home! Every click of the wheels carried me farther and farther away from that scrap of earth on the other side of the world which I called home.
My mind wandered back to that sunny day, two months before, when through a mist of tears I had watched the hills of California disappear behind the Golden Gate. How blithely I had come away ! Blithely, because I knew that mine was a land where the latch-string was always out, and I could go back again at a moment's choosing.
I tried to think what it must be to be coming home to the land of the bolted door, to the land of the black scowl — the land that had suddenly thrown down its bars and turned a friendly, smil-
5
THE RED HEART OF RUSSIA
ing face and open arms toward the lonely out- casts.
My eyes wandered to the vestibule, where a Siberian soldier sat upon his kit-bag, a tin can with a bunch of dead lilies-of-the-valley held tightly in his two hards. For ten days and ten nights he had sat there, his big, round, brown eyes looking out across the great spaces, resignation and the infinite patience of these people of the East and the North reflected in his face. Home for him was done up in that little bunch of lilies- of-the-valley, long since dead. Every day I had passed him on my way to the dining-car, and my body ached with vicarious weariness as I saw him uncomplainingly sitting and dreaming over the faded lilies. He and I, of all the passengers, were the only ones who were not going home.
My musings were suddenly cut short. The Trans-Siberian Express, train de luxe of the longest railroad in the world, was slipping quietly to its place beside a deserted platform. A clean- cut young Englishman, on his way to be married in Petrograd, adjusted his coat collar the final time, and patted his hat to see that it was placed at the proper angle. Then he put his head out
6
THREE GOOD SAMARITANS
of the window to receive the first welcoming smile of the sweetheart he had not seen for a year. He drew his head in again, surprise, pain, embarrass- ment mingled on his fine, boyish face. She was not there.
Farther down the aisle, Count Tolstoy, son of the great Tolstoy, returning from America, lifted his window and searched the vacant platform for the face of his wife. He, too, turned back disap- pointed. Petrograd was as unaware of us as though we had been so many ghosts flitting in- visibly through the air. Petrograd was entirely engrossed in its own very important affairs. Even the station-master had failed to take cog- nizance of our coming. In the absence of port- ers, we trucked our own baggage ; and we had to wake up the guard to unlock the door and let us through.
Outside, the big circle was flooded with the light of the white night. My eyes focused for a mo- ment on Trubetskoy's squat, heavy, powerful granite man on horseback, Alexander III, — symbol of departed Romanoffs, symbol of dead Russia, — then wandered about in dazed bewilder- ment.
7
THE RED HEART OF RUSSIA
The cobblestones were dotted with men and women gathered in groups and talking in high- pitched, excited voices, eyes blazing and arms waving: students, peasants, soldiers, workmen, pouring a torrent of words into the night.
"What is the matter? Is it another revolu- tion?" I asked breathlessly.
"No," some one answered, "nothing is hap- pening. They are just talking. It has been like this ever since March."
"But it 's the middle of the night," I said. "It 's nearly morning. Something must be wrong."
"They talk all day and all night, all the time," my informant continued. "In the old days, you know, they were not allowed to talk, and now that the dam is broken, the flood of language never stops."
One lone and dilapidated carriage, drawn by a bored and weary looking horse, with head framed in a high wooden collar, stood at the curb. A Russian came through the door, and shouted, ap- parently into the air, a single magic word: "Iz- vostchik !"
A perambulating feather-bed in voluminous
8
THREE GOOD SAMARITANS
folds of blue broadcloth detached itself from the nearest crowd, swept its broadcloth train majes- tically over the sidewalk, and mounted the box. The carriage rattled away, the linguistically accomplished Russian and all his bags stowed neatly within. I watched this achievement with undisguised admiration and envy, blankly won- dering what I should do next.
A fellow traveler, a Swedish girl on her way home from Japan to be married to an English officer, joined me. Behind her waddled the stout and pleasing person of the Finnish missionary who with her "many luggages" had shared my compartment from Harbin.
We held a consultation. Here we were, all utterly alone at half -past two in the morning, in this great, strange city which talked on and on without even a glance in our direction. Our telegrams to friends were probably traveling in the mail-bags on the same train or coming along on next week's express.
A young Russian officer came gallantly to the rescue.
"I telegraphed for a room — you ladies can have that," he said; and, turning to me: "If you will
9
THE RED HEART OF RUSSIA
stay and mind the luggage, we will go uptown and see about it."
The last thing in the world I wanted to do at that moment was to stay and mind the luggage. The station was hot, close, and dirty. Soldiers- weary brown men in worn uniforms, unwashed and unshaven — asleep on their kit-bags or curled up on the floor in their overcoats, lay so thick that you had to pick your way carefully. I was tired of places that were close and dirty. I longed to be out in those strange, wide streets, so full of people with so many things to say that the days were not long enough. Politeness set a seal upon desire. My friends promised to be back in twenty minutes, so I returned to the stuffy wait- ing-room, and the odd assortment of bags and bundles for which I was to be responsible.
There was a clock on the wall, and the minute- hand slowly made its way around the dial. An hour passed — it was half-past three. Still no sign of the Russian gallant. The minute-hand began another journey.
Once for a few seconds I forgot the minute- hand. The waiter from the dining-car, who had grown more and more stepmotherly in the dis-
10
THREE GOOD SAMARITANS
tribution of portions as the journey progressed, entered the room. He walked to the corner where half a dozen bundles of soiled table linen were stacked, and, glancing about to see that no one was looking, he swiftly untied them. From the center of each he took a fifty-pound sack of white flour. It was no longer difficult to explain the sparkling stones from the Ural Mountains appearing on the hands of the dining-car crew as the train pulled out of Vyatka, or difficult to be- lieve the stories of the five-hundred-ruble game in progress in the dining-car of evenings. Flour in Petrograd was scarcer than Ural brilliants and far more highly priced.
At a quarter to five my friends returned. There was not a room to be had in Petrograd, they said. The Hotel Europe was crowded. At the France they were sleeping in the sitting- rooms. The Astoria, which had been the best hotel in town, was occupied by the military, and no civilians were allowed.
The Russian suggested that we stay where we were until the populace began to wake up, — about ten o'clock, — then consult our respective consuls. Nothing on earth could have induced
11
THE RED HEART OF RUSSIA
me at that moment to spend five seconds longer in the fetid atmosphere of that station. Five hours was a prospect I refused even to contem- plate.
The guard was once more asleep and the door locked. I made my way through a labyrinth of baggage-rooms to an opening on a side street. The same groups of men were still excitedly talk- ing, and here and there along the curb a peasant woman, with a market-basket of hard-boiled eggs, cucumbers, lemons, or sunflower seeds, offered her wares.
I paused at the corner and speculated as to which road to take. The Nevsky Prospect, fa- mous as the Champs Elysees, the Strand, and Fifth Avenue, though I knew it not for itself at the moment, stretched wide before me in one di- rection. To my left was another street only slightly narrower, and flanked on either side by towering buildings, large enough to house a world of little people like myself. Surely, in all those great masses of wood and stucco and stone, there was some little corner where I could put my weary head. I walked in a daze, peering up at the strange painted signs. If it had been an
THREE GOOD SAMARITANS
overcoat, a cheese, or a pair of boots for which I had been searching, it would have been quite sim- ple; for the little shops were profusely covered with frightful paintings of all these things, de- signed for people who, like myself, could not read.
Three blocks from the station I came upon a huge ornate gray building, rambling around three sides of a court. There was an air of elegance about the place, and on one of the doors was a small brass sign, which looked as though it might be designed for people who could read. I picked out the letters one by one, trying frantically to remember whether the English r was the Russian p or vice versa. The building had the look of a hotel. It might as easily have been a theater, or a palace, or the police-station, for all the in- telligence those strange letters conveyed to me.
I was just screwing up my courage to the point of entering when an izvostchik drove up to the door, and Count Tolstoy and the lost wife stepped out. He came quickly to the rescue.
"Yes, yes, this is the Select Hotel," he said. "If you will step inside I will ask if there is a room for you, and perhaps you would like to take
13
THE RED HEART OF RUSSIA
my izvostchik back to the station for your bag- gage. But first the passportist must have your passport."
Five minutes later I was back at the depot, announcing the news to the astounded group, and gathering the weary women and the "many luggages" into the ramshackle old carriage. At six o'clock the wild pigeons in the courtyard sang me to sleep.
I awoke with a start six hours later. "Where am I?" I asked. "In Petrograd," I answered myself — "in Petrograd, in the heart of the Revo- lution." The midday sun, creeping through the window of my tiny room, made all its imperfec- tions pitifully plain. I was grateful to that room as to a stranger who had found me homeless and opened her door, but I wanted to be quickly away, out into the exciting promise of the blue-and-gold day. I dressed hurriedly and ran through a stack of letters of introduction, but discarded them all. On a slip of paper I found an ad- dress, "Moika 64." It was the home of a news- paper man — a fellow correspondent, an old friend. On this day I needed an old friend. I
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THREE GOOD SAMARITANS
would find Moika 64, and on the way I would stop for breakfast at the Hotel Europe.
It was all quite simple, you see. Where were those threatening dangers poured like poison into my ears? Petrograd was like any other place. The clerk at the desk answered my simple Eng- lish request for directions with a shake of his head and a volley of Russian, from which I fled in laughing despair.
Once outside, I made my way to that wide street rejected earlier in the morning. There was an air of importance about it, something that made me feel it led to that nebulous locality which in every city we call "uptown."
A dozen street-cars passed me. They were crowded with soldiers who filled seats, aisles, and platforms, and overflowed on to the steps. I hailed one, and squirmed my way through the faded uniforms to the woman conductor in blue broadcloth and gold buttons.
"Pazhal'sta, Hotel Europe?" I said, exhaust- ing in one breath half of my entire Russian vo- cabulary.
She shook her head, a simple gesture that I
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THE RED HEART OF RUSSIA
understood perfectly, then followed it with a vol- ley of language which left me dazed. She looked at my blank and bewildered face.
"American," I said. Again she shook her head. Then a great light broke into her face.
"Amerikanka, da, da, da!" she said, and laughed in pleased delight at her discovery.
I handed her my paper with Moika 64 upon it. It was written in English and conveyed noth- ing to her.
By this time the entire car had become inter- ested. A simple-looking woman, with a platok on her head, took the paper, and she and two com- panions consulted long and earnestly over it. They motioned me to wait. The car moved slowly up the wide wood-paved Nevsky; past faded brick and yellow stucco palaces, whose proud sides were pasted with revolutionary post- ers and proclamations; past the great Gostinny Dvor (Court of the Strangers), where the little shops were shuttered now in Sabbath seclusion behind the hedge of linden trees.
Like the muddy water in a stream, the endless procession of khaki-clad soldiers flowed along the street. The feather-bed izvostchiks, calling en-
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THREE GOOD SAMARITANS
couragement to their horses, rattled over the wooden cobbles. Under the columns of the great Kazan Cathedral, the little people, dwarfed by the mighty proportions of this pile of masonry, passed back and forth, crossing themselves and dropping alms into the hands of beggars on the wide steps. On the gravel-covered paths in the formal garden the children played hop -scotch, while their parents sat on the benches, contentedly watching them.
On every corner, and in between streets, the groups of people were talking, talking, talking! Ambulances and field hospital wagons, decorated with red flags and green boughs, and filled with crippled soldiers and Red Cross nurses, darted in from side streets and all hurried off in the same direction.
Quite abruptly we turned a corner and skirted the edges of a pleasant park, with trees in full leaf, and a multitude of birds noisily chattering in the young spring green. Ivan in khaki, with Vera beside him in her best spring clothes, strolled along the winding paths, or sat contentedly munching sunflower seeds, and talking as volubly as the noisy sparrows up above.
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THE RED HEART OF RUSSIA
Peace, joy, exultation, was upon that spring- clad city. Freedom was young then, like the spring, like the leaves on the trees, like Vera and Ivan. Freedom was a butterfly upon a high bush, the sheen still upon her wings; and Vera and Ivan looked, rejoiced, and feared to touch — so new, so beautiful, so fragile.
Poor Ivan! Poor Vera! They could not guess that afternoon, any more than I, what the months would do to their butterfly treasure. They could not know that they themselves would soon lay violent hands upon it, and the day would come when the broken wings would lie crushed like a blade of grass beneath a heavy boot. They could not know that Freedom must return in many other guises before she would be strong enough for Russia's need.
Eyes and ears hungrily drinking in strange ights and sounds, and thoughts darting back and forth from the land of Tolstoy, Turgenieff , and Dostoievsky to the Russia of Ivan's dreaming, I almost forgot that I had a destination, and a rapidly increasing appetite.
Suddenly one of the three women who had
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THREE GOOD SAMARITANS
taken me under their wings touched me on the shoulder and motioned me to follow. She left her friends, and together we walked blocks and blocks, while she searched silently for street num- bers, and I tried to look the gratitude I could not speak. Finally she stopped, smiling happily, and pointed to a sign that read "64." Then, with a cheery, friendly "Dosvidanya !" (Good- bye!), she left me.
I knocked on the first door. The dvornik shook his head. Then I tried the second. I bat- tered at a dozen before I realized that in Russia the entire building has the same number. At last, up five flights of stairs, I found a gleam of recognition in the eyes of the servant. She made it clear by means of the sign language that there was no one at home. But at sight of my crest- fallen face she invited me in, and for half an hour tried vainly to reach my friend by telephone. She wept with exasperation at her inability to help me, and to make herself understood.
It was half-past three when I found myself again on the tree-bordered canal. I was still without breakfast or luncheon, and heaven and
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THE RED HEART OF RUSSIA
the Russians only knew what had become of the Hotel Europe. Both seemed to be involved in a conspiracy of silence on the subject.
I wandered up the canal, stopping every likely and unlikely person to ask if they spoke English. Always I got the same headshake and the same kindly "Nyet, nyet, barishna!"
I came out upon a huge square, crowded with ambulances and field-wagons, automobiles, and trucks, filled with crippled soldiers and sailors, men from the ranks who had already paid the heavy toll of war, — armless men and legless men, and men with eyes to which sight would never come back, — all were pleading with their able- bodied brothers to fight to a victorious conclu- sion.
It was a war demonstration, a pitiful, futile attempt of the broken men to rally their brothers to a standard they were rapidly deserting. For the first time, my eyes were seeing what war does to human flesh. I stood there, watching the faces of these men, listening to the unintelligible tor- rent of eloquence that poured from their lips, and thought sorrowfully of another country half way across the world making ready for this.
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THREE GOOD SAMARITANS
Finally I recalled my quest. Surely in all that vast throng there must be some one who spoke English. I walked in and out, trying one and another; meeting always with that same be- wildered headshake, and that same sympathetic glance of true regret which every Russian, be he prince or peasant, gives you when he is unable to do the thing you ask. ,
I crossed the square, walking aimlessly I knew not where. On the corner was a huge building with high, boarded windows and bullet-holes in the plastered walls. A man was sitting in the doorway, and I asked if he spoke English. He shook his head. I did not know which way to turn. For some strange reason that I shall never fathom, I walked through the doorway and into the building.
I found myself in a huge, empty marble lobby, opening into a series of large rooms stripped bare of everything but a broken plate-glass cabinet of silver inlay, and a bloodstained but once bright rose-colored velvet carpet. I stood wondering where I was, and what I should do next, when down the broad stairs came a Russian officer in the splendid full-skirted wine-colored coat of the
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THE RED HEART OF RUSSIA
Caucasians. His dark olive face and black hair were topped with a high military hat, and a sword of inlaid silver jangled on each marble step as he walked.
"Pardon, do you speak English?" I asked in a faint and by this time rather despairing voice.
He clicked his spurs together, and bowed low before me.
"A leetle, madame," he answered. "Can I be of service to you?"
Never again will the sound of my native tongue be such blissful music. I told him of my recent arrival, and of my search for friends, and ended with:
"I want to go somewhere where I can get some- thing to eat."
He looked at me out of smiling and kindly brown eyes.
"This is a hotel," he said. "The Astoria Ho- tel. But it is now the headquarters of the mili- tary, the Voina Gostinnitsa (War Hotel), and civilians are not allowed. At the time of the Revolution it was sacked, as you can see; so the dining-room has been closed since, and meals are served only in one's room. If you had a room
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THREE GOOD SAMARITANS
you might have luncheon here. Are you the wife of a military man, or something of that sort?"
I shook my head, told him I was nothing "of that sort," and offered my card and credentials. He brightened.
"Ah!" he said. "There may yet be a way. The correspondents are under the control of the military now, and it is just possible the General might make an exception and permit you to stay here. Shall I take you to him?"
I glanced at him for a single searching second, then nodded. We climbed the marble stairs, and at the end of a long corridor we came upon the General, white-haired and white-whiskered, and all that a Russian General should be. He arose from behind a flat-top mahogany desk, bowed low, kissed my hand, and invited me to a seat.
My new-found Caucasian friend explained me in Russian, and the General nodded.
Fifteen minutes later, comfortably established in my own little blue-and- white room on the sixth floor of the War Hotel, amid all the conveniences of a first-class American hotel, I sat down to a platter of cold meat and a service of steaming Russian tea. Another hour found me collecting
•a
THE RED HEART OF RUSSIA
typewriter and passports and preparing to es- tablish a base of operations from which to ex- plore that vast new Russia.
That night, on the roof-garden of the Europe, overlooking the glistening domes and spires of the City of Peter, I dined with friends. I had stumbled upon them when I had ceased to look.
"Where are you stopping?" one of them asked.
"At the War Hotel," I answered.
Mouths and eyes opened in chorus.
"But it is impossible!" they said. "That is for the military, and they are most strict that no civilian be admitted."
I told them the story of the three Good Samari- tans— of the little woman with the shawl over her head, who left the car, her friends, and her own pleasure, to walk blocks through the scorching sun with a total stranger ; of the maid who almost wept in her distress because she could not help me; and, last, of the dark-haired knight of the Caucasus, who made Cinderella's fairy god- mother seem a mere stepmother by comparison.
Back in the little blue-and-white room, wrapped in the warm glow of their kindliness, I sat down in a bewildered heap to think it over.
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THREE GOOD SAMARITANS
My mind wandered far that night, — into the black past of Russia, and into the vague unknown future, — but never did it even remotely suspect the stirring times that room and I would share together in the year to come.
CHAPTER II
DIPLOMATS OFFICIAL AND OTHERWISE
IT was less than a week after my early morn- ing advent in Petrograd when I once more passed before the candle-lighted ikons in the Nicolaiski Station and out to the platform. This time the station was far from deserted. A line of sol- diers, a picked escort of stalwart men in dun- colored coats, stood at attention. The tall, dark, handsome young Foreign Minister, Teresh- chenko, towered above the genial white-vested person of the American Ambassador Francis. The American colony was out in force.
The Provisional Government of Russia, suc- cessor of Tsar and bureaucracy, between Cabinet crises and food problems, had found time to pre- pare to entertain. Ambassador-Extraordinary Root and the special diplomatic mission to Rus- sia were due to arrive at any moment.
Earlier in the day I had wandered curiously through the great corridors of the rambling old
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DIPLOMATS
Winter Palace and watched the servants putting the finishing touches upon the mansion of the Czars. With the true Russian sense of the dramatic, the new hosts of all the Russias had chosen to be at home to their republican brothers from over the seas in the very premises where royal heads were once held highest and lackeys' backs once bent lowest.
The huge red stucco building — acres and acres of it — had been swept and dusted and polished until Nicholas himself could have found no spot at which to point the imperial finger of disap- proval. The big mahogany bath-tub in the am- bassador's suite had been scrubbed for the last time. The nudity of the tiny ultra-modern brass bed, cowering behind the crushed-mulberry cur- tains, had been only partly covered with fresh linen and a new silk eiderdown quilt. The huge oval-topped mahogany table from which Peter the Great had taken his caviar and vodka was prepared to serve ham and eggs American style. As I looked from behind the pink silk curtains out on the blue waters of the Neva, sparkling in the spring sunshine, I wondered what the coming of these Americans would mean to Russia.
27
THE RED HEART OF RUSSIA
While official Russia was getting ready to wel- come my countrymen, I had been trying to find out what unofficial Russia was thinking about. With the help of an interpreter, I had been listening to the babble of voices that sounded through the golden days and white nights. Al- ready I had learned that revolution is a term as variable as truth, and newly mined by every man who speaks it.
r I discovered that the Revolution that over- (threw the Tsar and absolutism was a simple thing, ^beautifully logical, gloriously unanimous. Ev- ery one wanted it; every one was glad when it came. The monarchy that had brought such desperate misery to the millions crumbled to dust with the first vigorous blow of the rising peoples like a thing long since dead. The heavy heart of Russia lifted in a mighty shout of joy : "Svo- boda ! ( Freedom. ) We are free 1"
For the moment this was enough. That sin- gle word, with its age-old power of placing man on the mountain-tops, made Russia happy.
Soon her people began to be specific.
"Freedom for the peasant," they said. "Free- dom for the worker." "Freedom for the sol-
28
DIPLOMATS
dier." "Freedom for the Jew." "Freedom for
women."
Russia still rejoiced, but with certain vague mental reservations faintly disturbed by this di- versity. Then came definition. Each man translated revolution into the terms of his own life.
Nicolai Voronoff, whom I met at dinner one night, voiced the conservative intellectuals' idea of freedom.
"Things could not go on as they were," he said. "We had to have freedom. Freedom of speech, freedom of press, freedom of assembly, inviolability of person — freedom as you Ameri* cans and English know it."
Old Chekmar, the peasant delegate from a re- mote south Russian village, spoke of freedom in terms of land.
"Freedom for the peasant," he said. "Yes, yes, land — we shall have land. The Tsar Alex- ander gave it to us when he freed the serfs, but the landlords have kept it away. Mother earth —it is ours at last! — God's and the people's."
Chekmar tossed his fine old head in a gesture of pride and exaltation as he said it, and his dull
29
THE RED HEART OF RUSSIA
blue eyes were lit with the fervor of young ideals.
The same light was in the eyes of Andrey Krugloff, from the great Putiloff works, when he said: "Freedom for the worker. The day of the proletariat has come. The men who use the tools shall control them, the fruits of labor shall belong to labor. We will put an end to capitalistic exploitation; we will do away with poverty; the workers of the world shall unite."
Ivan Borovsky, who had come from the front to attend the all-Russian convention of Work- men's and Soldiers' Deputies, saw freedom in terms of the soldiers. "Peace, peace," he said. "We dig our graves and call them trenches. What is the use of freedom to a man in his grave? We will stop this bloody slaughter. This is not our war. This is the Tsar's war. The soldiers of all the world shall rise as we have done. They will throw off the yokes of kings and kaisers, and we will all make peace. There shall be no more court-martial, no more capital punishment. We will have honest, democratic peace. Then we can go back to our farms and our factories and put an end to all wars."
Little curly blond-haired Petroff, who brought 30
DIPLOMATS
me my morning chei (tea), with a smile that sparkled like the sunshine on the Neva, defined revolution in his own way when he refused to ac- cept my first tip. "We are free now," he ex- plained. "We will get our regular per cent of the bill for service."
So it went. Revolution was to every man the sum of his desires. Yet above and beneath and beyond each man's interpretation was the deeper thing that old Chekmar voiced when he spoke of land as "God's and the people's." It was not only of himself that Chekmar thought when he said, "It is ours!" Personal greed could never have brought that light into his dull blue eyes. Something more than his own hours and wages sounded through the words of Andrey Krugloff . Hours and wages alone were not enough to lift his heavy face out of the mold of common clay. It was the knowledge that they were one with the great living, breathing human mass — the people — that filled their eyes with visions.
The honeymoon of Revolution was already waning on that day when the American commis- sion came to Petrograd; but the consciousness of "the people" as an entity still remained. Slowly
31
THE RED HEART OF RUSSIA
the years of political and economic slavery, land hunger, and hideous physical poverty imposed
•
upon the many by the few had brought about a mass consciousness that was the most vital force in revolutionary Russia.
I discovered with surprise that the Tsar's name was seldom mentioned. He ceased to count for anything. A month after the first revolutionary attack, he was as completely forgotten as if he had never lived. When Vera and Ivan tore the double-headed eagles from the great wrought- iron fence around the Winter Palace, and ripped the imperial coat-of-arms from the buildings to make bonfires in the streets, all that there was of Nicholas, even his memory, was burned.
With the tragic failure of the first Revolution of 1905 and 1906, when the Workers tried to take control and lost everything, still fresh in their memory, they were trying desperately to cooper- ate, to give and take, to use the power of the in- tellectuals and at the same time direct revolution into the channels through which they wanted it to flow. They were theorists who had always been denied the right of action. Never having been allowed to try to put any of their theories
Around the statue of Alexander III, symbol of old Russia, the talking multitudes
surged
First Soviet of Workmen's and Soldiers' Deputies
Alexander Kerensky in the study of the Tzar
© Orrin 8. Wightman
The great stucco Winter Palace in which the American guests were housed
DIPLOMATS
into practice, they had never learned how to com- promise. Each group was willing to die for its own particular definition of revolution, but no group was able to yield to the theory of another. Consequently, Cabinet crises followed Cabinet crises.
Prince Lvoff and the scholarly Miliukoff had already been retired to private life before the Root Commission reached Russia. Miliukoff, student of English institutions, saw freedom for Russia in the terms of a constitutional monarchy. To him, and to the liberals who gathered around him, this was a sufficiently radical step for a country that had only yesterday crawled out from under the iron boot of absolutism. He and his followers were a hopeless minority, and, in spite of their past struggles for Russian freedom, were soon discarded, with the monarchial idea. They were liberals and could not follow Russia into the new social realms she was so eager to explore.
The demand of the people for a republic was insistent. The republican idea satisfied some, but not enough. A social democracy — a social- ist state — became the loudest..cry of the articu- late proletariat.
33
THE RED HEART OF RUSSIA
I heard it on the street corners and in the crowded trams, along the wide paths of the parks, and in the assembly rooms of palaces whose an- cient walls might well have shuddered at the strangeness of such sentiments.
Much of the time they talked of war, and I heard unkempt soldiers in dilapidated uniforms and workmen in shoddy suits demanding "an in- terbelligerent conference," "statement of Allied war aims," "publication of the secret treaties," as glibly as workingmen at home discuss hours and wages.
Here and there a group talked of the coming of the American Commission. Usually the spokesman was an unofficial diplomat returned from the United States and bringing his own de- cided idea of us and our faults. There were many of these in Petrograd in the days of early June. Some of them hailed from Hester Street; and Hester Street and New York's East Side became formidable factors in complicating the international situation. They had seen all of the worst and none of the best of America. They sat at the tables in the tea-room where the mem- bers of the Soviet of Workmen's and Soldiers'
34
DIPLOMATS
Deputies gathered around the samovar, and told stories of poverty and suffering on the East Side.
"Root is coming to make you fight," they said. "Root does n't care anything about the Revolu- tion. He 's a capitalist, a corporation attorney, a hide-bound reactionary. In the United States he 's against the workers."
Most of these men were honest revolutionists, soap-boxers, actuated by nothing more than hatred of the capitalistic system and a distrust of all things bearing a government stamp. There were other unofficial diplomats in Petrograd whose words had a different origin. They were under orders from Berlin, and their business was to discredit America and the Allies and make the Russian masses believe the German people were the true friends of Revolution. They conducted a telling and profitable propaganda. To begin with, they had linguistic and geographical advan-f tages that the Allies could not overcome. Many Germans speak Russian, still more Russians speak German. Being next-door neighbors, the Germans understood the Russian psychology.
They knew that nothing in the world meant anything to the mass of the Russians but saving
35
THE RED HEART OF RUSSIA
their Revolution, and they simulated a sympathy for revolution that they were temperamentally in- capable of possessing. They pictured Germany as huftgry for democratic peace, and the Allies as imperialists who would not stop fighting until they had crushed the German masses and divided the German territory. They accused the Allies of trying to continue the war for the purpose of destroying the Revolution. They took the pas- sion and idealism of the Russian mass and tried to turn it to their own ends.
They also had something to say about the com- ing of the American Commission, and they said it where it would take effect.
For the most part, unofficial Russia was too engrossed in its own very important business to pay much attention to the tall, gray-haired, dis- tinguished American who was coming to town. Unofficial Russia was concerned chiefly with de- fining revolution, and each individual group was possessed of a passionate necessity for making the other groups accept its definition.
All together, it was not a happy situation into which the imperial train was bringing the Ameri- can diplomats that June afternoon. The train,
36
DIPLOMATS
looking almost as it did when the royal family last journeyed forth from Petrograd, slipped into view on the appointed second.
At ten o'clock next morning Ambassador Root sat in a corner of the huge drawing-room in his suite at the Winter Palace with his back to the light. Half a dozen of us foreign correspondents sat stiffly upon the edges of flower-brocaded chairs drawn in a circle around him, while he introduced the Washington Code into Petrograd.
The Washington Code is a Maxim silencer. It is a gentleman's agreement to which an occa- sional lady is reluctantly admitted. A great man sits in a corner — with his back to the light — and announces that he would like to be able to discuss quite openly everything that happens and even to have the benefit of your advice. Of course, if he is to do so, he must be assured that all he says will be held in strictest confidence. You — perhaps because you are flattered by the great man's confidence, perhaps because of your curi- osity— joyfully consent. Sometimes you consent only because you know the folly of cutting off your ears merely because your lips are sealed.
The Washington Code was the only check to
37
THE RED HEART OF RUSSIA
speech in all that great land swamped beneath a flood of words.
Those morning conferences became a regular institution. We did most of the talking while Mr. Root sat silently listening. Occasionally he made one of those simple, pat, nut-shell com- ments for which he has such an amazing talent, and we regretted the "made in America" rules for correspondents.
From time to time, special missions took flying trips out of Petrograd to study some particular phase of the complex situation. The military men went to the front; the naval representatives took in a mutiny of the Black Sea Fleet ; the bank- ers investigated Russia's depleted treasury; and the religiously inclined went to Moscow to dis- cover the future status of the Russian Church.
There was no official life of any kind. When the Commission donned its Prince Alberts and paid its first two formal visits, they found the Foreign Minister in a sack-suit and tan shoes and the members of the Council dressed like working- men. The young men of the Provisional Gov- ernment were growing old overnight with the burden of the task upon them. And the mem-
DIPLOMATS
bers of the Soviet were groping endlessly for that hidden road which idealism and reality may travel Jn equity.
Every man, from the young Minister Presi- dent, Alexander Kerensky — whose health was already giving way under the frightful strain of trying to make the dilapidated economic machine inherited from the Tsar's regime supply the ex- haustive demands of war and revolution — to the most insignificant little delegate in the Soviet, was working with his sleeves rolled up to re- mold Russia nearer to his heart's desire.
As the Soviet moved, so Russia moved. It was the mouth-piece of the awakened masses. Already it was the government behind the gov- ernment. Charles Edward Russell was the only member of the Commission who was able to get the least bit close to the Council of Workmen's and Soldiers' Deputies. They treated him with more courtesy than any other official foreign representative, though they looked upon him as a renegade socialist.
I went with him to the Soviet one day when he was to speak. His buttonhole flaunted the red- dest red ribbon in Petrograd, and his white linen
39
THE RED HEART OF RUSSIA
collar, the only one in the huge assembly, was encircled by a flaming scarlet tie. They listened to his message, but it had no meaning for them. He had come to Russia to help make Russia fight, and the dream of the Russian revolutionist was not only to stop Russia from fighting, but to put an end to all wars. Separate peace was no part of the revolutionary scheme. Even the most radical members of the Soviet were play- ing for larger stakes. Internationalism was at the bottom of their creed, and it was not until ten months after the fall of the Romanoffs that I heard a revolutionist admit the possibility of separate peace. It was at a meeting in the Duma, when Leon Trotzky, after the armistice negotiations at Brest-Litovsk, said:
"We have given the Allies a month to come into the peace negotiations. Perhaps we can give them a little more time if they need it, but we can't go on forever. Russia is bleeding to death, and to save her we have to get back to the mills and the farms and the factories."
They believed that the failure of international- ism in 1914 did not necessarily mean the failure of internationalism in 1917, for now the interna-
40
DIPLOMATS
tionalists of the world had before their eyes the example of Russia and the Russian Revolution. The revolutionists had no hope from the German autocracy, but they were confident that if they could but speak loud enough, the masses of the German people would rise and overthrow their government, as the Russian workers, soldiers, and peasants had done.
A few men believed, with the elder Liebknecht, that the German people could never be free until the German military power was defeated at arms, and these tried frantically to continue the war.
"Peace, but not separate peace," was the phrase on every Russian tongue.
The Root Commission realized this, and it re- alized also that the question was not whether the government had the will to go on fighting, but whether it had the power. The mission was in- terested in helping to give Russia that power. Perhaps what it failed to realize was that Rus- sia's spiritual needs were as great or greater than her material needs. The thing above every- thing else that Russia needed to keep her in the war was a cause. Root, "battered old cam- paigner," as he styled himself, was not unmoved
THE RED HEART OF RUSSIA
by the sincerity and immensity of the movement in which Russia was engrossed. It was not his day — it was the day of the diplomats from Hes- ter Street. He might not agree with their judg- ments or approve their methods, but I think he felt himself in the presence of something big, something epochal.
For three years, Ivan had fought desperately in the trenches, simply because the Little Father had told him to. Sometimes it was for love of the Little Father that he fought. More often it was for fear of him and his generals. More often still it was only in response to that blind obedience to orders which absolutism instils in those whom it enslaves. Sometimes Ivan did not know until he reached the big city of Petrograd what enemy of Holy Russia it was that he must fight.
Manpower was cheap in Russia. Russia was correspondingly careless as to how she wasted it. Ivan fought as no other soldier in the world is asked to fight — fought with bare hands, fought with pitchforks, fought with guns that he took from the hands of comrades as they fell in battle.
One day Ivan discovered that the Tsar, in
DIPLOMATS
whom he had believed, was just a little man whom he was able quite easily to put aside. The gen- eral, the colonel, the captain of the regiment — they too were little men. He need not salute them ; he need not respect them ; he need not obey them.
The great driving force — fear — was gone. That greater driving force of war — a cause — Ivan had never known. No one had bothered to give him one. No one had cared enough.
Suddenly the facts were changed. The old gods were swept away in a single hour. Tsar and church and country crumbled together. Revolution took their place. Russia had a cause. "Save the Revolution!" became the rallying cry. To save the Revolution, and what it meant to each, became the common faith. However men differed in their definition of terms, they were all agreed as to the slogan. Russia would follow no other flag.
Ivan was tired of war — tired to death. Being Russian, he had no relish either for killing or for dying; but when the occasion demanded, he did both with a degree of resignation and despatch that is almost Oriental. Living always in the
THE RED HEART OF RUSSIA
shadow of danger, he acquired an indifference to it as sublime as it is tragic. Essentially a fatal- ist, he accepted the facts of life as they came to him, and contented himself with thinking occa- sionally of that day of the people off there in the vague future when all would be different. He was n't interested in other men's territory. Con- stantinople had no meaning for him. He was not naturally imperialistic or militaristic. He wanted to govern himself and let other people govern themselves.
Freedom had come, and he wanted desper- ately to enjoy it, to use it to its limit and still to save it.
Diplomatically, Germany was in the strategic point. She pressed her advantage. She asked Ivan to do what he wanted to do — to stop fight- ing. The Allies asked Ivan to do what he did not want to do — to go on fighting.
The Root Commission made it plain that, un- derlying the whole question of aid to Russia, was the fundamental question of whether Russia was going to continue in the war.
The July offensive was the answer of Keren- sky to the Allies. It was a blunder from its in--
44
DIPLOMATS
ception — a forced offensive for which Ivan was not psychologically prepared. He invested no part of his faith in it, and he chose to be shot as a coward and traitor rather than continue it. A few picked men went into battle and put up a brilliant and courageous fight; but the rank and file of the Russian soldiers were not behind them. Ivan could no longer be driven to battle by the whip of fear, and he had not yet come to know Germany as a greater enemy to himself than to the Tsar.
The Root Commission waited to see the of- fensive well started before it left Petrograd, but did not remain to see the tragic end.
CHAPTER III
IRRECONCILABLE BED-FELLOWS
WAR and revolution are irreconcilable bed- fellows. Mars is a jealous god, demanding more and ever more sacrifice. Revolution cries inces- santly for larger freedom. Out in that nebulous land, beyond the edges of civilization, for which all nations have a common name — "the front "- I came close, very close, to the staggering re- ality of war. I came to know how revolution wars on war, and war on revolution, and both on freedom and democracy. Conflict is the char- acteristic element of revolution, as of war. Democracy languishes, and freedom sickens in the midst of conflict.
On that dismal gray day when I slipped quietly away from Petrograd, the capital was celebrating in a mild, half-hearted fashion the offensive on the southwestern front.
With me went Peter Bukowski, carrying in his pockets two of those most coveted of all docu-
46
IRRECONCILABLE BED-FELLOWS
ments to the war-time correspondent — the pass that entitles the bearer to safe-conduct into that forbidden territory where visitors are discouraged at the point of the bayonet. Only slightly less important than the permits was Peter himself; for he was my voice, my ears, and my body- guard— though in this last capacity he proved entirely superfluous.
Polish grandparents bequeathed to Peter a foreign name and an aptitude for languages. Somebody — it must have been a fairy, for every one else disclaimed all responsibility — put a map of Ireland on his face. Two generations of Chi- cago, U. S. A., did the rest. The result was a typical American, one hundred and seventy pounds of bounding vitality, irrepressible good nature, and plain boy. Peter won the heart of every one from Johanna Ivanovna to the Di- vision Chief, and paved my way from the lazaret to the trenches. Peter, upon the night of our departure, was torn with conflicting emotions. The American colony was going to honor the Fourth of July by consuming quantities of white- bread sandwiches from the Ambassador's pantry. Peter wanted desperately to see the 'Russian
47
THE RED HEART OF RUSSIA
front. The vision of stacks of sandwiches— white-bread sandwiches — appeared before him, but Peter would not be there.
We went early to the station, in the hope of claiming two upper berths. There were no longer any sleeping-car reservations in Russia, but there was an unwritten law that the person who first put his belongings into the upper berth was entitled to sleep there, while the other oc- cupants huddled together on the seat below or stood in the aisles. We poked inquiring heads into one compartment after another, but the earlier birds, to make assurance doubly sure, had thrown not only their baggage but their persons in the coveted places.
When I dozed off to sleep, a girl who had fled from Riga at the German advance was sitting beside me. I awoke an hour later, and she was gone. In her place was a round-faced, blue- eyed boy drawing shiny black cavalry boots over blue breeches with a golden stripe down each bulging side. He looked too young for war, but five red stripes on his sleeve proclaimed as many wounds.
All night long the stream of life flowed in and
48
IRRECONCILABLE BED-FELLOWS
out. All night long a changing procession filed through the compartment. Men stayed for an hour or two, and dropped off at wayside stations. Some, just out of the hospital, were home on sick leave. Some were returning to their positions at the front. All were tired — tired to death; yet sleep was out of the question. Each man un- folded his own scrap of story, expressed his opinion about the war, and dropped out to make room for another.
The boy stayed longer than the others. Peter offered him a cigarette, and soon he was relat- ing a round, unvarnished tale. Smirnoff Brusi- loff was his name, and his age eighteen. He was in school at Petrograd when the war broke out, and he made up his mind to enlist. His father, a Russian general, promptly ordered him to stick to his books. He as promptly rejected parental commands and ran away to join the army. From his pocket he drew a handful of medals. They were the four Orders of St. George. Each of them marked some daredevil adventure and hairbreadth escape. The last, the Gold Cross, highest award in the gift of the Tsar, was given for blowing up a railroad bridge used by the
49
THE RED HEART OF RUSSIA
Germans for transport of provisions and war sup- plies.
To him, war was a great game. The abstract ideas of revolution meant nothing. The the- ories that were keeping his peasant brothers in the trenches awake at night passed him by en- tirely. "There is no sport left in fighting with the Russian army," he said. "I am going to cut down south and try to break into the English lines."
He left — and toward morning there sat in his place a simple fellow with a strange look in his vacant eyes. He unwrapped a big hunk of black bread, and with a pocket-knife pared off scraps and ate them. When he had finished his break- fast, he nodded to sleep. The soldier beside him drew the wabbling head down to his shoulder, as he might have done to a tired child. "The war," he said, laying a gentle hand on the boy's hair — "he is not right here."
When I opened the door of the compartment in the morning, the aisle was filled with soldiers asleep on the floor. I picked my way over one human bundle after another to the platform, to negotiate the purchase of wild strawberries, bot-
50
IRRECONCILABLE BED-FELLOWS
ties of fresh milk, and prim little round bouquets of wild flowers which the barefoot peasant chil- dren were offering for sale.
Late that afternoon we moved into the com- partment of a kindly colonel, with whom Peter had made friends. We were all bound for the same section of the front, and the only other oc- cupant of the compartment was Corporal Kuzma, of the proud age of fourteen. Already he had seen two and a half years of service, and had been twice wounded. He had a wonderful red pencil, which he fingered affectionately as he took us into his confidence. This pencil had been given him by a nurse in the hospital where he had been convalescing from his last injury.
The corporal's father, according to his story, was a captain of staff, and his mother a first-aid nurse. Both had been killed at the beginning of the war. An older brother, an officer in the army, had been killed in action; and a sister, seventeen years old, who was a nurse, was drowned while swimming the Niemen River to get away from the Germans. The corporal, lone survivor of his family, naturally joined the army. Two promotions were the reward for
51
THE RED HEART OF RUSSIA
valor under fire. His uniform confirmed his story.
The corporal did not say that he was pressed for funds, but he offered to dispose of his treas- ured red pencil for a consideration. Peter bought it for a ruble, and presented it again. Then the Colonel bought it for a ruble, and he too followed the rest of Peter's example.
"But," added the Colonel, "if I ever hear of you selling it again, I will not only take it away, but I will have you dismissed from the army in disgrace."
I wanted to see more of this astounding child; but when we changed trains at the next station, he too dropped into the stream of the procession and disappeared.
The next part of the journey we made sitting upon a wooden bench in a fourth-class carriage. That night we picked up a sleeper again, and the Colonel insisted on stowing me away in the up- per berth, with a tiny pillow that his daughter had made for him tucked under my head. He confided to Peter that I was the first American woman he had ever met.
"My father was in the army before me, and
52
IRRECONCILABLE BED-FELLOWS
my grandfather before him," he said, with a sigh ; 4 'but I am going to send my boy to America to be educated for some other profession."
He understood the revolutionary soldier no more than young Brusiloff did. This lusty new thing that had come crashing into the ordered ways of his military life, and snapped its fingers in the face of all the traditions upon which his world was founded, left him hurt and helpless and bewildered. I fell asleep still listening to his voice. The next thing I knew, it was day- light, and he and Peter were hurrying me off the train.
Not a note of war jarred the quiet of this land- scape. Nothing in the wooded slopes or in the deep meadows remotely suggested war. The Colonel sniffed the morning air. "It smells like the front," he said, with a sense of real satisfac- tion.
We parted. He was to continue on the main line for another station, while we shot off in a different direction. The rest of the journey we made squatting on the floor of a box-car. The only other passengers were two soldiers and a tiny pansy-faced girl of six with great gray eyes,
53
THE RED HEART OP RUSSIA
shy and wistful. She sat upon the edge of my skirt, spread out for ithat purpose, and seriously crunched sunflower seeds.
Our way led through fields of rye, yellowing in the sunshine, and potato patches, green and promising. On the edge of the distant clearing a herd of cattle grazed, and along the road-bed women, barefooted and in calico dresses, worked with picks and wooden shovels. An army motor- truck, driven by a woman, chugged across our path.
At ten o'clock the branch line came to an end in a cleared space in the forest, and we stepped into a huge tent canteen with a Red Cross sign above the door. Soldiers, a hundred or more, slouched over the tables, slicing off hunks of black bread with their pocket-knives, and washing the bread down with tea drunk from tin cans. They were of the earth, these men. Their dun clothes were heavy with the brown mud of the trenches, their faces weathered to the color of the soil, their tawny hair sun-bleached. Only their eyes, sky-blue or shining black, lifted them out of the monotone.
One of them brought us tin cups of steaming
54
IRRECONCILABLE BED-FELLOWS
tea, and explained that he and his comrades were just out of the first-line trenches. Peter asked him to direct us to the lazaret, which was to pro- vide us with sleeping quarters. He pointed to- ward the forest, where a thin wisp of gray smoke curled slowly up into the blue sky, and volun- teered to take us there. We started across the fields on foot. It was a crisp and clear morning. A recent rain had washed and polished every blade of grass. A little wind stirred gently the feathery tops of the distant pines, and rippled the field of blue corn-flowers, white buckwheat, yellow mustard, and purple clover-bloom.
Surely this could not be war — these painted fields, those dark, peaceful woods! The thought had barely registered, when a dull boom! boom! boom! came suddenly to my ears. Peter looked at the soldier and at me.
"It 's war, all right," he said.
Beyond the first row of trees we came abruptly upon a cluster of low frame buildings, log cabins, and brush-covered dugouts. From the top of a tiny log bungalow, with blue curtains at the win- dows, an American flag was flying. A frisking colt kicked up its heels on the edge of the clear-
55
THE RED HEART OF RUSSIA
ing, and a flock of friendly geese came waddling to meet us.
We stopped in front of a large building, and a "Sister of Mercy in the Russian Red Cross uni- form opened the door. She led the way to the dining-room, and ordered coffee with warm milk from the lazaret's own dairy.
Suddenly we heard a whirr above our heads. The nurse ran to the door, excitedly motioning to me to follow. An aeroplane, — a German aeroplane — was outlined against the cloudless sky. A battery opened fire to the right of us, and another to the left. The shots came in quick succession, like the beating of a drum. A tiny cloud of smoke appeared in the wake of the flyer. Another broke just above him. A third and a fourth shell exploded below. The gunners had missed. The German sailed safely on his de- structive way.
"You had better get inside," said a Russian doctor, who joined the group. "There will be a shower of shrapnel fragments in a minute."
"We have been rather expecting an aeroplane raid to-day," he continued, lighting a cigarette. "Our fellows celebrated the victory on the other
56
IRRECONCILABLE BED-FELLOWS
front yesterday by peppering the Germans with artillery fire, and we thought they might retali- ate with bombs."
We spent the day exploring the hospital, built upon ground once occupied by the Germans, and from trees felled there in the forest and sawed on the premises with a primitive two-man-power Russian saw.
With the exception of one hospital captured from the Austrians, there was not a more com- plete plant along the entire length of the great front ; and the flag flying over the tiny bungalow had a real significance — an American was respon- sible for that hospital.
Dr. Eugene Samuelevitch Hurd, the Russians called him, and, though he was already on his way to France to help his own countrymen, he had left a record that made me realize what one unofficial American can do in the matter of diplo- macy. Peter and I in the days to follow had cause to be profoundly grateful; for on this sec- tor of the front one needed only to be American to have all ways opened unto him.
At dinner we sat down to excellent Russian fare: shchee (sour cabbage soup), kasha (boiled
57
THE RED HEART OF RUSSIA
buckwheat), stewed meat, potatoes, and bread at least three shades lighter than any we had seen in Petrograd.
After dinner, Johanna Ivanovna, head nurse for the military hospital next door, took me for a walk through the woods. Johanna Ivanovna was young, fresh, and softly, sadly pretty in her Sister's garb. She was lonesome out there on the edge of the forest. She spoke a little English, rusty from long disuse. She was the only per- son in all those fields and forests who understood even a stray word of my native language.
As we turned back toward the lazaret, a Rus- sian rocket flashed into the western sky. It was followed by another, and another.
"A German scouting party had been sighted outside the barbed-wire entanglements," Johanna Ivanovna explained from long experience at the front. "The rockets are torches to help trace their movements."
I slept that night on a narrow army cot in a typical camp room, the only unfamiliar feature of which was a strange contraption like a knapsack hanging on the wall. It proved to be a gas- mask, and bore the warning: "Keep your gas-
58
IRRECONCILABLE BED-FELLOWS
mask always with you — it will save your life." I put the mask back on its nail, and turned down the gray army blankets, to find white sheets. My clothes had not been off for two nights, and those sheets were alluring. My last recollection was the sound of the low grumble of artillery on the firing line to the west.
Division Staff Headquarters was our immedi- ate objective next morning. A breechka, with one horse in the shafts and another to run along- side in the strange Russian fashion, was at the door of the lazaret when we finished our coffee. The road led over a hillside and through a typical Russian village : a cluster of wooden houses hud- dled together in the center of fields of grain and flax. They were pitiful little homes, weather- grayed, straw-thatched, and dilapidated. The main street was thronged with soldiers, who had come to buy picture post-cards, cigarettes, and candy from the meager store. Beyond the vil- lage we headed into the forest, bumping our way over a military corduroy road of rough logs laid together like the boards in a floor.
The wagon path bristled on both sides with barbed-wire entanglements, and the woods were
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THE RED HEART OF RUSSIA
honeycombed with trenches. They were tim- bered with logs, and the roofs were covered with moss and delicate wild flowers.
The sentries glanced curiously at me. Women, even Red Cross nurses, seldom pene- trated this far into their domain. But they al- lowed me to pass unchallenged. We stopped in front of an old-fashioned farm-house with a pas- sion-vine growing over the veranda, and a rustic summer-house built around an aged tree in the front yard.
The General's aide came out to meet us. He took us to the commanding officer, and we drank tea while plans and permits were being made and horses saddled. Once permission was granted to visit the Russian front the military host left noth- ing to be desired.
The General offered me his aide as a guide; and he, Lieutenant Gusaroff , mounted me on his beautiful black "Arabka." The pony and I cov- ered eighteen miles through the dark forests that day, and before I left we were thoroughly fa- miliar with that sector of the front. Every mile of the way was bounded by trenches running off into the depths of the woods. Here and there
60
IRRECONCILABLE BED-FELLOWS
we passed a pine snapped in the middle as if it had been a match, and great cavities in the earth marked the havoc of enemy artillery fire.
We lunched with the Colonel and a group of young officers in a log-lined dugout, with flowers upon the table and an elaborate hanging lamp made from pine cones suspended above it. In one corner of the living-room was a tiny wire pen in which three baby chickens were being carefully reared.
Table conversation turned to the question of the offensive on the southwestern front. Most of the men were hopeful that it might once more mean active participation of all the Russian troops. Some were dubious. It was evident that none of them liked the new committee sys- tem of managing the army. It was hardly to be expected that they would, for it meant a com- plete overturn of all their training.
Many were sympathetic with the Revolution; a few were revolutionists: but most of them wanted revolution to behave according to their own well ordered plan and not according to the nature of revolution.
The quiet of the morning departed. The
61
THE RED HEART OF RUSSIA
rumble of the guns seemed quite close now. When luncheon was over, we all mounted horses and rode off in the direction they called. We came to a halt on the shores of another and much larger lake, a great inland sea nearly fifteen miles long. The wind had lashed its surface into whitecaps, and waves came beating noisily against the barbed-wire entanglements that poked their heads formidably above the water.
Here we dismounted, and they led me to an observation station cleverly screened by trees. Young Gusaroff adjusted the glasses and turned them over to me; then — "Bvistra, Miss Beatty, bvistra!" he shouted.
I looked, and at the opposite side of the lake a great cloud of sand rose suddenly into the air. A section of a German trench blew up in a puff of smoke.
Stretched out before me, beyond that powerful lens, were the Russian and German trenches. Above the ground the barbed -wire entanglements zigzagged across the gray hillsides. Under the surface, facing each other with watchful eyes and ears and ready trigger-fingers, were two long lines of silent men.
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IRRECONCILABLE BED-FELLOWS
In the reserve trenches beyond were more men
—thousands of them, talking, sleeping, playing
cards, brewing tea, living their lives like so many
ants — who were of the earth and knew no other
world.
A flotilla of tiny armored water-craft guarded the Russian end of the lake, and between it and the little German lake-craft was a stretch of mined water, which either would hesitate to cross.
It was hard to realize, looking through those glasses at the clouds of dust now on the German side of the line, now on the Russian, that every time the slim young lieutenant called "Bvistra!" the reaper of battlefields was shouting a more final command to some one or more of the dwell- ers under the earth.
Back at staff headquarters again, we sat down at a table with military maps spread before us. Gusaroff was an engineer, and loved every line of the complicated maps.
"If we had had enough ammunition in 1915 you would not have to be fighting to-day," he said.
"Here" — pointing to a spot in Poland now in the possession of the Germans — "sixteen thou- sand of us went into battle in 1915, and only five
63
THE RED HEART OF RUSSIA
hundred of us returned. The artillery retreated, not because it did not want to go on fighting— not because it was beaten — but because it had only two rounds of ammunition left."
He moved his finger to another point on the map. "There is a hill here," he said, "which our men charged forty-eight times. On the forty- ninth attack there were only four survivors out of three thousand, and they shot themselves rather than surrender to the Germans. Reserves ar- rived in time to rescue the situation, but too late to save the men."
"Yes," said another officer; "if we had had the ammunition in 1915, 1 would be back with Mother Moscow, practising law, and all this business would be over. What will happen now— I don't know. It is very bad.
"War and revolution do not get on well to- gether; yet we younger men realize that revolu- tion had to come. Things could not go on as they were."
64
CHAPTER IV
SPECKS ON THE HORIZON
WAR as Russia has known it, war as they know it on the western front, is a different thing from war as I saw it made in the dark forests in July. Yet war as it came to me in flashes was real and terrible enough to fix itself everlastingly.
One afternoon I sat in a bomb-proof observa- tion station and looked through a tiny round hole across a narrow strip of sand-dunes to a tangle of barbed wire. No Man's Land lay like a bone between two hungry dogs. Less than two hun- dred feet away, beyond that last strand of vicious metal, were the Germans.
I sat there, trying to believe it — trying to re- alize that here, a few steps distant, so close that I could almost reach out my hands and touch them, were the fighting forces of the man who stands to most of the civilized world as the arch- enemy of liberty and peace.
65
THE RED HEART OF RUSSIA
Suddenly my wandering mind stopped short. Two black specks appeared for a moment above that metal line. On the instant two rifles cracked — short, sharp, and final.
The specks were gone. I caught my breath. It could not be true ! I had imagined it.
The officer beside me was speaking. I had not heard. I begged his pardon abstractedly, and he repeated:
"A couple of Germans put their heads over the trench — bad thing to do."
When I returned to the Colonel's headquar- ters a few minutes later, I found him surrounded by soldiers beaming with pleasure and being beamed upon in return. The Colonel, a stocky little man, brisk and alert, introduced me to his men, and pointed to a section of barbed-wire en- tanglement that they had just brought in. It was not the crude Russian entanglement fash- ioned from crossed logs sawed from the forest, but the made-in-Germany kind with slender port- able metal standards, easy to fold and easy to carry. Under cover of the darkness of the night before, they had brazenly helped themselves to this sample of German efficiency, and before the
66
SPECKS ON THE HORIZON
enemy awoke to the situation the successful raiders were chuckling happily in safety in their trenches.
When darkness came again, the scouting party once more ventured forth; and this time, after a short sharp fight, they came back bringing a German with a shattered hip — left by his com- rades to die.
The prisoner, a lad of eighteen, was from Dresden, and he told me it was his first night in the front-line trenches. I saw him on a cot in the Siberian Hospital the next day. At the foot of his bed sat a Russian officer, plying him with questions and filling long sheets of foolscap with the answers. Occasionally the boy turned his head to the pillow and sobbed with pain and ex- haustion. The nurse looked at him compas- sionately.
"Heaven knows, I don't like the Germans/' she said, "but I can't help feeling sorry for that boy. He is suffering terribly."
A woman doctor stepped up to the officer.
"He can stand no more," she said.
I stooped to brush the flies from his feet tuck the sheets around them. He looked
67
THE RED HEART OF RUSSIA
me and managed a feeble and a grateful English "Thank you."
The next night a deserter was brought in. He was from Alsace. He told us that the Alsatians in the trenches were alternated with Germans or- dered to watch them. In addition, a German officer continually patrolled the rear of the line. It was raining, and the officer was apparently less vigilant. The man watched his chance, and slipped away under cover of the storm.
Johanna Ivanovna, Peter, and I went fre- quently in the evenings to a near-by village where a young Cossack captain, Vasaili Pestrakoff , and a command of a hundred men operated an anti- aircraft battery. The Captain was a living de- nial of all my preconceived ideas of Cossacks. He was quiet and serious and almost puritanical in his denunciation of the moral code preached and practised by some of his brother officers.
One evening we found the regimental band drawn up outside the entrance to the village. It was St. John's Day, and the occupants of the straw-thatched huts were out in the brightest and best calico clothes their meager wardrobes per- mitted. All of the soldiers within walking dis-
68
SPECKS ON THE HORIZON
tance of the battery were there. When they saw us coming, the band proudly played an Ameri- can march — "in-honor of the Amerikanka," ex- plained Johanna Ivanovna. A Russian waltz followed, then a lively peasant tune.
Russia has danced little since the war, but the music was a real temptation. A soldier grabbed a barefoot woman and whirled her into the circle. Another followed his example, then another, and another. The women danced with flying feet and tragic faces. Three years of living in con- stant apprehension, fleeing from home in terror and straggling back again to take up life within sound of enemy guns, had painted fear and resig- nation into their great, soft eyes. The children huddled together in a group on the edge of the ring, peeping shyly up at me from under their kerchiefs when curiosity got the better of timid- ity. The telephone had tinkled out the informa- tion that three enemy aeroplanes were headed that way, and while the crowd danced the Cos- sack Captain's observers searched the heavens with powerful glasses.
The band struck up the Russian Mazurka, and Captain Pestrakoff, at the urging of his soldiers,
69
THE RED HEART OF RUSSIA
whirled me into the circle. One and another of the dancers dropped out and marked time on the side-lines. The Russian steps were as strange to my feet as the language was strange to my ears, but the music was irresistible. What relation there was between what we danced and the Rus- sian Mazurka I do not know; but we danced and the crowd cheered. Suddenly the Captain be- came conscious that we were alone in the circle. He colored and abruptly stopped. Half a dozen men grabbed him up on their shoulders and tossed him in the air again and again. A dashing little soldier from the Ural Mountains caught me and whirled me through a succession of spirited steps to the end of the music.
As I left the crowd, another soldier saluted and slipped something into my hand with a shy posh' alasta (please). I looked down and found two tiny emblems, the crossed wings and propellers of the aviation corps, cleverly fashioned from the aluminum cap of a German shell.
The telephone tinkled the news that the enemy aeroplanes were avoiding the battery, and had passed far to the south. From the dance we went to the Captain's brown canvas palaika (tent),
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SPECKS ON THE HORIZON
where a tiny brass samovar bubbled. There was candy from Moscow, an almost unheard-of lux- ury in those days, and wild blueberries gathered by the villagers and presented in gratitude for the security that the Captain was bringing. I noticed a balalika in one corner, and at our urg- ing our host clicked off the favorite folk-songs of the Don Cossacks.
The following night we were again drinking tea in the little palatka. The hour was late. The sky was hung with clouds. A drizzle pat- tered on the canvas roof. It was the last pos- sible time and place to expect an aerial caller. The Captain jumped suddenly from his chair.
"We have a visitor," he said.
"What?" asked Peter.
"There is an aeroplane in the vicinity," he said.
We listened, but our untrained ears distin- guished nothing but the rain on the roof. We followed the Captain to the square. Deserted a moment before, it was now filling quickly with barefoot men in various stages of night-dress. The Captain ordered all lights in the village out, and sent the men — who were targets in their white night-clothes — back to dress. He gave
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THE RED HEART OF RUSSIA
the command to load the guns and stand ready.
In low tones the men speculated as to whether they were in for a bomb attack on the battery or a Zeppelin raid on the railway junction. By this time the purr of the motor was audible even to Peter and to me. Alternatives were discussed in whispers. The Captain might fire a random shot; but if it were a bomb attack, this would merely disclose the position of the battery. He waited and said nothing.
A deathly hush fell upon the square. For an interminable half-hour we listened to the hum- ming of the motor, momentarily expecting a mes- sage from the bird-man and quite oblivious of the softly falling rain. Then gradually the sound diminished in volume, and finally ceased altogether. The rat-tat-tat of the machine-gun of the adjoining battery announced that the fate of the visitor had passed beyond the possible con- trol of our Captain. We went back to the samo- var and fresh glasses of tea.
Fair weather had departed. The crisp, clear days of blue and gold were gone. Rain came down in torrents, and dry boots and I became ut- ter strangers. The first wet day I spent in the
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SPECKS ON THE HORIZON
hospital. In the morning I slipped on a nurse's smock and went to the surgery.
It was not war out there in the moonlight. The tinkling telephones, the captured Austrian machine-gun, the cellar full of American ammuni- tion,— even the whirring of the motors and the boom of the guns to the west, — could not make it seem real. But here in the surgery were shat- tered bones and tortured flesh, the agonized faces of patient men, and the terrible stench of gan- grene. This was war.
The first anguished cry of "Gaspadin docteur" sent me to the operating-table. It was impossi- ble to stay in that room and do nothing. I put my first-aid knowledge timidly to work, and be- fore the morning was over two or three patients were calling me "Sestra" and taxing my meager knowledge of Russian and my intuition to its limit. Once the doctor beckoned me to look at a horrible mass of decayed flesh that had been a
leg.
"Dum-dum bullet," he told me.
At luncheon Peter was in high spirits. War had taken hold of his imagination. He saw it as a great game.
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THE RED HEART OF RUSSIA
"You 'd better see the surgery," I suggested.
He refused, but he spent the afternoon with me in the hospital wards, to which we took a sup- ply of cigarettes and matches.
All of Russia was gathered under that roof. There were Little Russians, merry-souled chaps, blue-eyed and fair-haired, who came from a land where the sun shines much and the earth yields plentifully. There were Veliko'rus, or Big Rus- sians, inured to hardship, their sterner struggle with the soil photographed upon their determined faces. Scattered among them were fair-haired Cossacks from the Don and dark-skinned Cos- sacks from the Urals with a strain of Tartar marked in the slant of their eyes and the color of their skin. Sometimes it was an Esthonian who looked up from the pillow, a Pole, a Lett, a Lithuanian, or a member of one of the numerous Caucasian or Siberian tribes. There were three who stood above the others : Hamid Galli, Vasilli, and Ivan Markovitch.
Hamid Galli had a great joke on himself. All day long he lay on his back and laughed about it. He laughed with his eyes, black and shining like jet beads, and with his mouth, spread wide across
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SPECKS ON THE HORIZON
a row of gleaming white teeth. He was a Cos- sack from the Urals, small, brown, and wiry. He and his pony from the Urals, wiry, dark, and spirited like the master himself, had been at the front for three years. Time after time they had both gone into that mad rush of man and horse and steel called a cavalry charge, and come out without a scratch. Three weeks before, the pony had climbed up on his hind legs and toppled his master off. For a Cossack to be thrown from any horse is either a swearing or a laughing mat- ter. Hamid Galli swore, then he tried to pick himself up. To his amazement, he could not move. His leg was broken — broken by his own pony. To Hamid Galli that was a hundred-per- cent, joke. He began to laugh. He was still laughing when the stretcher-bearers carried him away. He laughed while the doctor was setting it. And the nurse told me that even in the night, when the ache of it kept him awake, he laughed quietly to himself.
Vasilli, who was in the next bed, smiled also; but Vasilli's smile was the feeble effort of blood- less lips and trusting blue eyes, deep sunken from long suffering. Vasilli's smile was the courage-
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THE RED HEART OF RUSSIA
ous effort of the spirit, and there was no mirth behind it. Vasilli's deathly white hand rested on the bandaged stump of a once serviceable young leg.
One day they wheeled him in to the operating- table, where the doctor was coming to dress his wounds. Vasilli had had one previous experi- ence with operating-tables. A frightened look came into his eyes. He said nothing until the doctor left the room; then in a whisper to the nurse :
"Seestra, is he going to cut off my other leg?"
"No, no; he is going to dress your leg to make you feel more comfortable," she answered.
The feeble, patient smile crept into Vasilli's blue eyes.
"Is n't he good to me?" he said.
Ivan Markovitch, in the ward beyond, neither smiled nor laughed. Ivan lay on the pillow, his face ghastly gray and his breath coming in short, quick gasps. When Peter offered him ciga- rettes, he shook his head, and we had to stoop low over the bed to catch the faint words that came in whispers from his lips.
In the whole wide world Ivan could find no
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SPECKS ON THE HORIZON
cause for laughing. He had tuberculosis; and the pity in the eyes of the sister, when she looked at him, confirmed my worst fears.
Ivan was twenty, and the only boy in a large family of girls. His people were peasant farm- ers, and until he was drafted for a soldier, he spent all his days in the fields, cultivating the hemp and flax and planting potatoes. The win- ter before in the trenches he took cold. His lungs began to pain, and he applied several times to be allowed to see the doctor.
"It was before the Revolution," he whispered. "They would n't listen to me. The officers told me to go back to my regiment where I belonged. Now look at me."
Peter said something intended to be cheering; but there was a note in the voice of the American boy of the bubbling spirits that I had not heard there before.
Two days later I met Ivan's nurse coming from the field with her arms full of white daisies.
We took them, wet with raindrops, and made a wreath and a long garland, and when we had finished we went to the crude little chapel on the edge of the wood.
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THE RED HEART OF RUSSIA
Leaning against the wall was a wooden cross, sawed that morning from a freshly cut pine. In- side, the light from a tiny altar lamp fell across a white pine coffin and upon the face of Ivan. We arranged the garland upon the coffin, and tied a bow of white gauze on the wreath. Then we stood back and looked silently a minute at the peasant boy from the distant country who had not lived to know either the joys or the limi- tations of freedom.
Two other nurses slipped through the door and stood beside us. Tears came into the eyes of one and another, and they gave me a strip of white gauze because I had forgotten my hand- kerchief.
It was a common language that we spoke — the only one we had in common.
Ivan was Ivan, to us : a peasant boy who died in the years of his strength and youth, alone and far from home. Ivan was all the boys of the world to each of us, and a special boy or two in some particular corner of the world.
I doubt if I could have danced that night, however tempting the music or importune the partner. Yet one must dance ! The sun and the
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SPECKS ON THE HORIZON
moon rise and the current of life flows on, heedless of tortured flesh, unmindful who lies dying.
For two days I stayed away from the trenches. The rain oozed through the cracks in the rough pine boards in my room and spread in puddles over the floor. It showed no signs of ceasing. One morning, regardless of Peter's protest, we set out to cover the three miles to the staff. A very much astonished young Russian met us at the door.
"How did you get here?" he asked.
I explained that we had come with much ease and some exhilaration on our own feet, and were none the worse for the walk.
"But surely you don't want to go to the trenches on a day like this ! You will be up to your knees in mud. You can't imagine what it is like," he said.
"I have a very strong desire to find out at first hand," I answered.
He consulted two brother officers, who in turn consulted the telephone.
Finally they decided: "It is possible, but foolish."
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THE RED HEART OF RUSSIA
Still smiling, but frowning indulgently upon me, they put me in the General's big gray mo- tor-car, and we started for the forest.
Twice the heavy car stuck in the mud, and Lieutenant Gustaroff told me to tell my govern- ment to send some American Fords parcels post.
Just as we reached headquarters the sun came slashing through the heavy clouds, and for three hours the downpour ceased.
The officers were waiting for us, curious to see these strange Americans who did n't stay indoors when it rained. We made our way through sandy trench roads, untimbered ditches bordered with shaggy lavender poppies, green oats, and blue cornflowers clinging close to their sloping sides. Then we went into the trenches. There were miles and miles of them, zigzagging back and forth like the Greek border on a guest towel. At intervals big metal plates were placed near the top, flanked on each side by sand-bags. Through the observation holes I peeped out on No Man's Land with the barbed-wire entangle- ments of the Germans beyond. Once they told me we were within a hundred and sixty feet of the enemy's first-line trench.
80
1
I
Blessing of the banners of the Battalion of Death
The Woman's Regiment on review before its departure for the trenches
SPECKS ON THE HORIZON
Our friends at the staff had not exaggerated the mud. The first time we came to a puddle, one of the officers lifted me up in his arms and carried me over. I protested that I was pre- pared for mud and did not mind it. Not under- standing, he paid no attention. While I con- tinued to protest, he carried me across three other puddles. Soon puddles disappeared — the trench became a continuous river of red mud. I es- caped, and plunged in up to the top of my high boots.
Twice we lost our way in communication- trenches and had to retrace our steps. Intermit- tent artillery fire punctuated the journey, and an officer who spoke a little English taught me to distinguish between "Baba-yaga" and the "flutes," the "trunks" and the "suit-cases."
The big twelve-inch shells that carried whole- sale destruction to the soldier and his carefully built trenches were named after the evil old Rus- sian witch. The two-inch shell, whizzing through the air with a shrill whistle, was the flute. The nine- and ten-inch shells were trunks and suit- cases.
At one point we discovered that a "suit-case"
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THE RED HEART OF RUSSIA
had preceded us and caved in the timbers. Once, when the lay of the land permitted, I was al- lowed to put my head over the trench to see the remains of a Russian village. All that was left were the skeletons of two Russian brick stoves and their chimneys.
Electric light and kindred comforts such as they have in the enemy trenches were utterly lacking here. Mud! Mud! Here was noth- ing but mud ! In one small trench-house — a bur- row in the ground in the back- wall of the trench —three soldiers were playing cards ; another was washing his shirt. Here and there we found men polishing their guns, and others brewing tea in aluminum pails over tiny fires. More of them were snatching a little sleep in order to be vigi- lant for the night.
Though none of them saluted the officers, there seemed little to indicate disorganization here ; but the commanding Colonel told me that some of his men had deserted, and more were sick. Scurvy was making frightful inroads in the Russian ranks on every front, and to the north, in the vicinity of Riga, the men were in a pathetic con- dition as a result of poor food.
SPECKS ON THE HORIZON
The dirt, the flies, the vermin, the monotonous round, the endless soup and kasha, the waiting — these are the things that take the last ounce of a man's courage and faith. The Russian, like the Frenchman, the Englishman, and the Belgian, had had three years of it. The others knew for what they fought. Each had a cause; each had a country standing behind him and trying to send some fragment of comfort into his meager life. The Russian went to the front and stayed there simply because he was told to. It was tragic that he should be leaving his trenches, but it was un- derstandable.
The danger of warfare made little impression on me that afternoon, but I came out knowing that men who have stood three years of trench life, whether they be English, French, Italian, Russian, or any other, can not be dismissed as "cowards" by those who stay at home. An hour later eight of us were gathered at dinner in the officers' mess. The Colonel had just asked for a second helping. Suddenly, as one man, we dropped our forks and listened. Boom! Boom! Boom! The big guns crashed in our ears. Baba-yaga, the flutes, the trunks, the suit-cases
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THE RED HEART OF RUSSIA
— all of them at once. The sounds of the after- noon were like silence in comparison. Two men rose and hurried away. The Colonel left his plate untouched.
One of the officers hurried back and said some- thing in Russian to his commanding officer. He turned to me.
"You got out just in time," he said. "They are bombarding the trenches — down where you
were."
And this was war! I had seen the trenches- walked safely through them with men whose chief concern was that I, a woman, should not get my feet wet. Hardly an hour later, the guns of the enemy were crashing them to pieces.
Always the German was there, waiting, play- ing the diabolical game of war just as effectively in the silence as when the guns were pounding death into the trenches. Sometimes it was a newspaper printed in Russian that found its way down from Berlin and into the Russian trenches ; sometimes it was a proclamation signed by Ger- man soldiers. The newspaper contained ac- counts of British and French defeats and Ger-
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SPECKS ON THE HORIZON
man victories, with profuse proffers of aid sprinkled through its news item.
"You are finished, Russia, but we will try to help you," one of them read. "It will be good for you and good for us to make a separate peace. We are not your enemies. We do not want to spoil your Revolution. We want to help you save it."
One afternoon, while a crowd of us were sit- ting at tea in the officers' dug-out not far from the front-line trenches, a soldier appeared at the door and called the commanding Colonel out. When the Colonel returned he had a sheet of yellowish paper covered on both sides with neat Russian script. A scouting party outside the barbed-wire entanglement had suddenly come upon a group of Germans hiding in a hole in the sand. The Russians expected to be fired upon, but instead the Germans ran up a white flag and motioned them to come forward.
"This," said the Colonel, "is what they gave them."
It was a German proclamation, compiled with thorough knowledge of the psychology of the
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THE RED HEART OF RUSSIA
Russian soldier. The Colonel read it aloud, pausing between sentences to permit Peter to translate.
"Russian soldiers!" [he began]. "The chief com- mander of the Western Army tells you that the army of the southwest front has broken our lines and achieved a great victory, and that we are defeated. This vic- tory is called the beginning of a fight upon the outcome of which depends the freedom of the Russian people. Asking you not to be traitors, he tells you that you must defend the freedom, the fortune, and the honor of the Russian nation.
"All this is not true. Our lines were not broken. They are very strong, and the divisions were forced to retreat with losses greater than ever before.
"It is known that the Russian soldier is always ready to shed his blood, but it is also known that your com- manders shed your blood for causes that are not worth it — for ideals that can never compensate for loss of life on the field of battle.
"We presume that you have not forgotten the place of the people's sacrifice ! The order of the commander of the western front is interesting because it does not correspond with what is printed in your papers.
"Have you forgotten what was said on the day of the Holy Easter? That represented the holy ideal of the Russian Revolution. It seems that peace, a gen- eral honorable peace, without war and indemnities, is the ideal of the Russian people and was the cause of the fall of Nicholas. This advance, these horrors, seem the only result of the sacrifice of those who sleep in the brothers' sepulcher.
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SPECKS ON THE HORIZON
"Do you hear the cry of the suffering workmen? Do you hear the cry of the blood of the soldiers ?' Does this appear to be your wish for peace ?
"Has the blood of the Revolution been spilt for nothing? The sacrfice of blood was little to what will now be spilt.
"Freed from the old regime, you have fallen into the hands of the English, French, and Americans. Re- member, we welcomed your freedom, did not interfere with your internal affairs, and offered you a brother's hand. We offered you peace and asked you to send representatives from your government to talk over peace. Swindled and bought by English gold, you re- fused to believe us, but in numberless instances your brothers have proved the historical fact: We are not your enemies. We do not wish you to perish, or your freedom.
"Those who fear separate peace furnish you with money and all kinds of material, and all this is a proof of your unbelief in us, which will bring you to your ruin. We stand firm and quiet, and await your ad- vance. The advance of English and French has been defeated, and we will also defeat you.
"THE GERMAN SOLDIERS."
"How shall you answer it?" I asked, when the Colonel had finished.
A lieutenant from Moscow, whom we had christened enfant terrible because of his bound- ing spirits and irrepressible pranks, raised his arms to imitate an aimed gun.
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"Boom! Boom! Boom! we shall answer them," he said.
But it was not so easily done as said. Those verbal gas-bombs, falling upon the simple, trust- ing mind of the Russian soldier, worked more havoc than heavy artillery and hand-grenade.
"My men are behaving pretty well, but I would n't dare order an offensive," one of the gen- erals told me, just before I left the front.
The hereditary distrust between the officer class and the private was growing continually. Old and ancient grievances were unforgotten, and, as always, ^many of the innocent paid the price of the guilty. There were all kinds of Russian officers, just as there were all kinds of common soldiers. The soldiers were sometimes undis- criminating, even as the officers in their day of absolutism had been undiscriminating.
The memory of punitive expeditions that fol- lowed the Revolution of 1905, when thousands upon thousands of revolutionists were shot and sometimes brutally tortured by order of Russian officers without even the pretense of a trial, still lingered. The soldiers generally looked upon their officers as the natural enemies of revolution,
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and regarded orders with suspicion. Tragedy followed tragedy on the Russian front, and en- emy treachery and pitiful misunderstanding on all sides were chiefly to blame.
Militarism was a product of autocracy, and the Russian front, at terrible cost, demonstrated that the larger freedom and the militaristic ideal can not live in the same world. The Russian revolu- tionist knew this. He knew in the summer of 1917 that freedoms, large or small, were not safe, in Russia or elsewhere, as long as one militaristic power lived to menace the others. He knew that the sword of militarism must be broken beneath the feet of the peace-hungry multitudes of the world before even the most limited of the free- doms are safe.
What the Russian did not know was that his brothers in Germany are themselves enslaved to the military ideal, and that the only way to win freedom is to defeat them and the power that keeps them in bondage. He did not realize that the only way to give constructive Germany back to the world is to destroy destructive Germany.
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CHAPTER V
THE BATTALION OF DEATH
NEWS — even bad news — travels slowly in Rus- sia.
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 Ger- man 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.
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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 min- utes 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 sig- nificant 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 sin- gle 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:
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"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 confu- sion upon the tidy pigeonholes in which we keep our firm convictions ready for all emergencies.
Marie Bachkarova, the crude, illiterate peas- ant woman whom Destiny had chosen for the big part, was as ignorant as Sidor Petroff of the im- portance of the moment.
She could barely write; but that night labori- ously 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
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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 ker- chief, 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 re- membered 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
THE RED HEART OF RUSSIA
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 thou- sands 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
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soldier women, stood at attention while three gen- erals 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 proclama- tion. The women soldiers fired three verbal vol- leys before they even saw their first round of am- munition. The first was an appeal to Russian women.
"Come with us in the name of your fallen he- roes," 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
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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 Ger- man 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 Petro- grad.
At their head was Bachkarova, the peasant. Beside her marched Marya Skridlova, the aristo- crat, 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 stron'g, head erect, and deep,
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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 Ger- man 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 Malo- detchna, 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 im- pressions 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
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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 com- ing 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, sand- wiched between a dug-out full of Austrian pris- oners 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.
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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 Rus- sia, 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 bar- racks.
Soon the brown bundles were all up and shed- ding 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, asid wash-
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ing 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 Com- mander 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 Revolu- tion. The ceaseless rain made drilling in the field impossible, but within the narrow limits of the barracks they marched back and forth, count- ing "Ras, dva, tri, chetiri; ras, dva, tri, chetiri," for several hours a day.
Very soon one soldier girl after another de- tached 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, uni- versity students and peasants, and a few who in
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the days before the war had been merely para- sites. Several were Red Cross nurses, and one, the oldest member of the regiment, a woman of forty-eight whose closely cropped hair was turn- ing gray, had exchanged a lucrative medical prac- tice 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 Si- berian 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 Moun- tains, fifteen years old, with soft, brown, ques- tioning 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
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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
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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 t*hat it awaited them there in the dark forests a few miles distant.
If there seemed to be any fear of them forget- ting it, — if girlish spirits ran too high in the bar- racks,— 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 mil- lions of other moments packed into it.
In a cord around each girl's neck was a collec- tion 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 an- swered, and pulled out the little gray pouch. "It is the strongest and surest kind there is," she said.
Orlova seldom spoke. From morning till 103
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night she went about the barracks, doing some- thing 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," Or- lova 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
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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 dis- cussed.
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 emo- tions.
"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, brush- 105
THE RED HEART OF RUSSIA
ing 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 Battal- ion. 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 super- ficial 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.
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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 coax- ing 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- 107
THE RED HEART OF RUSSIA
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 equip- ment 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
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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 bat- tle shouting a challenge to the deserting Rus- sian 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 med- als. 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 be- came separated from the main body of the troops, and took four rows of trenches before they were obliged to retreat for lack of reinforcements.
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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. Sup- pose 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 prison- ers. They refused to be taken. We had to throw hand-grenades in and destroy them. No; war is not easy for a woman."
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I asked about Leana.
"She was one of the six to stay behind," Marya Skridlova answered. "She was wounded in six- teen 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 or- der.
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 —
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like humans — everywhere. A little more melan- choly, perhaps, but in all their potentialities es- sentially the same. Destiny has done her work well.
There were nearly five thousand women sol- diers 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, repre- senting 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
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Lining up for soup and kasha
f
© Orrin S. Wightman
Women soldiers at rest between drills
The crowd hugs the Nevsky to get out of range of the machine-guns in the July
riots
The Cossacks bury their dead
THE BATTALION OF DEATH
a fresh battalion of girls to the defense of the new front.
Out on the Finland road, not far from Petro- grad, 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 com- mand.
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,
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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 re- made upon a basis of human freedom and safety.
CHAPTER VI
IN THE HOLLOW OF THEIR HAND
TURNING into the Nevsky Prospect was like opening a telegram. I could never be quite cer- tain what I would find there, but the first glance always told the whole story.
Nevsky was the revolutionary thermometer. When the City of Peter pursued the calm and normal way, the wood-paved avenue indicated the fact. When the hectic passions of revolt ran high, the temper of the populace was as plainly registered.
It was on the Nevsky Prospect, in the early days of March, that the first courageous crowd of men and women dared Cossack whips and sa- bers and cast amazed glances at the soldiers who gave them smiles and words of encouragement when they had expected the stinging lash and the deadly blade. It was here that the multitudes gathered for rejoicing when the victory was won, and here also they came, tragic and proud, bear-
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ing their martyred dead upon their shoulders. Each succeeding moment of joy or grief or pro- test was recorded here, and I quickly learned to read the signs.
At ten o'clock on a Tuesday morning in July, I stepped out of the Nicolaievski Station into the circle, to find the mercury rising and the Nevsky of the hour strangely different from that with which I had parted. The talking crowds in the Znamensky Square were gone. Alexander III sat alone on the bronze horse, undisputed mon- arch once more of all he surveyed. There was n't a street-car in sight. The only visible izvostchik wanted double his former price to carry me to the War Hotel.
It was the hour when shutters should be com- ing down from shops. Instead they were fas- tened tight, and in front of the Gostinny Dvor men were out with hammers, nailing boards across the plate-glass windows. Had something already happened, or was something about to happen? I could not be sure. The izvostchik kept up a rapid-fire conversation, pointing an excited finger occasionally toward a freshly made bullet-hole in the glass fronts.
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At the moment I was interested in nothing in the world so much as my clean little blue-and- white room and a hot bath. My trench khaki was caked with mud and reeked of the odors of barracks and stuffy trains. On the way back from the front, I had spent two sleepless nights sandwiched with fourteen other people into a compartment intended to accommodate four. The first night I shared the upper berth with another woman. It was so narrow that we had to lie head to foot. There were no pillows or bedding, and I am sure that neither of us closed our eyes. The next night I insisted on her sleep- ing alone, and I sat below, listening to the crowd talk. Toward morning a pathetic-looking little peasant woman, nodding uncomfortably back and forth, bumped against me. I glanced at her hair. It was hopelessly in need of a sham- poo. I decided that, after all, dirt did n't really matter, and settled her head on my shoulder. She went peacefully to sleep.
This morning all that was past. With soap and water so close at hand, dirt mattered more even than probable revolution. At the hotel I hastened upstairs without stopping to ask ques-
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tions. An hour later I emerged, remade and ready for anything.
I hurried toward the Nevsky. Again the scene was changed, and there was no mistaking the signs. The Bolsheviki were taking posses- sion of the city. The uprising that Petrograd had been expecting hourly for weeks had come. The Bolsheviki, radical minority in the Soviet of Workmen and Soldiers' Deputies, were making a demonstration against coalition with the bour- geoisie. Led by Nicolai Lenine and Leon Trotzky, the Red Guard, composed of armed workers from the factory districts and of sailors from the naval station at Kronstadt, had come out to demand "all power to the Soviet," and with banners of flaming red were crying: "Down with the capitalist ministers 1" "Land to the peasants!" "Control of industry by the workers!" and "Immediate general peace!"
The night before, thousands upon thousands of armed workers had marched through the streets singing the "Marseillaise." This morn- ing they were continuing the demonstration in more menacing terms.
The deserted Nevsky was suddenly filled with 118
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people. Down the street came a huge motor- truck, a vicious-looking machine-gun mounted behind and another on each side. It was filled with Red Guardsmen and sailors. Each man was armed with a rifle, and its threatening nose was pointed in the direction of the crowd.
I stood there watching, wide-eyed and won- dering, recalling that whispered prophecy that had been sounding perpetually through the spring days : "The streets of Petrograd will run rivers of blood."
Could it be that these words were about to come true there before my eyes? I could not believe it. Unreality was in the air. The truck looked as if it had been wheeled on to the stage from the property-room. The guns might have been of papier-mache. The occupants them- selves seemed like boys playing a new game, rather than like men going out to kill and to die.
An automobile driven by a civilian whirled from a side street. Three sailors and a couple of armed factory workers ordered the chauffeur to halt. They backed their command by point- ing their guns at his head, and he promptly
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obeyed. One of them took the front seat. Two stretched themselves flat on the mud-guards and pointed their rifles in front of them. The others climbed into the tonneau. The car whizzed away out of sight.
The crowds on the sidewalk kept one eye on the guns, and one eye on a convenient exit in case of trouble. I walked in the direction of the Hotel Europe. I had gone a distance of three or four blocks when the sound of a shot brought all to a sudden stop. The crowd turned as a single man and fled in the opposite direction. The crowd was quicker and more earnest in flight than I. Before I had time to realize what had happened, I had been knocked to my knees. I found myself jammed against the iron grating of a basement door, with what seemed like half of Petrograd pushing me through the bars.
A moment later some one in the rear shouted, "Kharasho!" (All right), and the crowd climbed off my back. I picked myself up unhurt. A soldier standing near had been shoved through a plate-glass window, and his face and hands were covered with ugly cuts splashing blood liberally on the sidewalk.
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I waited while a formidable armored car passed, then crossed the street and turned the corner leading to the hotel. Just as I reached the entrance, I heard the rush of running footsteps behind me, and turned to see a crowd of men, women, and children tumbling out of the Nevsky as fast as willing legs could carry them.
Off in the direction of the Gostinny Dvor the staccato rat-a-tat-tat of machine-guns sounded like the beat of a snare-drum, interrupted at in- tervals by the sharp, quick crack of rifles.
However much those men with guns had seemed like small boys playing at being danger- ous, there was no doubt that the sounds were om- inous enough.
All that day Petrograd lay terrified and trem- bling in the hollow of the Bolsheviki hand. Most of the time the armored cars rode peacefully up and down the Nevsky. Now and then some- thing, nobody knows what, would start things. The guns rattled and the crowds ran.
"Somebody shot from the window," one of the Bolsheviki would venture furiously.
"Provokator! Provokator!" some one in the crowd would cry.
THE RED HEART OF RUSSIA
Occasionally the moan of a wounded man rose above the clatter of hurrying feet, but the guns were mercifully inaccurate and the death toll un- believably small.
What the night might have brought forth if the weather had been fine, no one can know. Early in the evening it began to rain, and rain has a more dampening effect on the ardor of Russians than any amount of armed force. The popu- lace stayed indoors. There was no one on the Nevsky to see the armored cars rush up and down, so they stopped rushing.
The sailors sailed back to Kronstadt again in the boats that had brought them, and the Red Guard retired to the opposite side of the Neva. Before they left they encountered a group of Cossacks on the Liteiny, and turned the machine- guns on them. The Cossacks wheeled their horses about and fled, but not before half a dozen of them had gone down before the guns. The horses were still there next morning when I ven- tured out into the rain. Around them stood a curious circle of men and women and little boys in red peasant blouses, who looked as though they expected the beautiful ponies to rise up
IN THE HOLLOW OF THEIR HAND
again and tell them what all this trouble was about.
The government crisis was acute. Most of the ministers had resigned. The majority of the Council of Workmen and Soldiers had refused to take all the power. Taking power was a thankless task. The Council was already the government behind the government, and to become the government would be to become the scapegoat for all the various brands of a discon- tent growing daily more rampant in Russia, and for all those that were to follow as food became scarcer and living more difficult.
Also, the majority of the Deputies, in spite of the general demand for peace, had voted against an immediate and independent termination of the war. The split between the majority made up of Mensheviki and Social Revolutionists and the Bolshevist minority was of ancient origin. It had its inception in the Socialist Conference in Switzerland in 1903, when the Bolsheviki re- jected the Menshevist proposal to work with the Russian liberals for the spread of democracy in Russia, and advocated armed revolution. Nico- lai Lenin, the leader then, as he is now. called the
THE RED HEART OF RUSSIA
Mensheviki "opportunists," and declared that the masses of the Russian people could never free themselves from economic as well as political slavery, except by means of a class war.
When Kerensky determined to bring troops from the front to defend the government, the executive council of the Soviet sanctioned the de- cision. By noon on Wednesday, the govern- ment, or so much of it as was still in office, began to get things into its own hands. On the Nevsky, that day, a few of the food shops were open, but most of the shutters remained down and the doors barred. There were no street-cars running, and all the bridges except one were swung open. That part of the city that lay beyond the Neva, and is known as the Petrograd side, was practically isolated. Only the palace bridge re- mained closed, and guards from the troops loyal to Kerensky were stationed at the entrance and examined all who crossed over.
The rain came down in torrents, and the streets were a desert. In the afternoon I walked to the Dvortsovy Square, where the War Department and the General Staff were housed in a great crescent-shaped building fronting the Winter
IN THE HOLLOW OF THEIR HAND
Palace. The square had suddenly become an armed camp. Armored cars and Red Cross am- bulances, motor-trucks for transporting soldiers, and all the paraphernalia that the Bolsheviki had similarly flaunted on the Nevsky the day before, was drawn up in front of the Staff office, await- ing signs of further disturbance.
All day Thursday and Friday the troops came in from the front. Thursday morning a bicycle regiment arrived, cycled through the city and across the Field of Mars. That evening from the War Hotel I watched an endless procession of Cossacks file through St. Isaac's Square. They came riding on gray horses, the descending sun flashing on the tips of their lances. Blankets and tents, kit-bags and balalakis were strapped to their saddles. The regimental band headed the procession, and the regimental priest and four bullocks brought up the rear. Sandwiched in between the soldiers and the priest were the soup kitchens on wheels, and the wagons filled with hay for the horses. They came clattering across the cobbles, making such a din that it hushed the cheers of the bystanders to a whisper.
At midnight I heard a band outside the window 125
THE RED HEART OF RUSSIA
playing the "Marseillaise." I hurried into the square, to find another procession of soldiers ar- riving from the front. When the band passed out of hearing, the soldiers tramped to a march- ing tune of their own making.
Thursday morning the Bolsheviki were still in control of the Fortress of Peter and Paul, and were directing their operations from the palace of a famous ballet-dancer who had been a favor- ite of the Tsar.
Friday morning the Neva was swarming with people. Most of the shops opened, and the street-cars were running on their usual uncertain schedule. The trouble seemed to be over, yet Petrograd's nerves were not quite relaxed.
At twelve that night I was lying in bed read- ing, when suddenly again came the unmistakable sputterings of the machine-guns and the crack of rifles. I slipped into a dressing-gown and out into the hall. It was rapidly filling with officers and their wives, all in a similar state of undress. The lights were quickly extinguished. Nobody could tell where the firing was, but it seemed to be directly below us.
I leaned out of the window on the sixth floor 126
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and looked at the square. Nothing was visible in the strange gray light of that darkest hour of the white night. There were no shouts, no cries, no single sound but the rattle of the machine-gun and the bark of the rifles.
The women stood about in frightened groups, talking in hushed tones. "It 's civil war," some- body said. "The streets will run blood before this thing is over."
An officer arriving at that moment reassured them.
"You have nothing to fear here," he said. "They are fighting on the palace bridge across the Neva. Some troops just landed from the front have been attacked by the Bolsheviki."
At one o'clock we crept back to our beds. The firing had stopped as suddenly as it had com- menced. At two the silence was broken by a few stray rifle shots on the Morskaya in front of the telephone exchange two blocks away. After that there was quiet for the night.
By Sunday fear had lifted from the heavy heart of Petrograd. Her people were being happy while they could. St. Isaac's Square was flooded with sunshine. The church bells, deep resound-
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ing bases and tinkling sopranos, called the faith- ful to worship.
The nerves of Petrograd were completely re- laxed. This sunny, smiling summer afternoon had been bought and paid for. But for the evi- dence of mangled bodies in the hospital morgues, we might have dreamed the week just past. But for the boarded windows in the Nevsky, and the sentries still guarding the telephone exchange and encamped before the Winter Palace, the sound of the machine-guns and the sight of the frightened crowd fleeing in terror might have been only a nightmare. There were no rivers of blood ; the gutters did not run red. There was only a handful of victims where we had feared there might be hundreds.
The Bolsheviki proclaimed the uprising a suc- cess. They said they had no desire for blood- shed, and wished only to make a demonstration of power. They had done that, and were satis- fied. The riots were significant chiefly because they introduced the Bolsheviki to a world that was soon to know much more of them, and be- cause they foreshadowed events to come.
The Cossacks were hailed as deliverers. The 128
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conservative and reactionary papers wrote pseans of praise of them. The moderate Socialist press was silent. Though they had been in favor of the suppression of the Bolshevik uprising, their traditional hatred of the system of force for which the Cossacks stood made it impossible for them to rejoice. Some of the Cossacks refused to ac- cept the role of hero, and passed a resolution de- claring that they did not wish to be praised by the bourgeoisie. They made it clear that they were revolutionists who were with the working- people and that they could not be counted upon to defend bourgeois law and order against the masses. It was the beginning of the breach in the Cossack ranks — a breach that was to be a vital factor in revolutionary movements of the future.
Late one afternoon the soldiers carried their dead in silver coffins into the great cool recesses of St. Isaac's Cathedral, and laid them in state before the "holy gate," with the towering columns of lapis lazuli and malachite to keep watch through the night.
The next morning the soldiers gathered in the square, black mourning flags fluttering from the
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tops of their lances. There were thousands and thousands of them — a military spectacle such as Petrograd had not seen since the days of the Tsars. The cavalry lined up on both sides of the square, their horses standing at perfect at- tention. The infantry stacked their rifles and squatted on the cobblestones during the long mass. The priests, in mourning robes of black and silver, carried ecclesiastical banners ; and the caskets were borne on ornate canopied hearses drawn by black horses.
There were Red Cross nurses carrying huge wreaths of artificial flowers. Foreign diplomats and members of the Allied military missions came to pay their respects. And, just as the last cof- fin was carried from the church, a limousine drove up. Alexander Kerensky stepped out and fell into line, and a mighty cheer broke from the crowd.
The funeral procession lasted most of the day. Scouts rode along the line of march, ordering all windows to be closed against the stray shots of provokators. There were no carriages, no au- tomobiles. In Russia they follow their dead to their graves on foot, and the tragic strains of the
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Russian funeral music sob their way into your very soul.
The casual observer in Petrograd would have said that revolutionary disturbances were a thing of the past; that order had come to stay. But the casual observer would have failed to under- stand the breadth and depth of the movements stirring beneath the surface.
As I stood watching the funeral procession file past, an acquaintance, opposed to the new Rus- sian order, joined me for a minute. "This is the end of Socialism," he said triumphantly.
On the contrary, it was only the beginning of the class struggle in the Revolution.
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CHAPTER VII
OLD RIVERS AND NEW DOCTRINES
LEON TROTZKY, Bolshevist leader, was secure in jail. Nicolai Lenin was in hiding. Those who believed he was in the employ of the German government declared he had escaped to Berlin. Those who still held to the belief that you can kill a movement by putting its leaders behind bars, or driving them underground, proudly boasted that the Bolsheviki were crushed.
One night several of us were having dinner in a little Italian restaurant. The argument of the evening — there was always an argument in Rus- sia— was about the origin of the Bolshevist move- ment. One man declared that the thing was a German plot. There was a new member of the American colony at dinner that night. Williams was his name — Albert Rhys Williams. He was decidedly an American type, tall, with a pleas- ant, frank face and a delightfully inclusive smile. He had been in Belgium at the time of the Ger-
OLD RIVERS AND NEW DOCTRINES
man advance, and had written a book on his ex- periences in the claws of the German eagle. He had come to Russia some time before, but had been away from Petrograd, meeting the peasants and workers. He took no part in the discussions for some time. Finally he said:
"I wonder how many Bolsheviki you know?"
We looked from one to another, and had to admit that our acquaintance in that quarter was rather limited.
"You know, it makes such a difference when we know people," he said. "There is Peters, now;" and he told the story of Peters, and of half a dozen others whom he had met.
"I think it would be ridiculous to suppose there is no German money in the Bolshevist move- ment," he said, "because there is German money everywhere. But the movement itself is far more fundamental. Remember, Trotzky and Lenin are preaching to-day the doctrine they were preaching fifteen years ago. It seems to me short-sighted and dangerous to dismiss the Bol- sheviki without more knowledge of him and his ideas."
Mr. Williams's story of Peters had interested
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me especially. I said I would like to meet him, and Mr. Williams promised to bring him to din- ner the next night. They came. It was the first of many times, and they opened many win- dows on the Revolution to me that would other- wise have been closed.
Jacob Peters was thirty-two years old, and looked even younger. He was a Lett — an in- tense, quick, nervous little chap with a shock of curly black hair brushed back from his forehead, an upturned nose that gave to his face the sug- gestion of a question-mark, and a pair of blue eyes full of human tenderness. He spoke Eng- lish with a London accent, and referred to his English wife as the "missis," and to his little girl in the language of all adoring fathers.
"Why are you a Bolshevik?" I asked him.
"Well," said he seriously, "I Ve lived in Lon- don, and I Ve seen them on the West Side living in luxury, in silks and satins, with gold plate and extravagant food; I Ve seen them on the East Side, sleeping out under the bridges at night. I don't know much about your America, but I know that you too have an East Side and a West Side. We in Russia have fought too long and
OLD RIVERS AND NEW DOCTRINES
sacrificed too much to be content with that. We must find a better way, or our freedom will not be worth while."
"What is your way?" I asked him.
"The Bolshevik believes in the shortest cut to socialism," he answered. "We believe that the people who till the land and the workers who run the industries should control them; and that the masses of the people should rise up and put a stop to capitalistic and imperialistic exploita- tion, which is responsible for war."
Not then, but on other occasions, I learned something of Peters' life. His story is the story of most revolutionists of the Baltic provinces, where, in spite of German control, — or perhaps because of German oppression, — the revolution- ists were more radical and more intense than in any other part of Russia. The richer landown- ers are known as "black barons," the lesser land- owners as "gray barons." Peters was the son of a "gray baron." He began to question life as a very small boy.
"I worked in the fields," he told me, "and when the thunderstorm came up I prayed God to save me. Then, when the thunderstorm was over,
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THE RED HEART OF RUSSIA
I began asking is there a God. When the thun- derstorm came again, I prayed. One day I was sent to see my grandmother. On the way I met a stranger. We walked together, and it "was a long journey. I asked him about all the things that were troubling me. He gave me two pamphlets. One was called 'The Tenth Man.' I had wondered why father, who was not nearly so clever as the workers, should have a whole vote for himself, while the workers had only one vote for ten men. I read the pamphlets, and at school I told my comrades about them. We pub- lished a paper about it; but the teacher confis- cated it and sent for my parents. My father beat me, and I hated him. From that moment I became a revolutionist."
At the age of fifteen Peters left home and went to work in a shop. He joined a revolutionary or- ganization, and was four times thrown into prison. He and his comrades were stood up against a wall while they counted out every tenth man and killed him. He saw his best friend shot down in this fashion, and dozens of other com- rades. Every act of oppression and repression only made him a more determined revolutionist.
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© Orrin S. Wightman
A typical street scene in the Volga river towns
OLD RIVERS AND NEW DOCTRINES
He escaped from prison, and lived in France, Switzerland, and England, helping as best he could his companions still in Russia. At the time of the Revolution in March he was holding an ex- cellent position as manager of the import depart- ment of a large English mercantile company. He wore a frock-coat on Sundays, and walked out with his English "missis" and his little girl in the height of order and respectability.
But the call of free Russia, the call of the Revo- lution, was too strong for him. He came back to rejoice and fight. He became the leader of the Lettish Socialists, and worked day and night for the cause in which he believed. He made flying trips to Petrograd, and usually managed to drop in for a few minutes while he was there. One night he drew a slip of paper from his pocket and asked me if I recognized the signature. I gasped.
"Why, it 's Lenin," I said. "Then he 's here ?"
Peters nodded.
"I 've seen him to-day," he said. "This is the candidate's ticket for the Constituent Assembly. They have given him to me, because our district is the most radical and w^can elect him there."
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THE RED HEART OF RUSSIA
"And you are absolutely sure that Lenin is an honest revolutionist and not a pro-German?" I asked.
He raised his head with a toss of defiance and his blue eyes flashed fire.
"If I wasn't sure I wouldn't have this," he said.
We had bitter arguments, but he did not re- sent my disagreement. He knew that I was try- ing honestly and sympathetically to understand all of the forces at work in the Revolution, and he respected that effort. Through him I met many other Bolsheviki, and they talked frankly of their dreams and their schemes.
One day a man showed me a letter from Trotzky, written in prison. It was a call to his followers — not for himself, but for his ideas. They told me that he was in constant touch with the men of his party, and was doing quite as ef- fective work in prison as he could have done out.
Jacob Peters told me much of the methods by which prisoners communicated with each other and the outside world. Occasionally a news- paper was smuggled in, and the man who received it read it hidden half u/ider a blanket, with one
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OLD RIVERS AND NEW DOCTRINES
eye on the spy-hole in the door, watching, for the guard, and then tapped its contents on the wall to the prisoner in the next cell. By a system of dots placed according to a prearranged code un- der the letters in a book, the men inside the prison were kept informed of what their comrades out- side were doing.
The most elaborate scheme Peters concocted was carried out with the aid of a girl revolution- ist. He was trying to escape, but he was deep in the black books of the prison officials and was allowed no reading matter. He took a piece of black bread, chewed it until it was in a sticky paste, and spread it on his arm to dry. Once dry it was as tough as a piece of parchment. He put his message on one side and rolled the parch- ment into a small ball. Just as the girl was leav- ing, he asked permission of the guard to kiss her good-by through the bars. The guard, seeing no harm in an innocent kiss, consented. The girl was immediately on the alert for a message. Peters slipped the ball into his mouth, and in the kiss transferred it to hers. She carried out his directions, and he succeeded in escaping.
As July wore into August, there was little go- 139
THE RED HEART OF RUSSIA
ing on in Petrograd, and I decided to take a journey to see if I could find out how the new doctrines were being received in some of the older and more remote parts of Russia. Various stories of the dangers of travel came to us.
Russian acquaintances and old residents in the foreign colony discouraged attempting travel; but an American friend, Helen Smith, a kindred spirit in eagerness for the trail, agreed to go with me. Miss Smith, who is an expert on the subject of peasant art, had traveled to Russia four times since the war. She spoke the language, and had a genuine understanding and a very real appre- ciation of the people. The pictured dangers had very little reality for either of us. We de- termined to go to Moscow, and from there to Nizhni Novgorod by rail, then up the Volga in a river steamer.
There has always been a strange lure for me in names. "Mother Volga," as the Russians call the largest and most romantic river in Europe, was one of the places in which I believed as one believes in fairies one never expects to see. The Russians speak its name with a caress. No other
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river in the world, unless it be the Nile, has been surrounded by so much story.
The Volga is the great highway of Russia from Petrograd to the Caspian Sea. To Nizhni Novgorod, where the Volga and Oka rivers meet, the commerce of the world comes flowing. Here they hold the most famous of Russia's sixteen hundred annual fairs.
The fair lasts for forty days; and for ninety- nine summers rug merchants from Persia, trap- pers from Siberia, silk dealers from China, wool kings from Manchuria, Turks and Arabs, Gyp- sies and Caucasians, Eastern and Continental tradesmen of all kinds, have come as regularly as the hot breezes that blow off the lazy, sleepy Old Volga. The exotic color, the weird customs, the strange play of the children of this patch-quilt earth all gathered under the same piece of sky, have made it a prolonged fete day and night from beginning to end.
Here, on the hundredth anniversary, we found the fair pathetically trying to pretend itself open. We drove through streets, miles and miles of streets, whose sides were packed solidly with
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THE RED HEART OF RUSSIA
bazaars. They were yellow-painted and green- roofed, as always, but padlocked doors told the story. The 200,000,000-ruble fair on the banks of the ancient river was virtually closed. In one of the main buildings a band tried hopelessly to rouse the spirits of the crowd ; but the result was more gruesome than laughter at a funeral. There was little for sale : a sordid mass of tawdry trinkets made in Germany and Japan, a few sugarless sweetmeats — that was all.
Our boat sailed at eight o'clock at night, pick- ing its way between the twinkling red and green lights gathered at the meeting of the rivers. Be- fore we went, we took an elevator to the top of the bluff to dine in an out-of-doors cafe. Food seemed quite as scarce here as in Petrograd, and even more expensive. We ordered some beef cutlets (the Russian equivalent of hamburg steak) . We waited and we waited; they did not come. We enlisted the efforts of the head waiter, who poured an avalanche of words upon his as- sistants. Still they did not come. The hour of sailing drew nearer and nearer. We watched the clock, and, when there was not another sec- ond to spare, prepared to leave. The cutlets ar-
OLD RIVERS AND NEW DOCTRINES
rived. We wrapped them in paper napkins and took them with us.
It was well we did; for war and revolution, whatever else it had done, had certainly robbed the Volga chefs of all their far-famed talents. I tried from six o'clock to eleven one night to persuade the cabin-boy to get me something to eat.
I wondered, as I looked at the fertile fields along the Volga, how much they knew of the part they would play in the coming course of revolu- tion. Even the gods seemed cruel to the cities of the north; for on the Volga, where transportation facilities were adequate, the spring rains had been so light that the crops were far below normal; and down in the south, where weather conditions had proved ideal, the railways were too disorgan- ized to move the grain.
The boat stopped at every little town along the way, and the landings were a series of Rapine pictures. Now it was a gang of stevedores in full cotton trousers with inch-wide stripes of gay color, and crude straw sandals upon their un- stockinged feet. They dragged their heavy car- goes down to the boat's edge with ropes held over
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THE RED HEART OF RUSSIA
their shoulders, singing a weird rhythmical tune of the Volga to time their movements. Again, it was a group of gypsies on the dock's edge, camped for the night — the naked brown babies swarming under the feet of the Volga giants, who dodged them uncomplainingly.
Everywhere we found the people talking revo- lution, and the phrases that sounded through the streets of Petrograd were familiar here. We bought the newspapers. Several of them were trying desperately to rouse the people to the great Germanic danger. Miss Smith read them to me. Many of the appeals were from the Zemstvo Unions. One from the Kineshna Revolutionary Committee said:
"We are facing a great disaster for free Rus- sia. Absolute ruin threatens us, and the tri- umph of the armed fist of William, if we are not bold enough to oppose to him a steel-like strength of the revolutionary army. Famine and its re- sults threaten us, and the counter-revolution is making use of this. We must at once be bold enough to rectify our food question, to exert great efforts over this and other dangers. An-
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archy and counter-revolution threaten to restore the old regime under William.
"A despicable peace, giving us into the claws of our enemy, threatens us unless we take imme- diate steps. All who can must be ready to go to the front to take the place of the worn and ex- hausted warriors — ready to hurl back the enemy or die in the attempt. It is a question of saving the land and the Revolution. The army is in need of ammunition, food, clothing, and uninter- rupted transfer. The workmen must place the interests of the land and the Revolution above all else and raise their standard of work to the maxi- mum. The peasants must give all the bread they can spare. All to work, to work! The danger is great!"
There was no doubt that the new doctrines had found their way to the banks of the old rivers. Petrograd was not the only place where revolu- tion interfered with work, and proclamations and counter-proclamations kept the populace in a turmoil of doubt and desire.
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CHAPTER VIII
THE MAN ON HORSEBACK
SEPTEMBER came. The padlocked doors of Nizhni Novgorod and the quiet waters of the Volga seemed far, far away. Farther still were the hectic days of early June when the recalci- trant machine-guns sputtered up and down the Nevsky. The white nights were gone. The sol- dier lovers and their sweethearts strolled beside the Neva now only at the invitation of the infre- quent moon.
The War Hotel had undergone a transforma- tion. After living for a whole summer each unto himself alone, breakfasting, lunching, teaing, and dining in our own rooms, we suddenly came out of hiding and looked one another over.
The bloodstains of the Revolution had been scoured from the rose-colored carpet in the draw- ing-room. The boards had come down from the broken windows, and new glass and gorgeous
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THE MAN ON HORSEBACK
crushed mulberry curtains had taken their place. The dining-room, a few weeks ago the repository of armless chairs and legless tables, dumb victims of the vengeance of an angry mob, now fronted the world arrayed in white napery.
It was a setting for luxury, but there was none. When Feodor served luncheon, the first course was often chopped meat and kasha stuffed into cabbage leaves, and the second the same chopped meat and kasha inadequately hidden by the half of a cucumber. There was no third. We had the best the market offered, and the cook was sorely tested to disguise its limitations.
A new spirit was abroad in the streets. The ghost of Peter walked with firmer tread. Many of the predicted calamities of the foregoing weeks had failed to materialize. Finland had not re- volted. Ukraine was still a part of Russia. The railroad strike continued only a threat. The breach between Kerensky and Korniloff, scheduled for the Moscow conference, had been averted.
The reactionaries still clamored for the strong hand of a dictator. The Bolsheviki still cried, "Down with the bourgeosie." Kerensky strove
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desperately to follow a middle course satisfactory to both. He knew his people well enough to re- alize that the first attempt to use force, even if he had it to use, would result in a reaction that would ultimately mean the downfall of his gov- ernment.
In the hours I had spent at the Soviet, in the Peasants' Convention, and talking with soldiers and workmen everywhere, I had become con- vinced there was no power in Russia that Keren- sky or any other man could use; that the masses would regard any attempt to instal a dictator as an attack on their Revolution and would desert the man responsible for it.
I ventured this opinion one night at dinner. Mrs. Pankhurst, the English suffragist, was there, and four or five others. They laughed at the idea; said Russia must have a strong hand; called Kerensky a weakling, and declared that only Korniloff could save the situation. He would rule with an iron hand.
One group of foreigners in Petrograd saw clearly the hopelessness of trying to impose a man on horseback upon the Russian workers. They were the members of the American Red
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Cross Mission to Russia. They came quietly into town one afternoon in August, with seventy tons of surgical supplies in their kit-bags, a large amount of common sense in their heads, and a wealth of human sympathy in their hearts. I was at the Nicolaievski Station when they ar- rived, twenty-nine of them, all in uniform of the American Red Cross. I looked at them and said to myself: "I wonder what sort of a dent you will make in Russia."
In one of the uniforms was the ample girth and the smiling round face of Colonel William B. Thompson, who was financing the mission. To the left of him, towering like an iron-gray moun- tain above the crowd, was Dr. Frank Billings of Chicago. On the other side, Raymond Robins, dark and determined, with a ready-for-anything look about him. There was something big about this trio, and they went to work on the Russian job in the best American spirit — with their sleeves rolled up.
They met the Russian aristocrat and the Rus- sian bourgeois. Then they met the Russian peo- ple. Breshkovskaya and Tchaikovski, grand- mother and grandfather of the Russian Revolu-
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tion, opened for them a door through which they looked down a long vista of hard years at the stu- pendous struggle of a brave crowd.
They saw that the old altars had been broken to bits, and the one vital, hopeful thing remaining was the devotion of the masses to their Revolu- tion. They had no faith in the altruistic inten- tion of the German, and believed for Russia to stop fighting would be suicidal. Kerensky and Breshkovskaya held the same belief, but they knew also that the war-weary multitudes were possessed of a consuming longing for peace; that German propaganda was working to discredit the Allies and to convince the Russians that the German people sympathized with their Revolu- tion and shared their longing for democratic peace. Almost daily they were supplementing their propaganda by blowing up munition plants and laying whole towns in ruins.
Raymond Robins, who brought to his study of the situation valuable experience in the American labor movement, said to me, in one of the first conversations we had:
"The only binder that will hold New Russia together is the Revolution. The only way to
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help Russia is to help her make a success of thatf Revolution."
The Provisional Government was in power. At its head was Alexander Kerensky, the young man. He and Katherine Breshkovskaya, the old, old woman, in spite of the fact that the forced offensive on the southwest front in July had weak- ened both, were at this time still the mouth-pieces of the majority. They were the only govern- ment there was. The Mission invested its ener- gies in trying to help the government in its diffi- cult problems of administration. Unfortu- nately, most of the other Allied representatives failed to share their opinion, or the results might have been different.
Suddenly Riga fell. The news of its actual occupation surprised no one. It had long been conceded in Petrograd that the Germans could take it whenever they chose. From the military standpoint, it had little significance. It was chiefly useful to the German militarists as a scalp to dangle before the war-weary section of their own populace. The Russian advocates of a dic- tator seized upon it as a weapon with which to attack Kerensky. They blamed the leniency of
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the Kerensky policy and the breakdown of the army for the fall of Riga. There were charges and counter-charges. The soldiers vehemently denounced their officers, accusing them of be- traying the city to the Germans. One regiment of Lettish troops had refused to retreat when or- dered, and fought until they were wiped out al- most to a man. Most of them were Bolsheviki, and they asserted that their officers were selling Riga to defeat their Revolution.
The Germans were reported marching on Petrograd. Refugees fleeing from Riga poured into the city. There was not a spare room any- where. AJmost as many people were trying to get out of the city as were trying to get in. They stood in queues before the railway offices all day and all night, trying to buy tickets that would take them anywhere beyond the reach of the Germans.
The anniversary of the sixth month of Russian freedom was at hand. Petrograd, ready at all times to expect the worst, believed there would be some tragic celebration of the day. Part of it trembled in its boots for fear of a Bolshevik uprising; more of it predicted a German air raid;
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some of it longingly scanned the horizon for a Russian Napoleon. Nobody was prepared for what happened, and everybody was still more amazed by what did not happen. When the of- ficial announcement was made, "the Korniloff ad- venture has been liquidated," the populace was still gasping.
Every man, woman, and child in Petrograd believed the city was about to become the battle- ground of the bloodiest conflict the world had ever seen. What else was there to believe? Were not the troops of General Korniloff, counted the strongest man in the Russian army, marching on Petrograd to capture the capital and proclaim their leader military dictator? Was not the advancing horde headed by the "savage" division — wildest of the wild Cossacks? Were not the government soldiers, charged with pro- tecting the country against counter-revolution at any cost, marching out to meet them in bloody combat? Korniloff had announced his dictator- ship, and offered Kerensky the portfolio of Min- ister of Justice. Kerensky had declined.
In the War Hotel, storm center of the storm center, we sat and awaited the inevitable. I
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dined that night with a Polish doctor who talked in low, mysterious tones. All around us were officers with various degrees of political belief, ranging from princes suspected of monarchistic tendencies to the most radical of the radicals. All were talking in low, mysterious tones. We spoke of Korniloff.
"He is a very desperate man; a very coura- geous man," he said. "I was in the battle of Mukden with him, and he remained when al] the others of the staff had gone. He is very deter- mined. I do not know what will happen, but I know he is a determined man."
This fact no one questioned. Whatever the political slant of the speaker, it never occurred to any one to suggest that the man whose military exploits are almost legendary might have started something he could not finish.
"He is determined ; but Kerensky is also a de- termined man," one Russian told me that night. "So it will be a fight to the finish."
During the evening Arno Dosch Flurot, an American correspondent, came in to advise me to leave the hotel and go somewhere else for the night.
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"The hotel may still be here in the morning, but it may not, and there is no use in taking chances," he said.
Rumor had promised me so many tragic ends — she had cried "Wolf, wolf!" so many times — that I had become skeptical.
The lobby was swarming with excited officers. Messengers from the staff and the various em- bassies dashed in and out all evening. A few of the officers were loyal to Kerensky, and their faces were grim and troubled. Most of the others were waiting with open arms to welcome the Dictator, and they made no attempt to hide the joy they felt. For them it was all settled. Kerensky would be overthrown — Korniloff would capture the city. The death penalty would be restored; the leaders of the Soviet would be hanged. Russia's troubles would be over.
I could not see Russia in such simple terms. I did not believe that the Russian Revolution could be understood in the terms of the French Revolution. I felt very small and alone when, at midnight, I left the chattering groups and went up to my little room. I was too engrossed in what was going to happen to Russia to care the
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least bit about what happened to me. I sat down before my typewriter and wrote until three, and then went to bed.
At five o'clock I was awakened from a sound sleep by a loud knocking. I jumped quickly up and opened the door. I looked out upon a sea of cutlasses. The hall was filled with Russian sailors, perhaps a couple hundred of them, husky chaps with rifles in their hands, and every rifle topped with the most bloodthirsty-looking blade I had ever seen. Life holds no further terrors for the man or woman who has faced two hun- dred such weapons all gathered in one spot. An Atlantic Ocean submarine would seem like a friendly neighbor come to call.
Still dazed with sleep, I looked at them un- comprehendingly. What had happened? Were they Bolsheviki from Kronstadt who had cap- tured the hotel? Was the city already in the possession of Korniloff? Was the battle going on downstairs at that very moment?
There was no one to answer my questions. I said something in English. A smile passed over the faces of the half dozen sailors nearest me. "Nechevo," they said in chorus.
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It is the most reassuring word in the Russian language — the first I learned, and the last I shall forget. It means "Never mind," "Don't worry," and other things of a kindred nature.
"Kharasho?" I asked.
"Kharasho nechevo," came back the double re- assurance.
I had learned that, so far as I was concerned at least, everything was all right. I closed the door and dressed.
Fifteen minutes later there was a great clatter of guns and marching feet, and when I went out into the hall again our visitors had gone. On all the landings, women, pale and terrified, were huddled in small groups, talking. A thousand sailors had taken possession of the hotel, exam- ined passports, searched rooms, and arrested fourteen officers. They were not from Kornilof? or Kerensky, but from the government behind the government — the Soviet. The Workmen's and Soldiers' Deputies had decided to take things into their own hands and arrest all officers whom they suspected of counter-revolutionary tenden- cies.
I stopped to talk with some of the women. 157
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One of them spoke to me in English — beautiful English. Her husband had been arrested but released immediately.
"This hotel is a terrible place," she said. "We Russians are mad, quite mad, all of us. Why do you stay here when you do not have to? I would go away — far, far away, to England or your America."
She was a Russian princess, and from that morning on I saw much of her. She was ex- quisitely pretty and completely helpless, a typical flower of Russian culture. I told her once that she reminded me of an orchid.
"Ah, orchidee" she said. "I like that; they are so beautiful." Then, nodding her head with a wise little smile, she said. "But I know what you mean. You mean that I am a parasite."
Always after that I called her "Orchidee." The pathos of her helplessness appealed to me, and also a certain loyalty that kept her in Petro- grad with her husband, when most of her friends had fled to the Caucasus or the Crimea or gone abroad.
"I love my husband," she told me. "It is very bourgeois of me, I know, but I can't help it."
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Her husband was an officer in the Guard, and she lived in hourly terror of his arrest. This day he had escaped, but there were others who were not so fortunate. At lunch-time several familiar figures were absent from the dining- room, and here and there a woman with troubled eyes sat alone.
In the following days we lived as much in the dark as to the actual state of affairs as if we had been in America.
Kerensky declared Korniloff counter-revolu- tionist and traitor. The Workmen and Soldiers in Petrograd, convinced that their Revolution and their throats were both in danger, worked day and night in the munition plants, and prepared to throw a trench around the great city. An- other part of the populace looked upon Korniloff as a deliverer, and waited impatiently for his coming.
All over Russia the people, unable to get the truth, traded in rumor. Down in the Caucasus the newspapers came out with lurid details of battles in the Nevsky and thousands of dead bodies strewing the streets.
While we were still in the dark as to what was 159
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happening, I went one morning to the Winter Palace, and climbed the stairs to Katherine Breshkovskaya's little room. Through all the troubled days of the last six months, she had been the right-hand lieutenant of Kerensky.
I found her, slipping her cloak over her calico wrapper and starting out to rally the soldiers to the support of the government. She was seven- ty-three years old. I had formed the habit of dropping in on the Babushka, who loved Ameri- cans and always had a radiant welcome. I climbed the marble stairs as one would climb a mountain, to get away from the tangle of petty things below, to look out over a distant vista, to see a broad view. Always I came away with the sense of having been on the heights, close to something big and fine, with a grandmotherly kiss upon my cheek and the memory of a friendly hand-clasp. Once, knowing well the burden of her answer, but curious to know how she would phrase it, I asked:
"What do you think of Kerensky?" She lifted her chin high and, with the ring of sincere faith in her voice, spoke in her quaint English:
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"Very well I think of him. He is a square man, and, what is better, he is not selfish. He needs no glory. He works only for the welfare of the people, and not only his people but for all the Allies, too. He is all around a good man. It is not strange to have a good man; but to have a man who is good and brave and clever is un- usual. I esteem him from the profound of my soul."
During the Korniloff rebellion she amply proved her faith; for day and night she went from barracks to barracks, urging the soldiers to stand by Kerensky.
From Babushka I went to Red Cross Head- quarters at the Hotel Europe, to find a dismal group. Some suave and kindly gentleman had just confided to Colonel Thompson, quite pleas- antly, that the hangings would begin at three o'clock that afternoon.
"If the old crowd comes back to Russia, I 'm through. I don't want to stay," said the Colonel ; and Raymond Robins nodded a gloomy second.
If the weight of Russia and of the world had been upon our shoulders, we could have been no more serious about it. We wept for the Petro-
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grad front. We wept that only a few miles dis- tant Russians were killing Russians, and noth- ing could be done to stop it. We might have saved our tears. The "savage" forces of Gen- eral Korniloff and the troops of Kerensky had taken things into their own hands and were set- tling them in their own way. They were using the new Russian method of liquidation — they were fraternizing. The only shot fired was that with which one of Korniloff s officers killed him- self. The soldiers turned the bloody civil war into a fiasco. The "wild" Cossacks refused to kill their fellows. Korniloff was captured and placed under arrest, and the government an- nounced that the Korniloff adventure had been liquidated.
The serious consequences were of another na- ture than bloodshed. The workers declared themselves through with all attempts to cooper- ate with the bourgeoisie. Korniloff 's friends ac- cused Kerensky of double dealing. He was un- able to explain himself to the satisfaction of his followers, and they began to distrust him. As nearly as I can gather from the investigation of many stories, Kerensky became possessed of
THE MAN ON HORSEBACK
knowledge that Korniloff, probably without his own knowledge, was being used by counter-revo- lutionists to overthrow the government. Keren- sky made overtures to trap Korniloff into admis- sions that would condemn him. By the time he had gained his object, he had involved himself so far that it was impossible to explain. His in- tentions were unquestionably of the highest, but his methods were not those that a popular hero can use and remain on the high pedestal that his followers demand.
The first attempt to instal a man on horseback resulted in driving the radical forces further and further to the left and creating a mass solidarity that was ultimately to prove fatal to the existing order.
The Korniloff adventure paved the way for the Bolsheviki Revolution.
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CHAPTER IX
THE CENTEABALT MAKES AN EXCEPTION
SINCE the days of the March Revolution, women have not been permitted aboard the Rus- sian fleet. The sailors, with the memory of Ras- putin still fresh in their minds, settled this as soon as they took command.
"Women have played so much hell in politics in the past, we better not take any chances in the future," one of them suggested.
For seven months the rule was rigidly kept. One afternoon in October, I, all unmindful of the prohibition, walked up the gang-plank of the Polar Star as she lay on the gray waters of the Gulf of Finland.
Half hidden in the heavy gray autumn mist were the battleships of the Baltic Fleet, decked in their proud new names of revolution. There was the one time Nicholas II, now the Tavarisch (Comrade). There, also, were the Grazhdanin
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(Citizen) , formerly the Tsarevitch; and, most im- portant of all, the Respublica ( Republic )> Not far away lay a wounded cruiser recently returned from battle with the Germans in their attack on the islands at the entrance to the Gulf. A British submarine, come unscathed through the fighting, rode safe and snug in the tidy little harbor.
Mr. Williams was with me that afternoon, and an English friend of the Polar Star's captain. The captain gave me a puzzled, almost frightened look as he saw me stepping aboard. The Eng- lishman introduced us, and explained our desire to see the famous yacht.
"I 'm very sorry," the captain said politely, "but women are not allowed aboard the fleet. It is a rule of the committee."
I must have looked my disappointment. The captain glanced sympathetically at me, then at a closed door at the end of a long passage.
"The committee is meeting in there in the Tsar's quarter. Perhaps they will make an ex- ception. I will ask," he said.
If a Russian naval officer had been told, a year before, that the day would come when he would
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have to ask permission of the sailors to bring a guest aboard his own command, he would have sent for the ship's doctor and ordered a padded cell prepared for his informant.
I thanked him, and he disappeared. A few minutes later he returned. The permission had been granted. He led the way into the officers' saloon and from there to his own cabin.
All of the sacred precincts of the old days were closed to us. They were still sacred, but sacred to the new owners of the Russian navy — the delegates of the fleet, the Russian sailors.
The captain was speaking:
"They used to cover this with velvet when the Tsar was on board," he said, with a sweep of his hand. "I 'm sorry I can not show you the Tsar's quarters. You would be interested. They have left the grand piano and some of the most valu- able things in Petrograd."
He led us to a point where we could peep curi- ously down a long passage, lined on either side with the cabins de luxe of the Tsarevitch, the Grand Duchess Titania, and other members of the Imperial family, to a closed door at the end.
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Behind that closed door was the organization of "common" sailors ruling the Russian waters — one of the most characteristically new things in all new Russia.
While the captain turned to speak to a soldier who had come up, we held a hurried consultation, mustered our various credentials, and appealed to the ship's officer once more to act in the capacity of go-between and ask the committee to receive us.
Again he left, and we waited anxiously for the closed door to open. A few minutes later, in the great saloon where Nicholas II once dispensed hospitality and favors, sixty Russian sailors, sit- ting in daily session in their regular headquar- ters, gallantly offered me the freedom of the Baltic Fleet.
The president arose, shook hands with us, and made a brief speech of welcome to the Americans, asking the captain to interpret it to us. Then the secretary arose, and on behalf of the com- mittee invited us to dine at the Sailors' Club in Helsingfors that night.
"We sent some one to telephone for our band- master who is an American," he said. "Until he
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comes we will go on with the business of our meeting, if you will permit."
The business before the Baltic Fleet concerned soldiers on the Riga front. News of the distress of the northern army had reached them, and they were collecting money and buying warm cloth- ing to send to the men who were hungry and cold in the trenches.
With the help of the captain, we had discov- ered so much when the band-master arrived.
In that committee meeting were eight Men- sheviki, three Anarchist communists, nine Social Revolutionists, and forty-five Bolsheviki. Those figures were the most significant I found in all of Russia. Before the Korniloff rebellion there had been only eighteen Bolsheviki in the com- mittee, and no Anarchists. The men were chosen by the vote of the entire fleet, and they reflected the complete swing to the left that was taking place in Russia from Vladivostok to the Black Sea.
The sailors, almost to a man, believe in the principles of internationalism, in the socialization of land and the control of industry by the work- ers. To them the Revolution meant the ultimate
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realization of all these dreams. Up to the time of the Korniloff rebellion, they were inclined to adopt the Mensheviki methods and to be patient. The Korniloff affair, regarded by them as an attack on the Revolution, swept away patience and shoved them into the ranks of the extremists.
Patriotism, in the old sense, was absolutely lacking among the sailors, as it was among the workmen; but there was a more burning form of patriotism aboard the fleet in October than any inspired in the past by the thought of the Tsar or the greatness of all the Russias — pa- triotism for the Revolution. The sailor, partly because he is of a more adventurous and daring spirit, partly because he has more education and has drunk more deeply from the fountain of rad- ical books, naturally took a more extreme posi- tion than the soldier. There was only fifteen per cent, illiteracy in the Russian navy, while seventy-five per cent, of the soldiers were un- able to read or write.
The committee governing the fleet was com- posed of six sub-committees. Food for officers and men was controlled by the supply commit- tee, which decided the menus. The sailors gave
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themselves tea and bread and butter at eight o'clock; soup and meat at twelve; potatoes, rice, or kasha at six; and tea again at eleven. On Sundays fruit compote was added. The officers' fare was much more varied and more extensive.
A komplectatsea, or "make-up committee," decided all problems relating to the crews. A "selection committee" studied the men to find promising material to make officers. The judi- ciary committee was the new disciplinarian. Disputes between officers and men were sub- mitted to it, and when the offenses were serious civil lawyers were employed to defend the men.
Discipline in the old days was entirely in the hands of the officers, from whom there was no appeal. If an officer was naturally an amiable fellow, fortunate were the men who served under him. If his good nature was dependent upon his luck at cards, the quality of his wine, or the momentary condition of his department of the interior, the lot of the sailor might not be a happy one.
Fortunately for the sailors, the average of humanity is fairly decent, whether it be Russian or anything else, and there were men in the Rus-
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sian navy who did not abuse their power. But there were enough of the other kind to stir a deep and intense bitterness in the breast of the Russian sailor, and this hatred found tragic utterance when the Revolution came.
The Englishman who was with us had been aboard one of the ships during the March Revo- lution.
"In the passion of the moment, they killed some of the good ones and left some of the bad ones," he said. "Just one man was killed on our ship. He was a high-handed, hot-headed chap, and when they told him of the Revolution he scoffed at them — said there wasn't any new regime in Petrograd, and never would be. His servant whipped out a gun. 'We '11 show you whether there is a new regime,' he said, and shot him."
Many of the crews simply arrested their offi- cers, and some asked them to sign a paper de- claring they would support the Revolution. As nearly as I can learn, sixty-five men were killed on the Baltic Sea Fleet, and a hundred on the Black Sea Fleet. The first day of the Revolu- tion, the sailors revenged themselves on the whole
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order of discipline, and it was hot blood that determined life and death. When the commit- tee was formed, the killing was stopped.
At the time of the Korniloff rebellion, four officers belonging to one of the ships were taken out and killed, against the protest of the Cen- tral Committee. Once more the sailors, mad- dened by what they believed to be an attack on the Revolution, took things into their own hands. They put three questions to their officers:
"Do you belong to the Soviet and Kerensky, or Korniloff?
"If Korniloff takes Petrograd, will you go to take it from him?
"If Korniloff tells you to go to Petrograd and fight the Provisional Government, will you go?"
Their answers to these questions saved or cost them their lives. The sailors formed their own committee and pronounced the death sentence.
The lot of the naval officer in Russia was no more enviable than that of the army officer; but it was a direct and logical result of the regime that made masters of the few and slaves of the many.
At Viborg and at some of the other points, the 178
Korniloff, his staff and Cossack bodyguard from the " Wild Division'
Bicycle troops to the rescue of Kerensky
Baltic sailors' bayonets speak for the Soviet
A dining-room in the Matrosski Klub (Sailors' Club), Helsingfors
AN EXCEPTION
fate of the officers was far worse than at Hel- singfors, and the stories told about the deaths they died are not pretty ones. The training and tradition of a naval officer unfitted him for faith in the new order, contradicted the belief of a life- time and the heritage of generations. The chasm that yawned between officers and men was too wide to be bridged in a day. A few made an honest effort to cross over it, and the men seemed pathetically grateful to them. Others took or- ders from the sailors for the same reason that the sailors had once taken orders from them — they were afraid to do otherwise. Some were merely biding their time, convinced that the topsy-turvy order would change and they would come into their "own" again. But one thing was evident here as elsewhere in Russia: that, whatever happens, nobody's "own" will ever again be quite what it has been in the past.
Admiral Verderevsky, the Minister of Ma- rine, said that discipline was destroyed at its root not at the moment of the Revolution, but long before; that new and democratic forms should have been created long ago; and that it could never be restored by the lash or the guillo-
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tine. Verderevsky blamed former Minister of War Goutchkoff for lack of discipline in the navy.
"He called me a pessimist," said Verderevsky. "He told me the fleet was bad, but the army mag- nificent. If my pessimism had been interpreted differently then, we should have had a new dis- cipline this autumn."
Before the committee adjourned, on the after- noon of our visit, they puzzled their heads over many problems of discipline ; and the young sec- retary, Theodore Averitchkin, who took us to the Sailors' Club, shook his head seriously as he unfolded the difficulties.
"Instruction is what we need," he said, as we drove through the spick-and-span streets of tidy little Helsingfors. "When