Reporting Under Fire Read Online Free PDF

Trans-Siberian Express, the “train deluxe of the longest railroad in the world” arrived in the middle of the night, no one was waiting for its weary passengers, the first hint that life in Petrograd was changing.
    When Bessie first walked its streets in June 1917, Petrograd, a Russian jewel, was abloom with flowers. Russia was in the hands of a provisional government, and the scene seemed peaceful. Bessie watched a young couple stroll through a park, tagging them with the names “Vera” and “Ivan.”
    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….
    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….
    Russia was descending into chaos. War with Germany already had placed huge demands on its people. With Russia’s old class system abolished and everything from factories to farms to schools to the police organized into soviets—committees of ordinary citizens—Russian society fell into disorder. Crops rotted in railway cars; soldiers refused to salute their officers and deserted the army. With no one to operate machinery, factory production ground to a halt. Bessie noticed the queues, lines that formed everywhere in Petrograd for bread, kerosene, shoes, chocolate, and even shipping trunks for those who hoped to escape Russia forever. Louise ached for the hungry children she saw throughout the countryside. Rheta wrote that 90 percent of Russians could not read and asked how such hungry, uneducated, and fatalistic people could establish a sane democracy.
    Week by week, Bessie Beatty, Louise Bryant, and Rheta Dorr mingled with the mighty and the masses as the summer and fall of 1917 unfolded. Bessie and her interpreter rode trains to the battle zone, scrounging seats as best they could in a new Russia where there was no longer such a thing as a reservation for a sleeping berth—for the moment, the revolution meant first come, first served.
    Bessie’s successful journey to the battle zone made her the only American woman to get to the Eastern Front in World War I. Standing just 160 feet from the trenches, she gazed from an observation post across no-man’s-land, “like a bone between two hungry dogs,” at the Russian-German line. As she stoodwith a Russian officer and her interpreter taking in the scene, she thought she saw something move.
    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:
    â€œA couple of Germans put their heads over the trench—bad thing to do.”

    Bessie Beatty (left) and Louise Bryant posed with a Russian count who served as a military commandant.
Courtesy of the Family of Bessie Beatty and the Occidental College Special Collections and College Archives
    More unusual were the reports coming from Russia that women were in combat fighting the Germans. Bessie Beatty and Rheta Childe Dorr traveled together to training camps to confirm these bizarre rumors. Yes, these rawsoldiers were women, volunteers who planned to relieve their exhausted men at the Eastern Front, many of whom had deserted the army. They called themselves the Battalion of Death, led by a rough peasant named Maria Bachkarova (today spelled Bochkareva). Bessie and Rheta slept in the wooden barracks that were home to this motley crew. Every night they rolled themselves into brown blankets and shared a sleeping platform with Bochkareva and her aide, an educated girl named Marya Skridlova. All it did was rain, so the women