Reporting Under Fire Read Online Free PDF Page B

drilled inside counting “Ras dva tri chetiri ras dva tri chetiri” (“One two three four one two three four”) for hours on end.
    In July 1917, Bessie and Rheta spent a week living with these women, who had shaved their heads and donned men’s boots to go to war. They sidestepped laundry, boots, and gas masks hanging from rafters in their barracks and shared the soldiers’ rations of black bread and soup. The women were of every class and type, rough girls from the country and demoiselles from the city.
    Every “soldier girl” had a story to tell, and Bessie pieced together what “pushed them out of their individual ruts into the mad maelstrom of war.” One was an orphan, another a secretary, yet another a Polish refugee who had fled from the German army. One was Japanese. One of them kissed her rifle as thought it were her lover. “I love my gun,” she told Bessie. “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.”
    Then came the call everyone was waiting for: the Women’s Battalion was going into battle. Bessie and Rheta went back to Petrograd; Rheta felt it wasn’t right for her to follow the women into battle because she would “simply have been a nuisance.” Both Rheta and Bessie wrote long articles about the women and the aftermath of battle. The women soldiers, the reporters said,conducted themselves with honor. Bessie’s words rang with drama:
    All the world knows how they went into battle shouting a challenge to the deserting Russian 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 20 others received medals. 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….
    I heard the story from the lips of twenty of the wounded women. No one of them can tell exactly what happened.
    â€œWe 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.”
    â€œNo,” 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. Suppose 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.
    â€œThere were wounded Germans in a hut,” she said. “We were ordered to take them prisoners. They refusedto be taken. We had to throw hand-grenades in and destroy them. No; war is not easy for a woman.”
    Bessie Beatty, Louise Bryant, and John Reed were in Petrograd to witness the October Revolution, the turning point in that fateful autumn of 1917, when the Bolsheviks stormed the Winter Palace, threw out Russia’s provisional government, and set up a government under Lenin. On the night of October 24-25, 1917, Bessie wangled a valuable pass bearing the blue seal of the Bolshevik Military Revolutionary Committee. The reporters depended on their passes to keep them out of trouble with bands of Red Guards (“factory men with rifles”) on the lookout for “bourgeoisie”—enemies of the revolution.
    The three Americans climbed into a truck that was dropping Bolshevik leaflets throughout Petrograd. (Louise was asked to remove the yellow band from her hat; it was an attractive target for snipers.) Meeting roadblocks and showing their passes when challenged, they