THE BOOK OF YASHKA.

Otago Witness, Issue 3495, 1 March 1921, Page 55

THE BOOK OF YASHKA.

By

JESSIE MACKEN

(Continued.) We have said that the Northern Joan of Arc heard her Voices, bidding her haste to help Mother Russia—heard them in the unsounded deeps of her pieasant soul, live hundred years of brutalising oppression, as many generations of the materialism that is choking Europe’s soul to death at this hour had not gone to quicken the ear of consecrated patriotism that heard the heavenly message in the green fields of Dauphiny. And Maria Botchkareva was bidden first to serve amid the moral squalor of a camp no purer than those of the Plantagenet wars before she rose to lead in the strength of a Britomarte armed with purity. Yet there was to be a terrible moment far on the marches of the Caucasus when the Russian Joan did hear an out-sounding voice of heavenly sweetness saying to her, “Your life will oe saved.” But that was years after the day, in 1914, when Botchkareva finally got the Czar’s special permission to 'enlist at Tomsk, half breaking her own and her mother’s heart, but resolute in her desire to help the men who were saving Russia from the brutal invader. Every step was tribulation on that uncharted track, but a woman’s invincible nobility conquered. Before the Siberian regiment reached the German front “Yashka” was as sacred as an icon to the men, whose risks and pains she shared in., frank goodfellowship. A man's life, and yet it was a woman’s hand that carried the wounded from No Man’s Land to shelter, that received last tokens for the dear ones of men who, foreboding, caught the cold prophetic whisper of Death; a woman’s hand that in relaxed hours helped the desolate wives and mothers of the scattered peasantry around, and received the giftless reward of a broken people’s gratitude. And she was learning, always learning, as she had been all her life. It was a strange school, this place of trenches, where brave men’s lives were thrown away by the treachery of false officers in league with the enemy, but it was here she learned the small amount of reading and writing that made up her literary education when she, too, became an officer and an organiser in the Russian army. Undaunted by the most horrible necessities of a soldier’s calling, she must often have looked back on the days when she and Yashka turned perforce to the family calling as a sort of caste, and became the butchers of the little Siberian town. After killing beasts it is not so hard to kill men. And still the sharp, dividing contrast between Nature and necessity held for Yashka’s young wife, the butcher baba, had been the guardian angel of the starving exiles whom she fed out of her own poor store. Sickness, privation, wounds, paralysis, j long months in the hospitals of Kiev and ’Moscow —all this would have broken the spirit of many a strong man. But when she rejoined her regiment at the Styr, she counted these things as nothing after the outburst of welcome from officers and fellow soldiers, the cross and the stripes of a non-commissioned officer that awaited “Yashka.” But a hitter yeast was working in the minds of these brave, war-worn soldiers in that February of 1917. The war had become a vast treadmill; they were filing at the enemy, they agonised and fell, but always in vain : a dead hand held them back from the victory they could have pressed home; they were sold, betrayed, by the Satanic Monk, the corrupt Minis ters, and the wicked Court. The war now in its third winter, was an eternitj of misery. Then came the jubilee of revolution

Czarism had fallen! The New Jerusalem had come! Heaven opened to the Russian soldiers when the Petrograd Soviet told them all were free and equal; disci pline by officers was at an end ; they were to elect their own committees and proceed with the war as free fighting citizens. The men were delirious with joy and drunk with sounding speeches. “The front,” said Yashka, “had become a veritable lunatic asylum.” She, almost alone, kept her head after the first ecstasy, and saw that this was the golden moment, while Russia was filled with supermen, to hurl the Germans over the border. Alas ! the new wine of republican oratory maddened like the old vodka-, the supermen were but super-talkers. “I will take no orders from a baba,” growled a soldier who would have “gone through fire for Yashka” a week before. Others were weakly civil, but inert under orders. They veered like weathercocks in a wind with every fresh speech. Krylov, a soldier, and Maria Botchkareva herself cried out for a drive against the Kaiser, the enemy of free peoples; no time for talk till the German revolution in its turn made fast a, people’s peace, a lasting peace. In tliat hour Petrograd could have shaken Europe. But ill tnv Czar’s chair sat no Botchkareva, no woman soul of waking Russia; it was Kerensky, the unstable, strutting peacock man-soul of drifting Russia that held the keys. Kerensky yea-and-nay, in whose sonorous Eden of phrases the serpent oi Bolshevism lay coiled from the first. Frank Bolshevism it was that came from the Army Committee, in reply to Yashka s call to duty. “ Peace,” but peace with whom? With the Germans, in order that the soldiers could fly back to take the land and destroy the bourgeoisie. The Czar was fallen, and the Czar’s war was done: the people’s war must now begin against all that had held down the people. It is through Botchkareva’s eyes that we behold this rosy dawn and sudden clouding. She sees what she sees: she knows what she knows. A peasant, her mind is free of the lumber of futile learning that chokes up the channels of mediocre intelligence. A woman, she holds instinctively to the few things that matter in life’s great crises. It is this | woman who responded best to the call of | Michael Rodzianko, President of the Duma, when he came to tell the army it must work out its own and Russia’s salvation. facing a. subtle and treacherous enemy watching for their dissensions to destroy their new-won freedom. One | feels the intense histrionic effect of Com--1 rade Orlov’s speech. Comrade Orlov, chairman of the Regimental Committee, nevertheless sane. “We will strike,” he says. “But send back those millions of useless soldiers spread over Russia and adding to her burden. Let us advance all together.” Rodzianko promises, agrees, but with a mournful reservation to the officers who press for the great offensive while the men can yet respond to Russia’s need. Alas! the Duma is powerless. It is Kerensky and his Soviet who have to decide all. Kerensky is idolised ; he talks —and talks. But Yashka asks to drop the useless feint of command and go home, if fighting is done, and Rodzianko can but ask her to Petrograd, to see what may happen. The soldiers give her testimonials —she had only asked for obediene, —vet those thousand signatures of men whom she hal tended, counselled, saved from death, touch her with the old yearning that had brought her from Tomsk'that November of 1914^ It was May, but there was autumn in my breast. There was autumn also | in the heart of Mother Russia. The | sunshine was dazzling. Tile fields and the forests rioted in all the glories of I spring. There was peace in the I trenches, calm in No Man’s Land. My 1 i country was still celebrating joyously 1 | the festival of the newly-won Freedom. I It was scarcely two months old, this 1 I child of. generations of pain and suffer--1 ing. My people still entertained the 1 | wonderful' illusions of these first days. I It was spring, the beginning of eternal j spring to them. But my heart pined. | I heard the autumn winds howling. I j felt instinctively an immense tragedy ’ ! developing, and my soul went out to 1 I Mother Russia. ’ I The spell of the wonderful narrative 1 deepens. Peace, the fatal peace that is ’ soon to eat the heart out of deluded I Russia, is on every tongue as Yashka nears Petrograd, and timidly seeks the j President of the Duma. The Rodziankos, husband and wife, give warm welcome to the beloved Amazon whose fame has gone ’ before her. She is asked as a general j. might be asked of the temper of the army i at the front, and she gives a general’s ’ 1 reply. There must he an offensive at : once, and reinforced by all the stranded j units dreaming in the background. Then „ it is that she is shown the cracked clay " feet of the new Republicanism. Kerensky j cannot send them : their committees object t . to joining the men at the front; the j Bolshevists are making trouble. “Who are they?” 1 asked. “They are a group led by one Lenin, who has just returned from abroad by way of Germany, and Trotsky, Kolontai, p and other political exiles. They attend the meeting of the Soviet in the Taurida Palace, in which the Duma meets, stir up class bitterness, and demand peace. ’ e At the Taurida Palace, that very night, - j is born a great idea. Yashka sits among f j the delegates from the soldiers at the d Taurida Palace, and is asked what can be done to restore the mumbling army, e A tense silence, and then a flash. Yashka s hears herself ask if she may lead 30C d | women to battle that the men may be g j shamed into action. The delegates do noi t i jeer, but they doubt that as many women n with the virtue and courage of Maria e Botchkareva can be found in Russia. The 1, . Northern Joan of Arc has no fear of liei 5- own discipline : if she is recruiter, organ *, iser, and captain (with no committee tc y j thwart her), the Women’s Battalion o j Death will stand against the world. Soov l. 1 she is sent to tell her thought to Brusilov

the Commander-in-chief. There is a great simplicity in these Slavonic men; blood and iron as they may be, they will listen to the great, wild thoughts of childhood. Brusilov is conquered. Last, she is taken to Kerensky; she sees a “voung face and eyes inflamed with sleeplessness.” He shakes her hand; “he walks about nervously and talks briefly and dryly.” He listens with impatience to details; all he wants to hear is that the moral standing of the women shall be high. Maria has won. The Battalion of Death is sanctioned. (To be Concluded.) Sixty years ago Frank Grow, of Harrodsburg, Kentucky, was married in a fine suit of broadcloth that cost him £4 12s. On a recent Sunday he went to church wearing the same suit in good condition. He says he wants to be buried in it. A suit like that, if it could now be got at any price, would cost at least £3O.

A REVERED HEAD MASTER. CHRISTCHURCH, February 22. Mr C. E. Bevan Brown, retiring head master of the Christchurch Boys’ High School, was fare welled last evening by the largest gathering of old boys ever assembled. Successive generations were represented, from the foundation of the school onwards. Mr A. T. Donnelly, who presided, said that so long as the school lasted the spirit, tradition, and the love of Mr Bevan Brown would survive; and so long as there were old boys his memory would be respected and revered among them. Replying, Mr Bevan Brown said the greatest reward for his 37 years of service w-as tile goodwill and affection of the old boys.