THE BOOK OF YASHKA.

Otago Witness, Issue 3495, 8 March 1921, Page 55

THE BOOK OF YASHKA.

By

Jessie Mackay.

(Concluded.' “Men and women citizens!” I heard my voice say. “Our mother is perishing. Our mother is Russia. I want to help to save her. I want women whose hearts are loyal, whose souls are pure, whose aims are high. With such women setting an example of self-sacrifice, you men will realise your duty in this grave hour!” These were the words God put in the mouth of the trembling peasant girl, according to her prayer, that night of May in the old Imperial box at the Mariynski Theatre. All Petrograd rose to her. Fifteen hundred women applied next day to be enrolled in the Battalion of Death. Maria Botchkareva left them no doubt regarding the sacrifice she and Russia demanded—sacrifice and obedience as complete as that of a veiled nun. She was stern by nature, she said, and would herself punish any misbehaviour. She and she only would be their captain: the women’s regiment would have no committee. Of the 2000 that passed the medical test, 80 were dismissed during the first two days for light talking or laughter at- drill. The battalion began to find itself. It stood its first baptism of fire, not from the Germans, but from the Bolshe viks, who saw in it a real menace to their peace propaganda, Their brutality preceded two immediate trials of Botchkareva’s iron resolve. Fifteen hundred jf the girls mutinied, desiring to form a eomraittee. She kept, the 300 who remained loyal, and sent the rest home. Then her division commander ordered her to relax her stern discipline and accept a committee. He and Kerensky heat in vain against the rock of her determination. The demonstrations of the 300, fearing harm to their beloved commander, swayed tlie nonplussed general. Her votive force showed itself indeed a model to the veering, irresolute army. The War Office capitulated, as its English prototype capitulated to Florence Nightingale. At Kagan Cathedral the banners of the bat- j tali on were blessed and a delirious ova- 1 tion awaited the •women who willed to 1 save the Republic. She needed both blessing and heartening when she reached the front, and saw the swift decay in the army during her two months’ absence. This sullen, unsoldierly rabble was indeed an object-lesson on committee rule and i delegates’ talk. Kerensky Yea-and-Nay 1 came down and renewed his order to place the battalion on the general footing. . Botchkareva tore off her epaulets and I threw them in his face—a unique episode in the history of Russian War Ministers ! “Shoot her!” shrieked the old Adam of Czarism after hersflving figure, and the second .Adam of Republicanism could scarcely be mollified by bis generals’ re minder that be had not oiilv created war committees but abolished the dcatn penalty. The trial subsequently ordered never took place. The generals, who had already eulogised the work and appearance of Botrhkareva’s battalion, could not conceal their admiration of her splendid misdemeanour. The whole book is a flashing of similar searchlights on the fall of Russia. it solves the puzzle that drove the Allies to despair that terrible spring when emancipated Russia crumpled like paper before the Germans. German gold there had been in the pre-revolution paralysis of the army: none was needed now. Czarism had dehumanised the people and destroyed finance. The country was ripe to fall. How it fell can he gauged well by this extraordinary story of the Battalion of Death, a thing only possible in a mediaeval state of society, scarcely possible amid an Aryan people. (Can we call the Russians a truly Aryan people?) Tn May the women’s corps was formed ; m June it was trained ; in July it was in action—aotion the memory of which should make the. cheeks of Russian men bum to the end of time. The battalion, hearing every agonising test of its integrity and cour-

age, as Yashka herself had borne it, was at last to put fighting Russia on its trial. A number of the most spirited officers and some picked men of the rank-and-file, sick of inaction, asked to join the battalion. In all, it now mustered a thousand strong. While the other regiments wasted the hour fixed for advance in Gilbertian debates, these gallant men and gallant girls hurled themselves at the ridges before No Man’s Land. The desperate sally succeeded; two lines were taken. Unfortunately the enemy’s plenteous supply of strong drink was also taken, and soon the bulk of the men were as helpless as flies in treacle. The girls destroyed quantities of the fiery temptation on the spot, and the re-formed battalion made a drive against the third 1 line. Reinforcements from the ample division behind them were momently looked for. Ineffable shame, the laggards sent word they had decided to defend, but not attack! The battalion was left to die. Then Botchkareva, reading Russia’s doom in this failure to rouse her men, rushed demented into the carnage, looking for death. Prostrate and dumb from shell-shock, she was carried over the ridge, leaving a third of her noble girls dead behind her. Taken to Petrograd, she lay helpless, vainly smothered with flowers and glory, Kerensky leading the pecan of praise. Rapidly the shadow of Brest-Litovsk, the shadow of the Allies’ wrath", the shadow of Russia’s ultra-debacle, seen alone by Botchkareva, was deepening over all. Russian faces were changing from the careless, generous bonhomie of 1915 to the dehumanised mask of the Bolshevik of 1917. Perhaps Russia was already too crippled with poverty to lead a dash to Berlin in the hour that Nicholas fell. But had the gold of Republican rapture been melted into instant action, then the whole sequence of that Titanic year had surely been recast, the Allies he'd by expediency if not bv gratitude, and the suicidal crime of the Baltic blockade been averted.

With speech and power restored, Botchkareva threw herself into the one campaign of hope—to induce Kerensky bo yield command of the army to some faithful general whose iron discipline might restore order. Her own trust was given to Komiloff, the Siberian, half Mongol and half Russian of her own peasant stock. The rest of the book, a stretch of breathless adventure, deals mainly with fruitless negotiations in which she was the intermediary. Rodzianko and what other honest leaders remained in crumbling Russia saw in the fame and steadfastness of this intrepid woman the last trump card of nationhood. But Kerensky’s megalomania and Russia’s paralysis deepened as the hideous “brotherliness” of the new doctrine spread. The utter horror of Bolshevik beginnings revealed itself in the last days of the battalion. The magic name of “Yashka” meant nothing now to the savage mob that had once been an army. Botchkareva was' all hut beaten to death, and 20 of her girls were lynched before the still human elements in the troops effected an escape to the woods for the survivors. In that brief unquiet pause the disbanding of the battalion was achieved as rapidly and secretly as possible, the girls being despatched singly in women’s clothes to near railway stations. It was a sorrowful sequel to the pomp that had blessed their march half a year before, this band of warrior vestals whose captain was a peasant and whose lieutenant was a princess. They had stood alone against Russia’s enemies, but Russia’s drugged and drunken men they could not shame. Intensely vivid are the pages telling of Kerensky’s fall. Here we glimpse at Lenin and Trotzkv, as she, a prisoner, saw them in the 'first flush of triumph. Without prejudice, she notes the Russian face of Lenin and the Jewish features of Trotzky, and the suave persuasions that would have drawn her into service for Russia’s new heaven on earth. But site, who would not inin Komiloff against her deluded countrymen, had no ear for KcrniIcff’s enemies. ' Bldntly she told them she knew the Germans and they did not: Russia was ruined. She was not, however, refused a pass to Siberia, where her family ! still lived, though every step of the way 1 was a Gethsemane of insult and malignity. Every good Bo'shevik would cheerfully have tom “Yaslika” in pieces now as a “Korniloffka.” a Ozarist. an enemy of peace and the people. She reached her own people, but only to he summoned back by the few remaining loyal generals lin Petrograd for a secret embassy to Komiloff. now at war with the Bolsheviks on the Don. Fiction can hardly parallel | either the ventures or the horrors of that j terrible journey, where she saw the blood- ; drunken communists wallow in torture and ! murder. Bv a hair-breadth her life ,was saved. Returning to Siberia, she determined on escaping to America to invoke President W’lson’s aid. It- is her amanuensis who adds the facts of her departure from America after seeing President Wilson, and her subsequent landing at Archangel in September. 1918. After that there seems no record.

Tt is an unforgettable picture of militant womanhood. F.verr chapter, nay, every page, is. charged with a symbolism far beyond her simple ken. All the militancy of woman against evil seems crowded into the life of this peasant girl, who was doomed to see and feel the worst of dying Pzarism and of Bolshevism in its bestial beginnings. The treachery, the cruelty, the fatuity, the fnrv of men beat against her from childhood ns waves against a rock. Nothing could break her or bend her, or turn her from her faith in goodness and in God. The men about her seem pigmies, foils, or shadows. She was tho living symbol of Russia’s soul. Hap she lived in vain? Gan a- nation die. consecrated hv love like hers? A deener shadow than ever, the shadow of Russia falls across the page. This word-painted kinoma of an Empire’s downfall, what does it figure fdrth to us in tho second year of a “peace'’ as hollow and hopeless as that Brest-Litovsk? Is it only a dream that the civilised peoples

of the world, ourselves with them, seem caught in a wider net of the laissez faire that gave Russia to isolation and ruin? The Russian men, clasping their old sins, their dice and their vodka, to their heart, slid over that precipice which women like Maria Botchkareva, Catherine Breshkovsky, and Marie Spiridonoft s'aw yawning for them—fatuity and selfishness. There may be a greater “Yashka” written one day, in which our own fatuity, inertia, and moral drift shall live again, like the Gilbertian debates of the Russian soldiers below the ridges of No Man’s Land. If that greater slide is not averted, God’s sun will still shine in the sky and something great and good will finally emerge out of the cataclysm, but that great and good thing can hardly oe the Aryan civilisation.