Trechos de Yashka: My Life As Peasant, Exile, And Soldier (1919), de Maria Bochkareva (como relatado a Isaac Don Levine).
It was November, 1914. With my heart steeled in the decision I had made, I resolutely approached the headquarters of the Twenty-fifth Reserve Battalion stationed in Tomsk. Upon entering a clerk asked me what I wanted.
- - -
The man looked at me for a moment and burst out laughing. He called to the other clerks. "Here is a baba [woman] who wants to enlist!" he announced jokingly, pointing at me.
- - -
There was little time for relaxation, however, as we went through an intensive training course of only three months before we were sent to the front.
- - -
MY FIRST EXPERIENCE OF NO MAN'S LAND
A big battle was raging at this time on our section of the front. We were told to be ready for an order to move at any moment to the front line. Meanwhile, we were sheltered in dugouts.
- - -
Our position was five miles behind the first line of trenches. The booming of the guns could be heard in the distance. Streams of wounded, some in vehicles and others on foot, flowed along the road.
- - -
Night came. The Germans were discharging a volume of gas at us. Perhaps they noticed an unusual movement behind the lines, and wished to annihilate us before we entered the battle. But they failed. Over the wire came the order to put on our masks. Thus were we baptized in this most inhuman of all German war inventions. Our masks were not perfect. The deadly gas penetrated some and made our eyes smart and water.
- - -
The front trench was a mere ditch, and as we lined up along it our shoulders touched. The positions of the enemy were less than three-quarters of a mile away, and the space between was filled with groans and swept by bullets. It was a scene full of horrors. Sometimes an enemy shell would land in the midst of our men, killing several and wounding more. We were sprinkled with the blood of our comrades and spattered by the mud.
- - -
I climbed out with the rest of the men, to be met by a volley of machine-gun fire. For a moment there was confusion. So many of our number had fallen like ripe wheat cut down by a gigantic scythe wielded by the invisible arm of Satan himself. Fresh blood was dripping on the cold corpses that had lain there for hours or days, and the moans were heart-rending.
- - -
And forward we went. The enemy had seen us go over the top, and he let loose Hell. As we ran forward we kept firing. Then the order came to lie down. The bombardment grew even more concentrated. Alternately running for some distance and then lying down, we reached the enemy's barbed wire entanglements. We had expected to find them demolished by our artillery, but, alas! they were untouched! There were only about seventy left of our Company of two hundred and fifty.
- - -
When dawn broke in the East, putting an end to my expeditions through No Man's Land, I had saved about fifty lives.
I had no idea at the time of what I had accomplished. But when the soldiers whom I had picked up were brought to the relief-station and asked who rescued them, about fifty replied, "Yashka." This was communicated to the Commander, who recommended me for an Order of the 4th Degree, "for distinguished valour shown in the saving of many lives under fire."
- - -
As I was about to descend into the ditch I suddenly observed a huge German taking aim at me. Hardly did I have time to fire when something struck my right leg, and I had a sensation of a warm liquid trickling down my flesh. I fell. My comrades had put the enemy to flight and were pursuing him. There were many wounded, and cries of "Save me, Holy Jesus!" came from every direction.
- - -
It was about Easter of 1915 when I arrived in Kiev. The station there was so crowded with wounded from the front that hundreds of stretchers could not be accommodated inside and were lined up in rows on the platform outside. I was picked up by an ambulance and taken to the Eugene Lazaret, where I was kept in the same ward with the men. Of course, it was a military hospital,and there was no woman's ward.
- - -
The fifteenth of August, 1915, was a memorable day in our lives. The enemy opened a violent fire at us at three o'clock in the morning, demolishing our barbed-wire defences, destroying some of our trenches, and burying many soldiers alive. Many others were killed by enemy shells. Altogether we lost fifteen killed and forty wounded out of two hundred and fifty. It was clear that the Germans contemplated an offensive. Our artillery replied vigorously, and the earth shook with the thunder of the guns. We sought every protection available, our nerves strained in momentary anticipation of an attack. We crossed ourselves, prayed to God, made ready our rifles, and awaited orders.
At six o'clock the Germans were observed climbing over the top and running in our direction. Closer and closer they came, and still we made no move, while our artillery rained shells on them. When they approached within a hundred feet of our line we received the order to open fire, and we greeted the enemy with such a concentrated hail of bullets, that his ranks were decimated and plunged in confusion. We took advantage of the situation and rushed at the Germans, turning them back and pursuing them along the twelve-mile front on which they had started to advance. The enemy lost ten thousand men that morning.
- - -
The autumn of 1915 passed, for us, uneventfully. Our life become one of routine. At night we kept watch, warming ourselves with hot tea, boiled on little stoves in the front trenches.
- - -
Every twelve days we were relieved and sent to the rear for a six-days' rest. There we found ready for us the baths established by the Union of Zemstvos which in 1915 had extended its activities along the whole front.
- - -
I suffered more than anybody else from the vermin. I could not think at first of going to the bath-house with the men. My skin was eaten through and through and scabs began to form all over my body.
- - -
I found myself confronted by a German, who towered far above me. There was not an instant to lose. Life or death hung in the balance.
I rushed at the German before he had time to move and ran him through the stomach with the bayonet. The bayonet stuck, and the man fell. A stream of blood gushed forth. I made an effort to pull out the bayonet, but failed. It was the first man that I had bayoneted; and it all happened with lightning-speed.
- - -
Our casualties were enormous The corpses lay thick everywhere, like mushrooms after rain, and there were innumerable wounded. One could not take a step in No Man's Land without coming into contact with the corpse of a Russian or a German. Bloody feet, hands, sometimes heads, lay scattered in the mud.
That was the most terrible offensive in which I was engaged. It has come down into history as the Battle of Postovy. We spent the first night in the German trenches we had captured. It was a night of unforgettable horrors. The darkness was impenetrable. The stench was suffocating. The ground was full of mud-holes. Some of us sat on corpses. Other rested their feet on dead men. One could not stretch a hand without touching a lifeless body. We were hungry. We were cold. Our flesh crept in the dreadful surroundings. I wanted to get up. My hand sought support. It fell on the face of a corpse, stuck against the wall. I screamed, slipped and fell. My fingers buried themselves in the torn abdomen of a body.
I was seized with horror such as I had never experienced, and shrieked hysterically.
- - -
I was informed, after an X-ray examination, that a fragment of shell was imbedded in my body and asked if I wished an operation to have it removed. I could not imagine living with a piece of shell in my flesh, and so requested its removal.
- - -
That journey on the train was a symbol of the country's condition in the winter of 1916. The government machinery was breaking down. The soldiers had lost faith in their leaders, and there was a general feeling that they were being sent in thousands merely to be slaughtered. Rumours flew thick and fast. The old soldiers had been killed off and the fresh drafts were impatient for the end of the war. The spirit of 1914 was no more.
- - -
The opening of the year 1917 found us resting two miles in the rear. There was much fun and merriment in the reserve, billets. Although the discipline was as strict as ever, the relations between the officers and men had, in the course of the three and a half years of the war, undergone a complete transformation.
The older officers, trained in pre-war conditions, were no longer to be found, having died in battle or been disabled. The new junior officers, all young men taken from civil life, many of them former students and school teachers, were liberal in their views and very humane in their conduct.
- - -
In February, 1917, the front was unprepared for the eruption that was soon to shake the world. The front maintained its fierce hatred for the Germans and could not conceive of a righteous peace save through the efficient organization of a gigantic offensive against the enemy. The obstacle in the way of such an offensive was the traitorous Government. Against this Government were directed the indignation and suppressed discontent of the rank and file. But so old, so stable, so deep-rooted was the institution of Tsarism that, with all their secret contempt for the Court, with all their secret hatred for the officials of the Government, the armies at the front were not ripe yet for a conscious and deliberate rising.
- - -
THE REVOLUTION AT THE FRONT
Then came Order No. 1, signed by the Petrograd Soviet of Workmen and Soldiers. Soldiers and officers were now equal, it declared. All the citizens of Free Russia were henceforth equal.
- - -
The speakers were almost all eloquent. They painted beautiful pictures of Russia's future, of universal brotherhood, of happiness and prosperity. The soldiers' eyes would light up with the glow of hope. More than once even I was caught by those eloquent and enticing phrases.
- - -
But there, a few hundred feet away, were the Germans. [...] They must be driven out before we could embark upon a life of peace. We were ready to drive them out.
- - -
Kerensky told me that the Women's Battalion of Death had already exerted a beneficial influence, that several bodies of troops had expressed a willingness to leave for the front, that many of the wounded had organized themselves for the purpose of going to the fighting line, declaring that if women could fight, then they - the cripples - would do so, too.
- - -
THE WOMEN'S BATTALION AT THE FRONT
At last the signal was given. We crossed ourselves and, hugging our rifles, leaped out of the trenches, every one of our lives dedicated to "the country and freedom." We moved forward under a devastating fire from machine guns and artillery, my brave girls, encouraged by the presence of men at their sides, marching steadily against the hail of bullets.
[...] But, dauntless of heart and firm of step, we moved forward. Our losses were increasing, but our line was unbroken. As we advanced further and further into No Man's Land, the shadows finally swallowing us completely, with only the fire of explosions revealing our figures at times to the eyes of our men in the rear, their hearts were touched.
[...] We swept forward and overwhelmed the first German line, and then the second. Our regiment alone captured two thousand prisoners.
[...] Here we were, a few hundred women, officers, men - all on the brink of a precipice, in imminent danger of being surrounded and wiped out of existence.
It was in these desperate circumstances, as I was rushing about from position to position, exposing myself to bullets in the hope that I might be struck dead rather than see the collapse of the whole enterprise, that I came across a couple hiding behind a trunk of a tree. One of the pair was a girl belonging to the Battalion, the other a soldier. They were having sex!
[...] The Germans re-occupied, without opposition, all the ground and trenches we had won at such terrible cost. There were only two hundred women left in the ranks of my Battalion.
I regained consciousness at a hospital in the rear. I was suffering from shell-shock.
- - -
[...] the news arrived of the overthrow of Kerensky and the Bolshevists' victory in Petrograd.
"Peace! Peace!" thundered through the air.
"We will leave the front now! We are going home! Hurrah for Lenin! Hurrah for Trotzky! Hurrah for Kolontay!"
"Land and freedom! Bread! Down with the bourgeoisie!"
[...] Meanwhile the mob was advancing. It encountered in the immediate rear about twenty of my girls, who were engaged in the supporting line.
These twenty girls were lynched by the maddened mob.
Four of the instructors, who made an attempt to defend these innocent women, were crushed under the heels of the savage crowd.
[...] I and my remaining soldiers ran for ten miles. Although we could see no sign of pursuers we ran no risks. We stopped in the woods beside the road to Molodechno.
Mais:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRfFIkFfaUA
- - -
The man looked at me for a moment and burst out laughing. He called to the other clerks. "Here is a baba [woman] who wants to enlist!" he announced jokingly, pointing at me.
- - -
There was little time for relaxation, however, as we went through an intensive training course of only three months before we were sent to the front.
- - -
MY FIRST EXPERIENCE OF NO MAN'S LAND
A big battle was raging at this time on our section of the front. We were told to be ready for an order to move at any moment to the front line. Meanwhile, we were sheltered in dugouts.
- - -
Our position was five miles behind the first line of trenches. The booming of the guns could be heard in the distance. Streams of wounded, some in vehicles and others on foot, flowed along the road.
- - -
Night came. The Germans were discharging a volume of gas at us. Perhaps they noticed an unusual movement behind the lines, and wished to annihilate us before we entered the battle. But they failed. Over the wire came the order to put on our masks. Thus were we baptized in this most inhuman of all German war inventions. Our masks were not perfect. The deadly gas penetrated some and made our eyes smart and water.
- - -
The front trench was a mere ditch, and as we lined up along it our shoulders touched. The positions of the enemy were less than three-quarters of a mile away, and the space between was filled with groans and swept by bullets. It was a scene full of horrors. Sometimes an enemy shell would land in the midst of our men, killing several and wounding more. We were sprinkled with the blood of our comrades and spattered by the mud.
- - -
I climbed out with the rest of the men, to be met by a volley of machine-gun fire. For a moment there was confusion. So many of our number had fallen like ripe wheat cut down by a gigantic scythe wielded by the invisible arm of Satan himself. Fresh blood was dripping on the cold corpses that had lain there for hours or days, and the moans were heart-rending.
- - -
And forward we went. The enemy had seen us go over the top, and he let loose Hell. As we ran forward we kept firing. Then the order came to lie down. The bombardment grew even more concentrated. Alternately running for some distance and then lying down, we reached the enemy's barbed wire entanglements. We had expected to find them demolished by our artillery, but, alas! they were untouched! There were only about seventy left of our Company of two hundred and fifty.
- - -
When dawn broke in the East, putting an end to my expeditions through No Man's Land, I had saved about fifty lives.
I had no idea at the time of what I had accomplished. But when the soldiers whom I had picked up were brought to the relief-station and asked who rescued them, about fifty replied, "Yashka." This was communicated to the Commander, who recommended me for an Order of the 4th Degree, "for distinguished valour shown in the saving of many lives under fire."
- - -
As I was about to descend into the ditch I suddenly observed a huge German taking aim at me. Hardly did I have time to fire when something struck my right leg, and I had a sensation of a warm liquid trickling down my flesh. I fell. My comrades had put the enemy to flight and were pursuing him. There were many wounded, and cries of "Save me, Holy Jesus!" came from every direction.
- - -
It was about Easter of 1915 when I arrived in Kiev. The station there was so crowded with wounded from the front that hundreds of stretchers could not be accommodated inside and were lined up in rows on the platform outside. I was picked up by an ambulance and taken to the Eugene Lazaret, where I was kept in the same ward with the men. Of course, it was a military hospital,and there was no woman's ward.
- - -
The fifteenth of August, 1915, was a memorable day in our lives. The enemy opened a violent fire at us at three o'clock in the morning, demolishing our barbed-wire defences, destroying some of our trenches, and burying many soldiers alive. Many others were killed by enemy shells. Altogether we lost fifteen killed and forty wounded out of two hundred and fifty. It was clear that the Germans contemplated an offensive. Our artillery replied vigorously, and the earth shook with the thunder of the guns. We sought every protection available, our nerves strained in momentary anticipation of an attack. We crossed ourselves, prayed to God, made ready our rifles, and awaited orders.
At six o'clock the Germans were observed climbing over the top and running in our direction. Closer and closer they came, and still we made no move, while our artillery rained shells on them. When they approached within a hundred feet of our line we received the order to open fire, and we greeted the enemy with such a concentrated hail of bullets, that his ranks were decimated and plunged in confusion. We took advantage of the situation and rushed at the Germans, turning them back and pursuing them along the twelve-mile front on which they had started to advance. The enemy lost ten thousand men that morning.
- - -
The autumn of 1915 passed, for us, uneventfully. Our life become one of routine. At night we kept watch, warming ourselves with hot tea, boiled on little stoves in the front trenches.
- - -
Every twelve days we were relieved and sent to the rear for a six-days' rest. There we found ready for us the baths established by the Union of Zemstvos which in 1915 had extended its activities along the whole front.
- - -
I suffered more than anybody else from the vermin. I could not think at first of going to the bath-house with the men. My skin was eaten through and through and scabs began to form all over my body.
- - -
I found myself confronted by a German, who towered far above me. There was not an instant to lose. Life or death hung in the balance.
I rushed at the German before he had time to move and ran him through the stomach with the bayonet. The bayonet stuck, and the man fell. A stream of blood gushed forth. I made an effort to pull out the bayonet, but failed. It was the first man that I had bayoneted; and it all happened with lightning-speed.
- - -
Our casualties were enormous The corpses lay thick everywhere, like mushrooms after rain, and there were innumerable wounded. One could not take a step in No Man's Land without coming into contact with the corpse of a Russian or a German. Bloody feet, hands, sometimes heads, lay scattered in the mud.
That was the most terrible offensive in which I was engaged. It has come down into history as the Battle of Postovy. We spent the first night in the German trenches we had captured. It was a night of unforgettable horrors. The darkness was impenetrable. The stench was suffocating. The ground was full of mud-holes. Some of us sat on corpses. Other rested their feet on dead men. One could not stretch a hand without touching a lifeless body. We were hungry. We were cold. Our flesh crept in the dreadful surroundings. I wanted to get up. My hand sought support. It fell on the face of a corpse, stuck against the wall. I screamed, slipped and fell. My fingers buried themselves in the torn abdomen of a body.
I was seized with horror such as I had never experienced, and shrieked hysterically.
- - -
I was informed, after an X-ray examination, that a fragment of shell was imbedded in my body and asked if I wished an operation to have it removed. I could not imagine living with a piece of shell in my flesh, and so requested its removal.
- - -
That journey on the train was a symbol of the country's condition in the winter of 1916. The government machinery was breaking down. The soldiers had lost faith in their leaders, and there was a general feeling that they were being sent in thousands merely to be slaughtered. Rumours flew thick and fast. The old soldiers had been killed off and the fresh drafts were impatient for the end of the war. The spirit of 1914 was no more.
- - -
The opening of the year 1917 found us resting two miles in the rear. There was much fun and merriment in the reserve, billets. Although the discipline was as strict as ever, the relations between the officers and men had, in the course of the three and a half years of the war, undergone a complete transformation.
The older officers, trained in pre-war conditions, were no longer to be found, having died in battle or been disabled. The new junior officers, all young men taken from civil life, many of them former students and school teachers, were liberal in their views and very humane in their conduct.
- - -
In February, 1917, the front was unprepared for the eruption that was soon to shake the world. The front maintained its fierce hatred for the Germans and could not conceive of a righteous peace save through the efficient organization of a gigantic offensive against the enemy. The obstacle in the way of such an offensive was the traitorous Government. Against this Government were directed the indignation and suppressed discontent of the rank and file. But so old, so stable, so deep-rooted was the institution of Tsarism that, with all their secret contempt for the Court, with all their secret hatred for the officials of the Government, the armies at the front were not ripe yet for a conscious and deliberate rising.
- - -
THE REVOLUTION AT THE FRONT
Then came Order No. 1, signed by the Petrograd Soviet of Workmen and Soldiers. Soldiers and officers were now equal, it declared. All the citizens of Free Russia were henceforth equal.
- - -
The speakers were almost all eloquent. They painted beautiful pictures of Russia's future, of universal brotherhood, of happiness and prosperity. The soldiers' eyes would light up with the glow of hope. More than once even I was caught by those eloquent and enticing phrases.
- - -
But there, a few hundred feet away, were the Germans. [...] They must be driven out before we could embark upon a life of peace. We were ready to drive them out.
- - -
Kerensky told me that the Women's Battalion of Death had already exerted a beneficial influence, that several bodies of troops had expressed a willingness to leave for the front, that many of the wounded had organized themselves for the purpose of going to the fighting line, declaring that if women could fight, then they - the cripples - would do so, too.
- - -
THE WOMEN'S BATTALION AT THE FRONT
At last the signal was given. We crossed ourselves and, hugging our rifles, leaped out of the trenches, every one of our lives dedicated to "the country and freedom." We moved forward under a devastating fire from machine guns and artillery, my brave girls, encouraged by the presence of men at their sides, marching steadily against the hail of bullets.
[...] But, dauntless of heart and firm of step, we moved forward. Our losses were increasing, but our line was unbroken. As we advanced further and further into No Man's Land, the shadows finally swallowing us completely, with only the fire of explosions revealing our figures at times to the eyes of our men in the rear, their hearts were touched.
[...] We swept forward and overwhelmed the first German line, and then the second. Our regiment alone captured two thousand prisoners.
[...] Here we were, a few hundred women, officers, men - all on the brink of a precipice, in imminent danger of being surrounded and wiped out of existence.
It was in these desperate circumstances, as I was rushing about from position to position, exposing myself to bullets in the hope that I might be struck dead rather than see the collapse of the whole enterprise, that I came across a couple hiding behind a trunk of a tree. One of the pair was a girl belonging to the Battalion, the other a soldier. They were having sex!
[...] The Germans re-occupied, without opposition, all the ground and trenches we had won at such terrible cost. There were only two hundred women left in the ranks of my Battalion.
I regained consciousness at a hospital in the rear. I was suffering from shell-shock.
- - -
[...] the news arrived of the overthrow of Kerensky and the Bolshevists' victory in Petrograd.
"Peace! Peace!" thundered through the air.
"We will leave the front now! We are going home! Hurrah for Lenin! Hurrah for Trotzky! Hurrah for Kolontay!"
"Land and freedom! Bread! Down with the bourgeoisie!"
[...] Meanwhile the mob was advancing. It encountered in the immediate rear about twenty of my girls, who were engaged in the supporting line.
These twenty girls were lynched by the maddened mob.
Four of the instructors, who made an attempt to defend these innocent women, were crushed under the heels of the savage crowd.
[...] I and my remaining soldiers ran for ten miles. Although we could see no sign of pursuers we ran no risks. We stopped in the woods beside the road to Molodechno.
Mais:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRfFIkFfaUA
