Reporting Under Fire (5 page)

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:

“A 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 raw
soldiers 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 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.

“We 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.”

“No,” 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.

“There were wounded Germans in a hut,” she said. “We were ordered to take them prisoners. They refused
to 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 finally arrived at the Winter Palace to stand in the shadow of a “great red arch.” The boom of a big gun and the crack of rifle fire echoed across the square where they watched as Red fighters, armed with guns and bayonets, stormed the palace.

And then it was all over. Louise and Bessie remarked how little looting went on in the lavish palace that first night when the Bolsheviks captured it. Their observations were soon challenged by other newsmen who charged the Bolsheviks with stripping the palace bare of its valuable art and sculpture, destroying much of it furnishings, rugs, and china. Louise believed that wagonloads of priceless treasures had left the palace for Moscow well before the Bolsheviks took it, broadly hinting that the precious cargo was in Moscow for safekeeping in case Petrograd was invaded by the German army.

Louise Bryant insisted that the Bolsheviks weren't nearly as violent as some claimed; she wrote that she could “go about” in a fur coat with no problems, and that theaters, the ballet, and movies still drew audiences.

It is silly to defend the revolution by claiming there has been no bloodshed and it is just as silly to insist that the streets are running blood. No one can predict what will happen before the problem of a new government is settled in Russia, but up to the present moment the actions of the mass, so long mistreated and suppressed, and now suddenly given liberty has been surprisingly gentle.

With their strong support for the rights of oppressed working men and women, Bryant and Beatty hoped that the Bolsheviks, who claimed to represent the working classes, would create a just and lasting society that valued everyone. “To have failed to see the hope in the Russian Revolution is to be as a blind man looking at a sunrise,” Bessie wrote in what was to become one of her best-known lines.

But Rheta Childe Dorr, an avowed progressive who had exposed the shameful working conditions in American factories, left Petrograd with grave doubts about the fate of Russia's working poor.

I saw a people delivered from one class tyranny deliberately hasten to establish another, quite as brutal and as unmindful of the common good as the old one…. I saw a working class which had been oppressed under czardom itself turn oppressor; an army that had been starved and betrayed use its freedom to starve and betray its own people. I saw elected delegates to the people's councils turn
into sneak thieves and looters. I saw law and order and decency and all regard for human life or human rights set aside.

Each with her own impressions in mind, Louise Bryant, Bessie Beatty, and Rheta Childe Dorr rushed home to write their books. Louise dedicated
Six Red Months in Russia
to her husband, “that beloved vagabond John Reed.” Bessie compiled her articles into
The Red Heart of Russia,
published in 1918.

Rheta Childe Dorr returned home note-free and wrote completely from memory. “[I] had not dared to write a line while I was in Russia,” she wrote later in her autobiography,
A Woman of Fifty.
“I sat at my typewriter hour after hour, oblivious to my surroundings, and when I got up from the day's work I was always astonished not to see from the window roofs of Petrograd or the domed churches the Kremlin. When it was all over I felt like an emptied pitcher.”

Rheta Childe Dorr.
Library of Congress mnwp 15000

Rheta Childe Dorr went back to Europe as a war reporter, but French authorities refused her pleas for credentials. Wise to the fact that women “had learned through uncounted centuries to move by indirection,” she end-ran the French by signing up with the YMCA as an entertainer. She couldn't sing or dance, so she entertained the troops by giving lectures about the Russian Revolution. There was a bonus: Rheta hoped to see her son Julian, who was serving in France. She met the top man himself, General John Pershing, who “seemed amused at the spectacle of a war mother going around France in riding breeches and a service cap.” Rheta delivered her lectures, got her stories, and saw her son twice. She continued to write books, including a biography of Susan B. Anthony. Her health began to fail after her son died young in 1936, and she died in 1948 after many years of illness.

Louise Bryant attended another Red Funeral in 1922 when her husband John Reed died of typhus and was buried in the Kremlin, the only American to be so honored by the Bolsheviks. Louise picked up the pieces of her life and continued to work in the United States and Europe. She had a daughter, Anne, by her second husband, William Bullitt; but the marriage was unhappy, and Louise became estranged from her child. As the years moved on, her addiction to alcohol and drugs ruled her life. She died forgotten and alone in Paris in 1936.

Bessie Beatty became editor of
McCall's
magazine following her work in Russia. She stayed active in American journalism, wrote for Hollywood and the stage, and hosted a popular radio program on WOR Radio in New York. In 1942,
Time
called her “Mrs. Know It All,” saying, “Her fans include the well-heeled and hard-up in almost equal numbers. They also include men. Yelled a bartender recently, when customers switched off Bessie's program: ‘Don't youse guys want to learn nothing? You
listen to Bessie Beatty. She'll teach you something.'” She died in 1947.

Today, the works of Bryant, Beatty, and Dorr are largely forgotten, as they were forgotten rather soon after World War I ended. When women requested press credentials to work as correspondents during World War II, they had to dig deep to discover that others had gone before them, 20 years earlier.

Mrs. Kirtland is the first and only woman correspondent to be allowed at the front since the famous Caporetto, at first as the guest of the navy and later of the army. Mrs. Kirtland photographed these troops under a late afternoon sun as they swung down the long road on their way to the lines.

—Leslie's Photographic Review of the Great War

On November 15, 1917, the
New York Times
splashed wedding news on
page 13
. The granddaughter of the legendary banker J. P. Morgan had wed in a small and elegant but subdued ceremony “owing to the war.” Below ran news of another wedding the day before:

B
RIDE OF
L. S. K
IRTLAND.

The marriage of Miss Helen Warner Johns, daughter of Mrs. Henry Ward Johns of Lawrence Park, Bronxville, and Lucian Swift Kirtland of this city and Minneapolis,
Minn., was solemnized yesterday in Christ Church, Bronxville. The ceremony was performed by the Rev. Dr. Villson, rector of the church, assisted by the Rev. Mr. Robinson.

The bride wore a gown of white satin and old point lace. Her sister, Miss Mabel Johns, was maid of honor, and appeared in a frock of orchid-colored satin and net. The bridesmaids, the Misses Julia Warner, Emily Poucher, Janet Hayward, and Vivian Maxwell, wore pastel shades of green and sand. Albert Strong was best man. A reception followed at the home of the bride's mother.