“MY heart yearned to be there in the boiling cauldron of war, to be baptised
by its fire and scorched by its lava.” The fearsome meditations of Attila
the Hun, Genghis Khan or Ivan the Terrible? No, the reflections are those of
a young Russian woman, Maria Bochkareva who, in 1917, with the morale of the
old Imperial Army collapsing in the struggle against the Germans and the
Austrians on two fronts, persuaded the Provisional Government of Alexander
Kerensky to allow her to form a battalion composed entirely of women. Thus,
she raised, trained and commanded the Petrograd “Battalion of Death”, whose
aim was to foster a more aggressive spirit in the Russian Army.
For Bochkareva, whose life had been one of unremitting hardship, a woman’s
participation in war was not a romantic notion. Born in Tomsk, Siberia, into
a peasant family, she had been mercilessly beaten by a drunken father, and
ran away from home at 15 to get married to a labourer, Afansi Bochkarev.
The young couple joined work gangs, Bochkareva being tough and capable enough
to be put in charge of a 25-man detachment. But her husband, too, beat her
and she left him to work as a crewman on a river steamboat.
She married again, but her second husband was a violent drunk, and she escaped
from him into the ranks of a Russian reserve battalion. There, the men
assumed — in spite of her shorn hair and ferocious mien — that she was a
prostitute who had joined up to ply her trade in the billets at night. The
first soldier who acted on that assumption received a rude awakening and a
savage kick in the ribs. “All night long my nerves were taut and my fists
were busy,” she recalled, after repelling a series of advances. Before long
her tormentors had learnt to call her “comrade” and her conduct in battle
earned her three decorations — and two wounds — over the next three years.
When, in 1917, she heard that large numbers of Russian soldiers were
deserting, she made her way to Petrograd to demand permission to recruit for
her Women’s Death Battalion. This went into action on the Austrian Front
that summer, holding trench lines from which men’s units had fled. It
suffered cruel losses, and by autumn its numbers were down from 2,000 to
250.
With the October Revolution, Bochkareva’s battalion came under the command of
the Petrograd military district and after suffering further casualties
eventually surrendered to the Bolsheviks during the storming of the Winter
Palace. Refusing to work with her captors (who, nevertheless greatly admired
her brave deeds), Bochkareva was sentenced to be shot. But she was reprieved
when one of the firing party recognised her as having saved his life at the
front, and begged to be able to die with her. She later escaped to America
where her memoir Yashka, My Life, was published in 1939.
In modern times Russian women have often been at the sharp end of conflict.
During the Second World War they were combat pilots and snipers at a time
when the Western Allies did not allow their women into the front line. In
that they appear to be firmly in the tradition of that resolutely “hands on”
female Russian leader, Catherine the Great, who came to the throne in 1762
uniformed and equipped as a soldier, led the forces that overthrew her
husband, Tsar Peter III, and embarked on a career of conquest that drove
back the Ottomans, took Russia’s southern frontier to the Black Sea and
added a large part of Poland to her empire.
Exploits like these are just a part of the Imperial War Museum’s exhibition Women
and War. Its sweep takes us from the mythological Amazon warriors
depicted on a 6th century BC Attic vase, and charred fragments dating from
Boadicea’s sack of London in AD60, through two world wars to the nurses and
support troops of the 1991 Gulf War and beyond. Besides the formalised
involvement of women in conflict, it demonstrates many instances of
idiosyncratic individual determination throughout the ages.
In 1745 a certain Hannah Snell, abandoned by her husband, donned men’s clothes
and set off in pursuit of him. Thus attired, she was pressganged into the
Army, ending up in the Royal Marines. Posted to India, she took part in the
Battle of Pondicherry, and was severely wounded in the intense fighting. She
never did find her husband — but her exploits became a bestselling book and
herself a celebrity. The British Army had never had such good publicity, and
its commander-in-chief, the Duke of Cumberland, personally saw to it that
she was granted a life pension.
In 1914 the Scottish suffragette Elsie Inglis was told by the War Office when
she offered her services: “My good lady, go home and sit still.” She did
nothing of the sort, but independently raised 14 Scottish hospital units
which saw service in France, Serbia, Salonika and Russia.
But, as its title suggests, this exhibition is not just about women at war,
but also about those overtaken by the dreadful events that accompany it. One
of its most moving images is of a Sudanese mother grieving over her dead
infant daughter, a pitifully emaciated figure lying in a tiny grave.
Women and War at the Imperial War Museum London, October 15, 2003, to April
18, 2004. 10am-6pm daily. Admission £7, concessions £5. Corsets
to Camouflage: Women and War by Kate Adie is published by Hodder and
Stoughton, £20, in association with the exhibition.
