She fought in campaigns on several fronts, earned medals and finally the coveted cross of St. George for valor under fire. She was three times wounded, the last time in the autumn of 1916, so badly that she lay in hospital for four months. She got back to her regiment, where she was now popular, and I imagine something of a leader, just before the revolution of February, 1917. Botchkareva was an ardent revolutionist, and her regiment was one of the first to go over to the people’s side. Her consternation and despair were great when, shortly after the emancipation from czardom, great masses of the people, and especially the soldiers at the front, began to demonstrate by riots and desertions how little they were ready for freedom. The men of her regiment deserted in numbers, and she went to members of the Duma who were going up and down the front trying to stay the tide, and said to them: “Give me leave to raise a regiment of women. We will go wherever men refuse to go. We will fight when they run. The women will lead the men back to the trenches.” This is the history of Botchkareva’s Battalion of Death, or rather of how it came to be organized. The Russian war ministry gave her leave to recruit the women, gave her a barrack in a former school building, and promised her equipment and a place at the front. Many women in Petrograd, women of wealth and social position, took fire with the idea, raised money for the regiment, helped in the recruiting, some of them joining. In an odd copy of an American newspaper that reached me in Russia I read a paragraph stating that the schoolgirls of Petrograd were forming a regiment under a man named Butchkareff, a lieutenant in the army. I don’t know who sent out that piece of news, but it lacked most of the facts. The women soldiers are not schoolgirls, and Botchkareva’s battalion has no men officers. Three drill sergeants, St. George cross men all of them, did assist in the training of the battalion while it remained in Petrograd. Other men drilled it behind the lines, but Botchkareva, and another remarkable woman, Marie Skridlova, her adjutant, commanded and led it in battle.