The day after we arrived, Monday, it rained. It poured. The camp became a swamp. The women stayed in their barrack, drilling as best they could in the narrow aisles. Sitting on the edge of their plank beds, the only place there was to sit, they listened with deep attention while under-officers read aloud the army code and regulations. In the morning a group of nurses from a hospital train in the neighborhood came to call, and in the afternoon half a dozen officers came from the stavka, two miles away. The commander, a charming man, seemed astonished and deeply impressed with the regiment standing at attention to greet him. “It is beautiful,” he said repeatedly, and he was good enough to say to me, “How wonderful for an American woman to be with them. Thank you for coming.” Tuesday it cleared and the battalion had its first open field drills. The rest of the Russian army stood around and pretended to be vastly amused. Whenever a woman made a mistake in the manual, and better still, when she fell down while charging, or splashed into a mud puddle on a run, the men laughed loudly. Some of that laughter, I feel pretty certain, hid hurt pride, for every decent soldier I talked to expressed his sorrow and humiliation that the women had felt the necessity of enlisting. Quite a number of men in that camp had been in America and of course spoke English. They said, “Say, sister, what do you suppose they think about this back in Illinois?” One man said, “Sister,” (I still wore the nurse’s coif, having no other headgear) “back home in the States they used to say women oughtn’t to vote because they couldn’t fight. I’ll bet these women can fight.” The officers in and around that army position were evidently of the same opinion. They came to the drill field every day to inspect and criticize the work, and they sent their best drill sergeants to instruct the women, who worked hard and learned quickly. One day the commander of the Tenth army, whose Russian name is too much for my memory at this distance, came over with his whole staff, a brilliant sight. The commander was plainly delighted, and shook hands with a great many of the women. He even went out of his way to shake hands with the American. Kerensky was in the neighborhood one day, but he did not visit us. The Nachalnik saw him at staff headquarters and he sent kind messages, promising the women that they should be sent to the front as soon as they were ready.