The impatience of those women to go forward, to get into action, was constant. They fretted and quarreled during the frequent rainy spells which kept them housebound, and were really happy only when something happened to promise an early start. One day it was the arrival of 250 pairs of new boots, great clumsy things which it would have crippled me to wear, and in fact all the women who could afford it had boots made to order. Another day it was the appearance of a camp cooking outfit especially for the battalion. Four good horses were attached to the outfit, and the country girls hailed them with delight as something to pet and fuss over. The women spent much time cleaning and learning their guns. They seemed to love their firearms, one girl always alluding to her rifle as “my sweetheart.” “How can you love a gun?” I asked her. “I love anything that brings death to the Germans,” she answered grimly. This girl, a highly educated, wellbred young woman, was in Germany when the war broke out. She was arrested and charged with espionage, a charge which, for all I know, may have been true. It was not proved, of course, or she would have been shot. On the mere suspicion, however, she was kept in prison for a year and must have suffered pretty severely. She looked forward to the coming fight with keen zest. I asked her one day what she would do if she was taken prisoner again. She pulled from under her blouse a slender gold chain on the end of which was a capsule in a chamois bag. “I shall never be taken prisoner,” she said. “None of us will.” From Thursday on the weather improved and the regiment worked hard in the field. I had felt the strain of confinement in barracks, and when I was not watching the drill I was taking long walks down a highway over which went a constant procession of troops and camp supply wagons, moving on and on, nearer the horizon, from which came frequent low mutterings like distant thunder, but which were heavy gunfire. Sometimes I walked as far as a little settlement which the Nachalnik told me was not unlike the village she found so unbearable after her husband left it. The village consisted of two rows of log or roughly timbered cottages along a winding, muddy road. Green moss grew on the thatched roofs, and the whole place had a forlorn, neglected look, but surrounding each cottage was a carefully tended garden with beets, cabbages, onions, potatoes, and sunflowers grown for the seeds, which are the Russian substitute for chewing gum. Often the cottages had poppies growing in the rows of vegetables, the bright blooms giving brilliance to the somber and lonely landscape.