This point of view I have heard expressed by other Russian women soldiers, those who have fought in men’s regiments. There are many such women; I have met and talked with some of them. One girl I saw in a hospital, a bullet in her side and a broken hand in a plaster cast, assured me that fighting was the most congenial work she had ever done. This girl had gone to Petrograd from Riga to join Botchkareva’s battalion, but for some reason she had not been accepted. She met a young marine who told her of a new Battalion of Death which was being formed out of the remnants of several old regiments and of a number of marines. “Why not join us?” he asked. “We already have four girl comrades.” So she joined. We were alone except for the interpreter, and I took occasion to ask this girl minutely how it fared with women who joined men’s regiments. Were the women treated with respect, let alone? How did they manage about their physical needs? Where did they bathe and change their clothes? Did not the officers object to their presence in the barracks? At first, my young soldier admitted, the men did not treat the women with respect, did not let them alone. She was obliged to give the men some severe lessons. But after a while they learned. They were considerate in certain respects, and arranged for the girls to have some privacy. Of course one lost foolish mock modesty when in camp. The officers did not object to their enlisting, but were inclined to treat them with a lofty indifference. The men too seemed to assume that the girls could not endure the real hardships of war when they came. “The first thing we had to do in camp was to make a quick march of twelve versts. ‘Of course the girls can’t walk that far,’ the men said, ‘they can ride on the cook wagons.’ But we said, ‘Not much we don’t ride on the cook wagons. We didn’t come here to watch you do things. We came to be soldiers like yourselves.’ So they said, ‘Oh, very well! _Harasho!_ March if you like.’ And we did. And when we got back to camp, it was so funny; sailors are not much used to walking, you know, and those men were completely tired out, exhausted. They lay around in their bunks and groaned and called on everybody to look at their feet and their blisters, while we weren’t tired at all. Why, any of us had walked as far and worked as hard in one day in the kitchen or the harvest field. So we laughed at the men and said, ‘You’re just a lot of old women. Look at us. We could do it all over again and not complain.’ After that I can tell you they didn’t patronize us quite such a lot.”