It was not intended to raise many regiments of women, I was told. The intention was to enlist and train to the highest point of efficiency between ten and twenty thousand women, and to distribute the regiments over the various front lines to inspire and stimulate the disorganized army. They would lead the men in battle when necessary, as Botchkareva’s brave band led them, and they would appear as a sign and symbol that the women of the country were not willing that the revolution, which generations of Russian men and women have died for, and have endured in the snows of Siberia sufferings worse than death, should end in chaos and national disintegration. CHAPTER X THE HOMING EXILES--TWO KINDS In a great, bare room, furnished with rows of narrow cots like a hospital, but with none of the crisp whiteness of the hospital, nor any of its promise of relief and restoration, a young man, propped with pillows, played on a concertina. He was white, emaciated, near the end of his young life. His eyes were like banked fires. He sat up in bed and in the intervals of coughing made the most wonderful music on that concertina, much more wonderful than I had ever dreamed the humble instrument could produce. The man was a true musician, and he had had many years of practice on his concertina, for it had been the one friend and solace of a solitary confinement which lasted nearly a dozen years. All around him in that bare room men lay in bed and listened to him. Some, however, were asleep. Even music could not break their weary rest. All were sick. Some were as near death as was the musician. Siberia had done its work with them. They had come home to die. On a soap box, or its equivalent on a corner of the Nevski Prospect near the Alexander Theater, another young man stood and poured out a passionate speech to the crowd of soldiers, workmen and workwomen and idle boys who had paused to listen. The man was about thirty years old, and his clothes, it was plain to see, had never been purchased in Russia. They were American clothes of fair quality, and of that stylish cut possible to buy for twenty-five dollars in almost any department store. He wore a derby hat, tipped back on his head, a soft collar and a flowing tie. He talked rapidly and with many gestures, and the crowd listened with rapt interest to his speech. I, too, stopped to listen. “What is he saying?” I asked my interpreter. “I don’t like to tell you,” she replied. I insisted, and this is an almost literal translation of what that man said, on that Petrograd street corner, on an August day, 1917: