What the Russian did not know was that his brothers in Germany are themselves enslaved to the military ideal, and that the only way to win freedom is to defeat them and the power that keeps them in bondage. He did not realize that the only way to give constructive Germany back to the world is to destroy destructive Germany. CHAPTER V THE BATTALION OF DEATH News--even bad news--travels slowly in Russia. When Sidor Petroff pushed open the door of Bachkarova’s forlorn little meat-shop one frosty March morning in 1915, Bachkaroff had already been dead three months. Marie Bachkarova was slicing off a hunk of sausage for the boy Vashka, whose father was killed in the first clash of Russian flesh and German arms. She looked up and saw Petroff standing there, leaning on his crutches. Something colder than the chill wind from the snow-covered street crept into the heart of Marie Bachkarova. The knife fell from her hand and clattered heavily to the meat-block. Her gray eyes opened wide in one flash of horror. They closed and opened again, dull and dumb with misery. The boy Vashka, who had seen news come to the village before on crutches, slipped quietly out of the shop without his sausage. When Sidor Petroff hobbled away a few minutes later to show his old friends the Cross of St. George glistening on his trench-grimed soldier blouse, he was unaware that Destiny had walked a bit of the way with him that morning. Destiny, marshaling her forces for a campaign against another group of ancient fetishes and cherished ideals, had allotted him a small but significant part in her project. Destiny, out in that desolate village of weather-grayed log houses, was preparing a shock that would be felt beyond the birch-wood forests and the Siberian steppes. Destiny was preparing the most amazing single phenomenon of the war--the _woman soldier_. Not the isolated individual woman who has buckled on a sword and shouldered a gun through the pages of history, but the woman soldier banded and fighting en masse--machine-gun companies of her, battalions of her, scouting parties of her, whole regiments of her. From the anti-suffragist Destiny was going to take forever his ancient and overworked formula: “Women can not bear arms! Therefore they should not vote.” From the feminist she was about to take her most triumphant retort: “Women don’t need to bear arms--they bear soldiers.” Against the fervid faith of the Pacifist--that “women, who pay such a terrible price to give life will never be able to take it away”--she was preparing to drive her saddest and bitterest blow. Destiny, in short, was about to bring confusion upon the tidy pigeonholes in which we keep our firm convictions ready for all emergencies. Marie Bachkarova, the crude, illiterate peasant woman whom Destiny had chosen for the big part, was as ignorant as Sidor Petroff of the importance of the moment. She could barely write; but that night laboriously she penned a letter.