Here were women--two hundred and fifty of them--on their way to battle, and just a fraction of the women’s army soon to be. Destiny, dawn, and an occasional inquiry led me at six o’clock in the morning to their door. They were housed in two pine-board sheds, sandwiched between a dug-out full of Austrian prisoners and the barracks of a battalion of Cossack cavalry. I found myself in a building a hundred or more feet long, with steep roofs sloping to the floor, and just enough width to allow for two shelves eight feet deep and an aisle between. The shelves at the moment were covered with brown bundles, and as I followed the sentry a hundred close-cropped heads emerged from them. Above my head, hanging from the rafters, was a jungle of gas-masks and wet laundry, boots, water-bottles, and kit-bags. Beside each girl lay her rifle. At the far end of the barracks we stopped before one of the brown bundles, and the sentry announced, “Gaspadin Nachalnik.” The man’s head and man’s shoulders of Bachkarova arose from the blanket. Next to her, another bundle stirred, and Marya Skridlova, aide-de-camp, moved over and invited me to come up. In that spot, between the social poles of Russia, Rheta Childe Dorr and I spent all the nights and most of the days in the week that followed. Without delay I changed my too feminine dress for “overettes,” and established myself as unobtrusively as possible in the life of the barracks. Soon the brown bundles were all up and shedding unbleached muslin pajamas for their soldier uniforms. Once dressed, they tumbled out into the rain, and lined up with their brother soldiers from the other barracks to fill their pails with hot water from the common kitchen. We ate our breakfast sitting on the edge of a bunk, slicing off hunks of black bread, and washing it down with tea from tin cups. Bachkarova sat next to me, eating sardines from a can and wiping her greasy fingers on the front of her blouse. Orlova spent most of her time washing these blouses, in a vain attempt to keep the Commander clean. The routine of the day began with the reading of the army regulations. The women soldiers had chosen to submit to the stern discipline of the Russian army in the days before the Revolution. The ceaseless rain made drilling in the field impossible, but within the narrow limits of the barracks they marched back and forth, counting “Ras, dva, tri, chetiri; ras, dva, tri, chetiri,” for several hours a day. Very soon one soldier girl after another detached herself from the mass and became to me an individual--a warm, personal human being. Bit by bit I gathered their stories. Little by little I discovered some of the forces that had pushed them out of their individual ruts into the mad maelstrom of war.