There were stenographers and dressmakers among them, servants and factory hands, university students and peasants, and a few who in the days before the war had been merely parasites. Several were Red Cross nurses, and one, the oldest member of the regiment, a woman of forty-eight whose closely cropped hair was turning gray, had exchanged a lucrative medical practice for a soldier’s uniform. Many had joined the regiment because they sincerely believed that the honor and even the existence of Russia were at stake, and nothing but a great human sacrifice could save her. Some, like Bachkarova, in the days of the Siberian village had simply come to the point where anything was better than the dreary drudgery and the drearier waiting of life as they lived it. Personal sorrow had driven some of them out of their homes and on to the battle-line. One girl, a Japanese, said tragically, when I asked her reason for joining: “My reasons are so many that I would rather not tell them.” There was a Cossack girl from the Ural Mountains, fifteen years old, with soft, brown, questioning eyes, and deep, rich color tinting her dark cheeks. Her father and two brothers had been killed early in the war. Soon after, her mother, who was a nurse, had died from the effects of a German bomb thrown upon the hospital where she was working. The girl was absolutely alone in the world. “What else is left for me?” she asked, with a pathetic droop to her strong young shoulders. Two girls, Red Cross nurses, who had already been decorated four or five times for service to their country, said they had seen too many brave men suffer and die for Russia to be willing to see her sacrificed now on the Kaiser’s altar. There was a lonesome little girl, named Leana, whose big brown eyes, wide and questioning, will always come back to me when I think of women and war. She was a Pole, and had fled from Warsaw before the advancing Germans. She was sixteen years old, and far more hungry for love than for killing. She had the ways of a child, and, though we had no common language but that of the heart, we became fast friends. She used to slip her arm around me, and we would walk up and down the barracks, never speaking, but understanding quite as well as if we had many words. Sometimes, when I looked at her and realized that all her potentialities would be wasted out there on the battlefield, my eyes filled with tears. They had come for many reasons, these women soldiers, but all of them were walking out to meet death with grim confidence that it awaited them there in the dark forests a few miles distant. If there seemed to be any fear of them forgetting it,--if girlish spirits ran too high in the barracks,--Bachkarova quickly recalled it.