“You may all be dead in three days,” she would say. And soon afterward the Volga boat-song or the rollicking peasant tune they were singing would change to a deep, melancholy mass, with all the tragedy of the moment and of millions of other moments packed into it. In a cord around each girl’s neck was a collection of sacred medals, and a tiny cloth pouch whose contents I speculated upon. “What will you do if you are made prisoner?” I asked Skridlova one day. “No one of us will ever be taken alive,” she answered, and pulled out the little gray pouch. “It is the strongest and surest kind there is,” she said. Orlova seldom spoke. From morning till night she went about the barracks, doing something for some one. I had no soldier coat to wrap about me at night, and Orlova spread a couple of tents over the hard boards. When the black bread came from the commissary, Orlova saw to it that we had our soldier ration--two pounds and a half a day, more than any of us could eat; and just at the moment when I was most nearly petrified with cold, she was sure to appear with a pail of hot tea. At noon and at night, when two ragged little children from a near-by village came to beg the “leavings,” Orlova always managed to have an extra lump of sugar for each of them. She was born for service, for mothering, for doing; but her solemn face, almost grim in its crude strength, remained fixed on her vision of death, and her thoughts were all for Holy Russia. Nina was the comedy member of the Battalion. She would have been an invaluable find for the “movies.” She was so big that she had to put gussets in her soldier blouse to make it fit around the hips. She had a wide mouth, an upturned nose, and blue eyes, alternately full of fun and tears. She kept the Battalion laughing all of the time that it was not busy putting comforting arms around her and drying her tears. A bundle of strange incongruities was Nina--utterly unfathomable to an American. Ever since the war began she had been jeopardizing her ample neck in the service of her country. The bars of an Austrian prison held her in check for six months, and she was considered such an important catch that her captors demanded no less a person than a famous Austrian general when terms of exchange of prisoners were discussed. She spoke a very little English, much French, and a smattering of half a dozen other languages. One day I looked up and found her kissing her rifle ecstatically. She caught the bewilderment in my eyes. “I love my gun,” she said almost defensively. “But why?” I asked, trying to inquire into that strange back-country of her mind and emotions. “Because it carries death. I love my bayonet, too. I love all arms. I love all things that carry death to the enemies of my country.” One night I sat on the edge of the bunk, brushing my hair. She put her hand out and touched it. Then she felt her own close-cropped head. “Do you like short hair?” I asked her.