She had blue eyes, soft, kind blue eyes, and lips that curled up at the corners. She was twenty-five years old, and had been a village dressmaker before she became a soldier. “But Russian women are different,” they say--they who have all their cubby-holes still in order. But they are not. I have talked with them, slept with them, played with them, danced with them, wept with them. They are like women--like humans--everywhere. A little more melancholy, perhaps, but in all their potentialities essentially the same. Destiny has done her work well. There were nearly five thousand women soldiers in Russia at the beginning of the fall of 1917. All over the country--in Moscow, in Kieff, in Odessa--they were learning to load, aim, and fire. Bachkarova’s little band in its first mad charge was but the advance-guard. The making of women soldiers became a business. People no longer followed the uniformed woman about the streets of Petrograd. They became a matter of course. In Moscow I saw a thousand of them, representing all spheres of life from the peasant to the princess. In the officers’ school, twenty girls were being trained to take their command. They were sleeping on boards, and getting used to soup and _kasha_, and all believed their day in the trenches was close at hand. Soon after the fall of Riga, Bachkarova left the hospital in Petrograd, where she had been slowly recovering, and went to Moscow to lead a fresh battalion of girls to the defense of the new front. [Illustration: © Orrin S. Wightman Lining up for soup and kasha] [Illustration: © Orrin S. Wightman Women soldiers at rest between drills] [Illustration: The crowd hugs the Nevsky to get out of range of the machine-guns in the July riots] [Illustration: The Cossacks bury their dead] Out on the Finland road, not far from Petrograd, eleven hundred of them, after a stiff course in training in barracks, had a month of camp life to harden them for service in the trenches. These girls were to see their only fighting in the defense of the Winter Palace in the Bolshevik Revolution, and none was killed. When the Cossack troops of General Korniloff prepared to march on Petrograd, the Provisional Government took stock of the forces at its command. Prince Kudasheff, who had been drilling the women soldiers, reported there was not a better disciplined or more thoroughly prepared unit in the Russian army. Bachkarova’s adventurous battalion took no thought of age or physical condition; but these later soldiers submitted to a rigid examination, conformed to all of the requirements of the men of the army, and were asked to adhere to a rigid moral code. They had their own transport and medical service, signal corps, machine-gun company, mitrailleuses, and a scouting detachment of twenty Cossack women. Such was the woman soldier as Destiny delivered her into a startled world.