With this the meeting ended. The train was now about to start and we hurried towards it, singing on the way. I felt happy and hopeful. Several thousand soldiers were not to be disregarded. They were almost unanimous in their new view of the country’s condition. Taken in combination with what I had observed in Moscow and on the way to Petrograd, this meeting further reinforced my hopes for Russia’s salvation. It was obviously a phenomenon of widespread occurrence, this awakening of the soldiers. My mother had received Petrukhin’s letter, and for six weeks had mourned me as dead. She was overwhelmed with joy upon my return, but became a little uneasy as she perceived a long line of girls, many of them almost barefoot, file after me into the little hut. She took me aside and asked what it meant, confiding to me that she had only fifty roubles left of the money I had brought home on my previous visit. I begged her to be patient and assured her that I would arrange matters promptly. I immediately went to the owner of the hut and several others of the leading peasants of the community, got them together, explained to them the situation, informed them that I had only one thousand roubles to spend toward the support of the girls, and asked if they would undertake to feed and house them on credit till my return from America. “I swear that I will pay every kopeck due to you. I will get enough money to pay not only the debts, but to ensure for them sustenance and shelter to the end of their lives. Now I want you to keep a record of all your expenses. Will you trust me?” “Yes,” replied the peasants. “We know that you have done a great deal for Russia, and we have confidence in you.” This was the arrangement under which the thirty invalids of my Battalion of Death were left by me in the village of Tutalsk in March, 1918. The thousand roubles I gave to my mother with instructions to buy shoes for the most destitute of the girls. Of the five hundred roubles given to me by the Consul, I gave three hundred to my mother I decided to take my youngest sister, Nadia, with me to America. Accompanied to the station by my parents, the thirty girls, and half the community, I started eastward, for Irkutsk and Vladivostok, dressed once more as a woman. At the station in Irkutsk I noticed a young girl, with two tiny children in her arms. Somehow her face looked familiar to me, but I could not recall who she was. She was evidently in trouble, poor and ragged. For a while she stared at me. Then she ran up and cried out breathlessly: “Mania!” She was the younger daughter of the woman Kitova, whose husband had killed the dog-catcher and who had accompanied him into exile, at the same time that I had gone into exile with Yasha. Then she was only a little girl, not more than eleven or twelve years old. Now she was the mother of two children.