Their entry was planned to be as glorious and beautiful as possible and it is needless to say with what rejoicing they were received. Allied troops marched past in review, and the King and Queen were accompanied by the most famous generals of the Allied armies. The soldiers of the Belgian army were crowned with flowers when reviewed by the King that so bravely led them.
Peace terms were drawn up and the Germans compelled to repay the Belgians to the last penny for the havoc and vandalism they had wrought. And it is a kind of poetic justice that Albert was reigning, while the Kaiser fled from his own country to cling to the skirts of another weak little power that he would surely have violated as remorselessly as he violated Belgium if it had chanced to stand in his way.
In 1919, twenty-one years after his first trip to this country, King Albert with Queen Elizabeth came to the United States again. They received a warm welcome from one end of the country to the other and the good wishes of all Americans have gone back with them to the wrecked and devastated land that they are striving to restore. Whether King Albert will perform as great work in reconstruction as he has already performed as a soldier and a King the future will decide, but he has already gained an immortal place in the history of the world.
CHAPTER XXXI
MARIA BOTCHKAREVA
Not since the time of Molly Pitcher has there been a woman soldier so famous in her own country as a Russian girl named Maria Botchkareva, who fought beside the men in the Russian army in the World War and afterward became the commander of a battalion of women soldiers, who called themselves the "Battalion of Death." It is only because the World War was so huge that the name of this girl is not known everywhere. Not only did she make as good a soldier as a man, but she was decorated for bravery. She carried to safety out of No Man's Land on her own back nearly a hundred wounded Russians, while the shells burst and the bullets flew around her, and in the course of the war she was wounded four times.
Maria Botchkareva, who is still living, was born in 1889, the daughter of a Russian fisherman, who was originally a serf. He was too poor to buy a wagon to market his fish, and was compelled to sell them at less than the market price to traveling pedlers. Her mother did manual labor for twelve hours a day to earn five cents. Starvation was constantly at the door, and the father was of a surly and cruel disposition, and frequently beat his wife and his little children.
When quite a young girl Maria became a servant in the family of a Russian army officer, and when still young she married a soldier named Afanasi Botchkarev, who gave her her present name. He beat her so often and treated her so brutally when he was drunk that she tried to drown herself, but was saved because some workmen had seen her plight. Shortly afterward she ran away from Botchkarev and worked her way to the town of Irkutsk in Siberia.
There she underwent many adventures. Her great strength enabled her to work as a man in a gang of laborers who were paving the courtyard of Irkutsk prison with asphalt, and she continued this work for a year, until she became ill and forced to go to a hospital.