The regiment entrained for the front and Yashka went with it. A Russian general heard of the presence of a girl soldier in its ranks and angrily ordered that she be taken from the line and sent to the rear—but Yashka was clever enough to point out that her enlistment had been received by the Czar himself and so superseded the order of the General, who wished to send her home from whence she had come.
The regiment went into the trenches, and Maria, for the first time, heard the roar of the cannon and the whistling of the shells. Her comrades had jokingly told her that she would run when the first shot was fired, but she minded the bombardment no more than any one else. The Germans threw over large quantities of their favorite weapon, gas, and the trenches and the hollows in the ground were filled with the noxious vapors that it was death to breathe, but the Russians put on their gas masks and still went forward.
Then, after serving in the line for some time, the girl soldier had her first experience in more active warfare, for her company was ordered over the top to capture the German sector opposite them, and with fixed bayonets the men moved forward under a heavy fire from the batteries of their own artillery. It was a severe attack, bravely delivered, but doomed to failure because the barbed wire entanglements of the enemy had not been destroyed by the Russian shells. Men dropped by the score, and when the company was finally compelled to retreat there were only seventy left out of two hundred and fifty that had begun the advance. Maria was one of the survivors, her woman's heart torn with pity at the cries of the wounded who had been left dying in No Man's Land. Crawling back from the shelter of the Russian trenches, she dragged a wounded soldier to safety and returned for another. All night she toiled bringing them in until more than fifty owed their lives to her. For this she was recommended for a decoration for bravery, but never received it. Later, however, she won her badge of courage for more work of the same sort performed under heavy fire and in the face of the greatest obstacles.
Then her own turn came. She was wounded and sent to the rear as a casualty. When her wound was healed she returned to the front, only to sustain further wounds and win another decoration. On one occasion she was captured by the Germans, but an attack freed her from their hands after she had been a prisoner for a little over eight hours.
In all the fighting that she had experienced this girl personally did her share, handling a rifle with skill and on several occasions using the bayonet with as much strength as a man. Her fame by this time had penetrated beyond her own regiment. The name of Yashka was known throughout the Russian army, and numbers of curious soldiers crowded around her when she happened to go to some part of the field where she had not previously been seen.
Then began the terrible Russian revolution—a revolution more dreadful than the French Terror in 1793. The Czar was deposed, and word of this was not long in reaching the front line, where groups of rejoicing soldiers hastened to form councils and committees regardless of the discipline that alone could hold them together to an extent to present a solid front to the enemy.
The Germans ceased firing when they learned the cause of the Russians' celebrations, and at once commenced to fraternize with the men they had so recently been fighting, telling the Russians that they desired peace and that the war now would soon be over. Vodka and beer were passed from side to side, and German and Russian soldiers strolled about in No Man's Land without a shot being fired. Nor was this all. A pilgrimage of inflammatory speakers and demagogues commenced to visit the ranks of the Russians, inciting them to revolt against all authority and to drive away their officers. The heads of the soldiers were turned, and good and bad, brave men and cowards, joined in the confusion that was increasing day by day, and the ruin that was sweeping over Russia's fortunes.
The simple heart and mind of Yashka, however, proved to be more astute and better versed in the conduct of war than most of the Russians. She saw what disorder was doing to the army, and worn out in spirit as well as in body, sought leave to return from a war where there was no fighting to her own home.
But finally the idea came to her to form a battalion of women soldiers and shame the men into returning to the front, from which they had been deserting in large numbers. She thought that if the soldiers saw Russian women in the ranks, doing battle with the enemy and proving themselves braver than the men themselves, perhaps they would be shamed into renewing the combat; that if women advanced in the front rank, the men would follow and the war would be resumed. Yashka knew too well that there could be no real peace so long as the Germans remained on Russian soil; and that further war was the only way to drive them out of Russia.
Fired with her idea she went to the leading powers of the Russian Government and asked permission to form a battalion of women soldiers, who were to make every sacrifice, visit the most dangerous parts of the battle front, and unhesitatingly be killed in order that the men might follow them into battle. The Government leaders, including Kerensky, approved of the idea; and Maria commenced to make speeches, calling on the women to enlist beneath her standard in the "Battalion of Death," as her new organization was to be named.