“Yes.”
“I wish to see you again. I shall try.”
The battalion marched a few moments later.
It was rather a bad business. They went over the top with a cheer. Fifty answered roll call that night.
However, the hun had learned one thing––that women soldiers were inferior to none.
Russia learned it, too. Everywhere battalions were raised, uniformed, armed, equipped, drilled. In the streets of cities the girl-soldiers became familiar sights: nobody any longer turned to stare at them. There were several dozen girls in the officers’ school, trying for commissions. In all the larger cities there were infantry battalions of girls, Cossack troops, machine gun units, signallers; they had a medical corps and transport service.
But never but once again did they go into action. And their last stand was made facing their own people, the brain-crazed Reds.
And after that the Battalion of Death became only a name; and the girl-soldiers bewildered fugitives, hunted down by the traitors who had sold out to the Germans at Brest-Litovsk. xxiii
PREFACE