"A soldier of experience said that he would rather fight a company of male soldiers than one woman soldier. He explained that woman is too resourceful in the matter of weapons. War transforms woman for the time into a beast."
II—STORY OF THE "POTASSIUM BRIGADE"
Russia's women soldiers have pledged themselves to take their own lives rather than become German war prisoners. Each woman soldier carries a ration of cyanide of potassium to be swallowed in case of capture.
The members of the women regiments, now constantly increasing, agreed that death was to be preferred to the fate they would probably meet at the hands of the Germans.
The "Legion of Death" fighters are "good killers." I learned this to-day, when I talked to five of them now in a hospital near here, suffering from shell shock. From a woman's lips I heard how she had run a German through with her bayonet, firing the rifle at the same time. From others I heard how these women and girls, fresh from comfortable homes and universities, went leaping over mangled bodies in the charge with enemy shells bursting all about them.
But these harrowing experiences of the women fighters have steeled them and hundreds of other girls to a new determination to see it through. Girl soldiers drilling in the streets are now a common sight in Petrograd. Huge crowds gather daily about the Engineers' School, where 1,000 girls are drilling preparing to go to the front. In Moscow 1,000 men are training, while Kieff and Odessa have smaller bands. Premier Kerensky has also authorized the formation of women marine detachments and has promised to assign them to ships. The new women commands attempt no sort of decoration. Their heads are shaved and they wear the regulation uniform, including the heavy, ugly army boots.
The five women fighters I visited at the hospital were partially paralyzed by shell shock. One of them, a peasant girl, smiled joyously as she pointed to a German helmet on the bed beside her. It was the first war prize of a Russian woman.
"I saw a German in front of me as I ran forward with the others in the charge," she told me. "It was his life or mine. I raised my rifle. I plunged with all my strength. I stabbed him. The bayonet went deep into his body. At the same moment I pulled the trigger. He dropped dead. Then I took his hat as a souvenir."
The girl soldier smiled with delight.
"What was the battle like?" I asked another of the legionnaires.