You have read more than once in these pages of women fighting in the Russian ranks. A story from Petrograd tells us that twelve schoolgirls from a Moscow college somehow obtained uniforms, boarded a military train at a roadside station, and thus reached the Austrian frontier. When they left the train for the march towards Lemberg the major discovered them, and ordered them back home; but they persuaded him to let them go on with the army. "We had to have our hair cropped," said one of them, Zoe Smirnoya, a girl of sixteen. "That is what I felt most. My hair was long, and I confess I cried. I've carried it ever since in my haversack."
The girls fought in many of the Galician battles. They never fell out of the ranks, and they shared all the hardships of the campaign. They took men's names, and their comrades treated them kindly. When von Mackensen's big guns swept away the Russian trenches they fell back with the army. An officer asked Zoe, "Were you afraid?" "Of course," she replied; "how could one help? When the big shells burst all around us we could not help crying out. Several of the girls were only fourteen, and in their terror they called for their mothers. For that matter, I think I blubbered too."
During the retreat one of the girls was killed by a shell. "We buried her on the morning after the battle," said Zoe. "We put her in a hurriedly-made grave, and set up a little cross marked with her name. On the morrow we were far away, and now I hardly remember the place where she was buried." Zoe was twice hit, and the second time was left out in the open, but was rescued by stretcher-bearers. She spent a month in hospital, and returned to the firing line as a corporal, wearing the war medal and the Cross of St. George.
Amongst the names that Russians hold in high honour is that of Michaelovna Ivanova, who acted as a nurse under her brother, a regimental surgeon. She insisted on going out to tend wounded even in the midst of a hail of bullets from rifles and machine guns. Her brother and the other regimental officers begged her to seek shelter, but in vain. When all the officers had fallen, the men lost heart for a moment and began to retire. At once the heroic nurse ran in amongst them, rallied them round her, and at their head rushed forward and captured a trench. Unhappily she was struck by a bullet, and died shortly afterwards.