source of all good. My heart is too full to be
satisfied by serving mankind alone."

The girl-soldier shook her head: "I try to understand. I can not. I am
sorry, because I love you."

"I love you, Ilse. I love my fellows."

After another silence:

"You go to the imperial family?" demanded Ilse abruptly.

"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.

PREFACE

A door opened; the rush of foggy air set the flames of the altar
candles blowing wildly. There came the clank of armed men.

Then, in the dim light of the chapel, a novice sprang to her feet,
brushing the white veil from her pallid young face.

At that the ex-Empress, still kneeling, lifted her head from her
devotions and calmly turned it, looking around over her right
shoulder.

The file of Red infantry advanced, shuffling slowly forward as though
feeling their way through the candle-lit dusk across the stone floor.
Their accoutrements clattered and clinked in the intense stillness. A
slovenly officer, switching a thin, naked sword in his ungloved fist,
led them. Another officer, carrying a sabre and marching in the rear,
halted to slam and lock the heavy chapel door; then he ran forward to
rejoin his men, while the chapel still reverberated with the echoes of
the clanging door.

A chair or two fell, pushed aside by the leading soldiers and hastily
kicked out of the way as the others advanced more swiftly now. For
there seemed to be some haste. These men w