There was a short silence; the blue eyes of the Swedish girl had become frosty as two midwinter stars. Suddenly they glimmered warm again as twin violets:
“Kharasho!” she said smiling. “And do you love your little comrade duchess?”
“Next only to God.”
“That is very beautiful, Palla. She is a child to be enlightened. Teach her the greater truth.”
“She has learned it, Ilse.”
“She?”
“Yes. And, if God wills it, she, and I also, take the vows some day.”
“The veil!”
“Yes.”
“You! A nun!”
“If God accepts me.”
The Swedish girl-soldier stood gazing upon her as though fascinated, crushing Palla’s slim hands between her own.
Presently she shook her head with a wearied smile:
“That,” she said, “is one thing I can not understand–the veil. No. I can understand this–” turning her head and glancing proudly around her at her girl comrades. “I can comprehend this thing that I am doing. But not what you wish to do, Palla. Not such service as you offer.”
“I wish to serve the 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 were plainly in a hurry, whatever their business there might be.
The Tzesarevitch, kneeling beside his mother, got up from his knees with visible difficulty. The Empress also rose, leisurely, supporting herself by one hand resting on the prie-dieu.
Then several young girls, who had been kneeling behind her at their devotions, stood up and turned to stare at the oncoming armed men, now surrounding them.
The officer carrying the naked sword, and reeking with fumes of brandy, counted these women in a loud, thick voice.
“That’s right,” he said. “You’re all present–one! two! three! four! five! six!–the whole accursed brood!” pointing waveringly with his sword from one to another.
Then he laughed stupidly, leering out of his inflamed eyes at the five women who all wore the garbs of the Sisters of Mercy, their white coiffes and tabliers contrasting sharply with the sombre habits of the Russian nuns who had gathered in the candle-lit dusk behind them.
“What do you wish?” demanded the ex-Empress in a fairly steady voice.
“Answer to your names!” retorted the officer brutally. The other officer came up and began to fumble for a note book in the breast of his dirty tunic. When he found it he licked the lead of his pencil and squinted at the ex-Empress out of drunken eyes.
“Alexandra Feodorovna!” he barked in her face. “If you’re here, say so!”
She remained calm, mute, cold as ice.
A soldier behind her suddenly began to shout:
“That’s the German woman. That’s the friend of the Staretz Novykh! That’s Sascha! Now we’ve got her, the thing to do is to shoot her–”
“Mark her present,” interrupted the officer in command. “No ceremony, now. Mark the cub Romanoff present. Mark ’em all–Olga, Tatyana, Marie, Anastasia!–no matter which is which–they’re all Romanoffs–”
But the same soldier who had interrupted before bawled out again: “They’re not Romanoffs! There are no German Romanoffs. There are no Romanoffs in Russia since a hundred and fifty years–”
The little Tzesarevitch, Alexis, red with anger, stepped forward to confront the man, his frail hands fiercely clenched. The officer in command struck him brutally across the breast with the flat of his sword, shoved him aside, strode toward the low door of the chapel crypt and jerked it open.
“Line them up!” he bawled. “We’ll settle this Romanoff dispute once for all! Shove them into line! Hurry up, there!”
But there seemed to be some confusion between the nuns and the soldiers, as the latter attempted to separate the ex-Empress and the young Grand Duchesses from the sisters.
“What’s all that trouble about!” cried the officer commanding. “Drive back those nuns, I tell you! They’re Germans, too! They’re Sascha’s new Deaconesses! Kick ’em out of the way!”
Then the novice, who had cried out in fear when the Red infantry first entered the chapel, forced her way out into the file formed by the Empress and her daughters.
“There’s a frightful mistake!” she cried, laying one hand on the arm of a young girl dressed, like the others, as a Sister of Mercy. “This woman is Miss Dumont, my American companion! Release her! I am the Grand Duchess Marie!”
The girl, whose arm had been seized, looked at the young novice over her shoulder in a dazed way; then, suddenly her lovely face flushed scarlet; tears sprang to her eyes; and she said to the infuriated officer:
“It is not true, Captain! I am the Grand Duchess Marie. She is trying to save me!”
“What the devil is all this row!” roared the officer, who now came tramping and storming among the prisoners, switching his sword to and fro with ferocious impatience.
The little Sister of Mercy, frightened but resolute, pointed at