SCHOOLGIRLS IN BATTLE.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXVIII, Issue 1544, 29 April 1916, Page 4

SCHOOLGIRLS IN BATTLE.

OVER CARPATHIANS WITH RUSSIANS. SHORN TRESSES CARRIED IN HAVERSACK. (From tho Daily' Chronicle Special Correspondent, G. H. Perris.) In the Paris journal, M. Lndovic Nandean, that paper’s Petrograd correspondent, folk the extraordinary story of how twelve Russian girls from a Moscow college got into the Russian Army and of their experiences in the war. One of them, named Zoo Smirnova, has jnst reached General Headquarters from the extreme front, where she has spent fourteen months among the men, dressed as a soldier, and taking her share of all the, soldiers’ work and hardships. Site is 1G years old, and, with hair cait short, looks like a lad, hut her voice is a girl’s.. With eleven of her. school comrades she determined to get to the front tit the end of July, 1914. 'They could not leave Moscow direct, for they would have been stopped at the railway station, so they took a carriage to a neighbouring town, where, having obtained uniforms, they boarded a military train and were welcomed as comrades by the regular .soldiers. Thus, without difficulty, though with many a nervous moment, they reached the Austrian frontier. THE MARCH ON LEMBERG. When they left the train for the inarch toward Lemberg, the Major got wind of their strange story. Preparations were made to send them back. At last, however, they were allowed to go oil “Only we had to he cropped,'’ says Miss Zoe, with a grimace, “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 regiment crossed Galicia, passed the Carpathians, and fought battle after battle. The girls never fell out of the ranks, shared all the privations of lb# soldiers, and witnessed all the horrors of war. They had gone through firing lessons and practice, and carried rifles with the rest.

Gradually they forgot their feminine names, and replied only to the men’s names they had adopted. The soldiers treated them kindly. Days passed, and the famous German phalanxes began to press hack the Russian line. “Were you not afraid?’! an officer asked Zoo. “Of course. How could one help?” she replied. “When the Germans began to send us their big shells several of us could not help crying out.” “Crying out what?” “They called first ‘Mamma!’ then ‘Lydia!’ They were only 14, and were always thinking of their mother. For that matter, I think I blubbered too. We all did. Even the men were afraid.” GIRL-SOLDIER’S LONELY GRAVE’ During one of the. Carpathian battles at night, one of the twelve girls, Zina orozoff, who was 15 years old, was killed on the spot by a shell. “We buried her on the morning after the battle,” says Zoe. “Wo put her in a hurriedly-made grave and set up a little cross marked with her name and the fact that she was a volunteer. On the morrow we were far away, and now I hardly remember the place where Zina was buried. It was far away among the great mountains over there in the Carpathians.” Several other of the girl comrades were wounded. Zoe herself was twice wounded in the leg and the side. The wounds were so serious that, on both occasions, she remained unconscious on the battlefield, being found accidentally by the stretcher-bearers. After the second wound she spent a month in hospital. When she got hack to the trenches, she found a company of soldiers she did not know, and sat down and cried. The men looked with astonishment and suspicion at this singular corporal who had already been decorated with the war medal and the Cross of St. George, and yet looked so young and was actually crying. When she explained, however, they became as kind as the others. But she was persuaded to leave the trenches and is now working in a hospital near an Austrian town. She docs not know what has become of her girl friends. 'Presumably they are still at the front.