Documenting one of the weirder adventures of the Great War, one would have expected the attempt to shame Russian men into fighting by fielding units of Russian women to fail. At least it's another indicator that Alexander Kerensky's provisional government had very little future if it was forced to adopt such counter-intuitive options. Still, one can only admire the Russian women who choose to put life, limb and honor on the line, and Stoff does a good job of describing the trends in Russian society that made this development possible. In particular there is the case of Maria Bochkareva, a hard-bitten peasant woman who was the most notable of these soldiers and who would have been a good drill sergeant in any-man's army. ( )