glorious and beautiful as possible and
it is needless to say with what rejoicing they were received. Allied
troops marched past in review, and the King and Queen were accompanied
by the most famous generals of the Allied armies. The soldiers of the
Belgian army were crowned with flowers when reviewed by the King that
so bravely led them.

Peace terms were drawn up and the Germans compelled to repay the
Belgians to the last penny for the havoc and vandalism they had
wrought. And it is a kind of poetic justice that Albert was reigning,
while the Kaiser fled from his own country to cling to the skirts of
another weak little power that he would surely have violated as
remorselessly as he violated Belgium if it had chanced to stand in his
way.

In 1919, twenty-one years after his first trip to this country, King
Albert with Queen Elizabeth came to the United States again. They
received a warm welcome from one end of the country to the other and
the good wishes of all Americans have gone back with them to the
wrecked and devastated land that they are striving to restore. Whether
King Albert will perform as great work in reconstruction as he has
already performed as a soldier and a King the future will decide, but
he has already gained an immortal place in the history of the world.

CHAPTER XXXI

MARIA BOTCHKAREVA

Not since the time of Molly Pitcher has there been a woman soldier so
famous in her own country as a Russian girl named Maria Botchkareva,
who fought beside the men in the Russian army in the World War and
afterward became the commander of a battalion of women soldiers, who
called themselves the "Battalion of Death." It is only because the
World War was so huge that the name of this girl is not known
everywhere. Not only did she make as good a soldier as a man, but she
was decorated for bravery. She carried to safety out of No Man's Land
on her own back nearly a hundred wounded Russians, while the shells
burst and the bullets flew around her, and in the course of the war she
was wounded four times.

Maria Botchkareva, who is still living, was born in 1889, the daughter
of a Russian fisherman, who was originally a serf. He was too poor to
buy a wagon to market his fish, and was compelled to sell them at less
than the market price to traveling pedlers. Her mother did manual labor
for twelve hours a day to earn five cents. Starvation was constantly at
the door, and the father was of a surly and cruel d