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wrote nor received any letters at the front, because she no longer had a family with which to correspond. The nurses carried sub-machine guns as well as medical bags, but found it very hard to grasp the reality of battle. “Tracer bullets looked like sparklers to us at first. They seemed too innocent and pretty to hurt anyone.” Their commanding officer would shout at them furiously under fire: “Get your heads down, girls!” Anna was wounded in the epic Leningrad battle by a shell which killed the girl next to her, and removed the legs from another. She herself was hit by fragments in the neck: “I felt little pain, just the warmth of blood running down my back.” After her recovery, she returned to the front. She, too, had a “field husband”: “He was a very handsome surgeon. He was married, but even after the war he would phone me and say ‘You are still my darling.’ ” For all its horrors, she always remembered the war with deep emotion. “That time was full of life,” she said.

Yet it would be mistaken to exaggerate the sexual role of women soldiers. Many served with cool and courageous professionalism. Women often fulfilled an intensely hazardous role as telephone linesmen, repairing signal links under fire. Vasily Krylov was manning a forward observation post when he lost contact with his battery and thought that a German attack had started. He was running hard for a bunker when he met a girl soldier who asked matter-of-factly: “Where are you going?” “It’s an attack!” he shouted. “The Germans are on the way!” The girl said: “Calm down. There’s no problem.” She set off under fire in pursuit of his telephone line, repaired the break caused by mortaring and cheerfully returned to reassure the troubled captain.

By the autumn of 1944, Sergeant Natalia Ivanova had seen more of war than most men. She was the twenty-three-year-old daughter of a Moscow dentist, herself a secretary at the Finance Ministry until she was called to the army in June 1941, and sent to Smolensk at twenty-four hours’ notice. “At first, it all seemed rather romantic,” she said. But before they even arrived at the front the truck carrying herself and other girls, still in civilian clothes and high heels, hit a mine. Several were killed. When she reached army headquarters, still shocked, a colonel told her to go and get some sleep, and pointed to a nearby shed. It proved to be already occupied by corpses. Soon afterwards, she was serving as a typist at Thirty-third Army when she and her section were ordered to attend small-arms practice in the woods. They returned to find the headquarters a blazing shambles following a Luftwaffe raid. The staff was hastily evacuating, with German tanks a mile away. Natalia was roundly cursed by an officer for insisting on running into the wreckage to retrieve her clothes before boarding a cart. “Girls are girls,” she shrugged. During the long retreat that followed, she found herself on a truck with two pilots and all Thirty-third Army’s files when they ran out of petrol. “You go and ask for some,” said the pilots. “Nobody will give it to a man.” She went to a nearby unit, who were tending scores of wounded. The soldiers said they would give her some fuel if she would first help with the casualties. “It was the first time I had dressed a wound,” she said. “My hands were shaking as I tried to deal with the stomach cases.” She ended up walking for hours through a forest, “slightly drunk and very frightened and hungry.” They picked potatoes from the gardens of houses they passed, and eventually escaped successfully, to reach Moscow.

She was reposted to the 222nd Rifle Division where, in her first battle, she and other girls were sent to recover wounded men under fire from German tanks. Because she was very small, the physical difficulties were very great: “It was hard to make oneself crawl out of cover, and then try to lift these big men. I was in shock.” She was awarded the Red Star for her part in that action. One day in 1943, she found herself in the middle of the German Dnieper counter-attack, with the men of their division running