As Smirnowa recounted to the newspapers, the girls left their Moscow school without informing anyone on the eighth day of mobilization — i.e. at the end of July 1914.
One girl, Zina Morozov, was killed in the Carpathians when a bomb fell at her feet.
[2] Upon her eventual release from hospital, she could not locate her former unit, and, in distress, she wept - upon which her gender was discovered.
[1][2] The group of young women, including Smirnowa, fought together for fourteen months.
Smirnowa's story was retold in Magnus Hirschfeld's The Sexual History of the World War (1930), a book that was later banned and burned during the Third Reich.