The Romanov Sisters
Page 31
For Tatiana and Olga, life continued on its narrow, repetitive course. The foreign press might be reminding their readers that behind the wartime nurse’s wimple, they were still considered ‘the most beautiful children of royalty in Europe’ as it speculated yet again on marital alliances with the Balkan states, but for Olga thoughts of love were still very firmly rooted in her own backyard.14 Mitya Shakh-Bagov had recovered and was to leave the hospital in early January and she was taking the prospect of his second departure very hard. ‘Olga has a tragic look once more’, Valentina was sad to record. Part of it, she felt, was in response to the gossip about her mother and Rasputin. There was about her such ‘terrible suppressed suffering’:
Perhaps the imminent departure of Shakh-Bagov is adding to it – her trusty knight is leaving. He really is a fine fellow. He venerates her, like a sacred object. ‘Olga Nikolaevna only need tell me that she finds Grigory disgusting, and he’d be dead the next day – I’d kill him’.15
Valentina felt that Mitya’s instincts were ‘primitive’, but he was an ‘honest man’. Tatiana meanwhile remained hard-working, self-effacing and ‘touchingly gentle’. ‘Everything is the same as ever here,’ she told her father in February, ‘nothing new.’16 When she came to the hospital one evening to help sterilize the instruments and boil the silk thread she ‘sat on her own in fumes of carbolic’, recalled Valentina. When, on another occasion, Valentina had tried to relieve her of this task in advance, ‘She caught me out. “Tell me please, what’s the hurry!… If you can breathe in the carbolic, why can’t I?”17 Such were her proven capabilities as a nurse that by the autumn Tatiana was being allowed to administer the chloroform in operations. But while she remained steadfast, her still frail and increasingly melancholic sister was sinking into a depression. ‘Olga assures [me] that she thinks she will remain a spinster’, Valentina noted, even though she and Shakh-Bagov ‘had been reading each other’s palms and he had prophesied she would have twelve children’. Tatiana’s hand was ‘interesting’: ‘the line of fate is suddenly interrupted and makes a sharp turn sideways. They assure her that she will do something unusual.’18 For the time being, however, Tatiana’s day was filled with responsibility – at home and at the hospital – allowing her little or no time to herself. On 16 January she recorded a typical day:
German lesson in the morning. At 10 o’clock went to the hospital. Dressed the wounds of Rogal of 149th Chernomorsk regiment, wound in skull, Gaiduk of 7th Samogitsk Grenadiers regiment, wound in left thigh, Martynov of the 74th Stavropol regiment, wound in left thigh, Shchetinin of the 31st Tomsk regiment, wound in left thigh, Melnik of the 17th Arkhangelsk regiment, wound in the right forearm, wound in right lower ribcage, Arkhipov of the 149th Chernomorsk regiment, wound in right hand with the loss of the fourth and fifth fingers, wound in right thigh. Then Bleish, Sergeyev, Chaikovsky, Ksifilinov, Martynov, Emelyanov – only superficial wounds. Then at 12 went upstairs with Valentina Ivanovna to the soldiers’ ward to change Popov’s dressings. Under anaesthetic. His kidney was removed. Then went back and went to see Tuznikov. Had lunch and drank tea with mama. Then had a history lesson. The four of us went for a troika ride with Iza. Then we were at the Big Palace for a concert. Then to vespers. Had supper with mama and Anna. Then Nikolay Pavlovich [Sablin] arrived. We said farewell to him as tomorrow he is going to join his battalion, in the army.19
With their mother out of action it devolved to Olga and Tatiana on 19 January to attend an important function on her behalf in town, along with their grandmother as surrogate – the official opening ceremony of the Anglo-Russian Hospital. This had been set up in Dmitri Pavlovich’s palace on the corner of the Fontanka by the Anichkov Bridge – he having given it over to use as a wartime hospital – and provided 188 beds and had its own operating theatre, bandaging room, lab and X-ray facilities. Supplies were sent out from England by Queen Mary’s Needlework Guild and the War Hospital Supply Depot, and its eight doctors and thirty nurses were British and Canadian volunteers. One of them, Enid Stoker (a niece of the novelist Bram Stoker), recalled their preparations for the opening:
the hospital was cleaned and polished to the last degree and looked lovely with big pots of flowers and palms and all its own beautiful carving and marble … by 2.30 we were all standing in there dressed up to the nines in starched everythings … Then we heard a crowd moving slowly up the stairs, and a small dowdy woman in black, like a plain edition of Alexandra – (the Empress sister of our own queen) but with a very sweet expression – came in. The two little princesses, Olga and Tatiana, looked charming and so pretty in little ermine hats with white ospreys in them and little low-necked rose-coloured frocks and ermine furs and muffs.20
Everyone at the hospital remarked on how attractive the Romanov girls were. Olga put on a good show of being cheerful and friendly. Enid thought her ‘the prettiest and really lovely’, adding that the sisters had been ‘so jolly-looking and natural’. Other members of the family would visit the hospital later, Enid Stoker remembering the arrival of Anastasia ‘with her hair down her back and an Alice in Wonderland comb’, and one ‘unforgettable’ day when the ‘little Czarevitch’ came – ‘one of the most beautiful children I ever saw’.21 Meriel Buchanan noted a similar response when Olga and Tatiana visited the English Colony Hospital run by her mother, where they toured the wards and talked to the patients, ‘Olga often making them laugh with her whimsical merriment, her sister talking to them gently, but with a greater reserve. How kind they were, the soldiers told me afterwards, how lovely they looked.’22 An appearance in civilian clothes was a rarity these days for the older Romanov sisters and for their mother too, so much so that people were taken aback when they saw them out of nurses’ uniform. One Sunday morning on the way to church they ‘went for half an hour to bid all good morning in the hospital’, Alexandra told Nicholas and ‘Like Babies they all stared at us in “dresses and hats” and looked at our rings and bracelets (the ladies too) and we felt shy and [like] “guests”’.23
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A French journalist who had been granted the rare privilege of meeting Alexandra and the girls at their hospital remarked in 1916 that there was ‘something of the serenity of the mystic about Olga Nikolaevna’.24 It was a trait that perhaps more than anything defined her Russianness and one that became more pronounced as the war went on. Olga seemed more and more lost in her own private thoughts about the kind of life, and love, that she longed for. One day at the hospital, she had confided to Valentina her personal ‘dreams of happiness’: ‘To get married, live always in the countryside winter and summer, always mix with good people, and no officialdom whatsoever.’25 She would no doubt therefore have been horrified to know that Grand Duchess Vladimir had recently approached her mother suggesting that Olga should marry her thirty-eight-year-old son Boris. It hadn’t surprised Alexandra, for the grand duchess’s ‘ambition to get [Boris] nearest to the throne is well known’.26 ‘The idea of Boris is too unsympathetic & the child would, I feel convinced, never agree to marry him and I should perfectly well understand her’, she wrote to Nicholas at Stavka, intimating that ‘other thoughts have filled the child’s head and heart’ – a possible allusion to her daughter’s feelings for Mitya Shakh-Bagov of which she must, surely, have been aware. ‘Those are a young girl’s holy secrets wh[ich] others must not know of’, she insisted. ‘It would terribly hurt Olga, who is so susceptible.’27
As for Boris: to ‘give over a well used half worn out, blasé young man to a pure, fresh girl, 18 years his junior, & to live in a house in which many a woman has “shared” his life … An inexperienced girl would suffer terribly, to have her husband 4th, 5th hand or more.’28 The suggestion of Boris as a husband had been an all too painful reminder of the bad company Dmitri Pavlovich – the husband they had once hoped for for Olga – had slipped into of late. As far as Alexandra was concerned, Dmitri was now well and truly out of the frame: ‘he is a boy without any caracter [sic] and can be lead by anybody.’29 He was currently
back in Petrograd pleading poor health, but ‘doing no work and drinking constantly’. Alexandra wanted Nicholas to order him back to his regiment. ‘Town and women are poison for him.’
One who might well have fitted the bill for Tatiana, had he been higher-born, was ‘my little Malama’, as Alexandra described him, for he was back in town. Many of the Russian cavalry regiments such as Dmitri’s had been decimated in eastern Prussia; left with no regiment to transfer to, he had been appointed an equerry at Tsarskoe Selo. Alexandra, who seemed to have a special affection for him, invited him to tea. ‘We had not seen him for 1½ years’, she told Nicky. ‘Looks flourishing more of a man now, an adorable boy still. I must say, a perfect son in law he w[ou]ld have been.’ Ah, there was the rub. ‘Why are foreign P[rin]ces not as nice!’ she added. As circumspect as ever, Tatiana did not confide her thoughts on Dmitri Malama’s return to either her diary or any letters.*30 Her sister by contrast made her own feelings all too clear, when, out of the blue, a letter arrived from Mitya: ‘Olga Nikolaevna in ecstasy, threw all her things around’, recalled Valentina: ‘She was on fire and jumping up and down: “Is it possible to have a heart attack at 20? I think I might just have one.”’31 The massages Olga was having in the mornings to help her mood swings did not seem to be having much effect. They were as pronounced as ever: Olga was ‘grumpy, sleepy, angry’ all the time, Alexandra complained to Nicholas in April, and ‘makes everything more difficult by her [ill] humour’.32
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While their older sisters were preoccupied at the annexe, Maria and Anastasia continued to watch over their own wounded at Fedorovsky Gorodok. Anastasia was now the proud honorary Commander-in-Chief of her own regiment, the 148th Caspian Infantry, gifted to her by her father just before her 14th birthday. Soon she was proudly writing to Nicholas at Stavka, signing herself ‘Nastaska the Caspian’.33 Sadly, she and Maria found themselves increasingly visiting the graves of those who had died; ‘we are constantly having offices for the dead nowadays’, Maria told Nicholas in August. Back in March, in a long and delightfully animated letter, she had described her own attempts, in deep snow and treacherous conditions, to find a couple of graves in the military cemetery of men from the lower ranks:
It took an incredibly long time to get there because the roads were extremely bad … The snow was piled up very high on the side of the road, so that it was a job getting through it on my knees and from there jumping down. The snow there turned out to be above my knees, and although I had big boots on, I was already wet, but I decided all the same to go further. And not much further on I found a grave with the name Mishchenko, one of our wounded. I laid some flowers on it and went further and suddenly I saw the same name again. I looked at the marker to see what regiment he was and it turned out that this one was our wounded man and not the other. Well I laid flowers there too and had just managed to move forward when I fell on my back, and lay there spread-eagled and almost for a minute couldn’t get up as there was so much snow that I couldn’t put my hand down on the ground in order to brace myself.34
Anastasia and Tatiana meanwhile had gone off to another part of the cemetery to visit the grave of Alexandra’s lady-in-waiting Sonia Orbeliani, who had died the previous December, leaving Maria with the cemetery caretaker to find the other grave she was searching for, which turned out to be near to the cemetery fence. To get there
we’d have to climb across a ditch. He stood in the ditch and said to me: ‘I will lift you over’. I said: ‘No’. He said: ‘Let’s try’. He did not of course manage to lift me to the other side, but dropped me right in the middle of the ditch. So there we both stood in the ditch, up to our tummies in snow and dying from laughter. It was very difficult for him to crawl out because the ditch was deep, and the same for me. But somehow or other he got out and then gave me his hand. I of course slipped down on my tummy back into the ditch about three more times, but at last I got myself out. And we did all this holding flowers in our hands. After that there was no way we could manage to crawl between the crosses as we both had overcoats on. But all the same, I did find the grave and at last we made it out of the cemetery.35
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By March 1916 Alexandra was becoming increasingly distressed that she remained too unwell to do her war work. The strain of managing the five children on her own was also beginning to tell on her. ‘Our train is just being emptied out & Marie’s comes later in the day with very heavy wounded’, she told Nicholas on 13 March, and there she was, ‘despairing not to be able to go and meet them and work in the hospital – every hand is needed at such a time’.36 She missed her husband so terribly: ‘such utter loneliness … the children with all their love still have quite other ideas & rarely understand my way of looking at things, the smallest even – they are always right and when I say how I was brought up and how one must be, they can’t understand, find it dull.’ Dependable Tatiana, in her view, seemed to be the only one of the five with a level head on her shoulders – ‘she grasps it’. Even the compliant Maria had become moody of late – particularly when she had her period – ‘grumbles all the time and bellows at one’. Olga continued to be a problem, being ‘always most unamiable about every proposition’.37
The war clearly was getting to all of them, and so in early May the five Romanov siblings were delighted to be taken on a trip on the imperial train, back at long last to their beloved Crimea. After visiting Alexandra’s huge, forty-ward hospital for 1,000 wounded at Vinnitsa and its supply depots they travelled on to Odessa. After the obligatory church service, troop inspections and tree-planting they sailed to Sevastopol where Nicholas reviewed the Black Sea Fleet. ‘I was so terribly glad to see the sea’, Tatiana wrote in her diary.38 It was their first visit to the Crimea since 1913 but sadly they did not go back to the Livadia Palace, even though the doctors said it would be good for Alexandra’s health. ‘It was, she said, “too great a treat to indulge in during the war”.’39 The sisters made the most of being able to lie in the warm sunshine, but when the time came, ‘It was dreadfully sad to set off from the Crimea and leave the sea, the sailors and the ships’, sighed Tatiana.40 At the end of their trip, with Alexey well once more, Nicholas announced that he was taking him back to Stavka again. In August Sydney Gibbes was asked by Alexandra to join them there in order to continue with Alexey’s English lessons. Nicholas had now promoted Alexey to corporal; he was finally settling down and at last seemed to be losing his shyness with strangers.
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In mid-May both David Iedigarov and Nikolay Karangozov were back at the annexe hospital, wounded again; and then, almost a year to the day since his first admittance, Mitya Shakh-Bagov returned to Tsarskoe on a visit with a fellow officer, Boris Ravtopulo.41 Olga’s spirits immediately lifted: she started coming back to the annexe in the evenings to help sterilize the instruments and sew compresses and once more played the piano for the wounded and sat talking to them in the garden on warm summer days. The sad, dejected girl of a few weeks earlier was now doing her utmost to stay as late as possible at the hospital, chatting to Mitya who often came to visit the wounded.42 Her health improved, as too did Alexandra’s. The tsaritsa resumed her work at the annexe, though she was rarely able to stand to do the bandaging or assist in operations. Instead she spent her time sitting by patients’ bedsides doing the fine embroidery at which she was so talented, and chatting to them.43 The annexe had effectively become home for all five women in the absence of Nicholas and Alexey. They missed their menfolk; it was hard to ‘be upstairs without Alexey’, Tatiana told her father. ‘Every time I pass through the dining-room at 6 p.m., I am surprised not to see the table laid for his dinner. And in general there’s very little noise now.’44 The annexe was such a huge comfort to them. ‘Yesterday we spent the evening cosily in the hospital’, Alexandra told Nicholas on 22 May. ‘The big girls cleaned instruments with the help of Shah B. and Raftopolo [sic], the little ones chattered till 10 – I sat working and later made puzzles – altogether forgot the time and sat
till 12, the Pss G [Dr Gedroits] also busy with puzzle!’45
The wounded – many very serious – were now coming thick and fast to both of the sisters’ hospitals. But sadly for Olga, Mitya Shakh-Bagov left Tsarskoe Selo on 6 June. He departed for the Caucasus with an icon she had given him.46 Valentina sympathized with the pain Olga was going through. Her attachment to Mitya was ‘so pure, naïve and without hope’, which made it so much harder to take. She found her a ‘strange, distinctive girl’ and saw how hard she was trying to bottle up her feelings: ‘When [Mitya] left the poor thing sat on her own for more than an hour, her nose buried in her sewing machine, furiously sewing away with great concentration.’ Then she suddenly became fixated on finding ‘the little penknife that Bagov had sharpened on the evening before his departure’. She searched all morning and, as Valentina recalled, ‘was beyond joy when she found it’. Everything connected with Mitya Shakh-Bagov was precious: after he left, Olga recorded every anniversary attached to his time at the hospital in her diary: when he had been wounded, when discharged, when returned, and, as Valentina noted, ‘She also treasures a page from the calendar for the 6th June – the day he left’.47