Life inside the Alexander Palace was transformed. The Empress, who had stayed in bed nursing her ills until noon, now was up for Mass at seven. Promptly at nine, dressed in the gray uniform of a nursing sister, she arrived at the hospital along with her two eldest daughters, Olga and Tatiana, and Anna Vyrubova for her nursing course. The hospital atmosphere was brutal and pathetic. Every day, Red Cross trains brought long lines of wounded and dying men back from the front. Most had had only first aid in the trenches and front-line dressing stations. They arrived dirty, bloodstained, feverish and groaning. Under the direction of trained nurses, the students washed and bandaged the ripped flesh and mangled bodies. “I have seen the Empress of Russia in the operating room,” wrote Anna Vyrubova, “… holding ether cones, handling sterilized instruments, assisting in the most difficult operations, taking from the hands of busy surgeons amputated legs and arms, removing bloody and even vermin-ridden field dressings, enduring all the sights and smells and agonies of the most dreadful of all places, a military hospital in the midst of war.” Nevertheless, wrote Anna, “I never saw her happier than on the day, at the end of her two months training, she marched at the head of the procession of nurses to receive the Red Cross … diploma of a certified war nurse.”
After a morning in the operating room, Alexandra ate a hurried lunch and spent the afternoon visiting other hospitals. Moving through the aisles between hospital beds, the tall figure of the Empress in her nurse’s uniform stirred the wounded men. They reached out bandaged hands to touch her; they wept as she knelt beside their beds to pray. Officers and peasant boys alike, facing amputations, cried from their beds, “Tsaritsa, stand near me. Hold my hand that I may have courage.
To Alexandra, this was Russia, bleeding and dying. She was the Russian Empress, the matushka of all the brave men and boys who had given themselves for Russia. “Very bad wounds,” she wrote to Nicholas on October 21, 1914 (O.S.). “For the first time, I shaved one of the soldiers’ legs near and around the wound.…” Later, the same day, in a second letter: “Three operations, 3 fingers were taken off as blood poisoning had set in and they were quite rotten.… My nose is full of hideous smells from those blood poisoning wounds.” And again: “I went in to see the wound of our standard bearer—awful, bones quite smashed, he suffered hideously during bandaging, but did not say a word, only got pale and perspiration ran down his face and body.…” On November 19 (O.S.): “An officer of the 2nd Rifles, poor boy, whose legs are getting quite dark and one fears an amputation may be necessary. I was with the boy yesterday during his dressing, awful to see, and he clung to me and kept quiet, poor child.” On November 20 (O.S.): “This morning we were present (I help as always giving the instruments and Olga threaded the needles) at our first big amputation. Whole arm was cut off.”
Alexandra spared herself nothing, not even terrible, shattering wounds in the groin: “I had wretched fellows with awful wounds—scarcely a man any more, so shot to pieces, perhaps it must be cut off as so black, but hope to save it—terrible to look at. I washed and cleaned and painted with iodine and smeared with vasoline and tied them up and bandaged all up.… I did three such—and one had a little tube in it. One’s heart bleeds for them—I won’t describe any more details as it’s so sad, but being a wife and mother I feel for them quite particularly—a young nurse (girl) I sent out of the room.”
To Nicholas, at Army Headquarters, death was remote, a question of arithmetic, as regiments, brigades and divisions shriveled away and then were restored by new recruits. To Alexandra, death was familiar and immediate. “During an operation a soldier died … hemorrhage,” she wrote on November 25, 1914 (O.S.). “All behaved well, none lost their heads [Olga and Tatiana] were brave—They and Ania [Vyrubova] had never seen a death. But he died in a minute.… How near death always is.”
In November, she formed a special attachment to a young boy, mentioning him repeatedly in her letters: “A young boy kept begging for me … the little boy begged me to come earlier today … I find the young boy gradually getting worse … in the evenings he is off his head and so weak … He will pass away gradually. I only hope not whilst we are away.”
Early in March, he died. She wrote: “My poor wounded friend has gone. God has taken him quietly and peacefully to himself. I was as usual with him in the morning and more than an hour in the afternoon. He talked a lot—in a whisper always—all about his service in the Caucasus—awfully interesting and so bright with his big shiny eyes.… Olga and I went to see him. He lay there so peacefully covered under my flowers I daily brought him, with his lovely peaceful smile—the forehead yet quite warm. I came home with my tears. The elder sister [nurse] cannot either realize it—he was quite calm, cheery, said felt a wee bit not comfy and when the sister 10 minutes after she had gone away, came in, found him with staring eyes, quite blue, breathed twice—and all was over—peaceful to the end. Never did he complain, never asked for anything, sweetness itself—all loved him and that shining smile. You, lovy mine, can understand what that is, when daily one has been there, thinking only of giving him pleasure—and suddenly—finished.… Forgive my writing so much about him, but going there and all that, had been a help with you away and I felt God let me bring him a little sunshine in his loneliness. Such is life! Another brave soul left this world to be added to the shining stars above. It must not make you sad what I wrote, only I could not bear it any longer.”
The Empress’s letters to the Tsar were never meant for any eyes but his. In all, 630 letters were found in a black leather suitcase in Ekaterinburg after her death; of these, 230 were written over the period from their first acquaintance to the outbreak of war in 1914. The other 400 were written during the war years 1914–1916. They were written with no inkling that anyone else would ever read them, far less that they would one day be published and become key historical documents used to explain events, personalities and decisions on the eve of the Russian Revolution. Today, they offer this and even more: an intimate window into a soul, a unique portrait of a woman which none of her contemporaries in Russia could possibly have seen.
Alexandra wrote voluminously. She would begin early in the morning, add paragraphs during the day, go on for pages late at night and perhaps add even more the next day. In a bold, rounded hand, she wrote to the Tsar in English in the same telegraphic style she used for her friends: breathless prose with irregular spelling, many abbreviations, frequent omissions of words that seemed obvious, and punctuation largely with dots and dashes. Both the length and the style of her letters are unfortunate. Often by skipping and jumping, she gives an impression of light-mindedness on subjects about which she actually cared deeply. Similarly, the intense fervor of other passages is strong evidence of the great passions of which Alexandra was capable, but not—as some have charged—sufficient proof that the Empress was mad. The sheer length of her letters has made their interpretation difficult for historians and biographers. It is arduous to read them all and impossible to quote more than a minuscule fraction. Yet, in her case to an extraordinary extent, excerpting has been misleading. A thought whose germination has been proceeding for sentences—perhaps paragraphs—suddenly arrives full strength in a stark and damning phrase. These phrases, plucked from the mass of verbiage, make a loquacious woman seem hopelessly hysterical.
A remarkable feature of these letters was the freshness of Alexandra’s love. After two decades of marriage, she still wrote like a young girl. The Empress, so shy and even icy about expressing emotion in public, released all her romantic passion in her letters. Beneath the Victorian surface of reserve, she revealed the extravagant, flowery emotions of the Victorian poets.
The letters, usually arriving with petals of lilies or violets pressed between their pages, begin “Good morning, my darling … My beloved one … My sweetest treasure … My Own Beloved Angel.” They end: “Sleep well, my treasure … I yearn to hold you in my arms and rest my head upon your shoulder … I yearn for your kisses, for your arms and shy Childy [Nichol
as] gives them me [only] in the dark and wify lives by them.” She was in anguish whenever he left for the front: “Oh, my love! It was hard bidding you goodbye and seeing that lonely, pale face with big sad eyes at the … [train] window—my heart cried out, take me with you … I gave my goodnight kiss to your cushion and longed to have you near me—in thoughts I see you lying in your compartment, bend over you, bless you, and gently kiss your sweet face all over—oh my Darling, how intensely dear you are to me—could I but help you in carrying your heavy burdens, there are so many that weigh on you.” Their burdens were much on her mind: “I … try to forget everything, gazing into your lovely eyes.… So much sorrow and pain, worries and trials—one gets so tired and one must keep up and be strong and face everything.… We show nothing of what we feel when together. Each keeps up for the other’s sake and suffers in silence. We have lived through so much together in these 20 years—and without words have understood each other.” Although her language had the fresh, gushing quality of young love, Alexandra did not deceive herself about the passing of time: “32 years ago my child’s heart already went out to you in deep love.… I know I ought not to say this, and for an old married woman it may seem ridiculous, but I cannot help it. With the years, love increases and the time without your sweet presence is hard to bear. Oh, could but our children be equally blessed in their married lives.”
Nicholas read her letters in bed at night, the last thing before going to sleep. His replies, if more restrained, were no less intimate and tender. “My beloved Sunny,” he wrote, “when I read your letters my eyes are moist … it seems that you are lying on your sofa and that I am listening to you, sitting in my armchair by the lamp.… I don’t know how I could have endured it all if God had not decreed to give you to me as a wife and friend. I speak in earnest. At times it is difficult to speak of such things and it is easier for me to put it down on paper, owing to stupid shyness.… Goodbye, my beloved sweet Sunny.… I kiss you and the children tenderly. Ever your old hubby, Nicky.”
Sitting on her balcony, the Empress described the changing seasons at Tsarskoe Selo: “the sun behind the trees, a soft haze over all, the swans swimming on the pond, steam rising off the grass,” and later, “the leaves are turning very yellow and red,” and then, “the pink sky behind the kitchen and the trees thickly covered in snow look quite fairy like.” From Mogilev, in early spring, Nicholas wrote “the Dnieper broke up yesterday. The whole river was covered with blocks of ice, they moved swiftly but noiselessly and only occasionally could be heard the sharp sound of the clashing of two large ice blocks. It was a magnificent spectacle.” A few weeks later: “the birches are growing green, the chestnuts are shimmering and soon will burst into bud. Everything smells good. I noticed two small dogs chasing each other while I stood washing at my window.”
Knowing how much he missed his children, Alexandra filled her letters with homey details of their activities: “Baby has his lessons and goes out in the donkey sled twice a day. We take tea in his room and he likes it.… Baby madly enjoys your bath and made us all come and look on his pranks in the water. All the daughters beg too for the same treat some evening. May they?” When the Tsar’s permission arrived: “The girls are wild that they may bathe in your bath.” And later: “Baby ate lots of blinis.… Baby improves playing on the balalaika. Tatiana too. I want them to learn to play together.… Marie stands at the door and, alas! picks her nose.… On the train, the girls are sprawling on the floor with the sun shining full upon them to get brown. From whom have they got that craze?…”
Despite the distraction of hospital work, the Empress continued to suffer from shortness of breath and used a wheelchair when not in public. Her feet were swollen and her teeth ached. During the spring of 1916, the dentist came daily; sometimes she saw him three separate times in a day. Alexis was bothered with recurring bleeding into his elbows and knees. When he was unable to walk, the Empress spent hours lying on a sofa in his room and took her dinner beside his bed. As evening approached and his pain became stronger—“he dreads the night,” she wrote—his sisters Olga and Tatiana came to distract him.
“Baby was awfully gay and cheery all day … in the night he woke up from pain in his left arm and from 2 on scarcely got a moment’s sleep,” she wrote on April 6, 1916. “The girls sat with him a good while. It seems he worked with a dirk and must have done too much—he is so strong that it’s difficult for him always to remember and think that he must not do strong movements. But as the pain came with such force in the night and the arm won’t bend I think it will pass quicker—generally three nights pain.… I cried like a baby in church. Cannot bear when the sweet child suffers.”
That night, she wrote again: “This afternoon I spent in Baby’s room whilst Mr. G. [Gilliard] read to him.… He suffered almost the whole time, then would doze for a few minutes, and then again strong pains.… Reading is the best thing, as for a time it distracts the thoughts.… Seeing him suffer makes me utterly wretched. Mr. G. is so gentle and kind with him, knows exactly how to be with him.”
For those who knew her, there never was any question of the Empress’s Russian patriotism. War between Germany and Russia was personally excruciating—her brother Grand Duke Ernest of Hesse was in the German army—but her allegiance was fervently Russian. “Twenty years have I spent in Russia,” she explained to a lady-in-waiting. “It is the country of my husband and my son. I have lived the life of a happy wife and mother in Russia. All my heart is bound to this country.” Nevertheless, she grieved at the change that had come over Germany. “What has happened to the Germany of my childhood?” she asked Pierre Gilliard. “I have such happy, poetic memories of my early years at Darmstadt. But on my later visits, Germany seemed to me a changed country, a country I did not know and had never known.… I had no community of thought or feeling with anyone.” She blamed the change on Prussia and the Kaiser. “Prussia has meant Germany’s ruin,” she declared. “I have no news of my brother. I shiver to think that the Emperor William may avenge himself against me by sending him to the Russian front. He is quite capable of such monstrous behavior.”
Because of her awkward personal position, Alexandra was especially sensitive to the national reputation of the soldiers on both sides. When the German army savagely burned the Belgian library town of Louvain, she cried, “I blush to have been a German.” On September 25, 1914 (O.S.), she wrote to the Tsar, “I long that our troops should behave exemplarily in every sense and not rob and pillage—leave that horror to the Prussian troops.… I want our Russian troops to be remembered hereafter with awe and respect—and admiration.… Now I am bothering you with things that do not concern me, but only out of love for your soldiers and their reputation.”
Her deep sorrow was war itself and the suffering it brought. Like so many others, she yearned that the suffering would have meaning: “I do wonder what will be after this great war is over. Will there be a reawakening and new birth in all—shall once more ideals exist, will people become more pure and poetic, or will they continue to be dry materialists? So many things one longs to know. But such terrible misery as the whole world has suffered must clean hearts and minds and purify the stagnant brains and sleeping souls. Oh, only to guide all wisely into the right and fruitful channel.”
Sharing the Tsar’s patriotism, convinced that she and her husband were the center of a great national movement which was sweeping Russia, the Empress worked in the hospitals and awaited victory which would surely come. It was not until the spring of 1915, when the prospect of early victory had faded, that Alexandra’s letters first showed a serious interest in her husband’s work.
Her concern began, curiously enough, with the matter of the Tsar’s personal bearing. Wholly imbued with the principle of autocracy, convinced that it was the only form of government for Russia, Alexandra worried that her gentle husband, whom she loved for his kindness and charm, was not sufficiently regal. “Forgive me, precious one,” she began to write in April 1915, “but you know you ar
e too kind and gentle—sometimes a good loud voice can do wonders and a severe look—do, my love, be more decided and sure of yourself. You know perfectly well what is right. They [the ministers] must remember who you are. You think me a meddlesome bore, but a woman feels and sees things sometimes clearer than my too humble sweetheart. Humility is God’s greatest gift but a sovereign needs to show his will more often.”
At the same time, she was advising, “Be more autocratic, my very own sweetheart … Be the master and lord, you are the autocrat,” Alexandra also began to warn against those she thought were encroaching on the Imperial prerogatives. Grand Duke Nicholas was one target of her criticism; she continued her chiding until he fell. Simultaneously, the Empress bitterly inveighed against the Duma. “Deary, I heard that that horrid Rodzianko and others … beg the Duma to be called at once together,” she wrote in July 1915. “Oh, please don’t it’s not their business, they want to discuss things not concerning them and bring more discontent—they must be kept away.” Over and over in her letters, she sounds the theme: “We’re not a constitutional country and dare not be, our people are not educated for it.… Never forget that you are and must remain autocratic Emperor. We are not ready for constitutional government.” It was not only her husband’s prerogative she was protecting, but also the rights of her son, the future tsar: “For Baby’s sake we must be firm as otherwise his inheritance will be awful, as with his character he won’t bow down to others but be his own master, as one must in Russia whilst people are still so uneducated.”
Nicholas and Alexandra: The Classic Account of the Fall of the Romanov Dynasty Page 42