With the queen eager to get her country to side with the Entente, Prime Minister Bratianu and a second important leader of Romania’s Liberal Party were prepared to assist Marie in pleading their case before the king. By a curious twist of fate that second Liberal leader was none other than Missy’s longtime flame, Prince Barbo Stirbey Bratianu’s brother-in-law. Slowly, the trio chipped away at King Ferdinand’s defenses, carefully explaining the necessity for Romania to abandon neutrality and side with Britain, France, and Russia. Ferdinand listened, quietly weighing in his analytical mind all the arguments placed before him.
As the war progressed, the pressure exerted on Greece by the Allied and Central Powers grew in intensity, making Constantine and Sophie’s predicament more treacherous. Constantine I’s refusal to join the Allied cause by keeping Greece neutral immediately elicited whispers that he was pro-German. Afer all, had he not been caught wearing a German field marshal’s uniform, complete with baton, when visiting his wife’s brother, the Kaiser, not that long ago? And what of the queen herself? She was even more pro-German, so the rumors went, than King Constantine. The vicious rumors surrounding Queen Sophie became uglier right around the time that Venizelos and the king came to blows over the prime minister’s insistence on joining the Dardanelles Campaign.
Exhausted by the unrelenting pressure, Tino fell ill in the summer of 1915. In no time, pneumonia set in. For the next several weeks, the king’s condition worsened. Two of his ribs were removed. But no sooner had this occurred than blood poisoning seeped through his body. The king was near death. In the meantime, stories were flying about that what had actually happened to Constantine was not pneumonia or pleurisy compounded by blood poisoning; instead, the queen had stabbed her husband in the back in the middle of a violent argument because he could not be persuaded to get Greece to side with Germany. It was a cruel and false story. Sophie nursed the king with devotion. What these stories did mean, however, was that Sophie was eyed with deep suspicion by some. The cruel rumors also meant that Sophie was seen by the dynasty’s enemies as a perfect target in their quest to bring Greece’s House of Glucksburg to its knees.
When Constantine’s condition became critical, a miraculous icon bearing the image of the Madonna and Child was requested to be brought before him. When the icon arrived at the palace, hoards of people outside knelt in silence, asking God to heal their king. Inside, Constantine prayed before the holy image and then lapsed into unconsciousness. Within a week, the crisis passed. King Constantine had been spared. Queen Sophie was so moved by the apparent miracle that she chose to donate a superb sapphire for the icon.
After this brush with death, Sophie’s husband was never the same vigorous man. In order to let the poison out of his body, a small incision was made in the king’s chest, from which fluid could escape. The wound always needed constant attention. But the king’s serious illness did not lead to a cessation in the ugly rumors spread about the couple’s supposed pro-German sympathies.
For those who cared to believe that the king and queen were anti-Entente and pro-German, alleged proof came by way of the fact that a number of their staff—men such as Ioannis Metaxas, the king’s chief of staff—received their training and education in Germany. Then there was Constantine himself, who had received his education at the Military Academy in Berlin.
As for Queen Sophie, her chamberlain, John Theotokis, and his brother, Nicholas (the Greek minister in Berlin), were supposed to be in league with the queen, along with Baron Schenk (responsible for German intelligence in Athens), in trying to deliver Greece to Germany. One thing was certain: within Greece, the Germans were busy setting up a network to cultivate (usually by means of bribery) a pro-German press and propaganda machine. Athens at the time was described by Prince Nicholas as being “a hotbead of political intrigue, of international espionage and counter-espionage.”28
Abroad, the foreign press were soon united in leveling accusations against the Greek monarchs. Again, the French led the way. One French newspaper “swore that a workshop at Phalerum, the pleasure beach of Athens and the constant resort of strollers, had set up a diabolical subterranean and sub-aqueous contrivance by which submarines could arrive in full daylight and, while submerged, attach themselves, 500 metres from the shore, to a pipe which yielded them huge quantities of oil…. Queen Sophia (it was gravely added) often came to Phalerum ‘about teatime’ to watch this operation.” And as for Kaiser Wil-helm’s villa at Corfu, the Achilleion, that was “no better than a formidable submarine base, which had been laid out in time of peace.”29 Such was some of the more outlandish slander to which Sophie was subjected abroad. Conveniently forgotten were her uneasy relations with the Kaiser, who had so publicly humiliated her and banned her from setting foot in Germany when Sophie defied him and converted to Orthodoxy.
It was Queen Sophie’s great tragedy that she was “swept away” in what has been described as a “flood of vituperation.” The parallels between Sophie and Tsarina Alexandra of Russia were not hard to miss. For these two German-born consorts, their close connection to Queen Victoria and their personal inclinations toward Great Britain were completely forgotten. It has been written that Queen Sophie “was presented as a fanatically pro-German, hard-hearted virago, determined to force her weak-willed husband into fighting for the Kaiser.”30 Those same words could just as easily describe how Tsarina Alexandra was being depicted by her enemies during World War I.
In Romania, Queen Elisabeth had moved to the bishop’s residence at Curtea de Arges in order to be near the burial site of Carol I. It was a logical move for a woman who believed in communicating with the dead. Though she continued to exasperate Queen Marie because of her staunch German sympathies and her peculiar rants about frequent talks with the Archangel Raphael, Marie treated the widowed Carmen Sylva with kindness and understanding. In a gesture of peace and magnanimity, she sought to heal the wounds that had set the two women at loggerheads with each other—wounds that were largely of Carmen Sylva’s making. Queen Elisabeth’s peaceful widowhood was short-lived. She died in early March 1916 from pneumonia caught while taking in the freezing cold air, a habit of the old queen because she feared being suffocated. She was buried next to Carol I.
Of the Entente Powers, France was the ringleader in the campaign to bring Constantine and his dynasty to its knees. For October 1915 marked “the beginning of French preeminence in Greek affairs.”31 By this time, stories of Constantine and Sophie’s alleged pro-German stance had become well established. When M. Denys Cochin, a French minister of state, visited the king, Constantine declared his position emphatically: “I am not a German…I am Greek and nothing but Greek; I have no other care but for the interests of my people, and I wish to spare them, as far as possible, the evils of war. That is the whole secret of my policy”32 The king was also beside himself over French policy in Greece, warning the British to watch out for them in this part of Europe. The British military attaché in Athens informed London of the king’s “fluent tirade against the French notably against the French Minister,” and that he had declared that “they were leading us [the British] by the nose.”33 But no amount of protestation on King Constantine’s part seemed to have the desired effect.
As ardent Anglophiles, it must have brought some measure of comfort to Sophie and Constantine to find that they had among their staunchest supporters two British military men, one in the Royal Navy and the other in the British Army. Admiral Mark Kerr had lived for some time in Greece and was naval adviser to King Constantine and commander in chief of the Royal Hellenic Navy, thus giving Kerr ample opportunity to come to know the Greek royal family, whom he viewed with admiration. An affable-looking man, with a receding hairline and an engaging smile, Kerr came to champion King Constantine, never deviating despite the pummeling the king’s reputation was to take in the ensuing years.
Admiral Kerr concluded that “the characters of King Constantine and Mr. Venizelos were ‘as far as the poles asunder.’ “ Although the king had “
a great strategic and tactical brain for war” and was also “truthful to the last degree and loathed intrigue,” his main weakness lay in the fact that he was “no diplomat.”34 Venizelos, on the other hand, though “a great orator with a great deal of personal magnetism,” failed Kerr’s character test because he was “a born intriguer and gave one the impression that he preferred to get his way by adroitness rather than by the open methods which his King invariably used.” Though to his credit the Cretan lawyer “was not to be bribed by money,” he suffered from a “jealousy that almost amounted to madness”; his “weakness lay in his overweening vanity. He wished to go down in history as the re-creator of the old Greek empire, and no one should be associated with his great work but himself.” Admiral Kerr also found Venizelos to lack any sympathy for the rank and file, while Constantine thought much about them, “perhaps even more, than he did about the upper classes.”35
The other great supporter of the beleaguered king was none other than the distinguished Lord Kitchener, famed for his battlefield exploits in Africa. As secretary of state for war, Kitchener visited Athens in the fall of 1915 to assess the deteriorating situation there. The tall, commanding soldier quickly sympathized with King Constantine. The two men, both professional soldiers, took to each other instinctively. The king liked Kitchener’s honest and open approach to Greece’s predicament, which came as a refreshing change from the duplicity of the diplomats and politicians in Athens. When Constantine asked Kitchener “if he did not agree with me that Greece’s condition was extremely precarious with nearly a million Germans waiting to fall upon us if we took the field against them,” Kitchener acquiesced, telling the king that “under the circumstances neutrality was the attitude best suited” to Greece’s interests, “while those of the Allied Powers would be well served by the continuance of Greece’s benevolent neutrality”36
Sadly for Constantine and Sophie, Kitchener died within months of his visit to Athens. As one historian points out, “Had Kitchener not been lost at sea in July 1916, and had there been another point of view to counter that of David Lloyd George, an ardent admirer of Venizelos and Kitchener’s successor as War Minister, the King’s fate might have been a happier one”37—and by extension, Queen Sophie’s, too. But thanks to Lloyd George’s antipathy for Constantine, and France’s lead in the campaign to vilify the Greek royal family and their supporters, Constantine and Sophie’s fate now assumed the dimensions of a Greek tragedy.
“I am an English woman. When Roumania comes into this war, there is but one side to choose,” declared Marie of Romania.38 Marie’s steady and unrelenting call to place their country firmly on the Allied side was making an impact on Ferdinand. He had already warned the Kaiser that he was bound, as King of Romania, to put his country’s interests before any personal inclinations he might have for the German fatherland. Undeterred by his Hohenzollern cousin’s musings about duty and sacrifice, the Kaiser proceeded to send “snorting telegrams,” as Queen Marie described them, to Bucharest. His messages, which were uncoded and therefore open for all to see, bristled with threats designed to intimidate both his Romanian and Greek cousins. Among those telegrams going through Bucharest was one addressed to Willy’s sister, Sophie. According to Queen Marie, it “contained loud threats against any who would dare oppose his victorious armies and his Deutscher Gott.”39 The Kaiser was clearly getting in over his head in the tug-of-war with the Allies over the Balkans. At the Berlin court, eyebrows were raised. Despite being long accustomed to their blustering sovereign, members of his entourage were shocked to find that the Kaiser “even wondered whether Romania’s hesitation in joining the Central Powers was due to the fact that he had not been pleasanter to Queen Marie during her pre-war visit to Berlin.”40 Wilhelm had obviously recognized Marie’s preeminent role in getting King Ferdinand to tilt toward the Entente side. The Kaiser’s annoyance with the Romanian queen had prompted him in 1915 to complain that his cousin Missy in Bucharest was nothing but a “meddlesome little flirt.”41
Marie’s “unshakable belief in England,” plus her embrace of “the national ideal of unity of all the Roumanians,” combined to strengthen her resolve. When Count Ottokar Czernin, the Austro-Hungarian minister to Romania, pressured her to get Romania to side with the Central Powers, Marie surprised him. In spite of an audience in which Marie said Czernin was “making me go through hell,” she stood firm. “I should die of grief if Roumania were to go to war against England,” snapped the defiant queen.42
For some time, Marie had carefully handled her husband, coaxing him gently toward the Allied cause. They went for drives through the beautiful Romanian countryside, to places that had special meaning to them when first discovered as a young couple. Missy’s efforts paid off when, at the end of August 1916, the moment of truth arrived. King Ferdinand summoned the Crown Council and stated his desire to have Romania enter the war on the side of the Triple Entente. An overwhelming majority of the ministers sided with their sovereign. The country had abandoned neutrality and was now at war against Germany and Austria-Hungary
The queen, who had been waiting anxiously outside the room, sought out her husband at the end of the momentous meeting. She needed only to glance at Ferdinand’s face to see the agony he had just endured. Slipping her hand into his in a gesture of love and support, Queen Marie announced to the assembled ministers: “Gentlemen, no one of you realizes so well as I what this has cost him. I am proud of him. And Roumania should be.”43 To George V, Marie wrote in detail of the tense moment: “I always knew that it would end like that. Indeed I was confident that it would not end otherwise, but the struggles were hard and poor Nando has made a tremendous sacrifice—the greatest that can be asked of a King and a man, to go against his own brothers, again [sic] the country he was born in, that he loved.” Then, on a bittersweet note, mingled with hope, Missy continued to her beloved cousin, “we are separated from England by the whole of Europe, yet we feel that England can be our great support and it is England that we trust. I never imagined that it would be the lot of our generation, we who are children together, to see this great war and in a way to have to remodel the face of Europe.”44
The House of Hohenzollern exacted its revenge on Ferdinand for what it saw as his traitorous action. Princess Marthe Bibesco wrote that “They killed him genealogically. His name was erased from the great book of the Hohenzollerns. At Sigmaringen they went into mourning for him as if he were dead. The head of his house, William II, King of Prussia, Emperor of Germany, annihilated him by telegraph. He took from him the order of the House of the Hohenzollerns which was equivalent to civil death.”45
Eighteen
“HOLD MY HAND THAT I MAY HAVE COURAGE”
RESUPPLYING RUSSIA PROVED DIFFICULT, ESPECIALLY FROM THE South, owing to the fact that Turkey and Bulgaria joined the Central Powers, thus making them enemies of Russia. The Allies’ failure to secure the Dardanelles plus the German blockade of the Baltic Sea meant that Russia was further cut off from help from the West, resulting in the virtual isolation of the empire. Hampered by insufficient weapons and supplies and poor food rations, Russia’s armies fought on, but the losses sustained by the empire were enormous. By August 1915, a staggering 450,000 Russians a month were dying at the front. This brought the total loss of life since the previous year to 1.5 million men. For the year 1915 alone, an astounding 2 million men were captured, wounded, or killed, and the whole Russian front had for all intents and purposes crumbled.
With 15 million mobilized to fight, the strain on the Russian economy was huge. Workers for the farms and factories were syphoned off to march to war. This resulted in a decrease in production, and shortages of goods, food, and fuel. Money became scarce. Soon, troubles came simmering to the surface. Beside problems with the outcome of the war itself, there were internal economic problems that spelled political trouble. With Russian fathers, brothers, and sons dying in the slaughter at the Eastern Front, their families back home faced all kinds of hardships as they struggled to
find food for the table.
Writing in early 1915, Tsarina Alexandra expressed her conflicting emotions about the war to the Bishop of Ripon: “We can only trust & pray that this terrible war may soon come to an end—The suffering around is too intense. You, who know all the members of our family so very well, can understand what we go through—relations on all sides, one against the other.” Alexandra left her most scathing words for the country she felt most responsible for the war: “And the gross disappointment of seeing a country morally sinking with such depths, as Germany has—is bitter to behold.”1
For Nicholas II, the dramatic setbacks on the front were uppermost in his mind. The losses spurred the tsar to dismiss the Grand Duke Nicholas (Niko-lasha) as the Russian Army’s supreme commander. In his stead, Nicholas II unwisely took personal command of his armies—a huge gamble and one he could ill afford to lose. For a tsar whose hold on the throne was precarious, taking over as generalissimo was the ultimate risk. But the tsarina greeted Nikolasha’s dismissal with relief. For months she had been haranguing her husband to sack the general whose hatred of Rasputin knew no bounds.
Taking over as commander in chief meant that Nicholas needed to be at Army Headquarters (Stavka) at Mogilev, far from St. Petersburg. This would literally cut the tsar off from his capital, thus virtually ensuring that he became even more out of touch with his ministers.
The tsar proved ineffectual in running a Russia in crisis, and with each passing day he and his government bore the brunt of an increasingly discontented people. But where the tsarina was concerned, the anger against her grew by leaps and bounds. Because Alexandra was increasingly looked upon as a traitorous foreigner, ever ready to deliver Russia into enemy hands with the connivance of her camarilla, headed by the hated Rasputin, she reaped the ill will of a growing number of Russians. Like a slow-growing bacillus that thrives undetected, the people’s hatred of Alexandra Feodorovna festered unchecked. So unhappy were people with their tsarina that rumors of plots against her were rampant. One of Nicholas II’s uncles, the Grand Duke Paul, admitted to Maurice Paléologue that there was talk of locking away Tsarina Alexandra in a convent in Siberia or the Urals—a favorite method in the past for dealing with traitorous or overam-bitious female royals. Paléologue replied that the tsar would never allow it. And, the ambassador continued, if things indeed had degenerated to such an extent, then the only alternative was revolution—though what kind of new government might take the place of tsarism was inconceivable since ignorance, corruption, and anarchism were rampant in Russia. After pacing the room with “eyes flashing horror,” the grand duke responded presciently: “If revolution breaks out, its barbarity will exceed anything ever known.…It will be hellish.…Russia won’t survive it!”2
Born to Rule: Five Reigning Consorts, Granddaughters of Queen Victoria Page 30