The catastrophic impact of the assassination was not immediately apparent. According to the usual courtesies, fellow sovereigns and foreign courts dispatched condolence telegrams to Emperor Franz Joseph and mourning was declared throughout most European countries.
Marie Louise, on reading of the murder in the newspaper, ‘wondered what would be the outcome of this, but little did I think that it would really mean war.’[166] The Russian ambassador in Vienna was equally complacent, writing to the Tsar that the Austrian response would be calm and restrained.
Several Austrian ministers, however, had long been waiting for an excuse to crush the disorderly Serbs and, refused to be placated by sympathetic words. The assassination, they claimed, was tantamount to a declaration of war and in response they issued an ultimatum which was so extreme in its demands that the Serbs were at a loss as to how to respond. In desperation, the Serbian Prince Regent turned for protection to his long-time ally, Russia.
Desperate to avoid war, the Tsar persuaded the Serbs to accept the treaty virtually in its entirety. This was not what the Austrians had been expecting or hoping to hear, and on July 19th they declared war on Serbia. The Tsar, duty-bound to defend his little neighbour, saw no alternative but to mobilise his troops along the Austrian border.
As Europe teetered on the brink of a precipice, Kaiser Wilhelm, aghast at the speed with which events had spiralled out of control, telegraphed his Russian cousin, asking him, cajoling him and ordering him to halt the Russian mobilisation. Nicholas, obliged to protect his smaller ally, replied that he could not do that unless the Austrians withdrew from Serbia. The Kaiser’s ministers urged him to issue his own ultimatum: unless the Tsar halted the mobilisation Germany, honouring her treaty with Austria, would have no option but to declare war on Russia.
Still, the Tsar remained optimistic and still the Kaiser frantically sought a solution but it was too late. Against the will of both the Kaiser and the Tsar, on 1st August, Germany declared war on Russia. At the same time, the Germans, intent on subduing the French before they had time to come to Russian aid, invaded neutral Belgium causing Britain to issue an ultimatum of her own. On August 4th, having received no response from the Kaiser, the British entered the conflict. War had begun on a scale the world had never seen before.
Patriotic fervour swept the continent. In London, vast crowds stood beneath the balcony of Buckingham Palace to cheer King George and Queen Mary. In Berlin, the Kaiser received great applause and the streets were filled with people rejoicing at the impending slaughter. Similar scenes greeted the Tsar and Tsarina outside the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg. When the Russian Imperial family arrived in Moscow for a service of dedication, devoted crowds gathered outside the cathedral. The French Ambassador, Maurice Paléologue, turned to the Tsarina, commenting on what relief she must feel to witness such a display of loyal affection:
“[Ella] joined in our conversation. Her face in the frame of her long white woollen veil was alive with spirituality. Her delicate features and white skin, the deep faraway look in her eyes, the low soft tone of her voice and the luminous glow round her brow all betrayed a being in close contact with the ineffable and divine.”[167]
But Ella’s calm faith could no more protect her from the tragedy befalling her family than the cheering crowds could console her sister, Alix.
“This is the end of everything,” the Tsarina was heard to murmur, knowing that her family would be literally ripped apart. While she, Victoria and Ella were committed to the Entente (Britain, France, Russia and Belgium), Irène and Ernie were on the side of the Central Powers (Germany and Austro-Hungary).
Though quick to affirm her allegiance to Russia, the broken-hearted Tsarina recalled her childhood in peace-loving Hesse and was eager to assure anyone who would listen that this evil was the fault of the proud Prussians. Her brother, she rightly insisted, had dreaded this war as much as she had, and her sentiments were echoed by Ernie in Darmstadt but, disheartened as he was, the Grand Duke of Hesse knew his duty and, like his father before him, prepared to lead the Hessian troops to the Front.
The declarations of war brought a sudden end to the royal cousins’ pleasant holidays and they began a frantic rush to return to their own countries before the outbreak of hostilities. Victoria Battenberg, leaving her jewels for safekeeping in St. Petersburg, returned to England. Irène, after exchanging her English maid for Victoria’s German maid, departed for Kiel, where her husband had command of the German Baltic Fleet. Sophie, entrusting her sons to the care of her cousin, King George of Britain, returned to neutral Greece to suffer criticism from both sides of her family. While her brother, the Kaiser, urged the Anglophile Queen to persuade the Greeks to aid the Central Powers, her English cousins were pressing her to do the same for the Entente. Sophie’s sisters faced no such dilemma; all four were settled in Germany from where Mossy’s sons and Charlotte’s husband were immediately called into service in the army.
In neutral Roumania, Missy found herself in a similar situation to Sophie’s. The proudly English Crown Princess favoured an alliance with the Entente but her German-born husband, Ferdinand, and his uncle, King Carol, could not renounce their Hohenzollern blood and were torn between the overwhelming Roumanian support for Russia, and their own familial connections to the Central Powers. For Missy matters were further complicated. Her mother, the Dowager Duchess of Coburg, renounced her Russian origins and adhered to the German side, as did Missy’s sister Sandra. Ducky, now settled with her husband in St. Petersburg, pledged her allegiance to Russia.
The strain proved too much for King Carol of Roumania and, within three months of the outbreak of war, he was dead. Missy rose with her usual aplomb to the role of Queen Consort but it would be two years before she could persuade her husband to abandon his neutral stance and join the Allies.
For Alice of Albany and the Christians, too, war came at a terrible personal cost. Alice’s English brother, Charles, now Duke of Coburg was forced to support the Kaiser, while she, a sister-in-law of the English Queen Mary, was bound to Britain. Like so many of his cousins, Charles, whose immediate impulse had been to hurry back to England, was vilified by both sides. The English considered him a traitor; the Germans, an Englishman. The same heart-rending situation faced Thora and Marie Louise. They had already lost one brother, Christle, fighting for Britain in the Boer War, and now saw a second brother, Albert, heir to an estate in Silesia, in the uniform of their German enemies. Out of consideration for his family ties, however, the Kaiser ensured that Albert would serve in a non-combatant role.
For those princesses whose countries remained neutral – Daisy Connaught, Crown Princess of Sweden, Queen Ena of Spain and Queen Maud of Norway – life was marginally less complicated. Daisy became the focal point through which siblings and cousins on opposing sides could keep in contact. Through her, it was possible for Thora and Marie Louise to follow the exploits of their brother, Albert, and through her too, Mossy would eventually be able to regain the mementos that the British had found on the body of her dying son. Even so, it was difficult for an English princess to remain entirely impartial in a court which, though officially unbiased, tended to favour the Central Powers.
The battle lines had been drawn up. The divisions were clear and yet, for all their allegiance to their adoptive countries, the princesses could neither deny their origins nor disown their own kindred. In a time of such heartfelt patriotism, foreign princesses would soon find themselves distrusted and even hated by the people they struggled to serve.
Chapter 32 – Hessian Witches and Foreign Spies
Following royal tradition, the queens and princesses of all combatant nations put family feeling aside to dedicate themselves to the war effort. Visiting troops, patronising hospitals and arranging transport for the wounded, each played her part. Even in those countries not directly affected by the war, Queen Victoria’s granddaughters played an active role.
In Canada, Patsy Connaught, who as patron of her own Princess Patr
icia’s Light Infantry Regiment had personally embroidered the regimental banner, sold signed photographs of herself to raise money for the allies. In neutral Norway, Queen Maud, no longer able to make her regular excursions to England, established relief committees to fund medical and food supplies; and in Spain, Queen Ena renovated the Red Cross Hospital of Madrid.
In England, the princesses visited the wounded and made improvements to hospital wards. Alice of Albany patronised the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Families Association, and, with her husband, made several visits to La Panne in Belgium where the heroic King Albert was struggling to defend what was left of his ravaged country. Thora of Schleswig-Holstein frequently travelled to France to examine the conditions at the base camps and, back in England she founded the Women’s Auxiliary Force. Her sister, Marie Louise, settling into a bed-sit in London, converted the girls’ club that she had established into a ‘perfect hospital with 100 beds.’
“I ran this completely self-sufficient unit myself from 1914 to 1920. It was directly under the War Office, with no well-meaning interference from the Red Cross or other bodies. I suppose I have the strange distinction of being one of the few women who never donned a uniform, not even an overall, during [the] war…I took especial care when visiting my wounded friends to put on my smartest dress and hat, and the men thoroughly appreciated the compliment paid them.”[168]
Across the continent, royal women were similarly occupied. For frequently ailing Charlotte, there came the added responsibility of briefly managing the affairs of Saxe-Meiningen in the absence of her husband, who had left with his army to the Front. Her cousin, Sandra (of Edinburgh, now Princess of Hohenlohe-Langenburg) enrolled as a nurse to tend the wounded Germans, while her sister, Ducky, organised ambulances for the Russian troops on the Polish front. In Russia, too:
“The Empress [Alix] sat till late in her small dressing-room, the room she generally used, discussing war charities with the Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna [Ella], who had at once begun to take an active part in everything as well as doing her usual work at the ‘Obitel.’”[169]
Alix devoted herself wholeheartedly to the Russian cause. Regardless of her own numerous ailments, she and her elder daughters enrolled for a course of nurse training and were soon busily employed in the military hospitals, dressed in the ordinary uniform of the Red Cross ‘Sisters of Mercy.’ Confounding those critics who had always viewed their Tsarina as haughty and aloof, Alix dedicated herself to her work with a gentleness and strength of character that amazed her patients.
“It was generally believed that the Empress was difficult to approach,” wrote Anna Vyrubova, “but this was never true of sincere and disinterested souls. Suffering always made a strong appeal to the Empress, and whenever she knew of anyone sad or in trouble her heart was instantly touched. Few people, even in Russia, ever knew how much the Empress did for the poor, the sick, and the helpless.”[170]
Unflinchingly, she assisted the surgeons, holding amputated limbs and dressing the most horrific wounds. Nursing came as naturally to her as it had to her sister and mother and, for the first time in her life, she found a role in which she was totally at ease.
“Looking after the wounded in my consolation…To lessen their suffering even in a small way helps the aching heart.”[171]
Alongside nursing, Alix also employed all her administrative skills to arrange for mobile baths and temporary churches to be taken to the soldiers at the Front. At home, she exhausted herself arranging for numerous smaller hospitals to be established throughout the country.
Travelling to and from the Front, her sister, Ella, already proficient in nursing the most abject patients, visited the base camps and arranged ambulance trains to transferral the wounded back to Moscow.
“The Empress and the Grand Duchess drew into their organisation all ranks of society, officials small and great, government employees, and all the hierarchy of feminine society from the highest to the lowest.”[172]
As the stark brutality of slaughter became apparent, the wild rejoicing of August 1914 gave way to disenchantment. While the Kaiser bemoaned the treachery of his cousins, stories of German atrocities in Belgium stoked the hatred of his enemies. The sight of the wounded soldiers returning on hospital trains fired the imaginations of the propagandists, portraying the ‘evil Hun’ as butchers and murderers.
The royal families were no more immune to the dangers than the least of their subjects. Only two months after the outbreak of war, Mossy of Prussia lost one son, Prince Max of Hesse-Kassel, in Belgium; and two years later a second son, Friedrich met the same fate in Roumania. That same year, Mossy’s grief was compounded by the death of her brother-in-law, Moretta’s husband, Adolph of Scahumburg-Lippe.
In Russia, the Tsar’s cousin, Konstantin Konstantinovich, lost a son-in-law; and, on the British side, Maurice, brother of Queen Ena of Spain, was killed at Ypres on 27th October 1914. For the royal cousins there could be no pleasure in victory wrought at such a cost.
As the war continued relentlessly, the fear of foreign spies became universal and, no matter how firmly the princesses declared and demonstrated their loyalty to their troops, the multi-national nature of their families left them wide open to suspicion and mistrust. When the lonely Toria of Wales befriended a maid servant belonging to an unorthodox church, the maid was unjustly accused of spying for the Germans and summarily dismissed. In October 1914, Victoria Battenberg’s husband, Louis, who had served in the British Navy for almost half a century, was pressurised to resign as First Lord of the Admiralty on account of his German birth. Victoria was aghast and angry with her cousin, King George V, but her sufferings were minimal compared with those endured by her sisters in Russia.
The Tsarina’s popularity plummeted as the Russian losses mounted. Though her mother had been English and she had spent the greater part of her childhood and youth with her grandmother in England, the Russians were quick to draw attention to her German origins. Totally unfounded rumours gained momentum, accusing her not only of favouring the enemy, but also of actively forewarning the Kaiser of the Russians’ military plans via her ‘lover’, Rasputin.
Alix was not the only victim of such slanders. The Muscovites, who had so recently been revering Ella as a saint, observed that a large number of the casualties arriving at her hospitals were not Russian soldiers but German prisoners-of-war. Though acutely embarrassed by the fact, Ella was powerless to decide which patients she received, and believed it her Christian duty to treat them all with equal respect. Being naturally fluent in German, she was able to speak with the prisoners and initially encouraged her committee to care for them with compassion, “but,” as she wrote to the Tsar, “their kindness was so badly interpreted and everything was put on my back.”
By April 1915, the complaints were so violent that, fearing both for the future of her foundation and the reputation of the Imperial Family, Ella pleaded with Nicholas to stop sending prisoners to Moscow:
“These rumours about me are not the chief reason I want to tell you but Moscow is a capital [and] having prisoners in the finest buildings…makes such very bad blood. Couldn’t the prisoners no longer be sent to Moscow? The people are furious to see their beautiful buildings for military hospitals – all 18 hospitals for prisoners except three. Forgive me mentioning this but perhaps you don’t know of the problem – if you come now and want to see the military hospitals, you will find one or two Russians or none, but hundreds of prisoners.”[173]
Still the death toll rose and, as spy-mania seized the country, the chief suspects were the ‘German bitches’ or ‘Hessian witches’ in the Imperial Family. Rumours that the Kaiser was planning to use the Grand Duke of Hesse to make a separate peace with Russia led to speculation that Ella was hiding her brother in her convent. Desperate to avoid giving rise to any hint of collaboration, Ella refused to receive a lady-in-waiting recently arrived in Moscow with a letter from her brother, Ernie, but public opinion remained unchanged. While the Tsarina was unreachable
in Tsarskoe Selo, the Grand Duchess, walking openly through the streets, was greeted with a barrage of accusations, spat upon, or even stoned. On one occasion a hostile mob gathered outside the House of Martha and Mary demanding to see the German spy who was hiding her brother in the convent. When Ella stepped out to meet them she was pelted with stones and only the timely arrival of a company of soldiers prevented further violence. The crowd dispersed baying for the blood of the Tsarina, Rasputin’s ‘German whore.’
In Greece, Queen Sophie was the victim of similar slanders. King Constantine (Tino), reluctant to embroil his people in another conflict so soon after the Balkan Wars, was determined to maintain his country’s neutrality. His stand brought him into opposition with his powerful and persuasive Prime Minister, Venizelos, who firmly advocated forming an alliance with the Entente. In spite of growing pressure from both sides, Tino stood his ground until autumn 1915 when the British fleet, with Venizelos’ encouragement, landed at Salonika. The outraged King dismissed his Prime Minister who responded by establishing a rival government, which divided the country into those who remained loyal to Tino and those who backed Venizelos’ demands to enter the war.
In an effort to force Tino to take a stand, Allied propaganda attempted to discredit Queen Sophie by circulating increasingly bizarre stories of her pro-German sympathies. Like her cousin, the Tsarina, she was accused of sending information to her brother, the Kaiser, via a secret telephone line linking her Tatoi home with Berlin. In the summer of 1916, an arsonist set fire to the palace while the Queen and her children were in residence and, though the family escape unharmed, several members of the household were killed.
To increase the pressure on Greece, the Kaiser began wooing the neighbouring states of Bulgaria and Roumania. Ferdinand of Bulgaria wavered until October 1915 when, convinced by a delegation of handsome young officers that the Germans were in the ascendancy, he threw in his lot with the Central Powers. Assuming that the same tactics would prove effective with Missy of Roumania, Cousin Willy dispatched another group, including her brother-in-law, Ernst of Hohenlohe-Langenburg, to Bucharest. Missy, however, was not to be swayed:
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