Alix worried that Willy would send her brother Ernie to the Russian front, and was greatly relieved to learn, in the early months of the war, that the armies of Hesse-Darmstadt were not engaged against Russian troops. Sister Irene’s ‘very amiable’ husband Henry was an admiral in the German navy, and sister Victoria’s husband Louis was a high-ranking British admiralty official. She was concerned about them too, and indeed about all those placed in harm’s way by the war.
‘One’s heart bleeds, thinking of all the misery everywhere and what will be afterwards!’ she wrote to Victoria in November, 1914. She wept for the loneliness of Ernie and all others far from home, for the pain and wretchedness of those in combat, for the fear suffered by those taken prisoner. She had seen that fear at first hand, when German prisoners were brought to her hospitals. They had been terrified at first that the Russians would shoot them, or cut off their noses and ears; she had seen the look of amazement on their faces when, instead of being brutalized, they were well treated and fed.
Before long Minnie returned to Russia and resumed her patronage of the Red Cross. Alix relinquished her temporary headship with relief, and concentrated on the larger issues of setting up hospitals and trying to fill the huge gaps in supplies for the wounded.
Royal palaces, with their hundreds of rooms, vast kitchens and larders, their garages and stables and staffs of servants, made ideal hospitals. Alix went to work making the arrangements for converting dozens of royal and aristocratic palaces, and other mansions and large public buildings, into military hospitals. Within the first four months of the war, eighty-five such hospitals were operating in and around Petrograd, all under her patronage. In Moscow, the Petrovsky Palace had begun taking in wounded and the Nicholas Palace, which had been Ella’s home before she founded her monastery, became a workshop where blankets were made and warm socks, mittens and hats knitted for the soldiers.
The vast blue and white Catherine Palace at Tsarskoe Selo was made into a hospital for officers, its beautiful amber-, lapis-and malachite-decorated reception rooms filled with beds, its ornate ballroom converted to an operating theatre. Alix had never liked the grandiose palace. Now, however, she had found the perfect use for it, and went there nearly every day to supervise its operations.
The Russian troops had gone bravely into battle, pushing westwards in numbers nearly half a million strong into the marshy wastes of East Prussia in the last days of August. But the Germans had surrounded them, trapping them in the treacherous swamps near the village of Tannenberg. Bogged down, sometimes swallowed by quicksand, men and horses, artillery and equipment sank into the morass, helpless against the German guns. The Chevaliers Gardes, the Red Hussars, the Preobrazhensky regiment, the Tirailleurs de la Garde – all perished, or were forced to surrender. Some ninety thousand troops were taken prisoner. The Russian general Samsonov, overwhelmed by dishonour, killed himself.
The citizens of Petrograd, reading of the battle in special editions of the evening papers, could not believe at first that their mighty military forces had suffered so sudden and so decisive a defeat. Unlike the tsar’s ministers, they were not aware of the vulnerability of the enormous Russian armies, their shortages of equipment and inept leadership. They had assumed that German and Austrian arms would not be able to hold out long against their own armies and those of the French, that the war would be over quickly and that they would win it. That the ‘Russian Steam Roller,’ as the press called the army, would flatten the enemy, that there would be Cossacks riding into Berlin by Christmas.10 Instead, they read of massive casualties, they saw the trains crowded with the wounded coming into the Petrograd stations, and they heard rumours, terrible rumours, of treachery and betrayal.
It was being said that Samsonov and his army had been deliberately abandoned, delivered into the hands of the enemy for slaughter, by General Rennenkampf – a Russian general with a suspiciously German-sounding name. General Rennenkampf’s own subsequent defeat at German hands did nothing to stifle these accusations. They heard whispers that Warsaw had fallen and that very soon all of Poland would belong to the Germans and Austrians, that instead of Cossacks in Berlin there would be elite German troops in Petrograd, pillaging houses and desecrating churches, befouling the Neva and marching up and down Nevsky Prospekt. The smell of smoke that had lingered in the air since early summer was now said to be due to German subversion; it was whispered that the Germans had set the peat bogs near Petrograd on fire, and were burning down the trackless forests of Siberia.
Fear and suspicion replaced the patriotic fervour that had prevailed in the days following the outbreak of war. Many in the streets wore black armbands or black gowns, the looks on their faces blank or apprehensive. Troops marched past in large numbers, on their way to the front, but they no longer marched to spirited tunes or roused the bystanders to loud cheering. The autumn days were growing short, snow had begun to fall, and the citizens of Petrograd had begun to count their losses and look for scapegoats. There was revived talk of the tsar’s German wife, that unfeeling woman who had danced on the night of the Khodynka massacre and whose immoral relations with the infamous Rasputin had shamed the imperial family and made foreigners laugh at Russia.
If indeed there was treachery in the air, then the German bitch was sure to be guilty of it.
But Alix, far from betraying Russia to her German relatives, was attending lectures on anatomy, internal medicine and surgical nursing, with her daughters and several dozen other women, all working towards receiving their certification as Red Cross nurses. It was not enough for her to supervise the running of hospitals, she felt the need to be physically present at the bedsides of the wounded, offering trained assistance.
‘To some it may seem unnecessary my doing this,’ she said, ‘but help is much needed and my hand is useful.’11 By the first week of November, 1914, Alix and her older daughters had completed a full surgical course, with supplemental lectures, and were planning to attend still more lectures. The training courses were held at night. In the morning the empress and her daughters, along with Anna Vyrubov, assisted at operations, cleaned bed-sores, changed dressings and offered what comfort they could to the wounded who crowded the hospitals.
It was dirty, tiring, emotionally draining work. Operations went on for hours, and often the empress was called upon to attend two or three operations in a row. She dripped ether onto masks, passed instruments to the surgeons, swabbed blood, handled amputated legs, arms and fingers. ‘I washed and cleaned, and painted with iodine and smeared with vaseline and tied them up and bandaged all up,’ she wrote to Nicky in November of 1914. ‘My nose is full of hideous smells from those blood-poisoning wounds.’12 Attending the men in the wards meant hearing their screaming and swearing, their delirious ravings and groans. Some moaned in agony and called for death. Many did die, despite the efforts of the nurses and doctors, and Alix was there, by their bedsides or beside the operating table, doing her best to comfort them and afterwards weeping in sorrow.
For those that lived, the pain and wretchedness were extreme. Amputations were all too often performed without anaesthetics; post-operative wounds became gangrenous because there were not enough disinfectants. The overworked doctors and nurses made mistakes, grew short-tempered, went to sleep on their feet. There was never enough medicine, or enough bed linen, soon not enough beds. The men were crowded together cheek by jowl, severe cases next to curable ones, with no ability to isolate men who carried infectious diseases. Crisis conditions prevailed.
But Alix, who had always been at her best in a crisis, and who had been yearning to prove herself to her husband’s subjects for twenty years, seemed at first to thrive. She rejoiced when she graduated from the nurses’ training programme, and wore the Red Cross patch on her apron with great pride. Going to her hospitals gave her a fresh sense of worth; devoting herself with ardour to the taxing labour of nursing made her burn with purpose and commitment. She could forget herself, immerse herself in sacrifice.
Wearin
g the robe and wimple of a nursing sister – a uniform that disguised her high rank and lent her a measure of anonymity, reducing her shyness and discomfort – she walked the overcrowded wards, becoming familiar with the men, stopping often to greet and talk with those she came to know. She liked to call herself a ‘sister of charity,’ and when one hospital official referred to her as ‘mother of mercy,’ she recorded the incident with pleasure. ‘It’s shy work,’ she told her sister Victoria in a letter, ‘but the sisters’ dresses help one.’ ‘Every hand is useful.’13
From the outset of the war Alix took special interest in the welfare of her own regiment of Lancers, and in a Siberian rifle regiment of which she was patroness. She said goodbye to all the officers and many of the men in person when they left for the front, and followed closely the movements and actions of the regiments and their vicissitudes. After every battle she wrote individual letters to the families of the men who died, and invited the wives and daughters of those who were wounded to stay in the palace, near their husbands and sons, while the injured men were treated; she made sure that when they arrived, she greeted them herself, telling her ladies-in-waiting to suspend the usual protocol of formal welcome.14
The empress’s concern for the suffering was universal. She was often to be found at the bedsides of German prisoners of war, and worried over the anxiety of their loved ones. When the ‘monstrous’ cousin Willy’s son was captured by Russian troops, she knew that Willy and his wife Dona would be desperate for news of him, and sent a personal message to Dona via the neutral Swedish court to let her know that her son was safe and well. ‘Only a mother pitying another mother,’ she wrote to Nicky when she told him what she had done.15
Alix was not the only member of the imperial family to dedicate herself to war work – Aunt Miechen headed a Red Cross effort to collect and distribute medical supplies, Ducky and Ella travelled, visiting hospitals, Nicky’s sister Olga and Grand Duke Paul’s daughter Marie became nurses, as did several of their cousins – but Alix was perhaps the most earnest, and the least appreciated. For to most soldiers she was the German Whore, suspected of colluding with the enemy, her nursing and war efforts nothing more than a smokescreen to disguise her treachery. For every soldier who was comforted by her presence or appreciated the goods her workshops provided there were thousands of others who abhorred her, some who even called out insults to her when she tried to attend to their needs. Once when she was inspecting a field ambulance she heard a voice call out ‘German bitch!’ and she burst into tears.16
‘Oh, this miserable war!’ she wrote to Nicky, who was away from Tsarskoe Selo visiting troops, early in November. ‘At moments we cannot bear it anymore, the misery and bloodshed break one’s heart.’17 The imperial family had recently buried its first casualty, Grand Duke Constantine’s son Oleg, who had been wounded with the First Army in East Prussia and had slowly wasted away in a hospital in Vilna. ‘Life is difficult to understand,’ Alix wrote, putting into simple words her mental turmoil.
Her mind already overtired and her thinking distorted by her fears and mental instability, Alix was exhausting herself trying to puzzle out what course needed to be taken to rescue, not only the ailing soldiers, but Russia itself from its evident peril.
‘My brain is cretinized,’ she wrote to Nicky. ‘My brain is tired and heavy.’ ‘Anything only not to think . . . ’18 She smoked, she had been fasting since the beginning of the war. Worst of all, she had become an insomniac, lying awake until three or four in the morning, turning over and over in her mind all that needed to be done. ‘The brain seems to be working all the time and never wanting to rest . . . Hundreds of ideas and combinations come bothering one.’19
‘During the sleepless nights which had become her portion she fancied all kinds of evils,’ Martha Mouchanow wrote, and then she would call headquarters and ask the aide-de-camp on duty for news of Nicky.20 He had been away so much since the war began in August, gone for weeks at a time, his absence increasing her anxieties and making her insomnia much worse. More even than her religious faith, her love for her husband was the solid granite on which her life rested. Without him nearby, she was edgy and restless, her thoughts awash in worries. The frightened child in her came to the fore, especially in the long watches of her sleepless nights.
Yet at the same time she knew, with the certainty of a perceptive adult, that the husband she relied on emotionally was himself far too vacillating, too easily influenced by others, too weak to confront the supreme test with which he was now faced. It was up to her to stiffen his backbone, just as it had been up to her to make him face his responsibilities when his father died. She alone was his disinterested, loving friend and helpmeet, the only one he trusted completely. She dared not let him down.
Caught between her fears and her obligations, she tossed and turned, searching for answers. The problems were clear enough: inept generals, soldiers fighting barefooted in the snow, ten men sharing a single rifle with only a few cartridges between them, casualties mounting, the Germans sweeping through Poland and a new enemy, Turkey, announcing its entry into the war.
She knew instinctively that unless she took action to avert it, disaster would surely arrive, and soon.
It was as if she were back on the Standart on its ill-fated cruise off the Finnish coast seven years earlier. With the yacht rapidly sinking, Nicky had stood back from the panic on the deck, consulting his stopwatch and calculating the time they had left; she, on the other hand, had hurried the women and children off the boat and gathered up all the valuables. She had rescued all, saved all, and the yacht had not sunk.
Now she had to step in, while her husband stood back, unsure how to proceed, and save and rescue Russia. She had to take charge. He needed her to do so. It had always been the essence of their partnership. She would do as much as she could, game to the end as ever, to the limit of her strength.
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She would work to the limit of her strength – but her strength was limited. Her nursing, her visits to all the Petrograd hospitals, her train trips to hospitals in Moscow and other distant towns, her battles with the Munitions Committee and the Red Cross and evasive local officials who tried to keep her from scrutinizing their operations, her reading of petitions people handed her on her trips, her collecting of cribs for the Society for Mothers and Babies (‘every baby must be cared for, as the losses are so heavy at the war’), her supervision of her workshops, of her school for nurses and housemaids, of her home for disabled sailors left her ‘dead tired,’ her chest aching and her breath coming in short nervous gasps.
‘Only sheer willpower kept her going during the first five months of the war,’ Sophie Buxhoeveden wrote of Alix. By December of 1914 she was seriously ill, and in danger of collapse.1 Nursing had to be put aside, though the invalid Alix insisted, during her months of convalescence, on knitting garments for the soldiers and preparing icons and images of her husband to be distributed to each regiment.
She insisted too on writing long, urgent, pleading letters to the usually absent Nicky, assuring him of her deep love and support, reaffirming her indissoluble loyalty to him and obsessive concern for him, letters in which, while retaining a certain tentativeness of tone, she nonetheless steered him towards the course she saw that he needed to take. He was the faltering helmsman, she the strong hand at the tiller.
‘I bless and love you, as man was [sic] rarely been loved before,’ she told him. ‘I long to lessen your weight, to help you carry it – to stroke your brow, press you to myself . . . I long often to hold you tight in my arms and let you rest your weary head upon my old breast. We have lived through so much together in these twenty years – and without words understand each other.’2 She called him by pet names, Lovebird, Huzy, Sunshine, the intimate ‘Agooweeone’ – a name she sometimes applied to Alexei, sometimes to Nicky. She perfumed her letters and sometimes enclosed sprigs of lilac in them; he sent her jasmine flowers in return. Everything she wrote, even when she was at her most decisive and
categorical, was couched in loving, tender phrases, and the tsar received her letters as a thirsty man in a desert receives cool water. (‘I drink them and savour every word you write, and often bury my nose and press my lips to the paper you have touched.’)
He basked in her ardour, her nurture. She was gratified by being a much-needed unlimited font of reassurance and advice. Such was their exchange. There was never a cold or critical word, never a note of domineering wife and subservient husband. Only love, flowing back and forth between them as it always had, and unquestioned understanding.
Embodied in Alix’s long letters were certain fixed principles: that Nicky needed to be much stronger in exerting his authority, and to protect himself from bad counsel; that there were ‘always liars, enemies’ around him – and her – and that these liars and enemies needed to be identified; that interfering relatives and a group she referred to as Ella’s ‘bad Moscow set’ were to be shunned; and that Grand Duke Nicholas – ‘Nikolasha’ – was not sufficiently loyal and was doing an unsatisfactory job in commanding the military.
Alix tried to keep herself informed about all that was going on, in the war, within the ministries, and in the country at large, but her sources of information were severely limited. She read the newspapers, and Nicky’s letters, but she talked to only a small circle of people, chiefly Anna Vyrubov (who was carrying on an unpleasant petty feud against her in the first year of the war, though their friendship continued), and the members of her household staff.3 Rumours from Petrograd reached her via chance conversations with wounded soldiers, doctors and nurses. Through Anna, an invalid after early 1915 but still able to get about a good deal, Alix learned what was being said at Anna’s father’s house, among his social circle which included officials, artists and aristocrats, and also at the salon of Princess Paley, Grand Duke Paul’s wife, who kept open house at her mansion in the capital. Most of what Alix heard or was told by others was partial or biased or tainted either by flattery or criticism. And none of it changed her opinions, or softened her rigid judgments.
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