by Sam Eastland
Nobody spoke. The only sound came from the clearing of parched throats and the involuntary sighs of those who wondered how long they could last without fainting in a heap upon the polished marble floor.
At the far end of the hall, on a platform raised waist high above the crowd and reached by a series of long, shallow and difficult-to-negotiate steps, knelt the Tsar. He wore a white military tunic and dark trousers tucked into knee-length boots.
Normally, he would have been facing the gathered assembly of dignitaries, seated on a red-and-gold throne, which was sheltered from above by a red velvet canopy, trimmed with yellow brocade and embroidered in gold bullion thread with the double-headed eagle of the Romanovs. On this occasion, however, the throne had been put to one side, making way for a wooden easel as tall as a man and covered with several layers of gold paint, on which rested a small, but vividly painted icon known simply as The Shepherd.
The painting showed a man in a white robe, standing beside a large stone. Leaning up against the stone was a stylised version of a shepherd’s crook. The man stood at the edge of a lake, on which there were many small islands, all of them crowded with sheep.
Set against the hall’s bewildering array of pillars, and the thousands of embellishments growing like moss from every corner, the icon appeared almost too crude to have deserved such a place of honour in the room. Only those who knew its history could understand the reason why the Tsar of all the Russias knelt before it.
The icon had been painted by an unknown artist in Constantinople, sometime in the eleventh century. From there, it had been carried by Crusaders to the city of Kazan, where it was placed for safekeeping in a monastery. In the year 1209, Kazan was overrun by the Tartars, who held it for the next 350 years. It was during this time that The Shepherd disappeared and, for generations afterwards, was presumed to have been destroyed. In 1579, as a fire raged across the city, many of Kazan’s inhabitants were forced to flee into the surrounding countryside. According to legend, a boy named Nestor, whose family had joined this flood of refugees, received a vision. Jesus appeared before him, wearing the robe of a shepherd, and ordered the boy to return to the house they had recently abandoned. There, the vision told him, something of great value had been hidden. He appealed to his parents, who refused to help, knowing that by now their home had been reduced to ashes. The next night, the vision appeared again. Once more Nestor begged his parents to return and for a second time they refused. When the vision appeared a third time, the parents finally relented. They retraced their steps to the smouldering remains of what had been their house, where, beneath the charred floorboards of his room, Nestor discovered the icon, wrapped in oilcloth and undamaged by the flames.
The following year, the family entrusted The Shepherd to Tsar Ivan IV, known as ‘Ivan the Terrible’, who promised that he, and those who came after him, would keep it safe for all eternity. From then on, the icon was established as the spiritual guardian of the Tsars. Jealously guarded by generations of rulers, it was eventually brought to a secret chamber in the Church of the Resurrection, private chapel of the Tsars on their summer estate at Tsarskoye Selo, just outside St Petersburg. Only in moments of supreme importance was The Shepherd brought out from its hiding place and shown to the people of Russia as proof of God’s blessing upon the Tsar and his safeguarding of the country.
Now the Tsar rose slowly to his feet. His face was flushed and, for the first time, the others who waited in the hall could see that he too was suffering in this oppressive August heat.
Unsteadily, he walked down the steps to the floor of the hall, where he was joined by his wife of twenty years, the Tsarina Alexandra, formerly the Grand Duchess of the German State of Hesse, against whose native country Russia was about to declare war. She wore a floor-length dress made of a wispy, off-white fabric, with a white ruffled shirt that covered her entire neck. Her wide-brimmed hat was decorated at the front with a spray of feathers and she carried a white parasol in her right hand. For a moment, their hands touched, his right against her left, and then the Tsar reached into the pocket of his tunic and withdrew a neatly folded sheet of paper.
The silence in the room grew more intense. The crowd watched, leaning forward so as not to miss a word of what was spoken. Even the faint, persistent rhythm of their breathing had been hushed.
The paper trembled in the Tsar’s hand as he began to read.
There was no mystery to what he had to say. Those who had filed into the hall two hours before to await the arrival of the Romanovs could have guessed, some of them syllable for syllable, the exact words the Tsar would use to unleash the Russian war machine upon Germany and the crumbling Habsburg Empire.
Barely a month before, on 28 June, a sickly-looking, narrow-shouldered man named Gavrilo Princip had stepped up on to the running board of a Model 1911 Gräf & Stift Double Phaeton saloon transporting the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and fired a bullet into his neck, severing the jugular vein, before putting another bullet into his wife, Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg. In the last seconds of his life, Ferdinand turned to her and, with blood pouring from his mouth on to his powder-blue tunic, begged her not to die. But it was already too late for the Duchess, and the Archduke himself perished before he reached the hospital.
Princip had been part of a small group of anarchists in Serbia who called themselves the Black Hand and had sworn to strike at the Habsburgs on behalf of their Bosnian brothers, whose country had long ago been swallowed up by Austro-Hungarians. They chose, as the date of their attack, the anniversary of Bosnia’s inclusion in the Empire and, as their target, the man who had been sent there to commemorate the day.
Armed with hand grenades and Browning automatic pistols supplied to them by a Serbian Intelligence officer, Dragutin Dimitrijević, who went by the code name ‘Apis’, members of the Black Hand stationed themselves along the route that had been planned for the Archduke’s tour of Sarajevo.
As the Archduke’s motorcade made its way across the city, one of the assassins, a man named Nedeljko Čabrinović, threw a hand grenade under the car. The grenade had a ten-second fuse and, by the time it exploded, the Archduke’s saloon had already passed by. The bomb detonated beneath a car which was travelling behind the Archduke, injuring several of his retinue and a number of nearby civilians.
Čabrinović ran for his life, chased by police and outraged members of the public. Unable to outpace his pursuers, he swallowed a vial of poison and jumped off a bridge into the Miljacka River. The poison failed to work. Čabrinović was hauled out of the water, which was less than a foot deep at that time of year, and nearly beaten to death by the crowd.
Although he was advised against it, the Archduke decided to continue his tour of the city, during which time his motorcade passed by several other members of the band who had sworn to kill him. But confronted by the physical presence of a man and a woman who had, until that moment, been only symbols to them, the assassins hesitated, one after the other, and the moment for action was lost.
An hour later, by which time he had covered most of his planned tour, the Archduke ordered his chauffeur, Leopold Lojka, to proceed to the hospital where those who had been injured earlier in the day were being treated.
Princip, considered by the other members of the Black Hand to be the least reliable of their number, was standing outside Moritz Schiller’s restaurant when the Archduke’s car drove past on its way to the hospital.
It was 10.55 a.m.
The street was bustling with pedestrians, slowing the Archduke’s progress, and a local governor, Oskar Potiorek, shouted to the chauffeur that he should have taken a different route instead.
The chauffeur, who was unfamiliar with the city, became confused and attempted to back up, but stalled the car when putting it into reverse, almost directly in front of where Princip was waiting.
Faced with this opportunity, and contrary to the expectations of his fellow assassins, Princip decided to carry out his sworn duty.
Believing
that he lacked the courage to shoot the couple in cold blood, Princip initially made up his mind to throw a hand grenade, but there were so many people crowding the sidewalk that Princip doubted he would have enough room to throw the bomb and still escape the blast. Instead, he drew his pistol, stepped out into the street, and leapt on to the running board, which acted as a step for passengers climbing in and out of the vehicle. Princip fired the gun without aiming. He was even seen to close his eyes, turning his head to the side as he pulled the trigger twice. Before he could fire a third shot, Princip was dragged to the ground by a guard of the local militia named Smail Spahović.
Hauled away to prison, Princip would die there four years later, wasted away from the effects of tuberculosis.
Within days of the assassinations, Austria had delivered a series of ultimatums to Serbia, a country only a fraction the size of the Habsburg Empire. When Serbia attempted to negotiate the details of the ultimatum, Austria responded by sending troops across the border to occupy the country.
The incursion by the Habsburgs into what Russia considered a ‘buffer state’ between itself and the potential threat of invasion by a western army forced the Tsar to begin mobilising his troops. It was no secret, to the Russians or anyone else, that at least six weeks would be required for Russia to bring its army into full preparedness for war. In that length of time, Germany and Austria-Hungary could not only mobilise their troops but could have launched a full-scale invasion. It was vital to the Russians, therefore, that they began mobilising first, if they were to have any hope of defending their country.
But Germany had plans of its own.
If Russia began to mobilise, Germany military policy dictated that the Kaiser must order his own troops to prepare for battle.
With such inflexible strategies in place, the outbreak of war became a foregone conclusion. Long-standing alliances between Britain, France and Russia on one hand, and Germany, Turkey and Austria-Hungary on the other, assured that hostilities would spread.
Too late, the Tsar came to understand that his cousin, Kaiser Wilhelm, had wanted this war all along. Surrounded by the weak and sagging Empires of the Ottomans and Habsburgs, and with only a fraction of the colonies possessed by France and Britain, Wilhelm felt that it was time for Germany to claim an empire for itself. The murder of the Archduke Ferdinand provided him with exactly the catalyst he needed to set in motion the Schlieffen Plan, by which the German Army could strike first at France and the West, before swinging east to devastate the Army of the Tsar. The Tsar appealed to the Kaiser to act as an intermediary between Russia and the Austrians, but Wilhelm had no intention of brokering a peace deal. Nicholas’s attempts to avoid hostilities were simply viewed as weakness by his German cousin, who responded by demanding that Russia demobilise its army, even as his own prepared to fight. To this, the Tsar could not agree. Doing so would have left his borders unprotected against two nations, whose armies were already deployed. Reluctantly, the Tsar instructed his Foreign Minister, Sergei Sazonov, that Russia would be going to war.
‘I solemnly swear,’ announced the Tsar, as he drew his declaration to a close, ‘that I will never make peace so long as one of the enemy is on the soil of the fatherland.’ This was the same oath Tsar Alexander I had taken when Napoleon’s troops invaded in 1812 and, months later, froze to a halt at Borodino, only a few days’ march from Moscow.
Carefully, the Tsar folded the piece of paper and returned it to his pocket. Then, with his wife at his side, he began the long walk to the end of the hall, where a balcony looked out over Palace Square, in which thousands of Russians had been waiting for this moment.
As Nicholas and Alexandra passed between the ranks of courtiers, those standing on either side began to applaud. At first, the clapping was uncertain and sporadic. No one seemed sure of what to do. But now the applause began to spread, until it echoed like thunder in the room. Encouraged, the Tsar quickened his pace. The weight of this monumental decision, which had hung on him for days while he tried hopelessly to negotiate a way out of hostilities, now seemed to rise from him and dissipate among the chandeliers.
Pekkala stood beside the balcony, just inside the hall. He had positioned himself there at the beginning of the ceremony, in the hope that it might be more bearable than sweltering in the centre of the room. He did not care for crowded places, and would gladly have stayed away, even from such an historic occasion, if the Tsar had not demanded his presence.
Now, as the Tsar stepped out on to the balcony, he turned and caught Pekkala’s eye. Immediately, the creases vanished from his forehead and the clenched muscles of his jaw relaxed. The only time he ever felt truly safe was in the presence of the Emerald Eye.
As soon as the Tsar stepped out on to the balcony, a roar went up from the square which drowned out even the hammering of palms inside the hall. If the Tsar had planned to speak a few words to the crowd, he soon thought better of it. To those below, no voice on earth could have been heard above that roar of celebration.
The Tsar stood beside a huge stone pillar, dwarfed by a shield bearing the Imperial crest which hung from the white metal railings. Unnerved by the long drop to the flagstoned street below, he gripped the railing firmly with one hand and, with the other, saluted the crowd. Glimpsing the pale moon of his palm, the cheering of the masses doubled and redoubled, until Pekkala could feel its vibration in his bones, as if he were standing on a platform as a train raced past the station.
And then the Tsar was calling his name.
Pekkala leaned around the corner. ‘Majesty?’
The Tsar beckoned to him. ‘Come,’ he said. ‘You will never see the likes of this again.’
The Tsarina, who had been greeting the throng with both hands raised above her head, saw a movement from the corner of her eye and turned, just as Pekkala stepped cautiously out on to the balcony. ‘What are you doing here?’ she snapped. ‘Get back inside with the others. Get back where you belong!’
‘He is not one of the others,’ said the Tsar, ‘and he is here because I asked him to be.’
For a moment, the Tsarina stared angrily at her husband. Then she turned abruptly and resumed waving to the people below. Pekkala looked out at the thousands of faces, like pink cat licks dappling a summer-clothing sea of browns and reds and blues and whites. Then his gaze wandered to the Tsarina.
He wondered how she must feel, being forced to celebrate this declaration of war against her own people and knowing that, no matter what happened in the months ahead, all allegiance to her adopted Russia would be doubted and dismissed.
The Tsar, by now, was completely swept up in the exhilaration of the moment. ‘Do you see, Pekkala?’ he shouted, struggling to make himself heard over the crowd, which had pressed forward against a line of policemen, whose linked arms strained to hold them back. ‘The spirit of the Russian people is unconquerable! With their faith in me and mine in them, we will bring a peace to this country that will last a thousand years! Nothing can defeat us! Not while we are guided by The Shepherd!’ He leaned across, resting his hand upon Pekkala’s. ‘And while the icon is looking after Russia, you will be looking after me!’
*
For a young man named Stefan Kohl, far to the east of Petrograd in a tiny village called Rosenheim, a war had already begun.
His family came from a long line of German farmers who had been invited by Catherine the Great, herself originally a German, to settle on the rich farmland near the river Volga. Beginning in the late 1700s, many such families arrived and were soon planting crops of wheat and rye in the Volga region’s black and fertile soil. They prospered and, although they were subjects of Russia, the Volga Germans kept their heritage intact.
But not all of the inhabitants of Rosenheim considered this cultural stubbornness to be a good idea.
Instead of the local school, where only German was spoken and the classes were so small that students of all ages were lumped together in the same rooms, Stefan’s father, Viktor Kohl, a Lutheran minist
er, sent his sons to the Russian school in the nearby town of Krasnoyar.
In Krasnoyar, the Kohl brothers were singled out for bullying, the result not only of their refusal to abandon their heritage but also of the lingering memory of the preferential treatment they had received when they first immigrated to Russia.
Stefan’s older brother, Emil, survived at the school by making himself as inconspicuous as possible, and by submitting so completely to the ridicule and torment of the bullies that they could find no sport in it, and eventually left him alone. Lacking the same instincts of self-preservation, Stefan was beaten so frequently that it became a rite of passage for Russian boys at the school to pick a fight with him.
The last of these scraps occurred between Stefan and a boy named Vyachyslav Konovalov. He was a slight and inoffensive young man, who would never have gone looking for trouble, least of all with the tall and powerful German, if he had not been goaded into it by his Russian classmates. Anxious to prove himself, Konovalov simply walked up to Stefan in the playground and took a swing at him.
Stefan, by now so used to these unprovoked attacks that nothing ever caught him by surprise, stepped back as Konovalov’s fist swept harmlessly past his face. Then, using the momentum of Konovalov’s swing to set him off balance, Stefan took hold of the boy’s arm, turned him sideways and landed a punch of his own. Stefan had been aiming to hit Konovalov in the jaw but as Konovalov spun around he lost his footing and began to fall. Stefan’s blow missed Konovalov’s jaw and struck him in the throat, causing a haemorrhage of the occipital vein. Konovalov dropped to the ground and immediately began coughing up blood. He was rushed to the hospital and, for a while, his life hung in the balance. Even though Konovalov eventually recovered from his injury, the sight of him retching up gore in the playground was too much for the school and Stefan was expelled.