“How?” said Felix. “It’s not wise to sail, with German ships prowling the waters.”
“Why shouldn’t we go by land? We’re not at war yet. I’ll arrange for my train to meet us in Calais.”
“If we’re returning by train, we’ll have to go by way of Berlin to Warsaw,” he reminded me. “We should send word to Xenia about any change of plans.”
“Such a nuisance. Only the Germans could contrive to make everything impossible.” Yet under my irritation, I was increasingly worried. It was midsummer; we were scattered across Europe on our annual vacations. Should war break out, how would any of us return home, if Berlin shut down the sole international railway to St. Petersburg?
“I could wire Princess Cecilie of Prussia,” Irina suggested. “She can petition her father-in-law. I can’t believe he would refuse us passage. We didn’t kill the archduke.”
“Of course the kaiser won’t refuse us.” I avoided Felix’s mordant regard. It was well known that for years I’d avoided passing through Germany while on the Continent. “Do so,” I told Irina. “I’ll cable Xenia to meet us in Calais. How soon can you be ready?”
“Is tomorrow soon enough?” said Felix.
I nodded. “I’ll send my carriage for you. Alix will be most unhappy.”
* * *
MY SISTER WAS more than unhappy. She started crying the moment I instructed Tania and Sophie to pack my luggage. “But you’ll be perfectly safe with us. Why must you cross Europe when there’s a war about to explode? I don’t understand.”
“I must.” I raised my voice so she could hear me, trying to stem my impatience. “Nicky needs me. The Red Cross. Provisions for our soldiers: Alexandra won’t attend to any of it. Alix, will you please stop crying? You’ll make me cry, too, and I can’t be a bawling old woman if I must contend with the kaiser.”
Alix moaned. She’d done her best to adapt to her limitations as queen mother, but she was lonely, always wanting me to stay longer than I could. I’d thought of inviting her to go to France with us and perhaps on to Hvidøre in Denmark. Now it was impossible.
“George thinks it very ill-advised of Nicky to oblige your return. You could stay here as long as required, until this awful situation is sorted out.”
“Yes, he told me the same,” I said as she craned her head to hear me. “He doesn’t want war any more than Nicky, but we mustn’t let the kaiser dictate the terms of peace, either. Let’s not make this any harder than it has to be. We’ll see each other again soon. My son needs me. You would do the same if you were in my position.”
I was frantic by the time I departed London. Overnight, Austria had begun to mobilize, and Germany had declared war on Russia for supporting Serbia. As I waited to board the train to Dover, pandemonium reigned in the station, with Felix and Irina failing to appear, though I’d sent my carriage for them. I had to depart with them; it was only as I boarded the ship for the channel crossing that they finally arrived, rushing on board with their little dogs and complaining about some trouble with their luggage. Once we reached Calais, my train was waiting, as instructed. Xenia was not. She’d sent a telegram, saying she’d meet us in Berlin. Irina assured me Princess Cecilie had agreed to intervene on our behalf, but their missing luggage was another matter. Felix left instructions for the luggage to be forwarded, and we went on, forewarned that Germany was about to close its borders.
My blood was up. We had to travel for three exhausting days, obliged to stop at regular intervals to allow German soldiers to board my train and conduct “inspections.” When we arrived in Berlin, we were brought to a halt at the station platform.
Stranded on the train as a jeering mob surrounded us outside, I ordered the curtains drawn on the carriage windows, but the insignia on my doors announced my occupancy, and the horde flung whatever they could find, splattering my carriage with mud and stones, chipping the paint and gilding until soldiers with bayonets stepped in to cordon the area. For hours, we sat like prisoners in the sweltering carriage with our panting dogs, hearing the Germans deride us, one well-aimed stone cracking a window and frightening Irina into tears. Finally, the Russian ambassador, accompanied by an official of the kaiser’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, arrived to inform us that we could proceed no further.
I forgot my manners, pointing my finger in the official’s face. “How dare you issue directives to me? I am the Dowager Empress of Russia.”
“Yes, and your country has declared war on Germany—” he started to say.
“That is a lie. You declared war on us. I demand to see the kaiser this instant.”
“His Majesty is unavailable. Your Majesty may return to England or travel on to Denmark, but not through Germany.”
“But my daughter is supposed to meet us here,” I cried out as he clicked his heels and turned to depart. The Russian ambassador stepped close to me. “I will wait for Her Imperial Highness. Your Majesty must leave. Now.”
“Now?” I gazed at him in disbelief.
Felix stood, holding out his hand to Irina. “We will wait for Xenia here. We’ll not depart until she’s with us.” He gave me a sardonic smile. “We might be at war and unable to agree on who declared it first, but the kaiser will not arrest us.”
I didn’t want to leave without them, but Felix waved aside my protests, entrusting their dogs to me and taking Irina by the hand, following the Russian ambassador out.
Two hours later, my train left Berlin. I had waited as long as I dared and Xenia had still not arrived, though other Russians had, aristocrats forced to cut short their vacations abroad. I accepted all of them on my train, unable to watch them cowering on the platform, subjected to derision. Surrounded by strangers, the dogs at my feet, I traveled through the night to Denmark. I had no idea if my granddaughter, her husband, or my daughter were safe, until I arrived and was informed they’d made it out by the skin of their teeth, boarding the last overcrowded train from Berlin to Copenhagen. Irina had taken ill from the fright, and Xenia was enraged by the long delay she’d endured at the German border, her bags confiscated and searched.
“Perhaps it was best that our luggage went missing,” remarked Felix. “I suppose I’ll have to buy some things here while Irina recovers.”
They were staying in a suite in Copenhagen’s finest hotel. After I visited my granddaughter to ascertain she mostly suffered from exhaustion—I suspected she might be pregnant, as it turned out she was—I decided to continue to Russia with Xenia, leaving Irina and Felix behind. My daughter fretted over Sandro, from whom she had no word, as he’d been in Cannes with his mistress. In no mood for her woes, I berated her. “He can find his way home on his own,” I said. “Seeing as you’ve let him do everything else as he pleases.”
Xenia shut her mouth, brooding as we departed Denmark for Finland, where the Finnish people rallied to us, alerted by the newspapers to our harrowing experience in Berlin.
“You cannot imagine my satisfaction that after disguising my feelings for fifty years, at last I’m free to say how much I detest the Germans,” I announced to the journalists. My comment was printed in every edition, making me hope it would reach the kaiser.
Not that anything I said mattered. Hungary pledged forces to Austria. Germany declared war on France and invaded Flanders. By the time we reached St. Petersburg, Great Britain had entered the fray. Felix had been right. A great war had broken out.
The murder of one archduke had unleashed damnation upon us all.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
St. Petersburg was awash in patriotic fervor that failed to impress me. I’d seen similar sentiment before during other conflicts and knew how quickly it could turn. My nephew King George V was in urgent communication with Nicky, warning that the kaiser’s aggressive militarization had amassed a powerful force, against which none of us were prepared—least of all Russia, where we barely had electricity outside our cities, our people
toiling in candlelit isolation, unaware of the modern horrors about to march across Europe.
At my insistence, Nicky appointed Sasha’s first cousin, Grand Duke Nikolai, known in the family as Nikolasha, as commander in chief of military operations. Fifty-seven years old and a career officer, Nikolasha had never led an army in the field, so the strategic planning was entrusted to our generals. Yet as I warned Nicky, as the tsar he must delegate, lest the unpredictability of war affect his reputation, which hadn’t improved since our last disastrous engagement with Japan.
Although nearly fifty-four and in exile for twelve years due to his unapproved morganatic marriage, his children having been raised by Ella, my brother-in-law Grand Duke Paul begged Nicky to forgive him and grant him a military appointment. I lent my voice in support of Paul’s return, and he reclaimed his status when Nicky appointed him to lead the First Corps of the Imperial Guard. Likewise, after much urging on my part, Nicky gave Misha leave to return from his own exile in England to serve as major general in the newly formed Caucasian Native Cavalry. As a gesture of reconciliation, Nicky accorded Misha’s four-year-old son George the title of Count Brasov. Natalia was thus free to style herself as Countess Brasova, even if she wasn’t acknowledged as Misha’s wife. Misha housed Natalia and his son in the city, where Natalia took to her imperial duty, founding two hospitals. Hearing of them, I went to tour the wards, chuckling under my breath when I saw the blank space over the entryway where Natalia’s portrait had been temporarily removed, so as not to cause me any offense.
I had no patience for such trivialities. We must all do our part. Germany posed a threat unlike any before, dividing nations and families, including mine. Due to her husband’s penurious position and residence in Austria, my sister Thyra was obliged to side with the kaiser, while my nephew in Denmark, if outwardly neutral, lent covert support to the allied nations, installing defensive cannon on my beach at Hvidøre.
However, when I said everyone must contribute, I didn’t include Alexandra, who I was certain would remain out of sight, a German-born empress hardly conducive to public appeal. Waves of anti-Prussian loathing had resulted in the smashing of German storefronts throughout St. Petersburg, prompting the renaming of the city as Petrograd to eliminate the German “burg.”
But to my astonishment, Nicky informed me that Alexandra, Olga, and Tatiana were training to become nurses, following my example. Alexandra had even installed a hospital ward in the Catherine Palace, which she would oversee. Despite my surprise, I found it commendable. My schedule was filled to capacity with my Red Cross duties; at my age, I couldn’t be expected to work in the wards. Olga and Xenia assumed that task for me in the Winter Palace, while I organized charity events to collect funds and dispatch medical supplies for the front. I called upon all my society contacts. Miechen threw open her palace for a charity gala, her famous cut-crystal bowls, once filled with gemstones for her guests, now serving as receptacles for rubles to support our war effort.
My relief work was the only means I had to keep fear at bay. We’d barely recovered from our 1905 revolution, and the Duma was not a success. War brought out the beast in man. I lived daily with the terror that should the Germans prove victorious, we’d turn on one another like Zenaida’s proverbial wolf. And while I was tireless in my endeavors, not even I could overcome the entrenched corruption in our bureaucracy. Unscrupulous ministers had no compunction in siphoning funds, sending our soldiers into battle without basic supplies. I had to telegram Nikolasha in outrage to request his personal leave for my Red Cross convoys to pass, as they were deemed unauthorized and returned to St. Petersburg, at the expense of a situation that grew more terrible by the hour.
The end of 1914 came and went in a tide of grief. Battle upon battle, each mind-numbing in its magnitude, plunged Russia into mourning, the lists of casualties so immense that the newspapers devoted separate editions to publish them. From the various fronts, injured soldiers were delivered to us on cattle-car trains after weeks of jarring travel, laid out on piles of rags, infested with lice, suffering from putrid wounds, dysentery, and barbaric battlefield amputations. Every hospital overflowed. Any palace not occupied—and many that were—was requisitioned as a ward, where society ladies who’d never fastened a button by themselves toiled under ghastly conditions until they fainted from the screams of the dying or the stench of gangrene.
Germany was relentless, foraging like a dragon through the mud and blood of the trenches, unloosing monstrous modern weapons of gas and artillery. I began to think any peace accord would be preferable to this horrid waste of life, with so many dying for a cause that few understood. I thought nothing could be worse than a war waged in the name of vengeance, but I hadn’t begun to realize what lay ahead.
* * *
“ARE YOU PLANNING to stay here forever?” Miechen demanded, having arrived in Kiev in a fury, on her private train. I’d repaired to the southern city in the Ukrainian region with my daughter Olga to establish a triage infirmary, after another terrible series of battles throughout the spring had resulted in Poland’s fall to the Germans and the decimation of our forces. Those of our men who’d managed to survive and claw their way back home had arrived in tatters, emaciated, frostbitten, and gravely wounded, with Polish refugees flooding in behind them, literally carrying whatever they could salvage.
“You know I’m here to assist Olga,” I said, bringing Miechen to the upstairs drawing room of Kiev’s Mariinsky Palace. The room was filled with furnishings that had been lugged up from the lower level, now occupied by our infirmary. “We had no place to put any of the wounded. Every hospital in the city is filled beyond capacity. Because Kiev is closer to the front lines, Olga thought it the ideal place to set up a new ward and refugee center. How could I begrudge her? She’s been tireless, training staff and spending sixteen hours a day on her feet as a nurse.”
Watching Miechen’s gaze narrow as she took in the extra chairs, tables, paintings, and statues heaped about us, sheets tossed over them like forgotten artifacts, I didn’t add that my youngest daughter’s lover, Kulikovsky, a colonel in active service, had suffered a head wound in Poland, which partly motivated Olga’s determination to remain here.
“I must commend Olga for her dedication,” Miechen said, “but this hardly looks comfortable for a dowager empress, Minnie.”
“I can assure you, our soldiers have far less comforts,” I retorted. I signaled Sophie for tea, resigned to receive Miechen with the social niceties she required. “You needn’t have come all this way. I’m well enough, under the circumstances.”
“I didn’t come to see if you are well. I came to tell you that mystic of hers is more of a menace than ever.” Before I could reply, she went on, “He’s advising her. He’s telling her which ministers to favor and which to dismiss. The Duma protested in mid-session, recommending she be shut away in a convent. The city is in an uproar; we have shortages of everything. As you surely know, our army is so poorly supplied they couldn’t keep out a pack of dogs, much less the kaiser. Yet she sends prayer books to German prisoners of war and forwards her mystic’s political recommendations to Nicky, clogging up his private line at his stavka. The talk everywhere is that Rasputin now rules Russia and that Nicky will dismiss Nikolasha to assume his post as commander in chief, with Alexandra overseeing the state.”
I remained silent as Sophie brought in the tea, served us, and retreated.
Miechen glared at me. “Are you going to say anything? Or better yet, do something?”
“What would you have me do?” I met her stare. “She has made it clear she’ll broach no interference where the mystic is concerned. We are at war. I cannot fight her when Russians are dying by the thousands.”
“Even more will die if you don’t. She’s hated by everyone. They call her Nemka, the German spy, and say that foul man is her lover. She may hide the truth for her dependence on him, but I know.” When I recoiled, she said, “Th
e boy is ill. Is it the bleeding disorder?”
Though I tried to resist, I glanced over my shoulder, to the ajar doors through which Sophie had disappeared. Other servants wandered the halls; there were ears everywhere.
“Minnie.” Miechen’s firm voice wrenched my gaze back to her. “Answer me.”
I swallowed. The admission stuck in my throat, but my lack of response was enough.
“As I thought.” Miechen dumped too much sugar into her cup, as usual. I wondered why she didn’t just clamp a cube between her teeth like the peasants and drink her tea through it. “She thinks her miracle worker can heal the child, so she’ll tear down Russia to defend him. You must intervene. No one but you can persuade Nicky to reason.”
“Nicky promised me that he’ll not assume military command. He appointed Nikolasha to that purpose and will not—”
“Nikolasha is losing the war. We are losing. The Germans are sending zeppelin raids over London! She thinks Nicky must assert himself as supreme commander because Rasputin told her so. My Cyril informed me Nicky said he’ll consider relieving Nikolasha of command once he returns to the city to review the new Chevalier Guard, though what he intends to review is beyond me. Will he dispatch riderless horses into battle to confound the Germans? We have no men to recruit. You know it better than anyone. You’re setting up wards in every nook and cranny. At this rate, by Epiphany we’ll be performing surgeries on our dining room tables.”
I picked up my cup but was so upset I could barely hold it.
Miechen made a contrite sound. “I understand your predicament. He’s not only our emperor, he’s your son. He chose her, though you knew she was unsuitable, and her son is ill, so how can you set yourself against her when, as a mother, you know how she suffers? But she must be stopped. This is not the time for her to assert her delusions of grandeur. She must keep her nose out of our affairs, and her mystic must be eliminated.”
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