There was a tender charm in this intimate companionship between father and son, briefly shared in the middle of a great war; for them, the room at Mogilev became a tiny haven of peace and affection set in the eye of the hurricane. “He brings much light into my life here,” Nicholas wrote. Later, he said, “His company gives light and life to all of us.”
Every morning at Headquarters, the Tsarevich did lessons with Gilliard on the veranda. Afterward, he played in the garden with a toy rifle. “He always carries his little gun with him and walks backwards and forwards on the path marching and singing loudly,” wrote Nicholas. “I went into the little garden where Alexei was marching about singing loudly and Derevenko was walking on another path, whistling.… His left hand hurts him a little because yesterday he worked in the sand on the river bank but he pays no attention and is very cheerful. After lunch, he rests for about a half an hour and Mr. Gilliard reads to him while I write. At the table, he sits on my left hand.… Alexei loves to tease. It is extraordinary how he has lost his shyness. He always follows me when I greet my gentlemen.”
In the afternoons, “we go out in the car … either into a wood or on the bank of the river, where we light a fire and I walk about nearby.” On hot days in summer, they swam in the Dnieper: “He splashes about near the bank. I bathe not far away.” Once “we found a lovely place with soft sand where he played happily. The sand was as soft and white as on the seashore. Baby [Alexis] ran about shouting. Fedorov allowed him to go barefoot. Naturally, he was delighted.” Sometimes, playmates appeared. “Did he [Alexis] describe to you how the peasant boys played all sorts of games with him?”
In Mogilev, meals were served in the dining room of the governor’s house or, in warm weather, in a large green tent set up in the garden. Along with the regular Headquarters staff, there were always “colonels and generals who are returning from the front.… [I] invite them to lunch and dinner. Mogilev is like an enormous hotel where crowds of people pass through.” Alexis plunged happily into this bustling atmosphere. “He sits on my left hand and behaves well but sometimes becomes inordinately gay and noisy, especially when I am talking with the others in the drawing room. In any case, it is pleasant for them and makes them smile.”
The Tsarevich’s favorites at Headquarters were “the foreigners—the military attachés of Britain, France, Italy, Serbia, Belgium and Japan. Before long, they had, in effect, adopted the high-spirited boy as their mascot. “I had expected to find a very delicate and not very lively boy,” wrote Hanbury-Williams, who became one of the Tsarevich’s favorites. “But in the periods of what may be called his good health, he had all the spirits and the mischief of any ordinary boy of that age.… He wore a khaki uniform and long Russian boots and was very proud of himself as a soldier, had excellent manners and spoke various languages well and clearly.
“As time went on and his first shyness wore off, he treated us as old friends and … had always some bit of fun with us. With me it was to make sure that each button on my coat was properly fastened, a habit which naturally made me take great care to have one or two unbuttoned, in which case he used at once to stop and tell me I was ‘untidy again,’ give a sigh at my lack of attention to these details and stop and carefully button me all up again.”
Once Alexis had made sure of his new friends, quite incredible things began to happen, especially at lunch: “While the rest of the party were eating zakouska, every conceivable game went on, a ‘rag’ in fact, ending most likely in a game of football with anything that came handy. The Belgian general of whom he was very fond, and used always to call ‘Papa de Ricquel,’ being a man of no mean girth, gave great opportunities for attack. The devoted tutor was almost in despair and it generally ended with the intervention of the Emperor, by which time the small boy was carefully hidden behind a curtain. He then used to reappear with a twinkle in his eye and solemnly march to take his place at the table. There he would begin again by a bread pellet attack … which risked all the Imperial china and glasses. If, however, he had a stranger sitting next to him he had all the courtesy and charm of his father, talking freely and asking sensible questions. The moment, however, that we adjourned to the anteroom the games used to begin again, and went on fast and furious till either the Emperor or his tutor carried him off.”
After lunch, the games often continued in the garden: “He dragged some of us off after lunch in the tent to a round fountain in the garden which had porpoise heads all round it, with two holes in each to represent the eyes. The game is to plug up these holes with one’s fingers, then turn on the fountain full split and suddenly let go. The result was that I nearly drowned the Emperor and his son and they returned the compliment, and we all had to go back and change, laughing till we nearly cried.” Nicholas, expecting that the Empress might disapprove of such rough games, wrote an explanatory note: “I am writing … having come in from the garden with wet sleeves and boots as Alexei has sprayed us at the fountain. It is his favorite game … peals of laughter ring out. I keep an eye in order to see that things do not go too far.”
Late in October, to show his son that war was not all games and toy forts and lead soldiers, the Tsar took Alexis on a month-long trip the length of the battlefront. In Galicia, returning after dark from a mass review, Nicholas and Alexis made a surprise visit to a front-line dressing station. The rooms were lit only by torches. Moving from one bandaged body to the next, Nicholas spoke to the suffering men, many of whom could scarcely believe that the Tsar himself was walking among them. Close behind came Alexis, deeply moved by the groaning and suffering all around him. Later, standing before a field of men on parade, Nicholas asked those who had served since the beginning of the war to raise their hands. “But very few hands were lifted above those thousands of heads,” wrote Gilliard. “There were whole companies in which not a man moved.… [This] made a very great impression on Alexis Nicolaievich.”
Wherever they went, Alexis was insatiably curious. At Reval, on the. Baltic coast, they visited four British submarines which had been sinking German ships in the Baltic. The hulls and conning towers were sheathed in sparkling ice as Nicholas thanked the officers and men and awarded the St. George Cross to the four Royal Navy captains. For Alexis, the submarines had an extraordinary fascination. “Alexei … crept into every possible hole,” wrote Nicholas. “I even overheard him talking freely to a lieutenant asking him questions.” That night, to the Tsarevich’s delight, the Tsar brought the four submarine captains back to the train for dinner.
In the south, the Tsar and his son inspected four regiments of Caucasian cavalry. Alexis was thrilled, and even the stolid Gilliard was impressed: “Among other units were the Kuban and Terek Cossacks, perched high in the saddle and wearing the huge fur caps which make them look so fierce. As we started to return, the whole mass of cavalry suddenly moved forward, took stations on both sides of the road, broke into a gallop, tearing up the hills, sweeping down the banks of ravines, clearing all obstacles, and thus escorted us to the station in a terrific charge in which men and animals crashed together on the ground while the melée rose the raucous yells of the Caucasian mountaineers. It was a spectacle at once magnificent and terrible.”
Besides visiting troops, father and son toured cities, factories, shipyards and hospitals. In Odessa, wrote Nicholas, “the streets were crowded with young soldiers and … people.… Our Treasure [Alexis] sat with a serious face, saluting all the time. Through the tumult of the crowd and the shouts of ‘Hurrah!’ I managed to hear women’s voices calling out, ‘The Heir!, The Angel!, The pretty boy!’ … He heard them too and smiled at them.” Once when the train stopped outside a town, “Alexei’s cat ran away and hid under a big pile of board. We put on our great coats and went to look for her. Nagorny found her at once with a flashlight, but it took a long time to make the wretch come out. She would not listen to Alexei. At last, he caught her by one of her hind legs and dragged her through the narrow chink.” Returning to Headquarters after a month on the train, Nic
holas reported happily to Alexandra, “Alexei has borne the strain … astonishingly well, only occasionally he suffered from a little bleeding at the nose.”
The Empress, as if unable to stay away from the exclusive male retreat of her husband and son, made occasional visits to Headquarters. Bringing her daughters and sometimes Anna Vyrubova, she lived aboard her train. During the mornings, while the Tsar was at work, she sat by the river or visited the families of peasants and railway workers. At noon, staff motorcars arrived to bring the ladies to the governor’s house for lunch. In the afternoon, while the family went driving together, the cars went back to the train for the maids, gowns and jewels needed to costume the women for dinner. In a house crowded with men, the ladies changed as best they could in niches and closets.
At dinner, Hanbury-Williams found her “much easier to get on with than I expected.… She told me how terribly shy she felt on coming into the room where we all were assembled … the chiefs of the Allied military missions … and a galaxy of Russian officers.… The moment one began to laugh over things, she brightened up and talk became easy and unaffected.… It seems extraordinary how little it takes to cheer her up.… She is so proud of Russia and so anxious that the Allies should win the war.… War to her seems almost more terrible, if such a thing is possible, than to other people. But she spoke of it to me as the ‘passing out of darkness into the light of victory. Victory we must have.’ ”
As long as Alexis was alone with his father, the Tsar carried the day-to-day burden of caring for his son’s health. His letters to Alexandra were filled with detailed descriptions: “When we arrived by train in the evening, Baby played the fool,” he wrote late in November 1915. “[He] pretended to fall off his chair and hurt his left arm (under the armpit). It did not hurt afterwards but swelled up instead. And so the first night here, he slept very restlessly, kept on sitting up in bed, groaning, calling for you and talking to me. Every few minutes he fell off to sleep again. This went on till 4 o’clock. Yesterday he spent in bed. I explained to everyone that he had simply slept badly.… Thank God, it is all over today except for paleness and a slight bleeding at the nose. For the rest, he is exactly as he usually is and we walked together in the little garden.”
The following summer, in July 1916, Nicholas wrote: “This morning while we were still in bed, Alexei showed me that his elbow would not bend; then he took his temperature and calmly announced that he had better stay in bed all day.” In November 1916: “The Little One is suffering from a strained vein in the upper part of his right leg.… During the night, he kept waking and groaned in his sleep. Fedorov has ordered him to lie quietly in bed.” On the following day: “Baby’s leg hurts from time to time and he cannot get off to sleep the first part of the night. When I come to bed, he tries not to groan.”
Although the situation was unprecedented in the history of war and monarchy—an emperor, the commander-in-chief of the world’s largest army, spending his nights caring for a groaning child—Nicholas carefully avoided any specific discussion of his son’s illness. “He rarely refers to the Tsarevich’s health but tonight I could see that he was anxious about him,” wrote Hanbury-Williams. “I suppose he recognizes that the boy’s health can never be satisfactory and no doubt wonders what will happen if he lives to succeed to the throne. Anyhow, he is doing all he possibly can to train him on what, if he ever succeeds, will be a very heavy task. He wishes very much that he may be able to travel about and see something of the world, and gain experiences from other countries which will be of use to him in Russia, with all the complications, as he put it to me, of this enormous Empire.”
For the most part, all went well, the disease remained under control, and Nicholas enjoyed the deceptive sense of calm and stability which often comes to the parents of hemophiliacs. But the disease, capricious and malevolent, awaits precisely these moments to strike. In December 1915, the Tsarevich suffered a severe nosebleed. The attack was the worst since Spala, the kind which haunted the dreams of the Empress. Unlike other external bleeding which can be checked by pressure and bandaging, nosebleeds pose an extreme danger to hemophiliacs. Difficult to treat, unsusceptible to pressure, once started they are almost impossible to check.
Nicholas and Alexis were on the train headed for Galicia to inspect a number of regiments of the Imperial Guard. “On the morning of our departure,” recalled Gilliard, “Alexis Nicolaievich, who had caught cold the previous day and was suffering from a heavy catarrh in the head, began to bleed heavily at the nose as a result of sneezing violently. I summoned Professor Fedorov but he could not entirely stop the bleeding.… During the night, the boy got worse. His temperature had gone up and he was getting weaker. At three o’clock in the morning Professor Fedorov, alarmed at his responsibilities, decided to have the Tsar roused and ask him to return to Mogilev where he could attend to the Tsarevich under more favorable conditions.
“The next morning we were on our way back to GHQ, but the boy’s state was so alarming that it was decided to take him back to Tsarskoe Selo.… The patient’s strength was failing rapidly. We had to have the train stopped several times to be able to change the [nose] plugs. Alexis Nicolaievich was supported in bed by his sailor Nagorny (he could not be allowed to lie full length), and twice in the night he swooned away and I thought the end had come.”
During the crisis, Anna Vyrubova was with the Empress: “I was with the Empress when the telegram came announcing the return of the Emperor and the boy to Tsarskoe Selo, and I can never forget the anguish of mind with which the poor mother awaited the arrival of her sick, perhaps dying child. Nor can I ever forget the waxen, grave-like pallor of the little pointed face as the boy with infinite care was borne into the palace and laid on his little white bed. Above the blood-soaked bandages his large blue eyes gazed at us with pathos unspeakable, and it seemed to all around the bed that the last hour of the unhappy child was at hand. The physicians kept up their ministrations, exhausting every means known to science to stop the incessant bleeding. In despair, the Empress sent for Rasputin. He came into the room, made the sign of the cross over the bed and, looking intently at the almost moribund child, said quietly to the kneeling parents: ‘Don’t be alarmed. Nothing will happen.’ Then he walked out of the room and out of the palace. That was all. The child fell asleep and the next day was so well that the Emperor left for the Stavka. Dr. Derevenko and Professor Fedorov told me afterwards that they did not even attempt to explain the cure.”
Gilliard’s account gives more credit to the doctors’ efforts, but does not challenge Vyrubova’s assertion that the Empress was convinced that only Rasputin had saved her son: “At last we reached Tsarskoe Selo. It was eleven o’clock. The Empress, who had been torn with anguish and anxiety, was on the platform with the Grand Duchesses. With infinite care the invalid was taken to the palace. The doctors ultimately succeeded in cauterizing the scar which had formed at the spot where a little blood vessel had burst. Once more the Empress attributed the improvement in her son’s condition to the prayers of Rasputin, and she remained convinced that the boy had been saved thanks to his intervention.”
Nicholas, sadly leaving his son surrounded again by women and pillows, returned to his life at the front. From Galicia, where he reviewed the Guards, he wrote, “They did not march past owing to the deep, thick mud—they would have lost their boots under my very eyes.… It was already getting dark.… A Te Deum [was held] in the center of a huge square in complete darkness. Having sat down in the car, I shouted ‘Good bye’ to the troops and from the invisible field rose a terrible roar.… On that day, I inspected 84,000 soldiers, Guards alone, and fed 105 commanding officers [on the train].… Tell the Little One I miss him terribly.”
At Mogilev, a stillness settled over the governor’s house. Conversations at meals became formal and professional. “Tell him,” Nicholas wrote to Alexandra, “that they [the foreigners] always finish their zakouski in the little room and remember him. I also think of him very often, especially in the
garden and in the evenings and I miss my cup of chocolate [with him].”
The Tsarevich remained at Tsarskoe Selo the rest of the winter, regaining his strength. The Empress reported his progress in every letter: “Thank God, your heart can be quiet about Alexei … Baby has got up and will lunch in my room. He looks sweet, thin, with big eyes.… Sunbeam is at last going out and I hope he will regain his pink cheeks again.… He received a charming telegram from all the foreigners at Headquarters in remembrance of the little room in which they used to sit and chat during zakouski.”
By February, he was well enough to go out into the park to play in the snow. One day, the Tsar—home for a few days—and his sisters were with him. “He [Alexis] slipped behind his youngest sister, who had not seen him coming, and threw a huge snowball at her,” wrote Gilliard. “His father … called the boy to him and talked to him severely: ‘You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Alexis! You’re behaving like a German to attack anyone from behind when they can’t defend themselves. It’s horrid and cowardly. Leave that sort of behavior to the Germans!’ ”
In May 1916, six months after Alexis was stricken, the Empress reluctantly allowed him to return to Headquarters. He was promoted from private to corporal. “He is very proud of his stripes and more mischievous than ever,” reported Hanbury-Williams. “At lunch the Tsarevich pushed all the cups, bread, toast, menus, etc which he could get hold of across to me and then called the attention of his father to count all the pieces I had.”
Nicholas and Alexandra: The Classic Account of the Fall of the Romanov Dynasty Page 39
