Born to Rule: Five Reigning Consorts, Granddaughters of Queen Victoria

by Julia P. Gelardi

  Tsarina Alexandra reluctantly agreed with Nicholas to let Alexei stay with him at Stavka in order to learn about command. Her fears proved correct when, in 1915, Alexei suffered a serious hemophiliac attack and was near death. But the frantic tsarina was reassured when she heard from Rasputin; for the staretzhad uttered the most comforting words Alix could have hoped for: “Thanks be to God! He has given me your son’s life once more.”3 Alexei did indeed survive this latest dance with death. For the tsarina, Rasputin had delivered yet another miracle.

  Having entered the war, Romania found that the cost of siding with the Allies was dear. Bearing down on the country was a quadruple onslaught from the German and Austro-Hungarian armies along with Bulgarians and Turks. When the Romanian troops tried to make headway into Transylvania, they fell back after two weeks of fighting. Dreams of a Greater Romania were shattered. Russia was not keen on coming to the aid of its ally once the pro-German Boris Stürmer ran the Russian Foreign Ministry; and neither were the French much help. Queen Marie was moved to make desperate pleas to George V and Nicholas II for help as the German forces tightened their grip: to the north were Erich von Falken-hayn’s troops and to the south were those of Field Marshal August von Mack-ensen. In the end, the much-hoped-for rescue through the famed Brusilov offensive did not materialize. The Germans managed to check the Russian advance through their superior tactical skill and weaponry.

  On the first day alone of a daylight bombing raid on Bucharest, some four hundred people were killed or wounded. One resident marveled at the audacity of the enemy fighters, describing how “the planes fly very low—they have no fear of the guns here, evidently”4 Another depicted the brutal German onslaught as a horrifying experience, describing “puddles or streams of blood on the streets.”5 The royal family—with the exception of the king and crown prince, who went to Army Headquarters—were sequestered at Buftea, Prince Stirbey’s home an hour away from Bucharest.

  From there, Marie ventured off to hospitals to tend to the wounded and dying. Everywhere she went, she was touched by the uncomplaining soldiers, ordinary Romanians. Charles Vopicka, the American ambassador to Romania, accompanied the queen during a tour of one hospital set up in the Royal Palace. He followed Queen Marie from room to room, watching her as she handed out cigarettes, candy, or cigars from a tray carried by her younger son, Nicolas. To Vopicka, she seemed “utterly downcast, and the tears continually rolled down her cheeks.” A good deal of this sadness came from the terrifying thought, as she said, that “if the Germans captured Bucharest, these wounded soldiers; who would be unable to leave, would meet their death.”

  Besides trying to keep herself from falling into depression, Marie was worried that King Ferdinand might falter. The thought that Nando might not live up to his role as king exasperated Missy, who confided to her diary that “the King needs to throw off certain old bonds, old habits, all those restrictions which stifle free action. Oh! Sometimes I do mind being a woman.”7

  The one person throughout these harrowing times she could rely on completely was Barbo Stirbey, who tutored the queen in the intricacies of international relations and war strategy. Every day, they met at Buftea, often going off for rides on Stirbey’s sprawling estate. King Ferdinand and Nadèje Stirbey made no move to break up the closeness of their respective spouses. Perhaps they realized that Marie and Barbo made a formidable team for Romania, and in a time of war, self-preservation mattered more than any jealousies over their relationship.

  For the queen, already immersed in fear and uncertainty, October 1916 proved a particularly devastating month. Her youngest child, three-year-old Prince Mircea, fell ill at Buftea with typhoid fever. This precocious bundle of joy, so full of life, had suddenly become desperately ill. Within days, death was imminent. On 29 October, Marie’s forty-first birthday, Mircea’s final struggle began. The tiny youngster screamed and gnashed his teeth. But in this, her darkest hour, Marie never forgot others or her duties as Queen of Romania. On All Souls Day, Mircea’s suffering ended. Marie held his small hand in hers as her boy breathed his last. The devastated mother placed him in a little coffin, with a rich cloth of gold and red brocade, and saw him buried in the chapel at Cotroceni Palace.

  Barbo Stirbey had shared Marie’s unbearable grief at Mircea’s death. Together, they had fought to persuade Ferdinand to fight against Germany; together, they continued to fight for Romania; and now they were united in their mutual sorrow over the passing of the young prince, who was perhaps fathered by Barbo. Barbo’s “constant presence” in the sickroom and the fact that Marie “often spoke with pride of [the child’s] dark-brown eyes” while “all the other children were blue-eyed, like Ferdinand and herself,” makes it seem likely that Barbo was indeed the father.8

  No sooner had Marie buried her son than the Germans were on Bucharest’s doorstep. The situation was so serious that at the end of November, “the panic,” according to one resident, “was indescribable.”9 Prince Stirbey advised Marie to evacuate to Jassy, the capital of the province of Moldavia, less than a dozen miles from the border with Russia.

  Marie and her five children were left with no choice. One of the last things Marie did was to say farewell to Mircea’s grave. There she wept by herself, consumed with grief for her dead son and for the fate of Romania. But she soon overcame her sorrow: “there was no time to cry over a personal grief, in the hour of disaster so much depends upon the leaders not losing their heads.”10

  The king and the government followed, leaving Bucharest in the beginning of December 1916 to join the queen in Jassy. They left in the nick of time as the capital fell to the Germans on 6 December. The strain on Jassy, a university town of some seventy thousand, now became acute. Refugees flooded in, swelling the population to over 1 million. Hospitals overflowed with desperate patients. Doctors were few and medical supplies woefully inadequate. As the Russian troops marched through, so did the fleas they brought with them, infected with the dreaded typhus. During a bitterly cold winter—the worst in half a century— where temperatures dropped to minus 30 degrees Celsius, everyone in Jassy found themselves seeking food, shelter, and medical help. Carcasses of emaciated horses, frozen solid, lined the streets. One eyewitness was struck by the tragic scenes at Jassy—the “shocking sight” of “poor unfortunates sink down upon the snow in the broad daylight—never to rise again! It is common to see old men, dragging their feet wrapped in sacking padded with straw over the icy pavements, search (very often in vain) for crusts and bones thrown away by someone more fortunate that they.…It is,” concluded this witness, “despairing to be surrounded with such suffering without the means of alleviating it.”11

  Members of the Romanian royal family were not immune from the hardships at Jassy, as they found themselves subsisting on small rations of bad-tasting beans, interspersed with whatever could be scraped together from the earth and unpalatable animals. The same tragic scene played itself out in Bucharest as the city’s residents struggled with pitiful supplies of fuel and food.

  The fuel shortage was particularly poignant because Romania possessed rich deposits of petroleum fuel, which the country had been exporting. But when it became evident that Germans were advancing into the country, the Romanians were determined not to let the oil-rich fields of Ploesti fall into enemy hands. A mad dash to beat the Germans unfolded as the scorched-earth policy took effect. With the Germans right on their heels, a group of dedicated workers destroyed everything they could get their hands on in the fields of Ploesti. Sir John Norton Griffiths, a wealthy engineering contractor, was assigned to supervise this unenviable task in the autumn of 1916. When the Romanians realized he was in their country to destroy its riches, including the corn that might end up feeding the advancing Germans, they tried to delay Griffiths. He then “went straight to Queen Marie, got her backing, and more or less did the job single-handed.”12

  In scenes worthy of the pages of Dante, tens of thousands of cubic meters of gasoline were set on fire, creating infernos that black
ened the skies with asphyxiating gases. Griffiths—a strong, muscular man—personally destroyed oil pipes, swinging a heavy sledgehammer, striking blow after blow. Together with his valiant team, many of whom suffered burns from inflammable clouds of gas, they torched their way through miles of territory, ignoring exhaustion and danger. The work itself was incredibly perilous, but added to this was a sense of urgency as the Germans were nipping at the workers’ heels. The price Romania paid was high as rivers of burning oil, roaring explosions from huge fuel tanks, and clouds of burning, poisonous gas suffocated every living thing in their path. According to one account, “the tortured leaping flames, the towering columns of dense black smoke…the flames rising like great leaping tongues nearly four hundred feet high” all amounted to “a panorama of magnificent horror!” In the end, “more than seventy refineries…were destroyed and more than 80,000 wagon-loads of petrol were burnt in the reservoirs.”13 All in all, the losses Romania sustained in the exercise amounted to a staggering 1 billion French francs. Griffiths and his men, now a largely forgotten set of heroes, had risked life and limb for Romania. But the Romanians succeeded in destroying their nation’s wealth in a bid to beat the Germans.

  In Russia, wounded soldiers coming home from the front poured in. Many large buildings, including several palaces in and around St. Petersburg, were turned into working hospitals. The large Catherine Palace at Tsarskoe Selo became a hospital for Russian officers. When war broke out, Alexandra was energized to do everything in her power to help Russia’s soldiers. Filled with a renewed sense of purpose, the tsarina plunged into war work, and for a while—at least while Alexei enjoyed good health—her thoughts were rarely consumed by the need to have Rasputin at her disposal. The tsarina and her two eldest daughters, Olga and Tatiana, along with the ever present Anna Viroubova, volunteered to become qualified nurses. They assiduously attended courses in medicine and were proud of having earned their Red Cross nursing certificates after passing their exams, along with dozens of other women volunteers. It was a most satisfying accomplishment where the tsarina was concerned. Viroubova, who knew Alexandra well and saw her nearly every day, recalled: “I think I never saw her happier than on the day, at the end of our two months’ intensive training, she marched at the head of the procession of nurses to receive the red cross and the diploma of a certificated war nurse.”14

  Once Tsarina Alexandra earned her credentials, she set about devoting every possible moment to ministering to the sick and dying. Hers was a truly hands-on approach, for Alexandra never shuddered from helping in the most heart-wrenching cases. One moment she could be found in the operating theater, handing out instruments; another would find her making bedside rounds. Here,she made no distinction between classes. Many an officer and soldier alike were cared for by their very own tsarina.

  Anna Viroubova spoke highly of Alexandra’s efforts during the Great War. “I have seen the Empress of Russia in the operating room of a hospital holding ether cones, handling sterilized instruments, assisting in the most difficult operations, taking from the hands of the busy surgeons amputated legs and arms, removing bloody and even vermin-infected dressings, enduring all the sights and smells and agonites of that most dreadful of all places, a military hospital in the midst of war.” Overall, “the Empress was spared nothing, nor did she wish to be.”15 Evidently Alexandra of Russia surpassed even the valiant efforts of Marie of Romania. Whereas Marie dutifully visited and comforted the wounded in hospitals, Alexandra went a step further, actually participating in the often gruesome task of assisting in the operating rooms.

  Alexandra was almost always on her feet for hours on end, and often she did not get to bed until midnight. The majority of her working hours were spent visiting injured and dying soldiers in the hospitals. As the tsarina went from one soldier to another in the wards, she became a beacon of hope for the unfortunate men. Some would even call for their tsarina before they went for an amputation. Alexandra never refused these requests. More than once were the words heard: “Tsaritsa! Stand near me. Hold my hand that I may have courage.”16

  Alexandra devoted as much time and energy as possible to her nursing. She confessed to Nicholas: “My consolation when I feel very down & wretched is to go to the very ill & try & bring them a ray of light & love—”17 And again, “Our work in the hospital is my consolation & the visiting the specially suffering ones in the Big Palace.”18

  Sadly for Alexandra Feodorovna, only a very small portion of the population was aware of her work. Never one to show her emotions, and certainly not one to show off her accomplishments, the tsarina inevitably was bound to be seen in a negative light by the many who were unaware of her contributions to the war effort. Major General Sir John Hanbury-Williams (chief of the British military mission in Russia from 1914–17) concluded that “the Empress through shyness and a nervous nature is but rarely seen, though she has worked splendidly for the sick and wounded, and has a really kind and sympathetic nature, which unfortunately no one experiences except those who are very near her, or who happen to have seen a good deal of her, as I have done.”19 Nevertheless, as the historian Dominic Lieven has rightly pointed out, the tsarina, “like her husband…hated self-advertisement”; but a certain amount of self-advertisement, like it or not, “is an essential feature of modern politics.”20 And as events in Russia had shown of late, the country and the rest of Europe were moving quickly toward modernity. What Alexandra failed to realize but her counterpart, Marie of Romania, grasped intuitively, was the fact that Marie knew that she had to put a public face on her nursing role, and she benefitted tremendously from the very exposed way she went about nurturing the injured and dying. Alexandra may have succeeded in keeping her work in the background, but in the process, ironically, she lost a golden opportunity to get closer to many of her subjects.

  With her ill health, Alexandra found herself exhausted by her duties. In time, much to her regret, she had to cut back on personal care of the sick. “I overtired my heart again,” she admitted to the Bishop of Ripon, “so I had to give up my hospital work for some time. I miss it sorely.” She went on: “It does one no end of good being with those brave fellows—how resignedly they bear all pain & loss of limbs.”21

  Alexandra’s efforts to help Russia’s suffering were not limited to nursing. When she had the time, she went over petitions sent for her attention. She also saw to the organization of numerous hospitals and sanitary trains used for disinfection purposes. All these charitable endeavors cost money, and the tsarina gave large sums. These efforts reaped dividends. She wrote of them to Nicholas, telling him, for instance, that “we have got masses of cribs in these three last months all over Russia for our Society for Mothers & Babies—its [sic] a great joy to me to see how all have taken to it so quickly & have realised the gravity of the question, now especially every Baby must be cared for, as the losses are so heavy at the war.”22 Toward the end of 1914, thanks to the tsarina, eighty-five hospitals were operating “under her patronage in the Petrograd area alone.” This was “but one example of Alexandra’s ability as an administrator.”23 The tsar himself was impressed with his wife’s success. He told her so in February 1916: “the sums received & spent by yr. [Red Cross] depot are enormous—I would have never expected them to reach such a size.”24 Alexandra’s selfless devotion to those in need, juxtaposed with her ever-increasing but misguided involvement in politics, underscore a complex character. On the one hand, she was humble and self-effacing; on the other, when it came to autocracy and Rasputin, she was as haughty and domineering as one could get.

  For the normally indefatigable Marie of Romania, the task of rallying those around her proved daunting. In mid-December 1916, she confessed in her diary that many were coming to her, pleading for help; overwhelmed by it all, she wanted to cry out: “It is enough, it is enough!”25 But Marie forged on. She went about her hospital rounds, in her familiar nurse’s uniform, bravely facing the stench and gore that awaited her. These daily rounds were complicated by de
adly outbreaks of typhoid. Spreading quickly, typhoid did not discriminate among its victims. Marie continued her visits knowing she could be struck down at any moment by the dreaded disease that had nearly killed her husband and oldest son and had already claimed the life of her youngest child. She placed her trust in God, hoping fervently that she would escape. Eschewing rubber gloves, even in the most serious cases, so as to bring as much humanity as she could when touching the infectious patients, the queen could easily have succumbed. But she was not completely careless; one historian notes that “every night she stepped fully-dressed into a tub of boiling water, only her riding boots saving her from serious burns. Then she shed her clothes into the scalding liquid to kill the typhus-carrying lice that clung to them like a gray powder.”2