Central Europe reacted like a row of dominoes to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914. On the twenty-eighth of July, Austria formally declared war on Serbia, and Germany declared war on Russia four days later. The following day, Kaiser Wilhelm invaded Luxembourg and demanded that Ferdinand of Roumania’s first cousin, the king of Belgium, permit the German army to march straight through on its way to invade France. King Albert of the Belgians refused. On August 2, 1914, the Kaiser asked King Carol to support the German offensive against Russia.
Ailing and weak, Carol was torn. He was all for supporting Germany, as was his queen, Carmen Sylva, who had also been born a German. Marie recognized that England would not remain on the sidelines for long, and would eventually fight against Germany. Her heart sympathized with Britain, which she was convinced would prevail. Irresolute as ever, even as he faced his uncle’s imminent demise and his own ascent to the throne, Ferdinand was in favor of Roumania remaining neutral for as long as possible, a position the kingdom would indeed retain through the first two years of the Great War.
It was Prince Stirbey who brought Marie the news of King Carol’s death on the morning of October 10, 1914, making Ferdinand the new king (Carol’s artsy wife, now the dowager, would die on March 2, 1916). “I was Queen. I felt wholly capable of being a Queen,” Marie declared after Carol’s death. Her husband, however, was not so ready for prime time. Marie confided in a letter to one of her sisters, “Poor Nando, it is hard for a character like his to take up such heavy responsibilities, and having been so long the humble follower it’s difficult for him to realize that he is master.” Ferdinand himself had no illusions about the crown, referring to it as a “legacy which I would not wish on my arch enemy.”
During the first two years of World War I, Roumania was being pressured from all sides to enter the conflict. Marie’s favorite sister, Victoria Melita, supported the Germans, and passionately urged her to do the same. Marie was equally related to the Russian czar, the German kaiser, and King George V of England. Being everyone’s cousin gave her a different sort of entrée as a diplomat and, when necessary, allowed Marie to use her considerable powers of persuasion, where a minister or mere civil servant would never have made any headway.
Remarkably, Ferdinand didn’t realize how much of an influence his wife had on Roumania’s foreign policy at the time, and how cleverly she was steering him toward manifesting the pro-English results she desired. Only seven months before the kingdom entered the war, Nando had naively declared, “Missy is not one bit interested in politics.” Meanwhile she had averred that his “habit of counting upon me for his material comforts had been unconsciously extended also to brainwork. I grasped things easily, even those not really within my province, and my old attitude of not taking myself overseriously allowed him to ignore how great a help I really was. . . .”
Confident that “England always wins the last battle,” Marie won over her husband, his government, and their subjects to her point of view. The queen recognized that an Allied victory could guarantee them more than they would get by casting their lot with the Germans. On August 17, 1916, Roumania entered the war on the Allied side—with conditions. In exchange for her support, assuming an Allied victory, at the war’s end Roumania would receive the following territories (which historically had once been hers, but had in the past been gobbled up by other eastern bloc nations): all of Transylvania, the Banat, Bukovina as far as the River Prut, Bessarabia, and Dobruja.
Three-year-old Prince Mircea, Marie’s youngest child and probably the only one fathered by Prince Stirbey, died at the beginning of November 1916, after suffering from typhoid fever for an agonizing four days. As an example of chivalry lasting even into the twentieth century, during the boy’s funeral at Cotroceni Palace in Bucharest, the kaiser had the opportunity to massacre the entire Roumanian nobility and their government, but out of respect for his cousin in her time of loss, he ordered a cease-fire and sent his condolences instead.
Geographically surrounded on all sides by the enemy, Marie fled the capital for Jassy in Moldavia. Ferdinand soon followed. Roumania subsequently spent the next two years under occupation. Heat and food became luxuries. Denying culpability, the Germans, Austrians, and Bulgarians blamed one another for the rapes and robberies of the Roumanian citizens. The winter of 1916–17 was the coldest in half a century. The people of Jassy dropped like flies from hypothermia, starvation, typhus, smallpox, and other epidemics. Even the royal family subsisted on a diet of beans. Roumania’s army ate horse meat. Their “coffee” was composed of dried acorns. Meanwhile, Marie’s Russian-born, Germanophile mother, the Duchess of Edinburgh and Coburg, illogically and hysterically accused her of starting the First World War and bringing all this misery to their people with her English sensibilities.
Crown Prince Carol was giving Marie grief as well, emigrating to Jassy with his tootsie, Zizi Lambrino. Zizi came from an aristocratic Roumanian family, but the prince knew perfectly well about the constitutional prohibitions against marrying a Roumanian. A few years earlier, at the start of 1914, Marie had endeavored to arrange a marriage for him with the Romanov Grand Duchess Olga, the daughter of her cousins Nicholas and Alexandra, but there had been no spark between them. Neither mother was keen on forcing a loveless match, but had Olga wed Carol, she would have been spared her family’s bloody fate in 1918.
While the crown prince was inclined to shirk his royal responsibilities, and her husband was a lackluster sovereign, the new queen was intent on becoming the inspirational leader of her people during their darkest hours. The Jassy railway station had been transformed into a triage unit. It was dark and lice-ridden and stank of filth and disease; yet Marie was the angel of mercy, visiting the wounded and doling out religious icons, medals, and crosses, feeding the starving patients herself with hard brown bread she had personally hacked off the loaves and spread with jam. Unafraid of illness or gore, she bathed the eyelids of one soldier whose face had been “shot to pieces,” and routinely offered her bare hand to enamored typhoid patients. “I really cannot ask them to kiss India rubber!” she insisted, after the doctors pressured her to protect herself. Every night, the queen of Roumania returned to her lodgings, and, clad only in rubber boots, she stood in a bucket of boiling water and shed her clothes to rid them of the lice she had attracted that day.
When she wasn’t comforting wounded soldiers, the not-quite-so-glamorous queen of Roumania was penning propaganda in the form of sentimental magazine articles and travelogues about her adopted kingdom. She had already turned her hand to poetry and fiction, writing fairy tales inspired by those of Hans Christian Andersen. During the war years, sales of her book My Country raised funds for the Red Cross, for which the queen herself volunteered as a nurse. Marie was also instrumental in securing an American loan for Roumania, employing her friend the dancer Loie Fuller as a go-between. The young woman from the U.S. Embassy who couriered Marie’s request to Fuller happened to be the former ward of America’s secretary of war, and steered the queen’s request for funds through the proper diplomatic channels.
By mid-September of 1917, Roumania’s active role in the war had come to an end. A few weeks later, the Germans and Russians were talking of an alliance. But Roumania lay dangerously sandwiched between these two superpowers. George V offered Marie’s family sanctuary, but there was no guarantee they could make it to England alive. On the same day the queen received her cousin’s offer, they heard a rumor that the Russian soldiers intended to murder Roumania’s royal family and disrupt the country’s government and the infrastructure of railways, and telephone and telegraph lines. Much had been devastated already. Even the Allied Powers took part in the destruction; they had bombed Roumania’s oil fields to prevent these precious resources from falling into enemy hands.
In January of 1918, during the same week that Marie and Ferdinand were celebrating their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, England’s prime ministe
r, David Lloyd George, moved the football, compromising Roumania’s 1916 treaty with them. Great Britain was no longer prepared to honor the territorial gains originally pledged. On the last day of the month, the Russians declared war on Roumania and claimed possession of the crown jewels. Roumania was in an untenable position, the country ravaged by years of war, and more or less abandoned by her greatest ally. The options, neither of them pleasant, were to surrender to the Germans, or face further destruction. Kaiser Wilhelm demanded that Ferdinand begin negotiating a peace with Germany and the other middle European countries (plus the Ottoman Empire) that formed the enemy bloc known as the Central Powers. Marie refused to concede to her hateful cousin, and the women of Roumania, as well as the crown prince, supported her. The royal spouses had a horrific argument in which Marie publicly accused her husband of “selling his soul, his honour and with it the honour of his family and country . . . not because he was a fool but because a man with his character is always the instrument and the dupe of those stronger than he.”
Ferdinand became so enraged “he would have certainly beaten me,” Marie later admitted. Nevertheless, she continued to berate him, insisting that by placing his signature on the proposed Treaty of Bucharest, a peace treaty with the Central Powers, he would be signing all of their death warrants. Prince Stirbey tried to restrain the queen and explain that Ferdinand couldn’t function in a vacuum; his position had to be “upheld by . . . responsible men”—which only further infuriated Marie. There were “no men in this country,” she fumed, adding that she was “ashamed of being the Queen of nothing but cowards!” Even the French minister to Roumania, the comte de Saint-Aulaire, commented, “There is only one man in Roumania and that is the Queen.”
Still infuriated with her husband, “no one rallies for resistance,” she lamented. And their opposite views on how to handle the wartime situation were tearing the couple further apart. “Nando and I could hardly face each other, he was a completely broken man.” She finally stopped trying to argue with him, recognizing that she had been “defeated”—let down not only by her ally, England, but by her own husband and his craven government. The Allies couldn’t even guarantee Marie that Ferdinand would retain his Roumanian sovereignty, should he be deposed or compelled to abdicate—a request that the king’s dignity could scarcely permit him to make on his own. A new government of pro-German ministers was formed, and Marie announced that far from considering herself a “beaten Queen,” she was “the leader of a glorious army which has not been vanquished, but had to submit to a fearful and preposterous peace because it was betrayed by its Ally, Russia.” Russia was in the throes of its own internal conflict, and had withdrawn from the war at the end of 1917 as a result of the October Revolution that had overthrown the Provisional Government. After Russia’s defection from the Great War, Roumania was left geographically isolated, surrounded by enemies affiliated with the Central Powers.
By spinning the tragedy this way, Marie became an international heroine, and the world sympathetically rallied around Roumania—if they could find it on a map. Thanks to the queen’s ability both to captivate an audience and to capitalize on her assets, those far beyond Roumania’s borders began to see Ferdinand’s kingdom as a David in a battle among Goliaths. But the royal spouses’ divergent views on how to handle the war were tearing them even further apart. Marie wrote in her diary, “I am . . . much too violent and then he gets angry. He is also angry because people come to me. I try to explain to him why they all come to me even the generals.” Yet her husband didn’t want to hear that his temper, or worse, his indecision, was off-putting. In the meantime, the queen had charmed Colonel Joe Boyle, a rugged, Canadian-born, aging Renaissance man and former Klondike prospector, who, among other things, used his numerous talents to secure a peace treaty between Roumania and Russia’s new Bolshevik government. Marie came to depend upon Boyle to help save her kingdom. In 1918, the married, fifty-one-year-old Boyle, recuperating from a stroke, confided to the queen that she was the love of his life.
On September 15, 1918, as Ferdinand and Marie were figuring out how to handle the shifting balance of power—with the occupying Germans growing more demanding and increasingly crueler to the Roumanians even as the Allies gained ground—the sovereigns were dealt a stunning personal blow: The twenty-four-year-old crown prince had eloped with a commoner, having secretly wed his lover the previous night. Carol was prepared to renounce his claim to the throne for his new bride, the petite and graceful brunette Jeanne Marie Valentine (“Zizi”) Lambrino. Although he’d been romancing Zizi for several months, the prince had clearly not been thinking with his head. Such a marriage played right into the Germans’ hands. Not only did Carol flee Jassy for the border with his bride; in doing so he had deserted his military regiment, which was a treasonable offense.
In his own youth, Ferdinand had been talked out of marrying a commoner; yet now he had no time for empathy, and no choice but to punish his son. Although the king was no longer the commander in chief of Roumania’s army, he sentenced Carol to two and a half months’ imprisonment for deserting his post and for crossing the frontier without permission. A defiant Carol insisted that the punishment would ruin his reputation. But Marie told her son that she had survived worse damage to her own name; he’d bounce back soon enough.
On September 22, 1918, Crown Prince Carol was packed off to a remote mountain monastery. Zizi refused to sign the divorce papers, but the royal marriage was annulled without her cooperation. Carol was liberated after Armistice Day, November 11, 1918, so he could lead his regiment triumphantly into Jassy on the same day Marie was greeted by her subjects with a surprise reception at the rail station.
The royal family’s return to Bucharest was delayed until December 1, because the Germans had blown up every bridge leading into Roumania’s capital. Ferdinand asked his wife whether she would do him the honor of riding at his side as he led the Roumanian and Allied troops into the city. “If ever a queen was one with her army, I was that queen! This I say without any modesty!” Marie exclaimed, costumed for the occasion in a military tunic, fur-collared cape, and gray curly astrakhan hat strapped under her chin like a helmet. Marie of Roumania always knew what to wear to a coming-out party. This was, after all, the person of whom it was written, “Marie of Roumania—one of the most wonderful women in the world. A woman like that is born once in a century.” She had penned the lines herself.
But behind the glamour lay a woman trapped in an unhappy marriage, whose grown children were turning out to be a dreadful disappointment, and whose adopted kingdom had for the past two years been raped and ravaged by the occupying Germans.
During the postwar peace talks at Versailles, Roumania’s prime minister ruffled too many feathers. It was the brainchild of the kingdom’s French minister to let the queen represent the kingdom instead. After all, she was related to half the participants. Who better to charm the superpowers into granting her country the reparations it deserved? Marie was thrilled. “Roumania needs a face and I will be that face,” she declared. This statement, possibly the most famous remark Marie ever uttered, made her even more of a heroine in the eyes of her subjects.
Prince Stirbey coached her thoroughly for her new diplomatic role. Yet in March 1919, when Marie arrived in France, because she was merely a consort and not a reigning sovereign, nor was she a member of Roumania’s government, there was no seat for her in Versailles’ Hall of Mirrors. Undaunted, Marie negotiated from her flower-filled, twenty-room Paris hotel suite. She practiced couture diplomacy, putting her mother’s sartorial wisdom to use at this critical moment for her kingdom by matching the perfect ensemble to each meeting with a foreign dignitary. The queen had traveled to Paris with sixty gowns, thirty-one coats, twenty-two fur wraps, twenty-nine hats, and eighty-three pairs of shoes. “I feel that this is no time to economize,” she averred. “Roumania . . . has to have Transylvania . . . Bessarabia too. And what if for the lack of a gown, a concession should b
e lost?”
If Marie met with obstructions or condescension, she opened her handbag and whipped out the secret treaty of 1916—proof that the Allies had promised specific, and massive, territorial gains if Roumania entered the war on their side. When Lloyd George balked, the queen found herself educating the English on the geography of the Balkans. During her youth, Marie had come to realize that she had a powerful effect on men; back then, she used her charisma to conquer the men themselves. Now, at forty-three, although she hadn’t lost a bit of her charm, she parlayed it differently, convincing men to yield territory to her instead. In essence, Marie was now flirting for Ferdinand’s sake—but mostly for that of Roumania, which was in desperate straits. Russia had fallen to the Communists and was an imminent threat to her kingdom. Roumania needed those lands Marie had been promised in order to expand and safeguard her borders.
Flooded with invitations, the self-proclaimed “most beautiful queen in Europe” became the toast of Paris. Marie then took the show on the road, to London. There she became frustrated with the self-effacing politeness of her English cousins and their hidebound traditions, telling George V, “Try not to be shocked at me. . . . Forgive me if I am different from what you think a queen ought to be.” But she pressed on. “[W]e want action, not just fine words,” Marie insisted, and the satirical magazine Punch got her point, publishing a cartoon of a rag-clad old woman labeled Roumania, begging by the railroad track as an Allied food transport passes. It is laden with reparations that are tagged for the Central Powers, the enemy that had left Roumania so bereft in the first place.
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