فصل 15

Chapter Fifteen

WE CANNOT DROP OUR WORK IN THE HOSPITALS

In January 1915 an additional burden of concern was placed on the shoulders of the Romanov sisters when Anna Vyrubova was very seriously injured in a railway accident on the line between Petrograd and Tsarskoe Selo. She was brought to the annexe in a desperate state with a dislocated shoulder, double fracture of her left leg, lacerations to the right one and head and spine injuries. She was not expected to live. Her elderly parents arrived; Tatiana met them in tears, and gently escorted them down the corridor. Valentina Chebotareva remembered that night vividly:

They sent for Grigory. I thought this was terrible, but I could not sit in judgment on another. The woman is dying, she believes in Grigory, in his saintliness, in [his] prayers. He arrived in a state of fright, his dishevelled beard shaking, his mouselike eyes flitting back and forth. He grasped Vera Ignateva [Dr Gedroits] by the hand: ‘She’ll live, she’ll live’. But as she herself later told me: ‘I decided to play the priest at his own game, thought for a moment and then said solemnly: ‘Thank you, but I will save her.’

Gedroits’s response did not go unnoticed by Nicholas who was home from Stavka at the time: ‘Each to his own’, he said, giving Gedroits a wry smile.1 He spoke with the doctor for some time that evening, as Valentina recalled. It seemed clear to both women that the tsar ‘without doubt did not believe in either Grigory’s saintliness or his powers, but put up with him, like a sick person when exhausted by suffering clutches at straws’. But Grigory himself had been visibly drained by the experience of willing Anna’s recovery. He always later claimed that he had ‘raised Annushka from the dead’, for against the odds she did indeed recover.2

After six weeks’ dedicated care Anna was able to return home but her recuperation was a long one and she was disabled by her injuries for the rest of her life. Meanwhile, early that year, having driven herself relentlessly since day one of the war in the face of her already unstable health, Alexandra broke down completely. Dr Botkin ordered her to bed for six weeks. ‘The nursing in the hospital and assisting at operations, tending and binding up the most hideous wounds,’ Alexandra explained to a friend, ‘is all less tiring than for hours visiting hospitals and talking with the poor wounded.’ She struggled to carry on with some of her work at the annexe, ‘Coming as privately and unexpectedly as possible, but it does not often succeed … One’s greatest comfort is being with the dear wounded and I miss my hospitals awfully.’3 When her energies failed her, Alexandra read and composed reports from her sickbed, meanwhile taking ‘lots of iron and arsenic and heartdrops.’4

For the next few weeks, in addition to their nursing duties at the hospital, Olga and Tatiana would spend their days visiting Anna and often sitting with their mother or Alexey, who was suffering recurring pain in his arms from overdoing it when playing. Moments of private pleasure were increasingly rare, but when she could Tatiana would escape in the afternoons on her own to go riding. In the evenings, while her other sisters often sat playing board games or the gramophone, or Anastasia fussed round the two dogs – clearing up after their numerous accidents – Tatiana would sit quietly and read poetry. She found her mother’s latest indisposition hard to take and constantly tormented herself that she was not doing enough to support her: ‘Mama, sweet, I am so awfully sad. I see so little of you … It doesn’t matter if sisters go earlier to bed – I’ll remain. For me it is better to sleep less and see more of you, my beloved one.’ ‘In such moments,’ she told Alexandra, ‘I am sorry I’m not a man.’5 She was now having to draw on all her strength of character to deal with the many duties required of her, as she told Nicholas in May:

Today I was in the hospital dressing the wounds of this poor unfortunate soldier with amputations of his tongue and ears. He’s young and has a lovely face, from the Orenburg district and cannot speak at all, so wrote down how it all had happened to him, which Mama asked me to send on to you … and he was very happy. Princess Gedroits hopes that he will in time be able to speak, as only half his tongue had to be amputated. He is in a lot of pain. He has lost the top of his right ear, and the bottom of his left one. I am so sorry for the poor man. After lunch Mama and I went into Petrograd to the Supreme Council. We sat for an hour and a half – it was dreadfully boring … then Mama and I went all round the supply depot. And we’ve only just got back now at 5.30.6

Alexandra was convinced that their committee work was ‘so good for the girls’; it would teach them to become independent and would ‘develop them much more having to think and speak for themselves without my constant aid’.7 It seems strange that, believing this, she had not allowed her daughters a greater role in society sooner; had she done so they would not still be grappling with the intense self-consciousness they suffered chairing committee meetings. Tatiana said these meetings made her want ‘to dive under the table from fright’. As for Olga, in addition to her mother’s interminable meetings at the Supreme Council, she had to sit and take donations every week, which Alexandra thought equally good for her: ‘she will get accustomed to see people and hear what is going [on]’, she told Nicholas, though she sometimes despaired of her: ‘She is a clever child but does not use her brains enough.’8

With the arrival of spring in 1915, the family could not but ruefully cast their minds back on how life had been before the war. It was still snowing at Tsarskoe Selo in mid-April but one of their friends in Livadia had sent them gifts of Crimean flowers – glycinia, golden rain, purple irises, anemones and peonies. ‘To see them in one’s vases makes me quite melancholy’, Alix told Nicky, ‘Does it not seem strange, hatred and bloodshed and all the horrors of war – and there simply Paradise, sunshine and flowers and peace … Dear me, how much has happened since the peaceful, homely life in the fjords!’9 They all longed for their usual visit to the Crimea. But duty was paramount, as Tatiana told Pavel Voronov’s wife Olga in June: ‘It’s the first summer that we are not going to live in Peterhof. We cannot drop our work in the hospitals. It would be distressing to live there and to think that there will be no yacht and no skerries. It’s a pity there is no sea here.’10

The girls had from time to time still seen Pavel and Olga when they had visited Tsarskoe Selo, but the sad summer of 1913 and all the heartache attached to it had now faded for Olga, whose thoughts since the end of May had been increasingly revolving around a new arrival at the annexe: Dmitri Shakh-Bagov, a Georgian adjutant in the Life Grenadiers of the Erevan Regiment. This was one of the oldest and most prestigious regiments in the Russian army and the dearest to the imperial family after the Escort. But Dmitri’s stay was short: ‘After supper spoke on the phone to Shakh-Bagov and said goodbye as he is going back to his regiment tomorrow’, Olga wrote in her diary on 22 June. ‘I’m so sorry for him the darling, it’s terrible, he is so sweet.’11 Tatiana also had a favourite patient from the same regiment – an ensign from Azerbaijan called Sergey Melik-Adamov. He had the archetypal swarthy looks and large moustache of his predecessors, but his fellow patients found his pockmarked face unattractive and his loud jokes something of an embarrassment.12

Dmitri Shakh-Bagov’s departure had a marked and immediate effect: ‘Dear Olga Nikolaevna became sad,’ recalled another patient, Ivan Belyaev, ‘her cheeks lost their usual ruddiness, and her eyes darkened with tears.’13 Soon afterwards, Dmitri’s commanding officer Konstantin Popov was brought in wounded and joined Melik-Adamov in the ‘Erevan’ Ward. ‘The Grand Duchesses greeted me like an old friend’, he recalled, and began asking questions about how the regiment was, about the officers they knew and so on.

What sweet simple people, I instinctively thought, and with every day I became more and more convinced of this. I was a witness of their daily work and was struck by their patience, persistence, their great skill for difficult work and their tenderness and kindness to everyone around them.14

Barely five weeks later, much to Olga’s joy, and despite the unfortunate circumstances, Dmitri Shakh-Bagov was brought back to the hospital, having been seriously wounded on a reconnaissance mis-sion near Zagrody in eastern Poland. He arrived on 2 August on a stretcher with a shattered leg and a hand wound, much thinner and looking very pale, and was immediately taken back to his former bed in the Erevan Ward.15 He was operated on and his leg put in plaster but although he was supposed to be confined to bed he was soon up and hobbling round after Olga like a devoted puppy. ‘It soon became noticeable how her previous mood returned … and her sweet eyes shone once more’, noted Ivan Belyaev.16 Olga’s Dmitri now began appearing regularly in her diary in the affectionate form of Mitya. She spent every precious moment she could in his company – sitting with him in the corridor, on the balcony and in the ward, as well as during the evenings when she sterilized the instruments and made up the cotton-wool swabs. She had every reason to feel deeply for him, for everyone loved Mitya. Konstantin Popov was fulsome in his praise of him as ‘a distinguished and brave officer, a rare friend and wonderfully good-natured person. If one were to add to this his handsome appearance and his great ability to wear his uniform and deport himself with distinction then you would have an example of the young Erevan officer in whom in truth our regiment prides itself.’17 Mitya was ‘very sweet and shy, like a girl’, remembered Ivan Belyaev, and what is more, ‘it was evident that he was completely in love with his nursing sister. His cheeks became brightly flushed whenever he looked at Olga Nikolaevna.’18

While Olga’s head might have been turned, there was no diminution in the compassion and care that she, like Tatiana, continued to offer to all their patients. Valentina Chebotareva remembered a particularly traumatic operation at which both sisters had assisted and how bitterly they had wept when the patient had died. ‘How poetic Tatiana Nikolaevna’s caresses are! How warmly she speaks when she calls on the telephone and reads the telegrams about her wounded’, Valentina wrote in her diary. ‘What a good, pure and deep feeling girl she is.’19 That summer, the highly reserved Tatiana, who had until now only shown passing interest in Dmitri Malama, appeared to have fallen for Vladimir Kiknadze – or Volodya as she was soon calling him – another Georgian and a 2nd lieutenant in the 3rd Guards Rifles Regiment. The two sisters began enjoying trysts as a foursome in the garden playing croquet with Kiknadze and Shakh-Bagov, and falling into a routine of shared smiles and confidences, sitting on their beds and looking at albums and taking each other’s photograph. The war, for a while, did not seem quite so grim.

Throughout 1915 Nicholas had managed to make regular trips back home to Tsarskoe Selo but in August he made a momentous decision that would take him away from the family for even longer periods. A succession of Russian defeats on the Eastern Front, resulting in a massive retreat from Galicia, had already seen 1.4 million Russians killed and wounded and 1 million captured. Morale in a poorly equipped imperial army was haemorrhaging away. In response he dismissed his uncle Grand Duke Nikolay as Commander-in-Chief of the army and took over command himself, moving Stavka to Mogilev, 490 miles (790 km) due south of Petrograd. This decision, like every other the tsar made during the war, was guided by his deeply held belief that the people trusted in him as their spiritual leader and that the fate of himself, his family and Russia lay in God’s hands. At 10 p.m. on 22 August the children went to the station with him. ‘My precious papa!’ Olga wrote as soon as he had left. ‘How sad it is that you are leaving but this time it is with a special feeling of joy that we see you off, because we all fervently believe that your arrival there will more than ever raise the strong spirit of our mighty, national Army.’ ‘Here I am with this new heavy responsibility on my shoulders!’ Nicholas told Alexandra upon his arrival. ‘But God’s will be fulfilled – I feel so calm.’20 Two months later he made another important decision: at the end of a visit home he took Alexey back with him to Stavka, partly for company, as he missed the family so terribly, but also because he and Alexandra both believed that the tsarevich’s presence would be a huge boost to army morale. Alexey, now aged eleven, was ecstatic; much as he loved his mother he was desperate to escape her suffocating presence and no doubt also the over-protectiveness of his sisters. As he would later complain: ‘I hate going back to Tsarskoe to be the only man amongst all those women.’21

Since the outbreak of war Alexey had been playing soldiers at home, proudly strutting around in his soldier’s greatcoat – ‘quite like a little military man’, as Alix told Nicky – standing guard, digging trenches and fortifications in the palace gardens with his dyadki and in the process sometimes provoking attacks of pain in his arms.22 But aside from this he was in better health than he had been for years, and for some time now had had no serious attacks. It was hard for Alexandra to let her boy go, but she agreed on condition that Alexey’s studies should not be interrupted. He was by now, however, woefully behind in his lessons and although he was followed to Stavka by both PVP and Pierre Gilliard, he rarely knuckled down to a full day’s lessons, preferring the distractions of board games, playing his balalaika and enjoying the company of his new dog, a cocker spaniel named Joy.23 At Stavka Alexey was in his element, sharing the same Spartan living conditions with his father, sleeping on campbeds, going on trips to army camps, inspecting the troops with him and enjoying the camaraderie of the soldiers, and taking particular pleasure in swimming with his father in the River Dnieper. Back at Tsarskoe everyone in the entourage felt the absence of father and son: ‘life at the Imperial Palace became, if possible, even quieter’, recalled Iza Buxhoeveden. ‘The whole place seemed dead. There was no movement in the great courtyard. We ladies-in-waiting went to the Empress through a series of empty halls.’24 Whenever Nicholas and Alexey returned on visits, ‘the palace sprang to life’.

At Stavka the young heir made a strong impression on all who met him. True, he could still be brattish – particularly at table, where he had a penchant for throwing pellets of bread at his father’s ADCs.25 But his extraordinary energy lit up a room. ‘It was the first time I had seen the Tsarevich when the door of our box flung open and he came like a gale of wind,’ recalled US naval attaché Newton McCully:

Full of life, healthy looking, and one of the handsomest youngsters I have ever seen, I was particularly glad to see him so closely because I had heard so many rumors about his being paralyzed – maimed for life – and so on. One could not wish to see a handsomer child. Undoubtedly he has been ill, but there are no signs of illness about him now – if anything perhaps a too exuberant vitality, perhaps an organism over-nervous.26

In mid-October, Alexandra, Anna Vyrubova and the girls visited Mogilev, in time to see Alexey awarded the Medal of St George 4th class. They were all delighted to see the continuing improvement in his health and strength. ‘He was developing marvelously through the summer both in bodily vigor and gaiety of spirits’, recalled Anna Vyrubova. ‘With his tutors, M. Gilliard and Petrov, he romped and played as though illness were a thing to him unknown.’27 The visit was a welcome break for the girls from their virtually monastic life at Tsarskoe. At Stavka they had more freedom to move around; they spent time playing with the children of railway workers and local peasants (whom Tatiana photographed for her album, scrupulously noting down all their names), though once more there were whisperings that the imperial sisters should not stoop so low in their friendships and that they looked scruffy and ‘unroyal’.28

The Governor’s House at Mogilev that served as HQ was too cramped to accommodate all the family, so Alexandra and the girls stayed on the imperial train, where Nicholas and Alexey dined with them in the evenings. The train was parked in the midst of wooded countryside and the girls were able to go walking unobserved and often unrecognized. Out in the woods they made bonfires and roasted potatoes with members of the Tsar’s Escort, much as they had done on their Finnish holidays; they slept in the sunshine on the new-mown hay and even enjoyed the occasional cigarette given to them by Nicholas. For the rest of the time it was boat rides on the River Dnieper and games of hide-and-seek on the imperial train, and even occasional visits to the local cinematograph in Mogilev.29 But in many of the photographs taken that October, Olga looked withdrawn and pensive, often sitting apart from the others. She came back from Stavka with a bad cough and Valentina Chebotareva immediately became concerned, not just about her melancholy frame of mind, but also her visibly declining health:

Her nerves are completely shot to pieces, she’s got thinner and paler. She hasn’t been able to do the bandaging lately, can’t bear to look at wounds and in the operating theatre is distressed, becomes irritable, tries to do things and can’t control herself – feels dizzy. It’s awful to see the child, how sad and overwrought she is. They say it’s exhaustion.30

In her later memoirs Anna Vyrubova claimed that although Tatiana from the outset demonstrated ‘extraordinary ability’ as a nurse, ‘Olga within two months [of her training] was almost too exhausted and too unnerved to continue’.31 It was clear that the long hours were taking their toll on her, that she was less resilient emotionally and physically than Tatiana, and also far less focused. She could not cope with the trauma of some of the operations she witnessed, nor could she knuckle down to regular routine as easily as her sister. And now she was distracted yet again by her feelings – this time for Mitya Shakh-Bagov. The exhaustion she was suffering was compounded by severe anaemia and, like her mother, she was put on a course of daily arsenic injections. ‘Olga’s condition still not famous’, Alexandra telegraphed Nicholas on 31 October, adding in a letter that their daughter had ‘only got up for a drive & now after tea she remains on the sopha and we shall dine upstairs – this is my treatment – she must lie more, as goes about so pale and wearily – the Arsenic injections will act quicker like that, you see’.*32

A few days later they were all celebrating Olga’s twentieth birthday, but of late she had hardly been to the annexe and when she did go, as she told her father, she ‘didn’t do anything, just sat with them. But they still make me lie down a lot.’ She didn’t like the daily arsenic injections from Dr Botkin: ‘I reek of garlic a bit, which is not nice.’†33 Whatever her private thoughts might have been at this time, Olga, like her sisters, retained a stoical acceptance of her lot. Fellow nurse Bibi happened to be visiting at the palace one evening when Olga and Tatiana were getting changed for dinner and choosing jewellery. ‘The only shame is that no one can enjoy seeing me like this,’ quipped Olga, ‘only papa!’ The remark was made, as Bibi told Valentina, totally without affectation. ‘One, two and her hair’s done (though no hairdo as such), and she didn’t even glance in the mirror.’ It was typical of Olga to take little interest in her looks or bother about how she appeared to others. During her hours lying at home feeling unwell the chambermaid Nyuta had brought Olga a gramophone record – ‘Goodbye Lou-Lou’. ‘Echoes, no doubt, of things seen in the hospital’, wrote Valentina in her diary, perhaps alluding to songs sung by Olga’s officer friends there. ‘It’s sad for the poor children to have to live in this gilded cage.’34

When she was finally able, Olga returned to the annexe, but on a much reduced workload, mainly taking temperatures, writing prescriptions and machining bed linen. The lion’s share of changing the dressings every morning was now done by Tatiana, who also did the injections and assisted Gedroits in surgery. Valentina and Tatiana had recently had to deal with a particularly unpleasant gangrenous wound that had required an urgent amputation. While Valentina rushed to prepare the Novocain, Tatiana, without need for instruction, had gathered together all the instruments, prepared the operating table and the linen. During the operation a good deal of hideous pus was drained away from the wound, and for once even Valentina had felt nauseous. ‘But Tatiana Nikolaevna wasn’t affected by it, only twitched at the groans and moans of the patient, and blushed scarlet.’ She returned to the hospital at nine that evening to sterilize the instruments with Olga and went in to see the patient at ten, just before leaving. Sadly he took a turn for the worse in the night and died.35

It was this kind of traumatic situation with which Olga was no longer able to cope, although she visited for a short while most days, especially while Mitya was still there. And now Tatiana was cheered by the return of Volodya Kiknadze, who had been wounded again. The cosy foursomes they had enjoyed earlier in the summer were once more resumed as the girls spun out the evenings sterilizing instruments and preparing swabs. ‘Who’s to know the drama Olga Nikolaevna has been living through’, wrote Valentina. ‘Why is she wasting away, become so thin, so pale: is she in love with Shakh-Bagov?’ Valentina was concerned at the amount of time the sisters were spending with their two favourites: ‘As soon as she finishes the dressings, Tatiana Nikolaevna goes to do the injections, and then she sits down in a twosome with K[iknadze] … he sits down at the piano, playing something with one finger, and chats animatedly with our dear girl for a long time.’ Bibi worried too; what if Elizaveta Naryshkina were to walk in on ‘this little scene’? She would die of shock.

Shakh Bagov has a fever and is in bed. Olga Nikolaevna spends the whole time sitting by his bed. The other pair joined them there yesterday and sat side by side on the bed looking through the album. K[iknadze] cosies up to her. Tatiana Nikolaevna’s sweet childlike face can’t hide a thing and is flushed and animated. But isn’t all this close proximity, all this touching dangerous? I’ve become anxious about it. The others are getting jealous, and annoyed and I imagine they gossip and spread it around in town, and maybe even beyond.36

Dr Gedroits shared Valentina’s concern; they both felt that Volodya Kiknadze was a ladykiller and was leading the impres-sionable Tatiana astray. Gedroits decided to send him away to the Crimea for recuperation, or rather – as she and Valentina both saw it – ‘out of harm’s way’. Even Mitya, Olga’s ‘precious one’, was not beyond reproach; Gedroits had discovered that once, when drunk, he had shown private letters Olga had written to him to another patient. ‘That is positively the last straw! The poor children!’37

Over at Stavka on 3 December 1915, Nicholas noted in his diary that ‘Alexey started developing a cold yesterday’; he began sneezing and a nosebleed ensued.38 Unable to stem the bleeding, Dr Feodorov advised that Alexey be taken back to Tsarskoe Selo. When they arrived on the 6th, Anna Vyrubova was shocked at

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.

Grigory had, of course, been sent for and arrived soon after. Much as before, he stood for a while by Alexey’s bed and made the sign of the cross over him. Then he turned to Alexandra and said, ‘Don’t be alarmed. Nothing will happen’; then he left.39 She nevertheless sat up with her son all night and did not go to bed until 8 a.m. the following morning; ‘half an hour later she got up and went to church’, Tatiana told Valentina.40 The following day a specialist named Dr Polyakov was called in and managed to cauterize the bleeding. Alexey remained in bed until 18 December but was still very frail. A disconsolate Nicholas had returned to Stavka alone on the 12th.

As Christmas 1915 approached Olga and Tatiana were feeling gloomy: Mitya and Volodya were soon to be discharged from the hospital. The girls begged their mother to intercede so they could at least stay for the holiday. On the 26th the girls ‘arranged to come just for an hour to do the dressings’ at the annexe, although not without ‘secret thoughts’ of chatting with Mitya and Volodya, as Valentina well knew. She was anxious to see the back of Kiknadze, whom she heard had been bragging of his conquest. ‘People are gossiping, they see how he is constantly taking her to one side in the ward, away from the others … always whispering things quietly, secretively in a low voice.’ Dr Gedroits was ‘in a rage’ about his inappropriate behaviour.41

On 30 December 1915 Olga noted wistfully in her diary that ‘Mitya was at the commission, then came back and we sat nearly the whole time together, playing at draughts and it was so simple. He is good, God knows.’ In the evening she spoke to him on the phone and heard the news she had dreaded: ‘He has suddenly received orders from his regiment to go to the Caucasus in two days’ time.’42