The Romanov Sisters (Four Sisters) (42 page)

– made the sign of the cross as they passed it’.83 In the afternoon,

Nicholas wearing field marshal’s uniform, and Alexandra and the

girls all in white, arrived in the capital in the
Aleksandriya
. Alexey, who was still recovering from his latest accident, had had to be left
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behind. From the royal landing stage at the Palace Bridge, the

imperial family walked the short distance to the Winter Palace

through crowds of people who fell onto their knees shouting hurrahs,

singing hymns and calling out blessings to Nicholas.84
‘Kostroma last year is nothing to this,’ said one eyewitness, ‘they’ll lay down their lives for him.’85

At 3 p.m. after a gun salute had thundered out across the city,

some 5,000 court officials, military and members of the aristocracy

gathered in the Nikolaevsky Hall of the Winter Palace for a solemn

and intensely moving
Te Deum
, sung in front of the talismanic icon of the Virgin of Kazan. This was the same icon Field Marshal

Mikhail Kutuzov had prayed to in August 1812 before leaving for

Smolensk to take on Napoleon, who had just invaded Russia. During

the service Nicholas ‘prayed with a holy fervor which gave his pale

face a movingly mystical expression’, noted the French ambassador

Maurice Paléologue, while Alexandra stood, characteristically tight-

lipped, by his side.86 The assembled crowd ‘all looked tremendously

tense and alive, as if gathering up their strength to offer it collectively to their ruler’.87 ‘Faces were strained and grave’, recalled Maria

Pavlovna. ‘Hands in long white gloves nervously crumpled hand-

kerchiefs and under the large hats fashionable at the time many eyes

were red with crying’. After the service, the court chaplain read out the manifesto declaring that Russia was at war with Germany, after

which Nicholas raised his right hand in front of the gospel and

announced: ‘We will not make peace until the last man and the last

horse of the enemy shall have left our soil.’88 Immediately afterwards,

‘quite spontaneously, from some 5,000 throats broke forth the

national anthem, which was not less beautiful because the voices

choked with emotion. Then cheer upon cheer came, until the walls

rang with their echo!’89

The tsar and tsaritsa then processed out. Nicholas’s face was a

blank; Alexandra more than ever looked like ‘a Madonna of Sorrows,

with tears on her cheeks’ and stooped to console people as she

passed; others fell on their knees or tried to grasp at Nicholas and

kiss his hand. When he emerged on the balcony overlooking Palace

Square, a vast crowd of around 250,000 people, who had been

patiently waiting ‘quiet, with faces grave and rapt’ knelt down ‘as

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GOD SAVE THE TSAR!

one’ ‘in mute adoration’.90 Nicholas made the sign of the cross and

brought Alexandra forward to greet them, after which he and she

retreated inside. But the crowd did not want to let them go: ‘Each

time that the sovereigns left the balcony the people clamoured for

their reappearance with loud hurrahs and sang
God Save the Tsar.
’91

The day had been ‘absolutely wonderful’, Tatiana later wrote in

her diary, but that evening for once there were no games of domi-

noes for Nicholas, and no reading aloud to his family.92 Returning

to Peterhof at 7.15, they all spent it ‘quietly’.93 The next morning, central St Petersburg seemed like a ghost town. The magnet of

everyone’s attention was now the railway stations as column after

column of troops marched in great lines towards them singing

popular Russian folk songs, waving their khaki caps and leaving

behind a trail of sobbing women and children.94 On 22 July (4 August

NS) Russia’s ally Great Britain declared war on Germany, upon

which Nicky received a telegram from the king, his cousin Georgie.

They both were fighting ‘for justice and right’, he said, and he hoped

‘this horrible war will soon be over’. In the meantime, ‘God bless

and protect you my dear Nicky . . . Ever your very devoted cousin

and friend.’95

In those first heady days of July–August 1914 Russia was gripped

by a consuming, almost feudal sense of nationhood that harked back

to the old Mother Russia of legend. ‘It seemed as if the Tsar and

his people embraced each other strongly, and in this embrace stood

before the great Russian land’, declared
Novoe Vremya
in suitably jingoistic terms.96 The declaration of war was a fitting coda to all

the ceremonial of the previous year’s Tercentary. ‘We believe

unshakeably that all our faithful subjects will rise with unanimity

and devotion for the defence of Russian soil’, Nicholas had declared

in his manifesto, adding the hope that ‘internal discord will be

forgotten in this threatening hour, that the unity of the Tsar with

his people will become still more close’.97

The capital might have been gripped by intensely felt patriotism

of a kind that every Russian knew from Tolstoy’s
War and Peace
, but in the countryside most of the peasants were resigned rather than

enthusiastic, knowing full well that the burden of the war effort

would fall on them, as it had always done. Rasputin was in despair

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that his warning had gone unheeded and that he had not had the

opportunity to persuade Nicholas, in person, against going to war.
*

The words of a telegram he had sent in the final days before war

was declared have, ever since, been seen as prophetic:

There is a terrible storm cloud over Russia: calamity, much grief,

no ray of light, an incalculable ocean of tears, and as for blood

– what can I say? There are no words, just an indescribable

horror. I know they all want war from you, even those who are

loyal, but without knowing that the price is destruction . . .

Everything will be drowned in much blood.98

*

There remained one final grandiose public act of ceremonial for

the Romanov family to perform – in Russia’s historic capital, Moscow, on 5 August. The imperial court and the diplomatic community

took the 444-mile (714.5-km) train journey south for what seemed

to British ambassador Sir George Buchanan an occasion where ‘the

heart of Russia voiced the feelings of the whole nation’.99 At the

Kremlin on their way to the
Te Deum
at the Uspensky Cathedral, the tsar and tsaritsa walked in procession, followed by their daughters. Meriel Buchanan thought they seemed ‘a little subdued and

grave, their faces pale’; Olga in particular had had ‘a rapt expression on her face’; Maria had been in tears and Meriel noticed how

‘Anastasia turned to her now and then with a little admonishing

word’.100 Much to his parents’ despair, Alexey had once more had

to be carried. Now, more than ever, the heir to the Russian throne

needed to be perceived as fit and well.

In a speech he made that day, Nicholas emphasized that the

conflict embraced all Slavic peoples of the Russian Empire: this war

would be nothing less than a defence of Slavdom against the Teutons.

Sir George Buchanan was impressed by the power of the religious

ceremony inside the Uspensky, which was ‘beautiful and impressive

beyond description’:

* Rasputin was in hospital in Tyumen, western Siberia, recovering from a knife attack made on him by a mentally unstable woman that summer.

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The long line of archbishops and bishops, in their vestments of

gold brocade, their mitres sparkling with precious stones; the

frescoes on the walls, with their golden background; the jewelled

icons – all lent colour and brilliancy to the picture presented by

the glorious old cathedral.

As soon as we had taken our places behind the imperial family

the deep bass voice of a priest was heard chanting the opening

passages of the liturgy, and then the choir, joining in, flooded

the church with harmony as it intoned the psalms and hymns of

the Orthodox ritual. As the service was nearing its close the

Emperor and Empress, followed by the Grand Duchesses, went

the round of the church, kneeling in deep devotion before each

of its shrines or kissing some specially sacred icon presented

them by the Metropolitan.

As he drove away with Maurice Paléologue, Buchanan ‘could not

help wondering how long this national enthusiasm would last, and

what would be the feeling of the people for their “Little Father”

were the war to be unduly prolonged’.101 A long and costly war of

attrition against Germany and Austria-Hungary, as Nicholas well

knew, would fan the flames of social unrest in Russia yet more, as

it had done during the war with Japan. For Alexandra, distraught

and desperately worried for her brother Ernie and his family trapped

in a Germany she no longer loved or recognized, the outbreak of

war ‘was the end of everything’.102 All that was left now was to beg

Grigory to pray with them for peace.

War of course put paid, at a stroke, to all talk of marriage for

the two eldest Romanov sisters. Nor would there be any more cruises

round the Finnish skerries or holidays in the Crimean sunshine; no

more idling away the long sunny days of summer chatting and

laughing with their favourite officers from the
Shtandart
; and no more Sunday afternoon teas with Aunt Olga, for she had volunteered

as a nurse and had already headed off on a hospital train to the

Russian front at Kiev.

On 1 August Tatiana recorded her aunt’s departure and the usual

mundane routine:

The five of us had lunch with Papa and Mama. In the afternoon

we went for a walk like yesterday. Went on the swing and got

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caught in the rain. Had tea with Papa and Mama. We spoke on

the phone to N. P. [Nikolay Sablin] and N. N. [Nikolay

Rodionov] – to whom I sent my little icon to wear round his

neck via N. P. The two of us had supper with Papa and Mama

and Grandmother. Xenia and Sandro were there too. Then

Kostya [Grand Duke Konstantin Konstaninovich] came to say

goodbye as he’s leaving for the war tomorrow with the Izmailovsky

Regiment. We came back at 10.30. Papa read.103

The safe, unchallenging, insular world that the Romanov sisters

had known until now was about to change dramatically.

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N

When Russia went to war in the summer of 1914, it was faced with

a desperate shortage of nurses. With massive losses of almost 70,000

killed or wounded in the first five days of fighting, the Russian

government predicted that at least 10,000 nurses would be needed.

Stirred by patriotic duty, legions of the fashionable and aristocratic ladies of St Petersburg – or rather Petrograd, as the city was quickly renamed – as well as the wives and daughters of government officials, and professional women such as teachers and academics, rushed to

do medical training and embrace the war effort. By September, with

the need for nurses increasingly acute, the Russian Red Cross had

reduced the usual year-long training to two months. Many women

did not make the grade and with it the right to be called
sestry

miloserdiya
– sisters of mercy – as nurses were termed in Russia.

From the day war broke out the tsaritsa was determined that she

and her two eldest daughters should play their part; in early

September they began their Red Cross training, taking on the

self-effacing titles of Sister Romanova, numbers 1, 2 and 3.1

Although Maria and Anastasia were too young to train they also

were to play an active role, as hospital visitors. No one repre-

sented the female war effort in Russia more emotively than did

the tsaritsa and her daughters through the three long and dispir-

iting years of war that preceded the revolution of 1917.

Everywhere – in newspapers, magazines and shop fronts – one

prevailing, iconic image dominated – of the three imperial sisters

of mercy soberly dressed in their Red Cross uniforms.
Stolitsa i

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Usadba
featured them in uniform regularly on its pages, a fact that inspired many other Russian women to follow their example.2

Edith Almedingen remembered a city full of young women

burning with ‘war-work fever’ and wearing the ‘short white veil

and the scarlet pectoral cross on their white aprons’.3

War galvanized the ailing tsaritsa; ‘Looking after the wounded

is my consolation’, she asserted.’4 Within three days of hostilities

beginning Alexandra had taken command of the vast national war

relief effort, re-establishing the huge supply depots that she had set up in the Winter Palace and elsewhere during the war with Japan.