Alexandra (36 page)

It was being said that Samsonov and his army had been deliberately abandoned, delivered into the hands of the enemy for slaughter, by General Rennenkampf – a Russian general with a
suspiciously German-sounding name. General Rennenkampf’s own subsequent defeat at German hands did nothing to stifle these accusations. They heard whispers that Warsaw had fallen and that
very soon all of Poland would belong to the Germans and Austrians, that instead of Cossacks in Berlin there would be elite German troops in Petrograd, pillaging houses and desecrating churches,
befouling the Neva and marching up and down Nevsky Prospekt. The smell of smoke that had lingered in the air since early summer was now said to be due to German subversion; it was whispered that
the Germans had set the peat bogs near Petrograd on fire, and were burning down the trackless forests of Siberia.

Fear and suspicion replaced the patriotic fervour that had prevailed in the days following the outbreak of war. Many in the streets wore black armbands or black gowns, the looks on their faces
blank or
apprehensive. Troops marched past in large numbers, on their way to the front, but they no longer marched to spirited tunes or roused the bystanders to loud
cheering. The autumn days were growing short, snow had begun to fall, and the citizens of Petrograd had begun to count their losses and look for scapegoats. There was revived talk of the
tsar’s German wife, that unfeeling woman who had danced on the night of the Khodynka massacre and whose immoral relations with the infamous Rasputin had shamed the imperial family and made
foreigners laugh at Russia.

If indeed there was treachery in the air, then the German bitch was sure to be guilty of it.

But Alix, far from betraying Russia to her German relatives, was attending lectures on anatomy, internal medicine and surgical nursing, with her daughters and several dozen other women, all
working towards receiving their certification as Red Cross nurses. It was not enough for her to supervise the running of hospitals, she felt the need to be physically present at the bedsides of the
wounded, offering trained assistance.

‘To some it may seem unnecessary my doing this,’ she said, ‘but help is much needed and my hand is useful.’
¹¹
By the
first week of November, 1914, Alix and her older daughters had completed a full surgical course, with supplemental lectures, and were planning to attend still more lectures. The training courses
were held at night. In the morning the empress and her daughters, along with Anna Vyrubov, assisted at operations, cleaned bed-sores, changed dressings and offered what comfort they could to the
wounded who crowded the hospitals.

It was dirty, tiring, emotionally draining work. Operations went on for hours, and often the empress was called upon to attend two or three operations in a row. She dripped ether onto masks,
passed instruments to the surgeons, swabbed blood, handled amputated legs, arms and fingers. ‘I washed and cleaned, and painted with iodine and smeared with vaseline and tied them up and
bandaged all up,’ she wrote to Nicky in November of 1914. ‘My nose is full of hideous smells from those blood-poisoning wounds.’
¹²
Attending the men
in the wards meant hearing their screaming and swearing, their delirious ravings and groans. Some moaned in agony and called for
death. Many did die, despite the efforts of the nurses and doctors, and Alix was there, by their bedsides or beside the operating table, doing her best to comfort them and afterwards weeping in
sorrow.

For those that lived, the pain and wretchedness were extreme. Amputations were all too often performed without anaesthetics; post-operative wounds became gangrenous because there were not enough
disinfectants. The overworked doctors and nurses made mistakes, grew short-tempered, went to sleep on their feet. There was never enough medicine, or enough bed linen, soon not enough beds. The men
were crowded together cheek by jowl, severe cases next to curable ones, with no ability to isolate men who carried infectious diseases. Crisis conditions prevailed.

But Alix, who had always been at her best in a crisis, and who had been yearning to prove herself to her husband’s subjects for twenty years, seemed at first to thrive. She rejoiced when
she graduated from the nurses’ training programme, and wore the Red Cross patch on her apron with great pride. Going to her hospitals gave her a fresh sense of worth; devoting herself with
ardour to the taxing labour of nursing made her burn with purpose and commitment. She could forget herself, immerse herself in sacrifice.

Wearing the robe and wimple of a nursing sister – a uniform that disguised her high rank and lent her a measure of anonymity, reducing her shyness and discomfort – she walked the
overcrowded wards, becoming familiar with the men, stopping often to greet and talk with those she came to know. She liked to call herself a ‘sister of charity,’ and when one hospital
official referred to her as ‘mother of mercy,’ she recorded the incident with pleasure. ‘It’s shy work,’ she told her sister Victoria in a letter, ‘but the
sisters’ dresses help one.’ ‘Every hand is useful.’
¹³

From the outset of the war Alix took special interest in the welfare of her own regiment of Lancers, and in a Siberian rifle regiment of which she was patroness. She said goodbye to all the
officers and many of the men in person when they left for the front, and followed
closely the movements and actions of the regiments and their vicissitudes. After every
battle she wrote individual letters to the families of the men who died, and invited the wives and daughters of those who were wounded to stay in the palace, near their husbands and sons, while the
injured men were treated; she made sure that when they arrived, she greeted them herself, telling her ladies-in-waiting to suspend the usual protocol of formal welcome.
¹⁴

The empress’s concern for the suffering was universal. She was often to be found at the bedsides of German prisoners of war, and worried over the anxiety of their loved ones. When the
‘monstrous’ cousin Willy’s son was captured by Russian troops, she knew that Willy and his wife Dona would be desperate for news of him, and sent a personal message to Dona via
the neutral Swedish court to let her know that her son was safe and well. ‘Only a mother pitying another mother,’ she wrote to Nicky when she told him what she had done.
¹⁵

Alix was not the only member of the imperial family to dedicate herself to war work – Aunt Miechen headed a Red Cross effort to collect and distribute medical supplies, Ducky and Ella
travelled, visiting hospitals, Nicky’s sister Olga and Grand Duke Paul’s daughter Marie became nurses, as did several of their cousins – but Alix was perhaps the most earnest, and
the least appreciated. For to most soldiers she was the German Whore, suspected of colluding with the enemy, her nursing and war efforts nothing more than a smokescreen to disguise her treachery.
For every soldier who was comforted by her presence or appreciated the goods her workshops provided there were thousands of others who abhorred her, some who even called out insults to her when she
tried to attend to their needs. Once when she was inspecting a field ambulance she heard a voice call out ‘German bitch!’ and she burst into tears.
¹⁶

‘Oh, this miserable war!’ she wrote to Nicky, who was away from Tsarskoe Selo visiting troops, early in November. ‘At moments we cannot bear it anymore, the misery and
bloodshed break one’s heart.’
¹⁷
The imperial family had recently buried its first casualty, Grand Duke Constantine’s son
Oleg, who had been wounded with
the First Army in East Prussia and had slowly wasted away in a hospital in Vilna. ‘Life is difficult to understand,’ Alix
wrote, putting into simple words her mental turmoil.

Her mind already overtired and her thinking distorted by her fears and mental instability, Alix was exhausting herself trying to puzzle out what course needed to be taken to rescue, not only the
ailing soldiers, but Russia itself from its evident peril.

‘My brain is cretinized,’ she wrote to Nicky. ‘My brain is tired and heavy.’ ‘Anything only not to think . . . ’
¹⁸
She smoked, she had been fasting since the beginning of the war. Worst of all, she had become an insomniac, lying awake until three or four in the morning, turning over and
over in her mind all that needed to be done. ‘The brain seems to be working all the time and never wanting to rest . . . Hundreds of ideas and combinations come bothering
one.’
¹⁹

‘During the sleepless nights which had become her portion she fancied all kinds of evils,’ Martha Mouchanow wrote, and then she would call headquarters and ask the aide-de-camp on
duty for news of Nicky.
²⁰
He had been away so much since the war began in August, gone for weeks at a time, his absence increasing her
anxieties and making her insomnia much worse. More even than her religious faith, her love for her husband was the solid granite on which her life rested. Without him nearby, she was edgy and
restless, her thoughts awash in worries. The frightened child in her came to the fore, especially in the long watches of her sleepless nights.

Yet at the same time she knew, with the certainty of a perceptive adult, that the husband she relied on emotionally was himself far too vacillating, too easily influenced by others, too weak to
confront the supreme test with which he was now faced. It was up to her to stiffen his backbone, just as it had been up to her to make him face his responsibilities when his father died. She alone
was his disinterested, loving friend and helpmeet, the only one he trusted completely. She dared not let him down.

Caught between her fears and her obligations, she tossed and turned, searching for answers. The problems were clear enough: inept generals, soldiers fighting barefooted in the snow, ten men
sharing a
single rifle with only a few cartridges between them, casualties mounting, the Germans sweeping through Poland and a new enemy, Turkey, announcing its entry into
the war.

She knew instinctively that unless she took action to avert it, disaster would surely arrive, and soon.

It was as if she were back on the
Standart
on its ill-fated cruise off the Finnish coast seven years earlier. With the yacht rapidly sinking, Nicky had stood back from the panic on the
deck, consulting his stopwatch and calculating the time they had left; she, on the other hand, had hurried the women and children off the boat and gathered up all the valuables. She had rescued
all, saved all, and the yacht had not sunk.

Now she had to step in, while her husband stood back, unsure how to proceed, and save and rescue Russia. She had to take charge. He needed her to do so. It had always been the essence of their
partnership. She would do as much as she could, game to the end as ever, to the limit of her strength.

S
he would work to the limit of her strength – but her strength was limited. Her nursing, her visits to all the Petrograd hospitals, her train
trips to hospitals in Moscow and other distant towns, her battles with the Munitions Committee and the Red Cross and evasive local officials who tried to keep her from scrutinizing their
operations, her reading of petitions people handed her on her trips, her collecting of cribs for the Society for Mothers and Babies (‘every baby must be cared for, as the losses are so heavy
at the war’), her supervision of her workshops, of her school for nurses and housemaids, of her home for disabled sailors left her ‘dead tired,’ her chest aching and her breath
coming in short nervous gasps.

‘Only sheer willpower kept her going during the first five months of the war,’ Sophie Buxhoeveden wrote of Alix. By December of 1914 she was seriously ill, and in danger of
collapse.
¹
Nursing had to be put aside, though the invalid Alix insisted, during her months of convalescence, on knitting garments for the
soldiers and preparing icons and images of her husband to be distributed to each regiment.

She insisted too on writing long, urgent, pleading letters to the usually absent Nicky, assuring him of her deep love and support, reaffirming her indissoluble loyalty to him and obsessive
concern for him, letters in which, while retaining a certain tentativeness of tone, she nonetheless steered him towards the course she saw that he needed to take. He was the faltering helmsman, she
the strong hand at the tiller.

‘I bless and love you, as man was [
sic
] rarely been loved before,’ she told him. ‘I long to lessen your weight, to help you carry it – to
stroke your brow, press you to myself . . . I long often to hold you tight in my arms and let you rest your weary head upon my old breast. We have lived through so much together in
these twenty years – and without words understand each other.’
²
She called him by pet names, Lovebird, Huzy, Sunshine, the intimate
‘Agooweeone’ – a name she sometimes applied to Alexei, sometimes to Nicky. She perfumed her letters and sometimes enclosed sprigs of lilac in them; he sent her jasmine flowers in
return. Everything she wrote, even when she was at her most decisive and categorical, was couched in loving, tender phrases, and the tsar received her letters as a thirsty man in a desert receives
cool water. (‘I drink them and savour every word you write, and often bury my nose and press my lips to the paper you have touched.’)