Alexandra (35 page)

And then, as the guests of honour watched, the tsar, riding on a white horse, rode past, looking tall and soldierly, no longer a man but a mythic leader of men, a symbol of power and greatness.
The crowd cheered and cheered, as the imperial uncles and cousins rode along behind the sovereign, a parade of resplendent, stalwart figures, followed in their turn by the imperial family in open
carriages, escorted by outriders in scarlet and gold.

A band began to play the Evening Hymn, and almost at once, an observer wrote, ‘from across the entire wide, vast plain the men’s voices joined in, taking up the melody’, as the
sky was filled with a blaze of sunset light. No theatrical spectacle could have been more majestic.

It was poignant, it was glorious. And it augured war.

Alix rode in one of the carriages, her immaculate white gown covered in dust, which made her cough. Her daughters rode beside her, all of them in large flower-trimmed hats to shade them from the
sun. The empress had been present at the diplomatic dinners, the palace entertainments presented in the French president’s honour, forcing herself to play her appropriate role. She knew that
much was at stake. But throughout the eventful days her thoughts were elsewhere.

Within hours of the assassination of the Austrian archduke, Father Gregory had also been attacked, in Pokrovsky, by a follower of his enemy, the monk Iliodor. Though his wounds were nearly
fatal, a doctor from Tiumen had saved his life – Alix had sent the doctor a gold watch and a fervent letter of thanks – and he was recuperating.

The assault on Father Gregory, and the sudden turmoil over the Balkan situation, broke in upon what had promised to be a quiet
summer for the imperial family, filled
with picnics and games of tennis, long walks in the woods and yachting trips along the Finnish coast. Alix had been planning the next visit to Livadia, sending out letters to Ernie, Irene and
Victoria, and to her old friend Marie Bariatinsky, instructing the staff to prepare the guest rooms and stock the larder. She had been looking forward to the warm autumn days in the Crimea, to
visiting her gardens and sitting on the broad terraces overlooking the ocean, to visiting her sanatoria and helping out with the charity bazaars.

The commotion of recent days had interrupted all those plans. Too much was happening too quickly. Making plans had become impossible. The most she could do was take her place beside Nicky, and
do her best to help while he coped with the difficulties.

By the final evening of the French president’s visit, after hours of dining followed by long speeches, she was worn out. She invited the French ambassador Maurice Paléologue to sit
beside her, to keep her company as the evening drew to a close.

‘With a forced smile,’ Paléologue recalled, ‘she said in a tired tone: “I’m glad I came tonight . . . I was afraid there would be a storm.”’ She
chatted about trivial things, the decorations for the dinner, the good weather to be expected for the president’s return voyage. Though making light conversation was always an effort to her,
she made the effort, though Paléologue knew how hard it was. He had watched her for the past four days, and observed her discomfort, how in the midst of a crowd her smile would become set
and the veins in her cheeks would stand out. How she bit her lip with tension, her breathing shallow, her eyes restless and on the edge of panic. He thought, at times, she was ‘obviously
struggling with hysteria’, and she relaxed only when her husband was nearby, or when she could fix her attention entirely on him.
⁸

As Alix chatted with the ambassador, the musicians suddenly began playing a loud, fast passage, complete with blaring brass and throbbing kettledrums. She winced, and put her hands up to cover
her ears. ‘With a pained and pleading glance,’ Paléologue remembered, she timidly pointed to the band, and murmured, ‘Couldn’t you? . . . ’

It was all too much, the jarring noise, the din of voices, the exhausting socializing, the intrusion of disturbing events and the threat of still more disturbing events
to come. Like a violent summer squall rising up to buffet the land, whirling all into chaos and confusion, the events of the past weeks had arisen out of nowhere to create mayhem and confuse her
plans, leaving her once again on edge and lost, abandoned to chance, as weightless as the yellow dust of the fields blown about by the winds of chance.

O
n the night of August 1, 1914, the empress’s lady-in-waiting Sophie Buxhoeveden received a phone call from her mistress.

‘War is declared,’ Alix said, her voice hoarse with suppressed sobs.

‘Good heavens!’ Sophie said. ‘So Austria has done it!’

‘No, no. Germany. It is ghastly, terrible – but God will help and will save Russia.’

It was after ten o’clock, but Alix was alert and active, telling Sophie that ‘we must work,’ and instructing her to begin at once to open the sewing workshop at the
Hermitage.
¹
She had prepared a list of things for Sophie to undertake, despite the lateness of the hour, secretaries and staff members to
contact, notes to write, telephone calls to make. As she read Sophie her instructions she grew calmer, her voice resuming its normal timbre.

During the year she had occupied the office of lady-in-waiting, Sophie had come to know the empress well. She had become accustomed to her high-strung temperament, her eccentricities – her
obsessive list-making and itemizing, her occasional sharpness and imperiousness with servants, her preference for white lilacs and orchids, her liking for cold rooms and her poor appetite and
vegetarianism. She had grown accustomed to Alix’s craving for solitude and distrust of strangers, her headaches and fatigue and frequent attacks of anxiety and her fatalism about what she
referred to as her loss of health.

The lady-in-waiting learned that her imperial mistress was sensitive on the subject of her ill health, that she became angry when people said she suffered from ‘nerves,’ and insisted
that her nerves ‘were as
strong as ever,’ and that it was only her ‘over-tired heart’ that gave her trouble.
²

Sophie was well aware, as were others in the empress’s household, that her illness was more than physical, more than a perpetual over-anxiousness that brought on severe physical symptoms
in the presence of crowds or strangers. That her mental compass was awry. As Nicky’s cousin Maria, daughter of his uncle Paul, put it, Alix had ‘lost . . . her mental equilibrium’
and showed an ‘increasing inner rigidity’ and a ‘fading sense of proportion.’
³
She clung to those she perceived to be her
friends and allies with an excessive loyalty. (‘When the empress thought well of a person,’ Sophie wrote, ‘in politics as in friendship, he had to reveal himself almost as a
criminal before she would give him up.’
⁴
) Towards those whom she distrusted she became vindictive, and no one could persuade her –
indeed, it would seem that few, other than Minnie, ever tried – that her judgment was askew and her knowledge of the world too narrow to lead her to sound opinions.

The deterioration was unmistakable. As Alix’s maid Madeleine Zanotti, who had served her since 1892, would later say of her, ‘in the last years she was not the same as she had been
earlier,’ convinced that bad luck pursued her, and that ‘in the eyes of Russia’ she could ‘never do right.’
⁵
Beneath her constantly reiterated assertions of trust and faith in a miracle-working God she was deeply distrustful, fearful of catastrophe, desperately unhappy.

Only in incessant activity could she find relief from the troubling thoughts that plagued her, and her preferred activity was rescuing and nurturing those in need.

‘It is my daily prayer,’ Alix affirmed, ‘that God should just send me the sorrowing.’ ‘After all, it is life’s greatest consolation to feel that the sorrowing
need one, and it has been my daily prayer, for years that God should just send me the sorrowing, and give me the possibility to be a help to them, through His infinite mercy.’
⁶

The outbreak of war was certain to increase the numbers of the sorrowing, and the empress meant to take her place on the battle lines as a fighter in the war against sorrow and pain.

The sheer scale of the effort was certain to be overwhelming, for within a few weeks of the declaration of war the head of the zemstvo Red Cross calculated that Russia
would need hospital space for a million wounded, and the hospital trains were bringing thousands of wounded men to Petersburg – now rechristened Petrograd, to avoid the former German-sounding
name – and its surroundings each day. Minnie was the patron of the Red Cross, but Minnie was in England; she appointed Alix to take her place temporarily, and nothing could have pleased the
empress more, until she began to encounter opposition and hostility from various officials in the organization.
⁷
The improvements she suggested
were criticized, the instructions she gave ignored; she was assumed to be pro-German, and to lack compassion for the Russian soldiers.

The opposition and accusation of being pro-German stung, for Alix had always disliked her cousin Willy and in her twenty years in Russia had become an ardent Russian patriot.

From the time, in the 1880s, when the youthful Willy had courted Ella and shocked the entire family of Grand Duke Louis by his arrogance and presumption, Alix had disliked him. ‘He thinks
he is a superman,’ she once said, ‘and he’s really nothing but a clown. He has no real worth. His only virtues are his strict morals and his conjugal fidelity.’
⁸
She called him the ‘monstrous Kaiser’ and was, as all her relatives observed, ‘passionately anti-German.’
⁹
Her father, who had fought against Prussia in his youth, had raised her to hate all things Prussian, and the kaiser was Prussian to the core.

Alix worried that Willy would send her brother Ernie to the Russian front, and was greatly relieved to learn, in the early months of the war, that the armies of Hesse-Darmstadt were not engaged
against Russian troops. Sister Irene’s ‘very amiable’ husband Henry was an admiral in the German navy, and sister Victoria’s husband Louis was a high-ranking British
admiralty official. She was concerned about them too, and indeed about all those placed in harm’s way by the war.

‘One’s heart bleeds, thinking of all the misery everywhere and what will be afterwards!’ she wrote to Victoria in November, 1914.
She wept for the
loneliness of Ernie and all others far from home, for the pain and wretchedness of those in combat, for the fear suffered by those taken prisoner. She had seen that fear at first hand, when German
prisoners were brought to her hospitals. They had been terrified at first that the Russians would shoot them, or cut off their noses and ears; she had seen the look of amazement on their faces
when, instead of being brutalized, they were well treated and fed.

Before long Minnie returned to Russia and resumed her patronage of the Red Cross. Alix relinquished her temporary headship with relief, and concentrated on the larger issues of setting up
hospitals and trying to fill the huge gaps in supplies for the wounded.

Royal palaces, with their hundreds of rooms, vast kitchens and larders, their garages and stables and staffs of servants, made ideal hospitals. Alix went to work making the arrangements for
converting dozens of royal and aristocratic palaces, and other mansions and large public buildings, into military hospitals. Within the first four months of the war, eighty-five such hospitals were
operating in and around Petrograd, all under her patronage. In Moscow, the Petrovsky Palace had begun taking in wounded and the Nicholas Palace, which had been Ella’s home before she founded
her monastery, became a workshop where blankets were made and warm socks, mittens and hats knitted for the soldiers.

The vast blue and white Catherine Palace at Tsarskoe Selo was made into a hospital for officers, its beautiful amber-, lapis-and malachite-decorated reception rooms filled with beds, its ornate
ballroom converted to an operating theatre. Alix had never liked the grandiose palace. Now, however, she had found the perfect use for it, and went there nearly every day to supervise its
operations.

The Russian troops had gone bravely into battle, pushing westwards in numbers nearly half a million strong into the marshy wastes of East Prussia in the last days of August. But the Germans had
surrounded them, trapping them in the treacherous swamps near the village of Tannenberg. Bogged down, sometimes swallowed by quicksand, men and horses, artillery and equipment sank into the morass,
helpless against the German guns. The Chevaliers Gardes,
the Red Hussars, the Preobrazhensky regiment, the Tirailleurs de la Garde – all perished, or were forced to
surrender. Some ninety thousand troops were taken prisoner. The Russian general Samsonov, overwhelmed by dishonour, killed himself.

The citizens of Petrograd, reading of the battle in special editions of the evening papers, could not believe at first that their mighty military forces had suffered so sudden and so decisive a
defeat. Unlike the tsar’s ministers, they were not aware of the vulnerability of the enormous Russian armies, their shortages of equipment and inept leadership. They had assumed that German
and Austrian arms would not be able to hold out long against their own armies and those of the French, that the war would be over quickly and that they would win it. That the ‘Russian Steam
Roller,’ as the press called the army, would flatten the enemy, that there would be Cossacks riding into Berlin by Christmas.
¹⁰
Instead,
they read of massive casualties, they saw the trains crowded with the wounded coming into the Petrograd stations, and they heard rumours, terrible rumours, of treachery and betrayal.