Nicholas and Alexandra (46 page)

trouble, notably during your last war. Even now, you can still save the peace of Europe by stopping your military measures.

Willy

News of the general mobilization of the huge Russian army caused consternation in Berlin. At midnight on July 31, Count Pourtalès appeared in Sazonov's office with a German ultimatum to Russia to halt her mobilization within twelve hours. At noon the following day, August 1, Russia had not replied, and the Kaiser ordered general mobilization.

Nicholas hurriedly telegraphed to William:

I understand that you are compelled to mobilize but I should like to have the same guarantee from you that I gave you myself —that these measures do not mean war and that we shall continue to negotiate to save the general peace so dear to our hearts. With God's help our long and tried friendship should be able to prevent bloodshed. I confidently await your reply.

Nicky

Before this message arrived in Berlin, however, coded instructions had been sent by the German government to Count Pourtalès in St. Petersburg. He was instructed to declare war on Russia at five p.m. The Count was tardy and it was not until 7:10 p.m. that he appeared ashen-faced before Sazonov. Three times Pourtalès asked if Sazonov could not assure him that Russia would cancel its mobilization; three times Sazonov refused. "In that case, sir," said Pourtalès, "my government charges me to hand you this note. His Majesty the Emperor, my august sovereign, in the name of the empire accepts the challenge and considers himself in a state of war with Russia." Pourtalès was overcome with emotion. He leaned against a window and wept openly. "Who could have thought I should be leaving St. Petersburg under such circumstances," he said. Sazonov rose from his desk, embraced the elderly Count and helped him from the room.

At Peterhof, the Tsar and his family had just come from evening prayer. Before going to dinner, Nicholas went to his study to read the latest dispatches. The Empress and her daughters went straight to the dinner table to await the Tsar. Nicholas was in his study when Count Fredericks brought him the message from Sazonov that Germany had declared war. Shaken but calm, the Tsar instructed his ministers to come to the palace at nine p.m.

Meanwhile, Alexandra and the girls waited with growing uneasiness. The Empress had just asked Tatiana to go and bring her father to the table when Nicholas appeared in the doorway. In a tense voice he told them what had happened. Alexandra began to weep. The girls, badly frightened, followed their mother's example. Nicholas did what he could to calm them and then withdrew, without dinner. At nine p.m., Sazonov, Goremykin and other ministers arrived at the palace along with the French and British Ambassadors, Paléologue and Buchanan.

Four months later, in another conversation with Paléologue, Nicholas revealed how the day had ended for him. Late that night, after war had been declared, he had received another telegram from the Kaiser. It read:

An immediate, clear and unmistakable reply of your government [to the German ultimatum] is the sole way to avoid endless misery. Until I receive this reply, I am unable to my great grief to enter upon the subject of your telegram. I must ask most earnestly that you, without delay, order your troops under no circumstances to commit the slightest violation of our frontiers.

Almost certainly this message had been intended for delivery before the declaration of war and had been caught in the crowded bureaucratic pipeline. Yet it was composed during the same hours that his country was declaring war, an indication of the Kaiser's state of mind. To Nicholas, this last message he ever received from the German Emperor seemed a final revelation of William's character.

"He was never sincere; not a moment," Nicholas told Paléologue, speaking of the Kaiser. "In the end he was hopelessly entangled in the net of his own perfidy and lies. ... It was half past one in the morning of August 2. ... I went to the Empress's room, as she was already in bed, to have a cup of tea with her before retiring myself. I stayed with her until two in the morning. Then I wanted to have a bath as I was very tired. I was just getting in when my servant knocked at the door saying he had 'a very important telegram . . . from His Majesty the Emperor William.' I read the telegram, read it again, and then repeated it aloud, but I couldn't understand a word. What on earth does William mean, I thought, pretending that it still depends on me whether war is averted or not? He implores me not to let my troops cross the frontier! Have I suddenly gone mad? Didn't the Minister of the Court, my trusted Fredericks, at least six hours ago

bring me the declaration of war the German ambassador had just handed to Sazonov? I returned to the Empress's room and read her William's telegram. . . . She said immediately: 'You're not going to answer it, are you?' 'Certainly not!'

"There is no doubt that the object of this strange and farcical telegram was to shake my resolution, disconcert me and inspire me to some absurd and dishonorable step. It produced the opposite effect. As I left the Empress's room I felt that all was over forever between me and William. I slept extremely well. When I woke at my usual hour, I felt as if a weight had fallen from my mind. My responsibility to God and my people was still enormous, but at least I knew what I had to do."

PART THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY

For the Defense of Holy Russia

The next afternoon, August 2, 1914, the Tsar issued a formal proclamation of hostilities at the Winter Palace. It was a blazing-hot midsummer day. The palace square, one of the largest in Europe, was packed with thousands of sweltering, excited people carrying banners, flags and icons and waiting impatiently for the moment when they could pour out their emotion in the presence of the sovereign himself. On the Neva side, where the Tsar would arrive by boat from Peterhof, crowds of people swarmed along the bridges and quays, singing and cheering. The river itself was teeming with yachts, steamers, sailboats, fishing smacks and rowboats, all streaming flags and crowded with spectators.

When Nicholas and Alexandra stepped onto the quay at the Palace Bridge, wave on wave of cheers rolled over them:
"Batiushka, Batiushka,
lead us to victory!" Nicholas wore the plain uniform of an infantry regiment. Alexandra, in a pure white dress, had turned up the brim of her picture hat so that the crowds could see her face. The four young Grand Duchesses walked behind, but the Tsarevich, still unable to walk because of his injury on the
Standart,
remained at Peterhof, weeping in disappointment.

Inside the palace, the Tsar and the Empress slowly made their way through the crush of people lining the grand staircases and wide corridors. As Nicholas passed, bowing and nodding, men and women dropped to their knees and frantically tried to kiss his hand. The service was held in the great white marble Salle de Nicholas, where five thousand people had jammed themselves beneath the glittering chandeliers. An altar had been erected in the center of the hall, and on it stood the miraculous icon, the Vladimir Mother of God. The icon, brought to Moscow in 1395, was said to have turned back Tamerlane. Before the icon in 1812 the grizzled General Kutuzov had

prayed as he was leaving to take command of Tsar Alexander I's armies in the war against Napoleon. Now, at the beginning of a new war, Nicholas II invoked the icon's blessing. Raising his right hand, he pronounced in a low voice the oath taken by Alexander I in 1812 : "I solemnly swear that I will never make peace so long as
a
single enemy remains on Russian soil."

After taking the oath, Nicholas and Alexandra went to meet the expectant masses waiting outside. When the two small figures appeared alone on a red-draped balcony high above them, the great crowd knelt. Nicholas raised his hand and tried to speak; the front rows hushed, but at the rear the excitement and commotion were too great and his words were drowned. Overwhelmed, Nicholas bowed his head. Seeing him, the crowd spontaneously began to sing the Imperial anthem whose chords make up the final crescendo of Tchaikovsky's "1812 Overture":

God save the Tsar, Mighty and powerful, Let him reign for our glory,

For the confusion of our enemies, The Orthodox Tsar, God save the Tsar.

Hand in hand, the man in the khaki uniform and the woman in the white dress stood on the balcony and wept with the crowd. "To those thousands on their knees," declared Paléologue, "at that moment the Tsar was really the Autocrat, the military, political and religious director of his people, the absolute master of their bodies and souls."

It was the same throughout the empire: wild excitement, crowds filling the streets, laughing, weeping, singing, cheering, kissing. Overnight, a wave of patriotism swept over Russia. In Moscow, Kiev, Odessa, Kharkov, Kazan, Tula, Rostov, Tiflis, Tomsk and Irkutsk, workmen exchanged their red flags of revolution for the icons of Holy Russia and portraits of the Tsar. Students rushed from the universities to enlist. Army officers, caught in the street, were happily tossed in the air.

In St. Petersburg, every day brought new demonstrations in favor of the Tsar and Russia's allies. From his window in the French Embassy, Paléologue looked down on huge processions carrying flags and icons, shouting
"Vive la France/"
On August 5, as the German armies crossed the frontiers of neutral Belgium, a telegram from London to Sir George Buchanan, the British Ambassador, announced that England had entered the war. The same day, the Union Jack was

hoisted into line with the Tricolor and the Russian Imperial banner. With a fine Gallic sense of detail, Paléologue noted that "the flags of the three nations blend eloquently. Composed of the same colors, blue, white and red, they are a picturesque and striking expression of the coalition."

At the German Embassy, an immense granite building surmounted on the roof by two huge bronze horses, the violent mob predicted by Count Pourtalès made a sudden vengeful appearance. Their rage was directed not at their own government, as Pourtalès had promised, but at his. Invading the building, they smashed windows, ripped tapestries and pictures and hurled into the street not only the Embassy furniture, china and glassware, but the Count's own priceless collection of Renaissance marbles and brasses. Ropes were coiled around the equestrian statues on the roof, hundreds of hands pulled and tugged, and with a crash the Kaiser's prancing horses toppled into the street.

In those early days, patriotism was closely tied to a deep-rooted fear of the Germans. "For Faith, Tsar and Country!" and "For the defense of Holy Russia!" were the calls that stirred the barracks, factories and villages. "The war with Japan," wrote Kerensky, was "dynastic and colonial," but "in 1914 the people immediately recognized the conflict with Germany as its own war ... a war which meant that the destinies of Russia were at stake." Rodzianko, walking in the streets of Petersburg, mingled with workers who a few days earlier had been chopping down telegraph poles, overturning streetcars and building barricades. "Now all Russia is involved," they told him. "We want to rally to our Tsar to make certain of victory over the Germans." Nobility and peasants burned with the same emotions. "This is not a political war," said Grand Duchess Marie Pavlovna, widow of the Tsar's uncle Vladimir. "It is a duel to the death between Slavism and Germanism. One of the two must succumb." An old peasant from Novgorod told Kokovtsov, the former Prime Minister, "If we are unlucky enough not to destroy the Germans, they'll come here. They'll reign over the whole of Russia and then they'll harness you and me—yes, you as well as me—to their plows."

The Duma sat only one day, August 8, passing the government's military budget without a dissenting vote. "War was declared and all at once, not a trace was left of the revolutionary movement," declared Kerensky. "Even the Bolshevik members of the Duma were forced to admit—though somewhat sullenly—that it was the duty of the proletariat to cooperate in the defense."

That Germany would be defeated, few Russians doubted; Britain's

entry made the outcome certain. There was controversy as to how long the war would go on. "Six months," said the pessimists, who argued that the Germans might fight. "The Germans don't know how to fight," replied the optimists. "They only know how to make sausages. All the Russians will have to do to annihilate the whole German army is simply to throw their caps at them."

Ancient tradition prescribed that Russian tsars begin their wars by going to Moscow to ask the blessing of God in the historic seat of tsarist rule, the Kremlin. If anything, when Nicholas and his family arrived in Moscow on August 17, the city was more wildly enthusiastic than St. Petersburg. A million people lined the streets, jammed balconies, windows and rooftops or clung from the branches of trees as the Imperial procession wound through the streets to the Kremlin's Iberian Gate. That night, inside the Kremlin, a private worry reappeared. "Alexis Nicolaievich is complaining a good deal of his leg tonight," Pierre Gilliard wrote in his diary. "Will he be able to walk tomorrow or will he have to be carried? The Tsar and Tsaritsa are in despair. The boy was not able to be present at the ceremony in the Winter Palace. It is always the same when he is supposed to appear in public . . . some complication will prevent it. Fate seems to pursue him."

On the following day, Gilliard continued: "When Alexis Nicolaievich found he could not walk this morning, he was in a terrible state. Their Majesties have decided he shall be present at the ceremony all the same. He will be carried by one of the Tsar's Cossacks. But it is a dreadful disappointment to the parents who do not wish the idea to gain ground among the people that the Heir to the Throne is an invalid."

At eleven, the Tsar, the Empress, their four daughters, the Tsare-vich, in the arms of a huge Cossack, and Grand Duchess Elizabeth, wearing the gray robe of her religious order, appeared in the St George Hall of the Kremlin. In the center of the hall, Nicholas proclaimed to the nobility and people of Moscow: "From this place, the very heart of Russia, I send my soul's greeting to my valiant troops and my noble allies. God is with us!" Moving into the Ouspensky Sobor—the Cathedral of the Assumption—where eighteen years earlier they had been crowned, the Tsar and the Empress prayed before the lofty, jeweled iconostasis. In the flickering glow of hundreds of candles, through pungent clouds of sweet incense, they walked around the church to kneel and pray before the tombs of Russia's patriarchs.