The Tsar's Doctor (17 page)
Authors: Mary McGrigor
That Tsar Alexander took a very personal interest in the hospitals, established by Wylie on his orders, is proved by Doctor Robert Lyall, who had come to St Petersburg to be the physician of the Countess Orlof Tchésmenska, one of the maids of honour to the empress. He describes how:
The Emperor may be seen in summer riding in a one-horse
droshki
, and in winter in a one-horse sledge, or walking on the quays of the Neva, or the boulevard of the admiralty in the most simple uniform. I shall never forget the first time I saw His Majesty. A few days after his return from Paris in 1815, I was introduced to Sir James Wylie, with whom I visited some of the military hospitals at Petersburg, and in which I spoke with a number of medical gentlemen. A few days afterwards, on the palace-quay, at no great distance from one of these hospitals, I remarked an officer in a plain uniform without epaulets, whom I took for one of the physicians I had seen, and meant to address him. But for my want of knowledge of the French language, at that time, I should have addressed him. While I hesitated to say
Comment vous portez vous Monsier le Docteur
, or simply,
Docteur?
the Emperor came upon me and stared. I detected my error and passed by. But what was my astonishment at seeing a number of persons, one after the other, standing to one side and taking off their hats as the said officer proceeded forward. On enquiry, I found I had taken the Emperor for a doctor.
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Lyall later described how the emperor sometimes visited hospitals totally unannounced:
On his arrival at a town, as soon as time permits, Alexander visits and examines the state of the public institutions and the hospitals, especially the military hospitals, with the minutest attention. Indeed so quick is His Majesty in his motions to these places that he sometimes arrives unexpectedly at an earlier hour than looked for and finds the establishment in its real state.
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Much as Russian doctors respected him it was Doctor Lefèvre, physician to the British Embassy in Moscow, who gave the most lasting testimony to Wylie’s achievements.
It is to Sir James Wylie that Russia is indebted for the organization of her medical schools both civil and military, and it has been by his persevering industry that the Medical Academy of Petersburg and Moscow has arrived at the honourable rank which it now holds among medical institutions . . . The common soldier has to thank Sir James Wylie for such care and protection as his predecessors demanded in vain and the army in general has to thank him for a real and effective, instead of nominal and inefficient, medical staff.
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It was not, in fact, until 1840, on the anniversary of the battle of Borodino, that Tsar Nicholas, the brother who succeeded Alexander, made official recognition of Wylie’s service to his country, by ordering the striking of a medal with his portrait on one side. This, although greatly gratifying, did not mean as much to him as a personal letter from Tsar Nicholas. ‘You yourself ceased not to give a grand example of zeal and self-denial for the welfare and relief of the suffering warriors.’
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Wylie, on receiving this, felt that his moment had arrived.
Wylie was now to become involved in yet another of Alexander’s initiative schemes. The end of the war with France brought new problems of its own. ‘The Russian army,’ wrote De Maistre, the Sardinian ambassador to Russia, in January 1816, ‘consists of 560,000 effective men, and 260,000 reserve’. The plan was to reduce it to 200,000 men, but the question then being asked was how could the soldiers who, once demobilized became free men, find employment in a country where serf labour was the rule?
Shortly after his return to his homeland, the tsar appointed General Alexei Arakcheev as his deputy on the committee of ministers with responsibility for supervising the Committee’s decisions and reporting them back to the tsar.
Arakcheev, the Gatchina sergeant-major who had defended Alexander from the tyranny of his father was, as he now realized, totally and unequivocally loyal. He was also ruthlessly efficient. It was largely thanks to him that the ruined city of Smolensk was rebuilt. These were his best qualities. He remained, as he had always been, a cruel and callous man. His temper – and likewise his appearance – had not improved with age. One of his officers described him as having ‘cold colourless eyes, a thick and very inelegant nose shaped like a shoe, a rather long chin and tightly compressed lips on which no one could remember having seen a smile or a laugh’.
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It was Arakcheev, rather than Wylie, who took credit for the military settlements with which both were closely involved.
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Alexander first mooted the proposal to establish them in a manifesto of November 1814.
The harsh conditions under which his soldiers were forced to serve had long distressed the tsar. There being no regular conscription, the government ordered the landowners to supply serfs for the army whenever the need arose. The term, which was supposed to last for twenty-five years, in fact continued in most cases until the men were either too old or too ill to fight. Once forced into the army the soldier said farewell to his family, knowing that in all probability he would never see them again. There was no leave, even in peacetime. Neither was there any form of pension either for the men themselves or for their families in the event of them being wounded or killed.
Determined to abolish such injustice, Alexander visualized a plan by which soldiers, in time of peace, could return to their families and work the land allotted to them. However, Arakcheev, when appointed commander-in-chief of all the military settlements in Russia, entirely disregarded the tsar’s humane intentions. Peasants, some only boys, forced into uniform, were marched to their work in the fields. At home, in the little huts, women had to have so many pots and platters laid out on a shelf for inspection. Fined for ridiculous irregularities, such as feeding the family fish on a day decreed for soup, or for failing to do washing on a Monday, they were brought before a military tribunal. Men at eighteen and girls at sixteen were married by drawing lots and widows of a child-bearing age were forced to re-marry.
Alexander remained in ignorance of the way in which his benevolent intentions were being carried out. His visits to the military settlements, always known in advance, were arranged so that he departed confident of happy and well-ordered villages.
Famously, on one tour of inspection, with Arakcheev at his side, as he visited every house of a settlement, he found a dinner prepared containing a succulent-looking roast pig. Prince Pyotr Volkonsky, the tsar’s aide-de-camp, becoming suspicious, surreptitiously cut the tail off the pig and put it into his pocket. Sure enough, at the next house, there again was the pig, this time minus its tail.
‘I think this is an old friend,’ Volkonsky said jokingly as he took the tail out of his pocket and put it back beside the end of the pig. But such was the general’s hold over Alexander that Volkonsky soon found himself disgraced.
Much enthused with his project, Alexander planned further military establishments on the River Volkhov, near Novgorod and Pskov, and also in the Ukraine. The result was that over 100 infantry battalions and about two hundred squadrons of cavalry, over 750,000 people in all, were planted in these settlements, which included both schools and hospitals.
In charge of the latter buildings was Sir James Wylie who, now in his late fifties, faced yet another enormous task. The fact that so little has been written about his efficiency in accomplishing what would have been a daunting challenge for many a younger man must be put down to the jealousy of his fellow doctors and of the higher echelons of the army of which Arakcheev, with his extraordinary hold over the tsar, was certainly one. It is fair to say that full recognition of Wylie’s achievements, in providing well-run hospitals for the Russian soldier and his dependants, was only accorded to him nearly forty years later. It was Nicholas, the brother who succeeded Alexander, who finally gave Wylie the credit for transforming Russian military hospitals, which, although still primitive by modern standards, compared favourably with others of their time.
In the spring of 1818 Alexander set off from Warsaw, where he had been attending an assembly of the Diet, as the Polish parliament was called, to visit the southern provinces of the enormous realm over which he ruled. With him, as part of his entourage, went Wylie, whose professional services were called upon when, on the appallingly bad roads of the country of the Don Cossacks, Alexander’s carriage overturned and his leg was badly injured. Wylie insisted that he must take at least a week’s rest with the limb in a horizontal position. Alexander, however, with typical stubbornness, would have none of it. His planned curriculum was all-important. Riding and walking, he carried on.
Crossing the estuary of the Don from Azov, he reached the port of Taganrog, which was later to be the scene of dramatic and tragic events. The reason for the tsar’s visit in this instance was that he had been advised to demolish the town on the grounds that either Theodosia or Kaffa were better situated as commercial seaports. Alexander, however, on reaching Taganrog, was so impressed by its obvious prosperity and the attractive appearance of the white-walled Tartar houses which clustered round the harbour – claimed to be shallow enough to freeze during the winter months – that he refused to consent to its abolition. In retrospect it would seem that it was the tranquillity and remoteness of this little town which so attracted his restless spirit that it drew him, as irresistibly as a siren, to the danger lying hidden within the surrounding marshes.
Alexander, having toured the southern provinces, eventually returned to St Petersburg after a journey of over 2,000 miles. By then, as Wylie had warned him, the injury to his leg had developed into chronic erysipelas and he also suffered severely from aching at the back of his head.
Wylie now had the tsar’s health, both mental and physical, continuously on his mind. Since his return to Russia Alexander had become increasingly neurotic. Obsessed with religion and prone to bouts of depression, he also became convinced that soon he would share the savage fate of his father and grandfather.
The man who had loved to walk among his people now refused to leave the palace until his guards had searched both sides of the street. His paranoia, brought on by overwork and the strain of responsibility of his enormous empire, rapidly and inexorably increased. Wylie did what he could to help him with the medicines available: opium and its derivative laudanum, which was generally mixed with wine, being the main means of killing pain and soothing a troubled mind.
Alexander was also obsessed with the idea of an impending revolution, writing to De Noailles, the French ambassador in St Petersburg,
‘Il ne faudra pas que votre gouvernement affranche de la surveillance des armeés alliées, s’endrome sur ces dangers’
(It will be important, once your government is freed from the surveillance of the allied armies, that it doesn’t ignore these dangers.).
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De Noailles replied that he believed his government was strong enough to dispel any revolutionary uprising, whereupon Alexander explained to him that the devil was waiting with a powerful secret organization, sworn to death and destruction, which would descend upon Europe. ‘We are all prepared for the battle,’ Alexander announced.
He was certainly correct in believing that many of Napoleon’s supporters continued to plot the assassination of those rulers concerned with his fall. In Paris the Duke of Wellington was fortunate to survive an attack by a man named Cantillon who, when acquitted through the connivance of French agents, was awarded by Napoleon with a legacy for the rest of his life.
Later it was to transpire that a plot had been hatched to seize Tsar Alexander by cutting the traces of his horses when he arrived on the French frontier to visit his army of occupation after leaving the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle in the autumn of 1818. Once in their hands they were to force him, under pain of death, to sign a paper ordering the liberation of Napoleon and the installation of Napoleon’s son as Emperor of France, with his mother Marie Louise as regent.
The insurgents were rumoured to have numbered as many as 1,600 men, including some actually present in Aix-la-Chapelle. However, the strict security measures taken by the Duke of Wellington who, together with Castlereagh and Canning, represented Britain at the Congress, succeeded in foiling their intentions.
When the treaty for the immediate evacuation of France was signed, Alexander went for a single day to Paris to present it to King Louis. The old man, overwhelmed with delight at the gesture (Alexander had travelled nearly 400 miles), afterwards declared that it had been ‘one of the happiest moments of my life’.
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Having reviewed his army at Valenciennes, Alexander returned to Aix-la-Chapelle, arriving in the middle of the night. The next morning he breakfasted with Wellington and, having thanked him for the care of his troops under his command, he gave him the baton of a Russian field marshal.
The tsar was back in St Petersburg in time to celebrate the Russian New Year of 1819. He was seen to be in excellent spirits and the omens seemed good for the coming year. Then suddenly devastation struck. Catherine Pavlovna, his favourite sister, remarried to Prince William of Württemberg just two years before, suddenly died. Alexander, who had visited her at Stuttgart only the previous month, found it almost impossible to believe. Although an attack of erysipelas in her head was given out as the cause of death, rumours that she had been murdered began to be whispered in the court. Catherine, so vibrant and outspoken, had made enemies – she was known to have quarrelled with her husband’s younger brother – but from the little evidence remaining it would seem that pneumonia, resulting from influenza, was the most likely cause of her death.
