Imperial Requiem: Four Royal Women and the Fall of the Age of Empires (55 page)

Of the four great empires that went to war in 1914, Russia suffered the most when the first volleys were fired. Within a matter of months, Nicholas II’s armies were in retreat. Germany had proved her military might from the outset. Russian troops soon pulled out of Poland altogether for the first time in nearly 150 years. Nearly three million men were lost before Poland was finally surrendered. Sadly, Russia was in no shape to wage war. In 1914, there were “a million fewer rifles in her arsenal than the number of men who were mobilized, and the same arsenals proved to be almost 600 million rounds of rifle ammunition short. There was only about one machine gun for every six hundred infantry … [and] the entire Russian army had only 60 batteries of heavy artillery with which to face the Austrians and the Germans, while the Germans alone had 381 to direct against the Russians.”
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As Nicholas II was forced to deal with Russia’s shattering defeats on the battlefield, he also had to contend with the return of Rasputin to his family’s life. The
staretz
was one of the most vocal opponents of the war, even going so far as to send Nicholas a telegram warning him, “Let Papa not plan war for with war will come the end of Russia and yourselves and you will lose to the last man.” The tsar was so outraged by Rasputin’s note that he tore it up the moment he read it.
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Within a year, Rasputin became a regular personage in the tsarina’s entourage. “The mad monk,” as he was derisively known, was a master manipulator who used Alexandra’s fears over Alexei’s health to his advantage. He recounted that, once, during an argument with the tsar and tsarina, “I threatened to go away and leave them to their fate; they then agreed to everything.”
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The
staretz
spread many stories about his relationship with Alexandra. “Many tales are told of the Empress and me,” he told a diplomat. “I know this. It is infamous. Yesterday I went to see her. The poor little thing; she too is in need of being able to speak frankly with some one. She suffers much. I console her. I talk to her of God, and of us peasants and she becomes calm. Ah! It is but yesterday she went to sleep on my shoulder.”
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Rasputin knew exactly how to twist and pull Alexandra as he desired. Preying upon her darkest fears, he once declared, “Remember that I need neither the Emperor nor yourself. If you abandon me to my enemies it will not worry me. I’m quite able to cope with them. The demons themselves are helpless against me.… But neither the Emperor nor you can do without
me
. If I am not there to protect you, your son will come to harm.”
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In declaring war on the Central powers, Great Britain faced a daunting task. It faced the obstacle of transporting troops and supplies across the English Channel to the front lines in France. The risk of convoys being attacked by German submarines was ever present. But King George V refused to be intimidated; so too did his wife. Queen Mary took a leading role in getting the British people behind the government and the war. In August, she met with Lady Bertha Dawkins, one of her ladies-in-waiting, to begin planning relief for the soldiers. “We must have everything ready,” she said. “I do not want to have the state of things which prevailed during the Boer War, with everybody just sending what they liked, without relation to the real needs of our soldiers, without organisation. It entails too much waste, and too great loss of time.”
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The queen was instrumental in organizing the “monstrous regiment of women” who took over many of the responsibilities on the home front when the men went off to war. Determined to keep the public morale afloat, she devoted herself to visiting hospitals and encouraging the troops. According to one of her biographers, Mary’s “whole life now seemed to have been a preparation for [this,] her finest hour.”
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She took it upon herself to mobilize England’s vast group of unemployed women. She organized entire manufacturing sectors, especially munitions, with only women workers. These groups later formed the Women’s Legion, which in turn became the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps. By the end of the summer, she was furiously working to get women workers the equality and respect they deserved. After haranguing much of the government, she was thrilled when the Central Committee on Women’s Employment was formed in 1914. Included on the roster was Margaret Bondfield, the first female cabinet minister in British history.

Along with organizing help for the war effort, the queen took special delight in bringing comfort and compassion to those whom society had neglected. Shortly after the war began, Mary was at Sandringham when she heard about an elderly widow in a nearby village who had fallen ill with a serious disease. The townspeople were too frightened of catching the illness to visit her, so she was alone. A few days later, onlookers were stunned when they saw Queen Mary go into the woman’s house and march straight up to the bedroom with her arms filled with flowers—which she picked herself—to visit the woman. In caring for others, Mary did not limit her time to just to the sick and wounded. She sought to inspire all her subjects.

Throughout that summer of 1914, Mary would sit by her window at Buckingham Palace and watch one regiment after another marching to the train station bound for Dover, and beyond that, France. This sight gnawed at her heart, especially because two of her sons were on active duty. The Prince of Wales was serving with the Grenadier Guards in France, and Bertie was an officer in the Royal Navy. Deeply moved by the sight of so many young men ready to give their lives for king and country, the queen issued a heartfelt letter addressed to “the Men of Our Army, Navy, and Air Force.” Reminiscent of Dona’s letter to the women of Germany, Mary’s note touched on national pride and the honor that the troops were rendering to Britain.

I send this message to tell every man how much we, the women of the British Empire at home, watch and pray for you during the long hours of these days of stress and endurance.

Our pride in you is immeasurable, our hope unbounded, our trust absolute. You are fighting in the cause of Righteousness and Freedom, fighting to defend the children and women of our land from the horrors that have overtaken other countries, fighting for our very existence as a People at Home and Across the Seas …

We, on our part, send forth, with full hearts and unfaltering will, the lives we hold most dear …

… I know that I am expressing what is felt by thousands of wives and mothers when I say that we are determined to help one another in keeping your homes ready against your glad home-coming.

In God’s Name we bless you and by His help we too will do our best.
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War brought upon Austria-Hungary a cataclysm it was unprepared to face. Its army, though large, was a hodgepodge of different ethnicities that did not even share a common language. Once fighting broke out, the empire suffered serious defeats on the battlefield, though not nearly as badly as those that had befallen Russia. The invasion of Serbia, expected to take only a matter of days, came to a screeching halt despite Austria’s forty-eight infantry divisions, compared with Serbia’s eleven. At the Battle of Cer in August 1914, the Austrians suffered the loss of 27,500 men compared to the Serbians’ 16,500. When it became obvious that Austria could not conquer Serbia so easily, imperial forces were sent north against the Russians, but that too failed. Despite their defeat in Poland, the tsarist armies quickly overran Galicia, making it as far west as the Carpathian Mountains. Part of the reason for Russia’s success was that they were in possession of Austrian mobilization schedules, thanks to Alfred Redl, an Austrian colonel who was selling state secrets to Russia. Austrian attempts to reclaim Galicia failed dismally, with more than 350,000 soldiers killed in the process. In the aftermath, Ukrainian citizens in Galicia suspected of being disloyal to Austria were executed. Only the defeat of the Russian army at Tannenberg by the German Eighth Army, which cost another 250,000 lives, slowed their advance into Hungary. By the end of the year, “some 82 percent of the original infantry complement of the Habsburg armed forces were casualties. About a million men were dead, wounded, or sick. The rest of the war would be fought by reserves, civilians, and officers just completing their training.”
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Emperor Franz Joseph believed the causes of the war were just and righteous. Throughout his sixty-year reign, he had watched as one territory after another was ripped away from his empire. Lombardy, Venice, and parts of Switzerland, Germany, Poland, and Romania had all belonged to the Habsburg monarchy at one time or another, but military defeats had forced the emperor to surrender them. He believed this war was an attack on Austria’s imperial sovereignty, and for this cause, Franz Joseph refused to back down, even if it meant the destruction of his empire. But he was also a pragmatist; every war of his reign had ended in a defeat for Austria. When Austria achieved a victory in one of its early battles in the fall of 1914, Zita congratulated the emperor, who forlornly and prophetically replied, “Yes it is a victory, but that is the way my wars always begin, only to end in defeat. And this time it will be even worse. They will say that I am old and cannot cope any more, and that after that revolutions will break out and then it will be the end.”
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Archduchess Zita, who was raised partly in Austria and spoke German, might easily have chosen to side with the emperor’s views about the war being an attack on Austria’s sovereignty. Her real inclinations, however, lay with France, the country she considered her true home. Not long after war was declared, she became a target of criticism “because she had the courage to proclaim her French sympathies and to express her indignation at the unwarranted attack against Serbia with which Austria inaugurated the long struggle which … she was to become one of the principle victims.”
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It was painful for her to watch as France, the land she loved so much, was invaded by Germany. She was also deeply saddened by the conquest of Belgium, whose king was married to Zita’s cousin Elisabeth.

The war was causing Zita deep personal grief as well because the conflict divided her close-knit family. At the end of August, Charles rejoined his regiment in Galicia and was sent to Przemysl on the eastern front to fight the Russians. The impact of a total war on both the Habsburgs and Austria-Hungary weighed heavily on Charles and Zita, who recalled taking a walk together at Schönbrunn before the archduke returned to the front.