Prisoners of the North (8 page)

Queen Marie of Romania, Boyle’s friend, confidante, and reputed mistress who enjoyed striking poses like this for the camera. She was a granddaughter of Queen Victoria
.

Marie’s fervent recollections of those midnight hours vibrate with the kind of passion one associates with cheap nineteenth-century novels or early twentieth-century movies. “I tried to let myself be steeled by the man’s relentless energy, tried to absorb some of the quiet force which emanates from him. I poured out my heart to him in those hours.… I do not know all that I told him, the memory is a blur, but I made a clean breast of all my grief and when he left me and I said that everyone was forsaking me, he answered very quietly, ‘But I don’t,’ and the grip of his hand was as strong as iron.”

Boyle left almost immediately for Odessa to implement the peace treaty with Russia that the Romanian cabinet had finally signed. Before he went, Marie reminded him that more than two dozen of her country’s most notable citizens—ex-ministers, politicians, industrialists, members of the aristocracy—were being held hostage in Odessa by the Bolsheviks, awaiting a prisoner exchange for Russians held in Romania. The situation was precarious. The prisoners were locked up in Turma, a heavily guarded prison fortress. Around them, something close to civil war was breaking out between leaders of the inexperienced Bolshevik regime and so-called White Russians. Under the new treaty, which Boyle himself had pressed for, the hostages were to be dispatched by rail from Odessa to Jassy while the four hundred Russians hived in Romania would get safe transport back to their own country. It was not to work out that way.

Now another remarkable woman enters the picture—a doughty Canadian, Madame Ethel Greening Pantazzi, whose husband, a high-ranking Romanian naval officer, was one of the hostages. A friendly source within the prison had bad news for her. The Bolsheviks in charge, she told Boyle, had decamped with all the prisoners’ money, valuables, and personal papers, leaving them guarded by the much-feared pro-Bolshevik Battalion of Death. Instead of being taken to the railway station for the journey home, they were being pushed onto the waterfront where the steamship
Imperator Trajan
waited to take them away, perhaps to their deaths.

Odessa was in a state of chaos. With Madame Pantazzi as his interpreter, Boyle hurried here and there vainly seeking a Romanian official who might be empowered to assist in an exchange of prisoners that he himself had negotiated. “I’ve been up in the Yukon and know how to deal with men like these,” he told her. “They have never gotten the best of me yet!”

Boyle was in his element at such moments. At the dockside they found that active preparations were being made to spirit the hostages away. As they rushed off again in search of aid, Boyle turned to her with a smile. “Quite a day for a lady!” he remarked. “I like this sort of thing—do you?” And Madame Pantazzi had to admit to herself that “in spite of the anguish tearing at my heart about B. [her husband], I was surprised to find I rather did.”

Unable to find help, they returned to the dockside. Here a series of tussles took place, with some hostages who were forced onto the ship trying to shoulder their way back down the gangplank and into the crowd while others were being driven back by guards. Members of the death battalion were firing indiscriminately into the throng, and Boyle realized that the safest place for the prisoners was aboard the ship. Pinned down momentarily by the press of people, he spotted Madame Pantazzi and shouted, “I can’t stand this. I’m going with them!” To which she replied, “Go! Or they are all dead men!” (The dialogue may seem overheated, but the story of this venture, as recorded in Madame Pantazzi’s book
Romania in Light and Shadow
, was confirmed subsequently by the hostages themselves.)

Unarmed and with only the uniform he stood in, Boyle forced his way up the steep gangplank to reach members of the death battalion who were beating an old man. He seized two of the tormentors, banged their heads together, and threw them back on the dock. The ship finally pushed off with a thousand Bolsheviks on board and all the hostages lined up on deck to be counted by the meticulous Boyle, who found that nine were missing or dead.

Where were they headed? Clearly not to Romania. After three days poking about the Black Sea and being turned away at several ports, the
Imperator Trajan
with its hungry and dispirited human cargo, was finally allowed to dock at Theodosia. The Battalion of Death refused to give up its prisoners—an alarming state of affairs, especially when Boyle received a whispered warning from a sympathizer aboard the ship. The prisoners, he said, were to be marched to an ammunitions shed and “accidentally” blown up.

Boyle and the high-class Romanian hostages he rescued from the death battalion
.

Boyle moved quickly. Borrowing money from the British consul in town, he bribed the captain of a small freighter, the
Chernomor
, to take the group to Romania. He had already engaged twenty Chinese soldiers from the Bolshevik International Brigade ostensibly to guard the hostages but actually to keep an eye on the unreliable members of the death battalion. At the last moment as the freighter made ready to sail off, the Chinese escorted their charges on board, catching the death battalion watchmen aboard the
Trajan
off guard. When two rushed over to find out what was happening, Boyle suggested they board the freighter and he would explain. When they did so, he locked the pair in a cabin and the
Chernomor
steamed away.

It took days of negotiation at the Black Sea ports of Sebastapol and Sulina, marked by threats, bribery, and bluff on Boyle’s part, to get his charges back to Jassy. There he found himself a national figure, cheered by thousands and decorated with the country’s finest honour for what Marie, in her diary, called “a prodigious feat of unselfish energy.” Suddenly the man from the Yukon was the Saviour of Romania, providing that country with a hero when it most needed one.

None of this was lost on the British army hierarchy or the bureaucrats and politicians in Canada who had struggled to put a damper on Boyle’s activities and vainly tried to keep him under close control. The elusive Boyle was hard to pin down. Every time the War Office tried to reach him, he had slipped away on a new adventure. The British ambassador in Petrograd considered Boyle a meddling freelancer with no military authority and at the end of December 1917 had wired his Foreign Office urging that he be recalled. The British in turn put pressure on Canada, and as a result the Duke of Devonshire, as governor general, issued an order unique in Canadian military history requiring him to come home. But where was Boyle? Somewhere in eastern Europe where the British couldn’t reach him. By the time he reappeared in Jassy to a tumultuous welcome, the authorities were forced to backtrack. The British ambassador in Jassy was told to retain Boyle “so long as his services were considered useful.”

This was the climax of Boyle’s career. He had helped negotiate the Russian–Romanian peace treaty, had risked his life to save some of the country’s notable citizens, and had brought back the nation’s archives and currency. The Bolshevik leaders of Russia held him in greater esteem than did the Canadians. As Bruce Lockhart, the unofficial British agent in Moscow, reported to the Foreign Office in April, “Trotsky has frequently asked about him and would be glad to make use of his services.”

To the snobbish military establishment he was nothing more than a civilian and a nuisance. He continued to wear his uniform long after hostilities had ceased, a stubborn insistence that galled one highly placed Canadian staff officer who described him as “a bluffing adventurer … who should not receive official encouragement.” Every effort was made to force him out of this trademark costume, but he had an answer to that. He had switched to civilian clothes just once, he said, but that act had nettled George V, who admired him, often inviting him to breakfast at Buckingham Palace. The King told him that as his sovereign he was ordering him to get back into the uniform that he had earned by his work for the Allied cause. At least that is the story Boyle told, and no one had the temerity to check it with the crusty monarch.

Boyle went on wearing the uniform for two more years in spite of further attempts to stop him. When much of Romania was under German occupation he had made a point of going everywhere in khaki. “Tell him to take off that uniform or I shall have him shot,” Mackensen, the commanding German field marshal, told the Romanian war minister. Boyle’s response was forthright. “Tell him that no German living will compel me to take off my uniform. I carry a single action Colt, and I am a man of my word. I promise to drill holes in the first German be he general or private who lays violent hands on me.” They left him alone from that moment.

Why this insistence on wearing the uniform? Other field officers sometimes wore mufti on informal or private occasions. Not Boyle. For him, the pleated serge with the lapel buttons of gleaming Klondike gold and the yukon shoulder flashes identified him not just as a Canadian but as a special kind of Canadian—a Northerner from the most glamorous corner of the Dominion, known the world over. It made him unique. No other officer bore that form of identification. It gave him status, and in eastern Europe it gave him authority.

There was more to it than that. Here, in the company of strangers, these magical symbols, combined with his field officer’s crown and pip, served to give reassurance to a man whose financial edifice was tottering. They reminded him, as they reminded others, that on the face of it he was Colonel Boyle, King of the Klondike—commander of men, mining magnate, soldier of fortune, confidant of a queen. He wore his uniform like a second skin and he had no intention of peeling it off.

There is little doubt that in the final months of 1918 the Saviour of Romania had fallen deeply in love with its queen. He saw her periodically as he moved in and out of Jassy. They managed to spend hours together after rides through the countryside. He told her about the Yukon, which she had long confused with Alaska, and the great gold dredges of the Klondike (but not about the wife he had left behind with whom he did not bother to correspond—a later revelation that shook Marie). He spoke of returning to the North and read to her from the works of Service, long passages of which he knew by heart. One of the Queen’s biographers has called her “the Last Romantic.” That she admired him and felt sustained by him there is no doubt. But was their relationship physical?

Boyle’s two leading biographers differ. Certainly there were whispers about “Colonel Lawrence of Romania,” as the catty court ladies dubbed him behind his back. The Romanian court was a hotbed of sexual intrigue, the by-product of a network of arranged marriages consummated in the interests of the state. Affairs, both grand and fleeting, were common and expected. The Queen herself enjoyed a long-standing relationship with Prince Barbu Stirbey, a courtier with a lengthy pedigree, but she did not distribute her favours widely, if at all. In Boyle she discovered “an unexpected touch of early Victorian Puritanism that added much to his quaintness.”

It is possible, as William Rodney has suggested, that in his relations with Marie, Boyle saw himself as a white knight, too chivalrous to sully this, the most important relationship of his life, with mere carnal appetite. Leonard Taylor, who had access to a newly discovered cache of Boyle papers after Rodney’s book was published, disagrees. “That they became lovers seems certain,” he wrote, pointing out that “both were full-blooded passionate individuals who made their own rules.… They were living at a pace only those who have survived a war can understand. When you may be dead tomorrow there is every reason to live today.”

Given the situation, it is hard to dispute Taylor’s assessment. Though the sentimental and elegant queen might have seemed unapproachable to a Romanian courtier, Boyle was not a man to let such class restraints deter him. To her, the Yukoner appeared the epitome of rugged masculinity. To him, she was almost the direct opposite of his previous partners—a highly intelligent woman of the world who before her death would publish no fewer than sixteen books and innumerable articles in magazines ranging from
Ladies Home Journal
to the
Paris Review
. The fact that they came from totally different worlds only increased their mutual attraction.