The Last Tsar: Emperor Michael II (8 page)

Michael’s division, assigned to the Galician front in the South, facing the Austro-Hungarians, was called the Caucasian Native Cavalry; it comprised six regiments, each known by the name of the tribe or place from which it was recruited: Daghestan, Kabardin, Chechen, Tartar, Circassian, and Ingush.
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Each horseman — or rider as they were termed in the division — was a volunteer, because conscription laws did not apply to the Caucasus under the terms agreed when it became part of the empire.
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The men, natural brigands, were difficult to discipline, for they would fight each other as readily as they would come to fight the Austro-Hungarians. But they were superb horsemen, fearless in a charge and terrifying to face in battle. On a training exercise, one regiment ordered to carry out a sham attack, switched to real ammunition when they ran out of blanks. As bullets whizzed past Michael’s head, their urbane colonel murmured, ‘I can only congratulate you on being for the first time under real fire’. The brigade commander standing beside them was furious, but ‘the Grand Duke laughed’.
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Under Michael the division would prove itself to be among the very best of the fighting units in Russia, and earn such a reputation that it would be known simply as the ‘Savage Division.’
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So absolute was its loyalty to Michael that in time it would also become known as ‘the Grand Duke’s private army’.

Michael’s parade uniform was the picturesque
cherkeska,
the long Circassian coat which fits tightly at the waist and folds down below the knees and over the top of polished soft leather high boots. His fur cap was of grey astrakhan from a new-born lamb, and he carried a sword and a razor-sharp dagger.
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It was a far cry from the ceremonial dress of the Blue Cuirassiers and Chevalier Gardes, and when Natasha first saw it she hated it.

The officers were all Russian, mostly professionals, and many of them volunteers from the Guards, attracted by the idea of serving under the Tsar’s brother. Among them was the young Prince Vyazemsky, whose wife had become a friend of Natasha. After he was appointed one of Michael’s aides-de-camp he wrote to a nephew: ‘You cannot imagine how colourful the whole outfit is — the customs, the whole spirit of the thing. The officers are mostly adventurous souls with a devil-may-care attitude. Some of them have had a “tumultuous past”, but they are far from dull…’ As for the men, ‘they seem to think that the war is a great holiday and their Muslim fatalism precludes all fear of death. They adore the Grand Duke.’
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As headquarters chaplain, Michael recruited Natasha’s family friend, Father Popsolov, who had christened baby George in 1910. However, his most personal appointment was that of an American boxing coach; boxing was one of his enthusiasms and he saw no reason why the war should interrupt it. The commander of his Tartar regiment, Colonel Peter Polovtsov — later a senior general — remembered Michael as ‘tall, very slim, a perfect sportsman, an excellent horseman, a very good shot, and his American boxing teacher always told me that it was a pity that he was a Grand Duke, because he would have done very well as a prizefighter in the ring.’
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Michael was well pleased with the way his division had come together in its first weeks and towards the end of October 1914 he went north to the supreme headquarters, called
Stavka
, to meet his brother who was there on a visit from Tsarskoe Selo. The headquarters were set in a clearing inside a forest of pines and birches, just outside Baranovichi, ‘a miserable little country town,’
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but which was an important railway junction and roughly at the centre of the 500-mile Russian line.

It was the first time the two brothers had seen each other in over two years, but it was not the occasion or place for a family discussion, so there was no mention of issues which were likely only to end up in a row. Nicholas simply found Michael enthusiastic about his new command. Three days later, on October 27, Nicholas wrote to Alexandra: ‘I had the pleasure of spending the whole of Saturday with Misha who has become quite his old self and is again charming.’ A little wooden church had been built beside the railway tracks and Michael and Nicholas went there for evening service, ‘and parted after dinner’.
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Michael went on briefly to Gatchina to finalise his affairs there and, before returning to the front and the risks of the battlefield, to write to his brother about a matter which he had not raised when they met but which continued to trouble him: the fact that four years after his birth, his son George was still illegitimate. Whilst a divisional commander’s life expectancy was considerably better than that of a junior office, rank was no protection against artillery shells, snipers, or a random bullet. Michael was also not a man to hang back in the rear; as one of his commanders would say of him later, ‘the only trouble he gave us was through his constant wish to be in the fighting-line; we sometimes had great difficulty in keeping him out of danger’.
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Were he to be killed in the war, as might happen, Natasha would not inherit anything. The 1912 manifesto, by which Michael’s assets had been placed in administration, remained in force; he was still in the same position as ‘a minor or a lunatic’
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and technically without rights to the management of his estates or monies. But to leave innocent little George as a bastard was surely to take punishment beyond anything which was reasonable. He said as much to Nicholas: ‘It is very hard for me to go away, leaving my family in such an ambiguous position. I wish for my only beloved son to be accepted by society as my son and not as the son of an unknown father, as he is registered on his birth certificate…Remove from me the burden of the worry that, should something happen to me, that my son would have to grow up with the stigma of illegitimacy… You alone can do this, as it is your right… And after all, he is not to blame!’
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There was no reply, and Michael set off to rejoin the Savage Division with even more reason to hope that he would come back alive. Now judged ready for action, his regiments had moved by train to the Austrian border where the wide-gauge Russian railway ended. The Russian frontline was far forward into the Carpathian Mountains, and the division rode the rest of the way to the positions selected for it as part of the Second Cavalry Corps.
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The Austrians would have good reason to fear Michael’s Muslims in the future, but the first to do so were the unfortunate inhabitants they met as they advanced over the frontier. Finding themselves on conquered territory, the men of one regiment, quartered in an Austrian village, decided to take the spoils of war, and that first night there was chaos as excited Tartars raced around the village, chasing dishevelled girls. It was only at dawn that order was restored and the most serious offenders lined up to be flogged, twenty-five lashes being considered the usual punishment, though rapists convicted at court martial could be shot. Later, two men in that regiment would be and when they were condemned the staff at Michael’s headquarters offered to provide a firing squad from another regiment. However, the Tartars insisted on carrying out the execution themselves, the two men preferring, it was said, to die facing friendly faces.
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The Savage Division was difficult to handle behind the lines, but when it reached the enemy it behaved with the courage expected of men who relished battle, whether on foot or on horseback. They would find themselves involved in very heavy fighting over the next months, and earn considerable distinction on that bloody battlefield. So would Michael. He would find himself coming out of it a national hero.

ALTHOUGH Michael was more than a thousand miles (1,600km) from Gatchina, the journey south to meet him was one which never daunted Natasha. It took two days to get there, over tracks made the slower by the amount of war traffic they were carrying. The first trip came at the beginning of December 1914, when she could only hope that he would be there when she arrived, and knowing that at best he could snatch no more than a few days from the front. Her destination was the former Polish city of Lvov, fifty miles inside Austro-Hungary and known there as Lemberg. The Russians had captured it in September; Michael’s headquarters were in a village 100 miles to the south-west and he could be in Lvov in a car in a few hours. Fortunately he was able to snatch a few days from the frontline, which for Natasha more than justified the laborious journey there and back to Gatchina. Indeed, she would return the following month, and then again two months later.

Apart from her natural fears for Michael’s life, what troubled Natasha particularly was her belief that he had been posted to the Savage Division in retaliation for his marriage. On her return to Gatchina she wrote to say: ‘You are naturally talked about more than the division and what pains me most of all is that they say you did not go to war of your own accord, but were sent to atone for your guilt towards Russia — so your heroism, with which you wished to surprise the world, has been totally wasted…
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In fact, it had not been wasted, but she could not know that at the time.

Nevertheless she had good reason to believe, as she would continue to do, that Michael had been sent to the most distant part of the Russian line as punishment for having married her, though Michael never seemed to care one way or another. He had come back to fight, and if that meant commanding an irregular division of Muslim horsemen, so be it. As it happened, they were very good at what they did, and that was its own cause for pride in his command.

In the New Year, he was in a sector of the front line which was quiet enough to allow him to take two weeks’ leave — effectively ten days since four days of that were spent in travelling. He arrived home on January 2, 1915 — ‘what a joy to be back with my family in lovely Gatchina’, he scribbled in his diary
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— and next day went to ‘the detestable Petrograd’ to inspect the new hospital which Natasha had organised for him in his unused palace on the English Embankment. Then, after shopping with Natasha, and calling on his mother, he went to Tsarskoe Selo to see his brother, and press him again about legitimising little George.

Nothing had been done about that in the two months since he had written to him about it, and nothing would happen this time. Nicholas avoided the subject, for it was a sore point at Tsarskoe Selo. Alexandra opposed any concessions suggesting acceptance of the marriage, and legalising George would in her mind have gone some way towards that. Michael returned home no further forward than before. It was a bitter failure. Three years later Nicholas would plead ‘a father’s feelings’ in justifying a decision about his son Alexis, but that applied only to himself. Michael’s worries were dismissed out of hand.

All too soon the leave was over and he set off back to his divisional headquarters, now at Lomna, sixty miles south-west of Lvov. ‘It is so sad to leave’, he wrote in his diary for January 11, though Natasha insisted on travelling with him as far as Lvov, which gave them almost two days extra together. On arrival they parted hurriedly, for the Austrians had launched an offensive, and the Russian line was being pushed back. ‘The fighting is unceasing’, he told Natasha in his first letter home.
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One of his colonels had been killed, and three staff officers seriously wounded, one of whom would die two days later. Sixty of his horsemen were casualties.

Michael’s headquarters had been pulled back in the fighting and in the confusion of the move all his belongings were mislaid, ‘so I do not have even a bar of soap’.
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But by January 20 he was able to report that ‘the crisis is over and the enemy is in retreat along our entire frontline. We are now dealing mainly with the Hungarian troops, who fight with great persistence. Yesterday our infantry (on our right flank) lost 1,000 men, but in my division the losses were quite small.’
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The Carpathians are a thick belt of mountains, with one rising above another, often with a slope of one-in-six and covered in trees. These heights dominate the passes, which were deep in snow, and each had to be fought for at the point of a bayonet. It was a savage business and no one who was there could think that war was glory. Temperatures fell to minus 17 degrees and ‘the poor soldiers, especially at night, freeze terribly and many have frostbitten feet and hands. The losses in the infantry attached to us have been very great,’ wrote Michael.
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The enemy suffered as greatly and sometimes more so. One Austrian regiment of some 1,800 men froze to death as it lay waiting to advance the following morning. Rifles locked solid by ice had to be heated over fires before infantrymen could be sent into battle. Trenches were so difficult to dig that men could often do no more than bury themselves in the snow.

The casualty figures in all armies were horrific and beyond anything known to history before. After six months of fighting the Russians had lost a million men, dead, wounded or captured. ‘Corps have become divisions, brigades have shrunk into regiments’, Nicholas confessed to Alexandra.
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The slaughter appalled Michael, who unlike his brother, could see it at first hand. He believed the war itself to be a catastrophe, entered into blindly by men who little knew what they were doing. As he told Natasha on February 16, 1915, in a letter which said much about his own political instincts: