The Romanov Sisters (Four Sisters) (48 page)

suppressed suffering’:

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Perhaps the imminent departure of Shakh-Bagov is adding to it

– her trusty knight is leaving. He really is a fine fellow. He

venerates her, like a sacred object. ‘Olga Nikolaevna only need

tell me that she finds Grigory disgusting, and he’d be dead the

next day – I’d kill him’.15

Valentina felt that Mitya’s instincts were ‘primitive’, but he was

an ‘honest man’. Tatiana meanwhile remained hard-working, self-

effacing and ‘touchingly gentle’. ‘Everything is the same as ever

here,’ she told her father in February, ‘nothing new.’16 When she

came to the hospital one evening to help sterilize the instruments

and boil the silk thread she ‘sat on her own in fumes of carbolic’,

recalled Valentina. When, on another occasion, Valentina had tried

to relieve her of this task in advance, ‘She caught me out. “Tell me

please, what’s the hurry! . . . If you can breathe in the carbolic, why can’t I?”17 Such were her proven capabilities as a nurse that by the

autumn Tatiana was being allowed to administer the chloroform in

operations. But while she remained steadfast, her still frail and

increasingly melancholic sister was sinking into a depression. ‘Olga

assures [me] that she thinks she will remain a spinster’, Valentina

noted, even though she and Shakh-Bagov ‘had been reading each

other’s palms and he had prophesied she would have twelve children’.

Tatiana’s hand was ‘interesting’: ‘the line of fate is suddenly interrupted and makes a sharp turn sideways. They assure her that she

will do something unusual.’18 For the time being, however, Tatiana’s

day was filled with responsibility – at home and at the hospital –

allowing her little or no time to herself. On 6 January she recorded

a typical day:

German lesson in the morning. At 10 o’clock went to the hospital.

Dressed the wounds of Rogal of 149th Chernomorsk regiment,

wound in skull, Gaiduk of 7th Samogitsk Grenadiers regiment,

wound in left thigh, Martynov of the 74th Stavropol regiment,

wound in left thigh, Shchetinin of the 31st Tomsk regiment, wound

in left thigh, Melnik of the 17th Arkhangelsk regiment, wound in

the right forearm, wound in right lower ribcage, Arkhipov of the

149th Chernomorsk regiment, wound in right hand with the loss

of the fourth and fifth fingers, wound in right thigh. Then Bleish,

Sergeyev, Chaikovsky, Ksifilinov, Martynov, Emelyanov – only

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superficial wounds. Then at 12 went upstairs with Valentina

Ivanovna to the soldiers’ ward to change Popov’s dressings. Under

anaesthetic. His kidney was removed. Then went back and went

to see Tuznikov. Had lunch and drank tea with mama. Then had

a history lesson. The four of us went for a troika ride with Iza.

Then we were at the Big Palace for a concert. Then to vespers.

Had supper with mama and Anna. Then Nikolay Pavlovich [Sablin]

arrived. We said farewell to him as tomorrow he is going to join

his battalion, in the army.19

With their mother out of action it devolved to Olga and Tatiana

on 19 January to attend an important function on her behalf in

town, along with their grandmother as surrogate – the official

opening ceremony of the Anglo-Russian Hospital. This had been

set up in Dmitri Pavlovich’s palace on the corner of the Fontanka

by the Anichkov Bridge – he having given it over to use as a wartime

hospital – and provided 188 beds and had its own operating theatre,

bandaging room, lab and X-ray facilities. Supplies were sent out

from England by Queen Mary’s Needlework Guild and the War

Hospital Supply Depot, and its eight doctors and thirty nurses were

all British volunteers. One of them, Enid Stoker (a niece of the

novelist Bram Stoker), recalled their preparations for the opening:

the hospital was cleaned and polished to the last degree and

looked
lovely
with big pots of flowers and palms and all its own beautiful carving and marble . . . by 2.30 we were all standing

in there dressed up to the nines in starched everythings . . . Then

we heard a crowd moving slowly up the stairs, and a small dowdy

woman in black, like a plain edition of Alexandra – (the Empress

sister of our own queen) but with a very sweet expression – came

in. The two little princesses, Olga and Tatiana, looked charming

and so pretty in little ermine hats with white ospreys in them

and little low-necked rose-coloured frocks and ermine furs and

muffs.20

Everyone at the hospital remarked on how attractive the Romanov

girls were. Olga put on a good show of being cheerful and friendly.

Enid thought her ‘the prettiest and really lovely’, adding that the

sisters had been ‘so jolly-looking and natural’. Other members of

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the family would visit the hospital later, Enid Stoker remembering

the arrival of Anastasia ‘with her hair down her back and an Alice

in Wonderland comb’, and one ‘unforgettable’ day when the ‘little

Czarevitch’ came – ‘one of the most beautiful children I ever saw’.21

Meriel Buchanan noted a similar response when Olga and Tatiana

visited the English Colony Hospital run by her mother, where they

toured the wards and talked to the patients, ‘Olga often making

them laugh with her whimsical merriment, her sister talking to them

gently, but with a greater reserve. How kind they were, the soldiers

told me afterwards, how lovely they looked.’22 An appearance in

civilian clothes was a rarity these days for the older Romanov sisters and for their mother too, so much so that people were taken aback

when they saw them out of nurses’ uniform. One Sunday morning

on the way to church they ‘went for half an hour to bid all good

morning in the hospital’, Alexandra told Nicholas and ‘Like Babies

they all stared at us in “dresses and hats” and looked at our rings

and bracelets (the ladies too) and we felt shy and [like] “guests”’.23

*

A French journalist who had been granted the rare privilege of

meeting Alexandra and the girls at their hospital remarked in 1916

that there was ‘something of the serenity of the mystic about Olga

Nikolaevna’.24 It was a trait that perhaps more than anything defined her Russianness and one that became more pronounced as the war

went on. Olga seemed more and more lost in her own private

thoughts about the kind of life, and love, that she longed for. One

day at the hospital, she had confided to Valentina her personal

‘dreams of happiness’: ‘To get married, live always in the countryside winter and summer, always mix with good people, and no officialdom

whatsoever.’25 She would no doubt have been horrified to know that

Grand Duchess Vladimir had recently approached her mother

suggesting that Olga should marry her thirty-eight-year-old son

Boris. It hadn’t surprised Alexandra, for the grand duchess’s ‘ambi-

tion to get [Boris] nearest to the throne is well known’.26 ‘The idea of Boris is too unsympathetic & the child would, I feel convinced, never agree to marry him and I should perfectly well understand

her’, she wrote to Nicholas at Stavka, intimating that ‘other thoughts
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have filled the child’s head and heart’ – a possible allusion to her

daughter’s feelings for Mitya Shakh-Bagov of which she must, surely,

have been aware. ‘Those are a young girl’s holy secrets wh[ich]

others must not know of’, she insisted. ‘It would terribly hurt Olga, who is so susceptible.’27

The suggestion of Boris as a husband had been an all too painful

reminder of the bad company Dmitri Pavlovich – the husband they

had once hoped for for Olga – had slipped into of late. To ‘give

over a well used half worn out, blasé young man to a pure, fresh

girl, 18 years his junior, & to live in a house in which many a woman has “shared” his life . . . An inexperienced girl would suffer terribly, to have her husband 4th, 5th hand or more.’28 As for Dmitri he was

now well and truly out of the frame. Alexandra had come to the

conclusion that ‘he is a boy without any caracter [
sic
] and can be lead by anybody.’29 He was currently back in Petrograd pleading

poor health, but ‘doing no work and drinking constantly’. Alexandra

wanted Nicholas to order him back to his regiment. ‘Town and

women are poison for him.’

One who might well have fitted the bill for Tatiana, had he been

higher-born, was ‘my little Malama’, as Alexandra described him,

for he was back in town. Many of the Russian cavalry regiments

such as Dmitri’s had been decimated in eastern Prussia; left with no

regiment to transfer to, he had been appointed an equerry at Tsarskoe Selo. Alexandra, who seemed to have a special affection for him,

invited him to tea. ‘We had not seen him for 1½ years’, she told

Nicky. ‘Looks flourishing more of a man now, an adorable boy still.

I must say, a perfect son in law he w[ou]ld have been.’ Ah, there

was the rub. ‘Why are foreign P[rin]ces not as nice!’ she added. As

circumspect as ever, Tatiana did not confide her thoughts on Dmitri

Malama’s return to either her diary or any letters.30
*
Her sister by contrast made her own feelings all too clear, when, out of the blue,

a letter arrived from Mitya: ‘Olga Nikolaevna in ecstasy, threw all

* Had circumstances been different one wonders whether at war’s end Nicholas and Alexandra would have conceded that the only way to see their daughters happily married, in Russia, would have been to allow morganatic marriages for them.

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her things around’, recalled Valentina: ‘She was on fire and jumping

up and down: “Is it possible to have a heart attack at 20? I think I

might just have one.”’31 The massages Olga was having in the morn-

ings to help her mood swings did not seem to be having much effect.

The swings were as pronounced as ever: Olga was ‘grumpy, sleepy,

angry’ all the time, Alexandra complained to Nicholas in April, and

‘makes everything more difficult by her [ill] humour’.32

*

While their older sisters were preoccupied at the annexe, Maria and

Anastasia continued to watch over their own wounded at Feodorovsky

Gorodok. Anastasia was now the proud honorary Commander-in-

Chief of her own regiment, the 148th Caspian Infantry, gifted to

her by her father just before her 14th birthday. Soon she was proudly writing to Nicholas at Stavka, signing herself ‘Nastaska the Caspian’.33

She and Maria now found themselves increasingly visiting the graves

of those who had died; ‘we are constantly having offices for the dead nowadays’, Maria told Nicholas in August. Back in March, in a long

and delightfully animated letter, she had described her own attempts, in deep snow and treacherous conditions, to find a couple of graves

in the military cemetery of men from the lower ranks:

It took an incredibly long time to get there because the roads

were extremely bad . . . The snow was piled up very high on

the side of the road, so that it was a job getting through it on

my knees and from there jumping down. The snow there turned

out to be above my knees, and although I had big boots on, I

was already wet, but I decided all the same to go further. And

not much further on I found a grave with the name Mishchenko,

one of our wounded. I laid some flowers on it and went further

and suddenly I saw the same name again. I looked at the marker

to see what regiment he was and it turned out that this one was

our wounded man and not the other. Well I laid flowers there

too and had just managed to move forward when I fell on my

back, and lay there spread-eagled and almost for a minute couldn’t

get up as there was so much snow that I couldn’t put my hand

down on the ground in order to brace myself.34

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Anastasia and Tatiana meanwhile had gone off to another part

of the cemetery to visit the grave of Alexandra’s lady-in-waiting

Sonia Orbeliani who had died the previous December, leaving Maria

with the cemetery caretaker to find the other grave she was searching for, which turned out to be near to the cemetery fence. To get there

we’d have to climb across a ditch. He stood in the ditch and said

to me: ‘I will lift you over’. I said: ‘No’. He said: ‘Let’s try’. He did not of course manage to lift me to the other side, but dropped

me right in the middle of the ditch. So there we both stood in

the ditch, up to our tummies in snow and dying from laughter.

It was very difficult for him to crawl out because the ditch was

deep, and the same for me. But somehow or other he got out

and then gave me his hand. I of course slipped down on my

tummy back into the ditch about three more times, but at last

I got myself out. And we did all this holding flowers in our

hands. After that there was no way we could manage to crawl