The Romanov Sisters (Four Sisters) (49 page)

between the crosses as we both had overcoats on. But all the

same, I did find the grave and at last we made it out of the

cemetery.35

*

By March 1916 Alexandra was becoming increasingly distressed that

she remained too unwell to do her war work. The strain of managing

the five children on her own was also beginning to tell on her. ‘Our

train is just being emptied out & Marie’s comes later in the day

with very heavy wounded’, she told Nicholas on 13 March, and

there she was, ‘despairing not to be able to go and meet them and

work in the hospital – every hand is needed at such a time’.36 She

missed her husband so terribly: ‘such utter loneliness . . . the children with all their love still have quite other ideas & rarely understand my way of looking at things, the smallest even – they are

always right and when I say how I was brought up and how one

must be, they can’t understand, find it dull.’ Dependable Tatiana,

in her view, seemed to be the only one of the five with a level head

on her shoulders – ‘she grasps it’. Even the compliant Maria had

become moody of late – particularly when she had her period –

‘grumbles all the time and bellows at one’. Olga continued to be a

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problem, being ‘always most unamiable about every proposition’.37

The war clearly was getting to all of them, and so in early May

the five Romanov siblings were delighted to be taken on a trip on

the imperial train, back at long last to their beloved Crimea. After

visiting Alexandra’s huge, forty-ward hospital for 1,000 wounded at

Vinnitsa and its supply depots they travelled on to Odessa. After

the obligatory church service, troop inspections and tree-planting

they sailed to Sevastopol where Nicholas reviewed the Black Sea

Fleet. ‘I was so terribly glad to see the sea’, Tatiana wrote in her

diary.38 It was their first visit to the Crimea since 1913 but sadly

they did not go back to the Livadia Palace, even though the doctors

said it would be good for Alexandra’s health. ‘It was, she said, “too great a treat to indulge in during the war”.’39 The sisters made the

most of being able to lie in the warm sunshine, but when the time

came, ‘It was dreadfully sad to set off from the Crimea and leave

the sea, the sailors and the ships’, sighed Tatiana.40 At the end of

their trip, with Alexey well once more, Nicholas announced that he

was taking him back to Stavka again. In August Sydney Gibbes was

asked by Alexandra to join them there in order to continue with

Alexey’s English lessons. Nicholas had now promoted Alexey to

corporal; he was finally settling down and at last seemed to be losing his shyness with strangers.

*

In mid-May both David Iedigarov and Nikolay Karangozov were

back at the annexe hospital, wounded again; and then, almost a year

to the day since his first admittance, Mitya Shakh-Bagov returned

to Tsarskoe on a visit with a fellow officer Boris Ravtopulo.41 Olga’s spirits immediately lifted: she started coming back to the annexe in

the evenings to help sterilize the instruments and sew compresses

and once more played the piano for the wounded and sat talking to

them in the garden on warm summer days. The sad, dejected girl

of a few weeks earlier was now doing her utmost to stay as late as

possible at the hospital, chatting to Mitya who often came to visit

the wounded.42 Her health improved, as too did Alexandra’s. The

tsaritsa resumed her work at the annexe, though she was rarely able

to stand to do the bandaging or assist in operations. Instead she

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spent her time sitting by patients’ bedsides doing the fine embroidery at which she was so talented, and chatting to them.43 The annexe

had effectively become home for all five women in the absence of

Nicholas and Alexey. They missed their menfolk; it was hard to ‘be

upstairs without Alexey’, Tatiana told her father. ‘Every time I pass through the dining-room at 6 p.m., I am surprised not to see the

table laid for his dinner. And in general there’s very little noise

now.’44 The annexe was such a huge comfort to them. ‘Yesterday

we spent the evening cosily in the hospital’, Alexandra told Nicholas on 22 May. ‘The big girls cleaned instruments with the help of Shah

B. and Raftopolo [
sic
], the little ones chattered till 10 – I sat working and later made puzzles – altogether forgot the time and sat till 12,

the Pss G [Dr Gedroits] also busy with puzzle!’45

The wounded – many very serious – were now coming thick and

fast to both of the sisters’ hospitals. But sadly for Olga, Mitya Shakh-Bagov left Tsarskoe Selo on 6 June. He departed for the Caucasus

with an icon she had given him.46 Valentina sympathized with the

pain Olga was going through. Her attachment to Mitya was ‘so

pure, naïve and without hope’, which made it so much harder to

take. She found her a ‘strange, distinctive girl’ and saw how hard

she was trying to bottle up her feelings: ‘When [Mitya] left the poor thing sat on her own for more than an hour, her nose buried in her

sewing machine, furiously sewing away with great concentration.’

Then she suddenly became fixated on finding ‘the little penknife

that Bagov had sharpened on the evening before his departure’. She

searched all morning and, as Valentina recalled, ‘was beyond joy

when she found it’. Everything connected with Mitya Shakh-Bagov

was precious: after he left, Olga recorded every anniversary attached to his time at the hospital in her diary: when he had been wounded,

when discharged, when returned, and, as Valentina noted, ‘She also

treasures a page from the calendar for the 6th June – the day he

left’.47

Reverting to her former morose state of mind, Olga went through

the motions of fulfilling her duties at the annexe – measuring and

handing out the medicines, sorting the bed linen, arranging flowers

and phlegmatically noting in her brief diary entries: ‘Did the same

as always. It’s boring without Mitya.’48 Day after day was much like

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any other, and she ‘didn’t do anything special’: maybe a walk or

drive in the afternoon, sewing pillowcases at the hospital in the

evening, or board games with the wounded, playing the piano and

then home to bed. But as Olga wilted like a fading flower Tatiana

had lost none of her vigour nor her application to duty. Nicholas,

who often referred to her as his secretary, was now entrusting her,

rather than Olga, with regular requests to send items such as writing paper or cigarettes out to him at Stavka. On Tatiana’s nineteenth

birthday he had telegraphed Alexandra congratulating her: ‘God

bless dear Tatiana and may she always remain the good, loving and

patient girl she is now and a consolation in our old days.’49 Alexandra agreed; by September and once again full of aches and pains, she

openly admitted to her husband ‘I do so want to get quicker well

again, have more work to do and all lies upon Tatiana’s shoulders.’50

*

Whenever any of their favourite officers were wounded the family

made special efforts to take care of their welfare. A case in point

was Lieutenant Viktor Zborovsky, their old friend from the Tsar’s

Escort, who was seriously wounded at the end of May 1916. Nicholas

himself sent special instructions from Stavka for Zborovsky to be

brought back from Novoselitsky in the Caucasus to Tsarskoe Selo.

Much to Anastasia’s great joy, Vitya as she affectionately called him, was brought to the officers’ ward of the Feodorovsky Gorodok. His

arrival raised everyone’s spirits – despite the severity of his wounds.

He looked ‘brown and all right,’ Alexandra told Nicky, ‘pretends he

has no pains, but one sees his face twitch. He is wounded through

the chest, but feels the arm.’51

His Majesty’s Own Cossack Escort, to give it its full title, was

comprised of four squadrons, two of Kuban Cossacks and two of

Tereks, who were distinguished wherever they went by their red

Cossack parade uniforms and black Persian lamb hats. Under the

command of Count Grabbe since January 1914, the Escort largely

performed a ceremonial role, but for the Romanov family it was the

heart and soul of the Russian army.
*
In July, when the four sisters

* The Escort had been formed in 1811 as a special security guard for Alexander
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visited Nicholas and Alexey at Stavka with their mother, they made

a surprise visit to the Escort’s summer camp. The soldiers sang old

Cossack songs for them and performed their traditional dance – the

lezginka
. Tatiana recalled one particular thrilling exploit of theirs in a letter to Rita Khitrovo, a friend and fellow nurse at the annexe:

Yesterday we went up on the banks of the Dnieper again. The

squadron of our Escort came along singing, hurrying to catch

up with us. They sang songs, and played games and we just lay

on the grass and enjoyed it. When they left, Papa said to them

that they should go along the same bank of the river, and that

we’d stay here for a bit longer, then drive in a fast moving car

lower down along the river. We caught up with the squadron

which had been going at a march playing the
zurna
*
and singing.

When we came alongside they put their horses into a full gallop

behind us and flew along. Further on there was a steep ravine

and a bend in the river. They had to cross it in a single stride

as the earth was soft. They had already fallen behind us, but as

soon as they came out of this ravine, then they began to catch

us at a full gallop. It was terribly exciting. They were like real

Caucasian horsemen at that pace. You can’t imagine just how

marvellous it was. They rode with a whoop and a shout. If they

go into an attack like that, especially whole regiments of them,

I think the Germans will run away out of fear and wonder at

what’s coming at them.52

Having such affection for the Escort, it is not surprising that

Maria and Anastasia delighted in having Viktor Zborovsky as a

patient at Feodorovsky Gorodok when the new officers’ ward was

opened there in June; they reported on his progress regularly in

their letters to Nicholas. They were now visiting daily, although

evenings were still mainly spent at the annexe hospital with Olga

I during the Napoleonic Wars, although the job of protecting the imperial family’s security had long since been taken over by the Okhrana and Spiridovich’s men. During the war, one squadron remained at Tsarskoe Selo with the empress; another served at Stavka with Nicholas, a third was based in Petrograd and a fourth, in rotation with the other three, was fighting at the front.

* An Azeri or Turkish wind instrument popular in the Caucasus.

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and Tatiana. At their own hospital the warm presence of the two

younger sisters greatly enhanced the sense of homeliness that the

place already exuded. In the autumn of 1916, Felix Dassel, an officer from Maria’s regiment, the 5th Kazan Dragoons, was brought in,

severely wounded in the leg. He found the hospital cosy and

welcoming with a wood fire crackling in the grate – ‘nothing like

how you would imagine a military hospital to be’. His small ward

was calm and intimate, the bed made up with snow-white linen.

Shortly after he arrived the grand duchesses came for their regular

visit and he remembered them vividly: ‘Maria, my patron, stocky,

with a round open face, good clear eyes, somewhat timid’, stopped

to ask whether he was in very much pain. ‘Anastasia, the smaller of

the two, with elfish, lusty eyes’, greeted him in the same concerned, though rather inattentive, way, ‘leaning on the end of the bed,

observing me sharply, examining me, swinging a foot, rolling her

handkerchief’.53

Not long afterwards Dassel fell into a delirium and was operated

on; he woke up to find roses on the table by his bed from the grand

duchesses, who had telephoned regularly to enquire on his progress.

During his time at the hospital the girls visited Dassel once or twice a week; Maria always remaining ‘a little self-conscious’, while the

forthright Anastasia was ‘freer, impish, with a very dry humour’,

and, as he noticed, adept too at cheating at board games with her

sister. She also liked to ‘tease in a childish way’ which brought

reproachful, warning glances from Maria.54 (The two sisters certainly still squabbled, as Tatiana told Valentina Chebotareva: they often

had cat fights when ‘Nastasya gets mad and pulls [Maria’s] hair and

tears out clumps of it’.55)55 Once Dassel started feeling better the

girls celebrated his recovery by posing for photographs with him.

He noticed how ‘terribly proud of her hospital’ Anastasia was: ‘she

feels like she’s half grown up, on an equal footing with her older

sisters’. Maria too talked with concern about the war, about the