The war brings a new range of occupations, as Alexandra, her eldest daughters and her friends take up nursing:

.....men can get gangrene anywhere, and perhaps in a sense the consequences of a wound in the groin can be harder to live with for a normal man. The younger girl nurses I sent out of the room when we came to dress wounds such as these, it was simply too distressing. My two young girl nurses were simply marvelous. So cool-headed and so gentle from the beginning, even on the day they saw their first death (poor man haemorrhaged during his operation).

Ania on the other hand got bored by it all - not enough attention being paid her personally - and she was shockingly rough at some of the wound-dressing. She preferred it if she could escort parties of injured when they were taken off to convalesce or wherever, because then she flirted madly with whoever had particularly caught her attention this week, and she enjoyed the appreciative things they said about her. On the other hand, she put lots of own money into the war effort (and she didn’t have much of it) and she was not at all a bad administrator, so without a doubt she was doing her best according to her talents.

 She and I and maybe Isa or Nastinka of my ladies often used in the afternoons to go off to other towns and visit the hospitals I had there. Best not to warn the staff that I was coming, since otherwise they panicked and put on a show, so I used to turn up in my Red Cross uniform and enjoy their reaction when they realised who I was. Also of course went on longer trips which took two days or more – off to Vilno in November, stopping that time at 2 in the morning to pay a surprise visit to a hospital train we came across, apologising all the while for waking them all up. Before Christmas I was in Moscow for more than a week with Nicky and of course Ella as well, checking the hospitals there and enjoying doing war work with my husband beside me for once.

 In the evenings at home in those days we would go to our own hospital again, and the three little ones with us, to chat with the wounded and play cards and board games and try to cheer them up (I know I am a bad loser, but the children didn’t have to tell the soldiers so!). There were film shows and concerts in there too for their benefit, but I think they enjoyed the children’s nonsense the most – they who were missing children of their own, or little brothers and sisters. Sometimes the dogs would come along with us and add more entertainment.

Still, she is no plaster saint, and the strain takes it toll on friendship and family relationships:

This was the bad period of Ania’s convalescence after her hideous train accident: she was well out of danger but she realised she wouldn’t walk again and she was being hopelessly demanding of everyone’s time. The children who used to love her when little now pulled a face if I asked them to pay her a visit. She was alright usually with them (although she liked to have them crawling around her arranging cushions for her legs, etc.) but she affected to faint if I so much as jogged her bed too hard. All this coming on top of worrying so much about Nicky and about the war meant I found it increasingly difficult to keep my temper in check with her. Not just her either; the minor stupidities of people in the household set me off as well and I spent heaps of time apologising.

"You should arrange your time to suit yourself,’ Nicky said. "I truly wish her well, but she has her parents and her sister and loads of friends, and she doesn’t need to be with us so constantly."

‘Because there is a war on,’ I said to her, ‘and in any case I want you to be useful – I didn’t bring you up to be a doll.’

 ‘I am not some little princess from a petty German court!’ she raged at me, ‘I am the daughter of the Tsar, and maybe I would like for once to do something which demands dignity!’

‘All the dignity you’ve earned,’ I always used to say sarcastically – and by this stage I had sometimes lost my temper with her. But she was anaemic and run-down, and the war was heavy on her soul, my poor sensitive girl – so I took her out of nursing for a while and let her spend her time reading and larking around in the garden with the little ones. Therefore, if I didn’t go in to work for whatever reason, it all fell upon Tatiana.   Tatiana coped with it.

 After the revolution comes uncertainty and the journey into exile, oddly comforted by the knowledge that they are following in the path of old friends:

They sent us here to Siberia, tracing the footsteps of so many political prisoners before us – but of many too who had found their lives here, in the wide-open spaces. Kerensky intended he said that we would spend the winter in Tobolsk before continuing on to Japan when spring came. Nicky was amused.

‘So I am re-doing the journey I did in 1891 – but backwards,’ he told the children as we waited for the last time in the Assembly Hall at home – July 31^st it was, the day after Alexei’s thirteenth birthday. ‘I crossed from Japan and then went all through Siberia, and you know I was the first future Tsar that ever did so. My grandfather visited Siberia as a young man, but he did not cross the whole of it.’

‘Siberia and the east is Russia’s future – that I still believe,’ he said to me. ‘It is clearer than ever now that Europe has brought us nothing but harm.’

I was thinking of another Russian family which went east many years ago: the Rosputin clan, who settled in Pokrovskoe in the seventeenth century and built their farm and made a better living there than they would have done in European Russia.

 Finally, at five a.m., the cars came for us, and we left for the station in a terrible state: this was our home, our Alexander Palace, to which Nicky and I had come nearly twenty two years ago and decorated with such love and teasing over our different tastes; exclusive home to the girls and me these last three years when we had not taken a single holiday. Even the garden is full of vegetables we planted in that spring and summer of 1917, to feed our household, the dear children loving the physical hard work of digging over the earth and shifting it around. We saw it behind us for the last time, simple, long and low and clear yellow in the bright light of a summer morning so like the many mornings years ago when we had risen at this time or earlier to walk across the park in the luminous beauty of the northern sunrise.

Back to contents                                                 Back to author page                                To the publisher's site (Belgarun.com)