The Last Tsar: Emperor Michael II (9 page)

The war and all the great horror it involves cannot help inspiring sadness in every sensible person; for example, I feel greatly embittered...and most of all towards those who are at the top, who hold power and allow all that horror to happen,. If the question of war were decided by the people at large, I would not be so passionately averse to that great calamity; but...nobody ever asks the nation, the country at large, what course of action they would choose.

I even sometimes feel ashamed to face the people, i.e. the soldiers and officers, particularly when visiting field hospitals, where so much suffering is to be seen, for they might think one is also responsible, for one is placed so high and yet has failed to prevent all that from happening and to protect one’s country from this disaster…’
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Two weeks earlier he had written to tell her to postpone her next proposed trip to Lvov because ‘the situation is such that it is difficult to say when we might have a few free days.’
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The fighting had not stopped since his return to the division after the New Year. It was a brutal business; on going forward to one captured position ‘we saw such horrors as I am not going to describe’.
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Yet at the same time, hoping to reassure her that he was in no personal danger, he had written that ‘most of the time I sit at home and feel miserably bored. To be at war and not even take advantage of the fresh air seems so stupid.’
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What he did not tell her was that the day before, as his diary noted, he had been climbing on foot through freezing snow up a mountain, identified on his map as Height 673, inspecting positions which within hours would be under heavy enemy assault, ‘with intense shooting from the front and both flanks, causing great losses.’ One regiment ‘lost 300 soldiers’.
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Despite the bitterness of the fighting, and Michael’s request on February 4 that she postpone her next visit, Natasha insisted on taking the chance of seeing him, setting off again on February 10. On this occasion she was lucky to see him at all, as he had warned. The Austrians had just regained two towns, Chernovitsy and Stanislavov, and the Russian Eighth Army commander General Aleksei Brusilov had ordered Michael ‘to straighten out the situation’.
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It involved a long cross-country move and the establishment of new headquarters in the town of Striy, forty miles from Lvov. Michael drove to Lvov to meet Natasha at the station, but it was the briefest of reunions. He wiped away her tears and left her in the Governor’s house. Shortly afterwards he sent her a note to say that ‘fighting is on and it is impossible to say how long it will last, maybe five, maybe more than ten days. Therefore I cannot ask you to stay on in Lvov and I suggest you leave at once…Yesterday there were heavy losses in the 2nd Brigade’. Then, thinking that this sounded alarmist, he added, ‘there is no need to worry about my safety, for I am far from the battle area’.
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That was not true. He was with the frontline troops, moving from village to village, finding lodgings where he could, and ‘walking with the main forces’ as they came up to the Austrians, led by their famous and rightly respected Tyrolese riflemen. Outnumbered two to one, Michael’s Tartars and Chechens, fighting on foot, met the Austrians in a forest. There was a bloody hand-to-hand battle, but the bayonets of the ‘stalwart Tyrolese’ wavered in the face of the swords and daggers of ‘the active little Tartars’, their commander proudly reported.
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Half his men lay dead among the trees, and as Michael rode up ‘he was very much impressed’ by the fight the regiment had put up, but also clearly saddened as he rode through the woods full of corpses. ‘A battlefield after a fight is not a beautiful picture,’ noted the Tartar colonel, ‘and I think that the kind heart of the Grand Duke suffered from the sight.’
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With that, Michael wrote to Natasha that his division had been pulled back for a rest and that they could meet again in Lvov. She arrived on March 1, and when she and Michael awoke next morning it was to find that he was being honoured with Russia’s highest gallantry award, the Order of St George, on the recommendation of his tough-minded army commander Brusilov. In contrast to the Cross of St George — which could be and was awarded in the field in its thousands by battlefield generals, the Order had to be approved by no less than fifteen Knights of the Order. No honour in Russia was so highly prized.

The award, made independently of the Tsar, was made in recognition of his conduct on the battlefield ‘during which he exposed his life to great danger, inspiring and encouraging the troops under constant enemy fire by the example of his personal bravery and courage and when resisting attacks by superior enemy forces…and later, when moving onto the offensive, he contributed to the successful development of our manoeuvres by his energetic actions...’
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The honour impressed even the cynical back-biting circles in the capital, Petrograd. Newspapers across the country published the announcement and the laudatory comments which accompanied it. Michael, wrote one war correspondent, ‘always wanted to be wherever there was danger…seeing the Grand Duke at their forward positions the ranks were ready to follow him to a loyal death’.
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He was ‘the idol of his men’, wrote another, ‘sleeping in the open with them, and living the same life as they did, without the least indulgence…’
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Brother-in-law Sandro was also highly approving, noting that Michael’s division, ‘led by him through innumerable battles, being recognised by GHQ as our best fighting unit’
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— and that after only six months with horsemen who had known nothing of soldiering when he took command.

‘We were all devoted to him’, said a colonel.
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Ordinary soldiers simply called him
Dzhigit Misha
— meaning ‘Our Caucasian horseman Michael’, a compliment they gave to no other Russian officer, and because they did not distinguish rank as carefully as they should have done, they also addressed him as ‘Your Majesty’ rather than ‘Your Royal Highness’.
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The men trusted him implicitly, believing that whatever their grievance they could go to him for justice. One such dispute involved an Ingush Cossack rider who had captured two officers. Taking an officer prisoner earned a medal, and the simple Ingush reasoned therefore that he was entitled to two medals. Stubbornly refusing to accept what he was told by his own officers, he argued his way into divisional headquarters and was brought before Michael. Having heard him, Michael burst out laughing: ‘Lord, what am I to do with him?’

His staff had no doubt. ‘You must tell him he is wrong, Your Highness.’

‘I know perfectly well he is wrong, but he is offended. He places his hopes on me, and it is not within my power to help him’.

With that, the Ingush bowed. ‘Do not help me’, he said. ‘I thought that they were lying, but if you say it, that means it is true. Do not be angry’. Michael gave him the medal he was due, and settled the matter of the second officer by handing the grateful rider twenty roubles.
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Some matters ended badly. Later, three men condemned to death by a court martial for looting, were taken out for execution. In the process they broke free and were shot dead, with one guard killed and another wounded in the confusion. Michael was horrified, noting that ‘it all turned out to very horrible and tragic, and such a shame, as a telegram with their pardon had been received and was to be read to them at the place of execution for greater effect — and it all failed!’
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Michael’s abiding concern for his men was its own testimony to his leadership in fashioning a formidable division from Muslim tribesmen who had never before known military discipline, and whose differences with each other hampered rather than helped the forging of a coherent unit. That in itself earned him distinction.

But with the Council of St George’s approval of his high award, an Order founded by Catherine the Great but rarely given for gallantry on the battlefield, Nicholas’s reaction was a curious mixture of pleasure, pride, and yet begrudging condescension. Writing to Alexandra, he told her about ‘the splendid behaviour of Misha’s division in the February fighting, when they were attacked in the Carpathians by two Austrian divisions…while Misha was the whole time in the line of fire.’ He then added patronisingly, ‘I am very glad for his sake, as I think this time that he has really earned this military distinction and it will show him that he is, after all, treated exactly as all the others, and by doing his duty well he also gets his reward’.
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Alexandra’s response was almost breathtaking in its priggishness. ‘I am sure this war will make more of a man of him — could one but get her out of his reach, her dictating influence is so bad for him.’
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She was too blind to her own faults to know it, but many people were beginning to think that the charge of ‘dictating influence’ was more true about her and Nicholas than it was about Natasha and Michael. But at least there was one private gain for Michael in all this. Ten days later he wrote to his brother, raising again the question of his son.

‘Something that upsets me very much is that neither when we saw each other in January, nor in your letter afterwards, have you said anything in response to my personal request which means so much to me…please remember about it during Easter.’
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With the Order of St George on his chest, Michael felt more entitled than ever before to demand the legitimisation of little George — and Nicholas less able to refuse him, whatever Alexandra’s protests. This time the Tsar gave in, and four-year-old George had at last a named father and a title of his own — he was now to be styled Count Brasov.
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But that was as far as Nicholas would go. He would still not release Michael’s assets; war hero he might be, but legally he was to remain in the role of madman. If he was killed, there might be some discretionary bequest now to his son, but Natasha would still be left penniless. The first three months of 1915 had seen the private tragedy of the death of her two sisters in Moscow: Olga of appendicitis in January, Vera of pneumonia in March. If anything, it heightened her fears for Michael. If he were killed, what would she have left? She could expect nothing from a Tsarskoe Selo which still thought of her as a villainess, and would never pardon her as they had yet to pardon Michael.

As if to underline the point that he was not forgiven, the Tsar snubbed his brother when he paid a visit to the southern front in early April on ‘a victory tour’ and to see the newly-captured fortress of Przemysl, 70 miles east of Lvov. Although he was joined in Lvov by his two sisters, Xenia and Olga — who was nursing in Kiev — there was no invitation to any family reunion for Michael, and indeed he would not know that Nicholas had been to nearby Lvov until he read about it later in a local newspaper on April 10.
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That raised eyebrows in the Savage Division —‘the best in the Russian army’ with its commander awarded the Order of St George. And the Tsar had not bothered to tell them he was coming? Odd.

Natasha, however, was in no doubt of the reason. Alexandra was not going to have Michael seen to be back in the family.

TWO weeks after the Tsar departed Lvov to return home, with heady talk of an advance to Vienna in prospect, Michael also went home. His sector of the front had been quiet, with relatively little action. On April 19, 1915, a German plane dropped five bombs on his headquarters ‘without causing any damage’, there was sporadic firing from the enemy outposts, and ‘we buried a soldier, Veris, killed the day before yesterday’.
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One dead soldier in two days; given what had gone before that was almost peace. Five days later he was back in Gatchina, his division, after six months in the frontline, being withdrawn for rest and refitting, and that would take at least a month.

That month passed so quickly that afterwards it seemed the briefest of interludes. Michael saw his brother twice at Tsarskoe Selo, and had tea with his mother at the Anichkov Palace. Otherwise he spent his whole time with Natasha. They drove out in his American Packard to have picnics with friends, went to the theatre in the capital, rode in the Gatchina palace park — and then, on May 23, Michael went back to the war. Natasha this time went with him only so far as Brest-Litovsk, a large town and railway junction some 200 miles north of Lvov, now too close to the frontline to be safe.

In the month Michael had been away the war had started to go badly for Russia. Ground won on the south-west front was now ground lost. The Tsar’s victory tour of early April had been followed with a new offensive, master-minded by the Germans, and launched with an overwhelming artillery barrage which tore apart the Russian divisions facing them. Trenches collapsed and reinforcements brought up melted away as the shellfire fell on them.

Many soldiers hastily marched into the battle zone were unarmed and dependent on picking up the weapons of soldiers who had fallen. A month after the offensive began, Przemysl was recaptured and three weeks later, on June 9, 1915, Lvov fell. Caught up in the retreat, Michael’s division withdrew behind the River Dniester, but held its ground thereafter. ‘Oh, how I wish this atrocious slaughter could be over soon’, he wrote home. In two days there were 1,000 casualties.