Nicholas and Alexandra

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

“Poor Fellows, They Are Ready to Give Their Lives for a Smile”

VICTORY on the Marne and disaster at Tannenberg tended to dim the result of a third great battle fought in the opening weeks of war. Even as Rennenkampf’s Cossacks rode through East Prussian barnyards, the main mass of the Austro-Hungarian army, one million strong, launched itself north from Galicia intending to amputate Poland from Russia. Within less than three weeks, the Russians had stopped and smashed these invaders. Four Austro-Hungarian armies were routed, two hundred thousand prisoners and Lemberg, the capital of the province, were taken, and Russian cavalry crossed the Carpathians to ride out onto the great Danube plain toward Budapest and Vienna. In terror, hinting that it might be forced to a separate peace, the Austrian government appealed to Berlin for help.

The German General Staff ordered Hindenburg to rush reinforcements. On September 14, 1914, two German army corps headed south from East Prussia; four days later, Hindenburg raised the rescue force by two additional army corps and a cavalry division. Even this help might not have been enough if the Russian offensive had not suddenly halted of its own accord. The source of this command—inexplicable and keenly frustrating to front-line generals who sensed a chance to knock Austria-Hungary out of the war—was Paris. On September 14, Paléologue received a telegram from his government. “It instructs me to impress on the Russian government that it is essential for the Russian armies to press home their direct offensive against Germany,” he wrote. “[We are] afraid that our Allies may have had their heads turned by their relatively easy successes in Galicia and may neglect the German front in order to concentrate on forcing their way to Vienna.” On the Tsar’s command, to accommodate the wishes of his ally, the triumphant Russians began receding from the Carpathians. Two of the four Russian armies in Galicia were shifted north to begin a fruitless attack on German Silesia. Again, Russia had made a gallant and expensive gesture toward her hard-pressed ally. But it represented a gross violation of sound military strategy as nicely expressed by the old Russian proverb: “If you chase two hares, you won’t catch either.” Russia’s chance to crush Austria-Hungary at the outset was lost.

In the early battles of 1914, the Russians learned that the Austrians were a far weaker foe than the Germans. Fighting Austrians soon came to be considered almost unworthy by Russian officers. Knox discovered this feeling among twenty young subalterns just posted from artillery school: “The poor boys were keen as mustard and told me that their one fear was lest they might be employed till the end of the war against the Austrians and never have a dash at the Prussians.”

The Russians also discovered on every battlefield that dash and bravery were not enough. The Russian cavalry, carrying long lances and swinging sabers, rode exuberantly to meet the Prussian Uhlans and Austrian Hussars. The Russian infantry, wielding vicious four-edged bayonets, willingly attacked whatever positions their officers indicated. But where those positions were defended by superior artillery and plentiful machine guns, the charging Russian ranks were scythed like rows of wheat. By the end of 1914, after only five months of war, one million Russians—one quarter of the army—had been killed, wounded or taken prisoner.

Among the officers, the ratio of loss was far higher. Unlike German and Austrian officers, who took sensible precautions, Russian officers considered it cowardly to take cover. Attacking in the face of murderous enemy fire, the officers made their men crawl forward on the ground while they themselves stood erect and walked into the enemy bullets. The famous Preobrajensky Guard Regiment lost 48 of its 70 officers; the 18th Division had only 40 of its original 370 officers. “These people play at war,” said Knox sadly.

To make good these losses, three thousand military cadets were commissioned early and sent to the front. Fifteen thousand university students, originally deferred from military service, were ordered to take four months of military training and become lieutenants. Orders were given to curb the flamboyant, wasteful bravery of young officers. “Remember what I am going to say to you,” said the Tsar on October 1, 1914, addressing a company of cadets promoted to lieutenant. “I have not the slightest doubt of your courage and bravery, but I need your lives, because useless losses in the officer corps may lead to serious consequences. I am sure that every one of you will give his life willingly when it becomes necessary, but do it only in cases of exceptional emergency. In other words, I am asking you to care for yourselves.”

Despite their sacrifices, the Russians began the war as a gentlemanly undertaking. Captured enemy officers were not questioned; it was considered improper to ask a brother officer to inform on his compatriots. In time, the relentlessness of the German combative spirit was to alter these generous feelings. One German officer, being carried wounded from the battlefield, drew his revolver and shot his stretcher bearers. Later, the Tsar was to write, “We take no prisoners where the enemy uses explosive bullets.”

Much of the power and resilience of the Russian army lay in its religious faith. Knox was enormously impressed by the simple, unquestioning belief, permeating all ranks, that prayer would lead to victory. In an underground hut near the front, he once listened to a Russian general discussing tactics with a group of Russian officers. “Then,” wrote Knox, “in the simplest possible way, without any hypocritical flourish … he added, ‘You must always remember, too, the value of prayer—with prayer you can do anything.’ So sudden a transition from professional technicalities to simple primary truths seemed incongruous, and gave me almost a shock, but was taken quite naturally by the officers crowding around, with serious, bearded faces, in the little dugout. This religious belief is a power in the Russian army.”

Knox watched a regiment of veterans drawn up on parade. Near the front, “The General … thanked them in the name of the Emperor and the country for their gallant service.… It was touching to see how the men were moved by his simple words of praise.… The latter leaned over and chucked men here and there under the chin as he rode along. ‘Poor fellows,’ he said as we drove away, ‘they are ready to give their lives for a smile.’ ”

The difference that faith could make was demonstrated on every battlefront. At Easter in 1916, a German attack was launched near the Baltic. At five a.m., German artillery began pounding the Russian trenches cut into the marshy ground. At the same time, the Germans released gas into the Russian lines. The Russians, lacking both gas masks and steel helmets, endured. After each hour of bombardment, the German artillery paused to learn the effect on the Russian trenches. Always, there was a resumption of rifle fire from the Russians, followed by a new German bombardment. After five hours of this devastation, Russian battalions of 500 men were reduced to 90 or 100. Yet when the German infantry finally advanced, it was met by a Russian bayonet charge. In all that day, the Russians gave up only a mile and half of front. That night, from within the Russian lines the Germans heard the sound of hundreds of men singing the Easter hymn, “Christ is risen from the dead, conquering death by death.”

Despite the huge losses of the previous autumn, the coming of spring 1915 found the Russian army again ready for battle. Its strength, down to 2,000,000 men in December 1914, had swollen to 4,200,000 as new drafts of recruits arrived at the front. In March, the Russians attacked, hurling themselves again on the Austrians in Galicia. They had immediate, brilliant success. Przemysl, the strongest fortress in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, fell on March 19 with 120,000 prisoners and 900 guns. “Nikolasha [Grand Duke Nicholas] came running into my carriage out of breath and with tears in his eyes and told me,” wrote Nicholas. A Te Deum in the church “was packed with officers and my splendid Cossacks. What beaming faces!” In his joy, the Tsar presented the Grand Duke with an ornamental golden sword of victory, its hilt and scabbard studded with diamonds. Early in April, the Tsar himself entered the conquered province, driving along hot roads covered with white dust. In Przemysl, he admired the fortress—“colossal works, terribly fortified, not an inch of ground remained undefended.” In Lemberg, he spent the night in the house of the Austrian governor-general, occupying a bed hitherto reserved exclusively for the Emperor Franz Joseph.

Once again, waves of Russian infantry and horsemen rolled exultantly up to the Carpathians. The peaks, craggy and thickly forested, were desperately defended by crack Hungarian regiments. Because of their pitiful lack of heavy artillery and ammunition, the Russians were unable to bombard the heights before their attacks. Instead, each hill, each ridge, each crest had to be stormed by bayonet. Advancing with what Ludendorff described as “supreme contempt for death,” the Russian infantry swept upward, leaving the hillsides soaked with blood. By mid-April, the Carpathian passes were in Russian hands and General Brusilov’s Eighth Army was descending onto the Danubian plain. Again Vienna trembled; again there was talk of a separate peace. On April 26, 1915, convinced that the Hapsburg empire was collapsing, Italy declared war on Austria-Hungary.

It was at this moment that Hindenburg and Ludendorff let fall on Russia the monster blow which for months they had been preparing. Having failed to destroy France in 1914, the German General Staff had selected 1915 as the year to drive Russia out of the war. Through March and April, while the Russians devastated the Austrians in Galicia and the Carpathians, the German generals calmly and efficiently massed men and artillery in southern Poland. On May 2, 1,500 German guns opened fire on a single sector of the Russian line. Within a four-hour period, 700,000 shells fell into the Russian trenches.

“From a neighboring height one could see an uninterrupted line of enemy fire for five miles to each side,” wrote Sir Bernard Pares, who witnessed the bombardment. “The Russian artillery was practically silent. The elementary Russian trenches were completely wiped out and so, to all intents and purposes, was human life in that area. The Russian division stationed at this point was reduced from a normal 16,000 to 500.”

In this maelstrom, the Russian line disintegrated. Reinforcements were brought by train directly to the battlefield and detrained under fire. The Third Caucasian Corps, rushed into the breach, was quickly reduced from 40,000 men to 6,000; even this remnant, attacking at night with bayonets, took 7,000 prisoners. The Russian Third Army, which took the brunt of the German blow, had—said its commander—“lost all its blood.” On June 2, the fortress of Przemysl was lost. Lemberg fell on June 22. “Poor Nikolasha,” wrote the Tsar, “while telling me this, wept in my private room and even asked whether I thought of replacing him by a more capable man.… He kept thanking me for staying here, because my presence here supported him personally.”

In the retreat, men lost their rifles or flung them away. The shortage quickly became desperate; one officer suggested arming some battalions with long-handled axes. “In recent battles, a third of the men had no rifles,” reported General Belaiev from Stavka. “These poor devils had to wait patiently until their comrades fell before their eyes and they could pick up weapons. The army is drowning in its own blood.” Unarmed men, waiting in support trenches until casualties on the firing line made weapons available, were “churned into gruel” by exploding shells and bursting shrapnel. The men understood what was happening. “You know, sir, we have no weapons except the soldier’s breast,” an infantry private said to Pares. “This is not war, sir, this is slaughter.”

Nothing could stem the German columns advancing through the deep summer dust of Poland. Ahead of them came the long, slow-moving lines of refugees, trudging eastward. So intense was their suffering that a Russian general who had always been friendly suddenly turned on Knox and demanded to know what the British were doing in the war. “We are playing the game,” said the Russian, distracted with anguish. “We are giving everything. Do you think it is easy for us to look at those long columns of refugees flying before the German advance? We know that all those children crowded on those carts will die before the winter is out.” Knox, overcome by the tragedy, bowed his head and did not speak.

On August 5, 1915, Warsaw fell. For Grand Duke Nicholas, Russian strategy had become a question not of saving Warsaw or even Poland, but of preserving the army. Like Kutuzov in 1812, he retreated, giving up villages, towns, even provinces, intent only on keeping the army intact. Through it all, the Russian soldiers never lost their fighting spirit. On the day Warsaw fell, Knox visited officers of the Preobrajensky Guard. He found them still joking. “We will retire to the Urals,” they explained, “and when we get there the enemy’s pursuing army will have dwindled to a single German and a single Austrian. The Austrian will, according to custom, give himself up as a prisoner, and we will kill the German.”

The ordeal of the Russian army in the spring and summer of 1915 seared all who survived. Half of the army was destroyed: 1,400,000 men were killed or wounded, 976,000 became prisoners. “The spring of 1915 I shall remember all my life,” wrote General Deniken. “The retreat from Galicia was one vast tragedy for the Russian army.… The German heavy artillery swept away whole lines of trenches, and their defenders with them. We hardly replied—there was nothing with which we could reply. Our regiments, although completely exhausted, were beating off one attack after another by bayonet.… Blood flowed unendingly, the ranks became thinner and thinner. The number of graves constantly multiplied.…” ^*

It was impossible to hide from the country what was happening at the front. The gaudy optimism which had placed the Russian Guards on the Unter den Linden in less than six months was replaced by pessimism and gloom. There were no great balls that winter in the gray, snow-covered cities of Russia; the young men who had danced so gaily two winters before lay dead in the forests of East Prussia or on the slopes of the Carpathians. On the Nevsky Prospect, there were no flags, no bands playing the national anthem, no cheering crowds, only silent groups standing in the cold reading the casualty lists posted in shopwindows. In hospital wards across the land lay the wounded soldiers, patient, gentle, grateful as children. “Nitchevo—it is nothing, little sister,” they responded to sympathy. Only rarely did the nurses hear a low-voiced “I suffer, little sister.”

The thrilling sense of national unity which had so profoundly moved the Tsar in the Winter Palace and the Kremlin had evaporated, and in its place surged all the old suspicions, quarrels and hatreds. Worst was the hatred of everything German. In Petrograd, Bach, Brahms and Beethoven were banned from orchestra programs. The windows of German bakeries were broken, and exclusive German schools were threatened with arson. At Christmas in 1914, the Holy Synod had foolishly banned Christmas trees as being a German custom. “I am going to make a row,” wrote the Empress to the Tsar when she heard about it. “Why take away the pleasure from the wounded and children because it originally comes from Germany? The narrow mindedness is too colossal.”

Anti-German feeling was strongest in Moscow. French-speaking people riding Moscow streetcars found themselves hissed as “Nemtsy” [Germans] by Russians who understood no foreign tongue. Bitter stories were told about the German-born Empress. The most popular of these tales concerned a general, walking along a corridor of the Winter Palace, who came upon the Tsarevich, weeping. Patting the boy on the head, the general asked, “What is wrong, my little man?” Half smiling, half crying, the Tsarevich replied, “When the Russians are beaten, Papa cries. When the Germans are beaten, Mama cries. When am I to cry?”

With the defeat of the supposedly invincible Russian army, the people of Moscow rushed into the streets to take vengeance. For three days beginning June 10, 1915, shops, factories and private houses belonging to people with German names were sacked and burned. “The country house of Knop, the great Russo-German millionaire who more than any man helped to build up the Russian cotton industry … was burned to the ground,” wrote the British Consul, R. H. Bruce Lock-hart. “The police could or would do nothing.… I stood and watched while hooligans sacked the leading piano store of Moscow. Bechsteins, Blüthners, grand pianos, baby grands, and uprights, were hurled one by one from the various stories to the ground.”

In Red Square, a mob shouted open insults to the Imperial family, demanding that the Empress be shut up in a convent, the Tsar deposed, Rasputin hanged and Grand Duke Nicholas crowned as Nicholas III. From Red Square, the crowd surged to the Convent of Mary and Martha, where the Empress’s sister Grand Duchess Elizabeth met them at the gate. There were wild, accusing shouts that she was giving sanctuary to a German spy and that she was hiding her brother Grand Duke Ernest of Hesse. The Grand Duchess, standing alone in white-and-gray robes, calmly invited the leaders to search the house to see for themselves that her brother was not there. As she answered, a stone landed at her feet. “Away with the German woman!” shouted the crowd, just as a company of soldiers arrived to drive them off.

Within the government, military defeat and the nation’s anger brought swift political repercussions. General Sukhomlinov, at last at a loss to explain away the desperate lack of guns and munitions with another amusing story, was swept away on June 20. On June 27, the Tsar, calling on “all faithful sons of the Fatherland without distinction of class or opinion, to work together with one heart and mind to supply the needs of the army,” announced that the Duma would be summoned “in order to hear the voice of the land of Russia.” A new Special Defense Council, including both ministers of the government and leaders of the Duma, was formed. These were hopeful signs, but they were appearing late. General Polivanov, Sukhomlinov’s successor as Minister of War, a vigorous, brusque, efficient man, spoke frankly to his fellow ministers at a meeting of the ministerial council on July 16. “I consider it my duty to declare to the Council of Ministers that the country is in danger,” he declared. “Where our retreat will end, only God knows.”

With his soldiers retreating, the Tsar’s intense feelings about being with the army were revived. On July 16, walking restlessly in the park at Tsarskoe Selo with the Tsarevich and Gilliard, he said to the tutor, “You have no idea how depressing it is to be away from the front. It seems as if everything here saps energy and enfeebles resolution.… Out at the front men fight and die for their country. At the front there is only one thought—the determination to conquer.”

Nicholas’s strong feelings about the army were constantly stimulated from another, less noble source: the personal animosity of the Empress against Grand Duke Nicholas. Alexandra had never liked the fiery, impetuous soldier who towered over her less colorful husband. She had never forgotten that it was his melodramatic threat to blow out his brains in the presence of the Tsar and Witte which had forced the signing of the 1905 Manifesto, creating the Duma. At the front, she knew that “Nikolasha’s” heroic size gave him the aura of the warrior grand duke, the real strong man of the Imperial family. There were rumors that among his intimates the Grand Duke did nothing to correct the stories that he would one day be crowned as Nicholas III. Worst, she knew that Nicholas Nicolaievich had sworn implacable hatred against Rasputin. Once Rasputin, hoping to regain favor with the man who had been his most prominent patron and had first introduced him at the Imperial palace, telegraphed the Grand Duke offering to come to Headquarters to bless an icon. “Yes, do come,” replied Grand Duke Nicholas. “I’ll hang you.”

Against this powerful, dangerous enemy Rasputin fought back skillfully. He quickly discovered the arguments to which the Empress was most susceptible, and whenever he was in her presence, he used them with poisonous effect against the Commander-in-Chief: The Grand Duke is deliberately currying favor in the army and overshadowing the Tsar so that one day he can claim the throne. The Grand Duke cannot possibly succeed on the battlefield because God will not bless him. How can God bless a man who has turned his back on me, the Man of God? In all probability, if the Grand Duke is allowed to keep his power, he will kill me, and then what will happen to the Tsarevich, the Tsar and Russia?

As long as the Russian army continued to advance, Grand Duke Nicholas’s command remained secure. But once his soldiers began to retreat, his position became increasingly vulnerable. Through the summer, Alexandra’s letters to the Tsar maintained a steady drumfire of criticism against the Grand Duke, echoing and re-echoing Rasputin’s arguments:

June 11 (O.S.): “Please my angel, make N. [Nikolasha, the Grand Duke] see with your eyes.… I hope my letter did not displease but I am haunted by our Friend’s [Rasputin’s] wish and know it will be fatal for us and the country if not fulfilled. He means what he says when He speaks so seriously.”

June 12: “Would to God N. were another man and not turned against a Man of God’s.”

June 16: “I have absolutely no faith in N.—know him to be far from clever and having gone against a Man of God, his work can’t be blessed or his advice good.… Russia will not be blessed if her sovereign lets a Man of God sent to help him be persecuted, I am sure.… You know N.’s hatred for Gregory is intense.”

June 17: “N’s fault and Witte’s that the Duma exists, and it has caused you more worry than joy. Oh, I do not like N. having anything to do with these big sittings which concern interior questions, he understands our country so little and imposes upon the ministers with his loud voice and gesticulations. I can go wild sometimes at his false position.… Nobody knows who is the Emperor now.… It is as though N. settles all, makes the choices and changes. It makes me utterly wretched.”

June 25: “I loathe your being at Headquarters … listening to N.’s advice which is not good and cannot be—he has no right to act as he does, mixing in your concerns. All are shocked that the ministers go with reports to him, as though he were now the sovereign. Ah, my Nicky, things are not as they ought to be and therefore N. keeps you near to have a hold over you with his ideas and bad counsels.”

The Tsar did not share his wife’s strong views of Grand Duke Nicholas. He respected the Grand Duke and had full—and thoroughly justified—confidence in his loyalty. Paléologue, visiting Stavka, once attempted to discuss the Tsar’s views with the Commander-in-Chief. Drawing himself up, the Grand Duke replied coldly, “I never discuss an opinion of His Majesty’s except when he does me the honor of asking my advice.” To suppress talk in some ranks of the army that Russia could not go on fighting, the Grand Duke issued an Order of the Day: “All faithful subjects know that in Russia, everyone from the Commander-in-Chief to the private soldier, obeys and obeys only the sacred and august will of the Anointed of God, our deeply revered Emperor, who alone has the power to begin and end a war.”

Wherever possible the Tsar tried to buffer relations between the Empress and Grand Duke Nicholas. In April 1915, when Nicholas was to visit Lemberg and Przemysl, Alexandra wanted the Grand Duke to remain behind so that her husband alone could receive the cheers of the troops. Calmly, Nicholas dissuaded her: “Darling mine, I do not agree with you that N. ought to remain here during my visit to Galicia. On the contrary, precisely because I am going in wartime to a conquered province, the commander-in-chief ought to be accompanying me. It is he who accompanies me, not I who am in his suite.”

Nevertheless, as the retreat continued, the Tsar’s determination to take personal command of the army intensified. With the army and the nation in danger, he was convinced that it was his duty to unify civil and military authority and take on his own person the full weight of responsibility for Russia’s destiny. In the Council of Ministers, where bitter attacks had been made on Grand Duke Nicholas’s handling of military operations, Prime Minister Goremykin warned his colleagues, “I consider it my duty to repeat to the members of the Council my emphatic advice to be extremely careful in what they are going to say to the Emperor about … those questions that relate to General Headquarters and the Grand Duke. Irritation against the Grand Duke at Tsarskoe Selo has become of a character which threatens serious consequences. I fear that your representations may serve as a pretext to bring about grave complications.”

On August 5, Warsaw fell. “The Emperor, white and trembling, brought this news to the Empress as we sat at tea on her balcony in the warm autumn air,” wrote Anna Vyrubova. “The Emperor was fairly overcome with grief and humiliation. ‘It cannot go on like this,’ he exclaimed bitterly.”

Three weeks later, Nicholas and Alexandra made an unannounced, private visit by automobile to Petrograd. They drove first to the cathedral in the Fortress of Peter and Paul, where they knelt before the tombs of the tsars. From there they went to the Cathedral of Our Lady of Kazan, where they remained for several hours kneeling at the miraculous icon of the Virgin, praying for guidance. That night, the Council of Ministers was summoned to the Alexander Palace. Nicholas dined that evening with his wife and Anna Vyrubova. Before leaving for the meeting, he asked them to pray that his resolution remain strong. Silently, Anna pressed into his hand a tiny icon which she always wore around her neck. Carrying the icon, Nicholas walked out of the room and the two women settled down to wait. As the minutes stretched into hours, Alexandra grew impatient. Throwing a cloak around her shoulders and motioning Anna to follow, she slipped out onto a balcony which led past the windows of the council chamber. Through the lace curtains inside, they could see the Tsar, sitting very straight in his chair, surrounded by his ministers. One of the ministers was on his feet, arguing passionately.

Without exception, the ministers were aghast at the Tsar’s proposal. They pointed to the disorganization of governmental machinery that would come if the head of state were to spend all his time at Headquarters, more than five hundred miles from the seat of government. They declared that the unity of administration which Nicholas sought would merely become a concentration of all blame for military defeats and political turmoil on the head of the sovereign. In the last resort, they begged him not to go to the front at a moment when the army was defeated. Nicholas listened, his brows and hands covered with perspiration, until every minister had spoken. Then he thanked them and announced quietly, “Gentlemen, in two days I leave for Stavka.”

His public letter to the Grand Duke, explaining his decision, was characteristic of the Tsar. Eloquent and felicitous, it managed to spare the Grand Duke’s pride while gracefully easing him out of his post:

To Your Imperial Highness:

At the beginning of the war there were reasons of a political nature which prevented me from following my personal inclinations and immediately putting myself at the head of the army. Hence the fact that I conferred upon you the supreme command of all the military and naval forces.

Before the eyes of all Russia, Your Imperial Highness has during the war displayed an invincible courage, which has given me and all Russians the greatest confidence in you, and roused the ardent hopes with which your name was everywhere associated in the inevitable vicissitudes of military fortune. Now that the enemy has penetrated far into the empire, my duty to the country which God has committed to my keeping ordains that I shall assume supreme command of the fighting forces, share the burdens and toils of war with my army and help it to protect Russian soil against the onslaught of the foe.

The ways of Providence are inscrutable; but my duty and my own desires strengthen me in a determination which has been inspired by concern for the common weal.

The hostile invasion which is making more progress every day on the western front, demands above all an extreme concentration of all civil and military authority, unity of command during the war, and intensification of the activities of the whole administrative services. But all these duties distract our attention from the southern front, and in these circumstances, I feel the necessity for your advice and help on that front. I therefore appoint you my lieutenant in the Caucasus and Commander-in-Chief of the brave army operating in that region.

To Your Imperial Highness I wish to express my profound gratitude and that of the country for all your work in the war.

Nicholas

The letter was personally delivered to Grand Duke Nicholas at Headquarters by the War Minister, Polivanov. “God be praised,” said Nicholas Nicolaievich simply. “The Emperor releases me from a task which was wearing me out.” When the Tsar himself arrived at Stavka, he wrote: “N. came in with a kind, brave smile and asked simply when I would order him to go. The following day at lunch and dinner he was very talkative and in a very good mood.”

The fall of the Grand Duke was a source of grim satisfaction to the Germans. “The Grand Duke,” Ludendorff wrote later, “was really a great soldier and strategist.” In the Russian army, officers and men were sad to see him go, but the summer of disaster had dimmed his hero’s luster. Within the mauve boudoir at Tsarskoe Selo, the change was hailed as a supreme personal triumph. When Nicholas left for Stavka, he carried with him a letter of ecstasy from Alexandra:

My very own beloved one, I cannot find words to express all I want to—my heart is too full. I only long to hold you tight in my arms and whisper words of intense love, courage, strength and endless blessings.… You have fought this great fight for your country and throne—alone and with bravery and decision. Never have they seen such firmness in you before.… I know what it costs you … forgive me, I beseech you, my Angel, for having left you no peace and worried you so much, but I too well know your marvelously gentle character and you had to shake it off this time, had to win your fight alone against all. It will be a glorious page in your reign and Russian history, the story of these weeks and days.… God anointed you at your coronation, he placed you where you stand and you have done your duty, be sure, quite sure of that and He forsaketh not his anointed. Our Friend’s prayers arise day and night for you to Heaven and God will hear them.… It is the beginning of the great glory of your reign, He said so and I absolutely believe it.… Sleep well, my Sunshine, Russia’s Savior. Remember last night how tenderly we clung together. I shall yearn for your caresses.… I kiss you without end and bless you. Holy Angels guard your slumber. I am near and with you forever and ever and none shall separate us.

Your very own wife,

Sunny

In France and England, the Tsar’s decision was greeted with a sigh of relief. Russian defeats had aroused fear in both countries that the Tsar’s government might be forced to withdraw from the war. By taking personal command, Nicholas was regarded as pledging himself and his empire once again to the alliance.

In the Russian army, it was clearly understood that the Tsar’s role would be that of a figurehead, and that the actual military decisions would be made by whichever professional soldier became his chief of staff. Nicholas’s choice for this post was reassuring. Michael Vasilevich Alexeiev was an energetic soldier of humble beginnings who had risen to the top by sheer ability and hard work. A former professor at the military staff college, he had served in the southwest against the Austrians and had commanded the Northern Front. Now, as Chief of Staff, he was in fact, if not in name, Commander-in-Chief of the Russian armies.

In appearance, Alexeiev compared poorly with the Grand Duke. He was short, with a simple, wide Russian face which, unlike most Russian generals, he chose to expose without a beard. He had trouble with an eye muscle, and Nicholas once described him to Alexandra as “Alexeiev, my cross-eyed friend.” At Headquarters, he was solitary, avoiding contact with the Imperial suite. His weakness was a failure to delegate authority; he tried to do everything himself, including checking map references on the huge war maps spread out on Headquarters tables. Nevertheless, Nicholas was delighted with him. “I have such good help from Alexeiev,” he telegraphed immediately after taking command. And a few days later: “I cannot tell you how pleased I am with Alexeiev. Conscientious, clever, modest and what a worker!”

In September 1915, soon after the change of command at Russian Headquarters, the German offensive began to lose impetus. Russian troops, fighting now on the soil of Russia itself, gave ground slowly, contesting every river, hill and marsh. By November, as winter closed down most of the front, Alexeiev had managed to stabilize a line which ran, on the average, two hundred miles east of the front in May. Firmly in German hands lay all of Russian Poland and the lower Baltic territories. Indeed, the battle line at the end of 1915 became almost precisely the western frontier of Soviet Russia until 1939 and the outbreak of the Second World War.

There were no further great German offensives in the East during the war. Assuming that the losses of 1915 had broken the back of the Russian army, the German General Staff transferred its main effort back to the Western Front. Beginning in February 1916, all of the great mass of German artillery and a million infantrymen were hurled at the pivotal French fortress of Verdun. To the utter astonishment and intense dismay of the Kaiser’s generals, no sooner were they committed in the West than the Russians attacked again in the East. From May until October, the Russians pressed forward; by July, eighteen German divisions had been transferred from West to East and the assault on Verdun had been abandoned. But the cost to the Russian army of the 1916 campaign again was a terrible one: 1,200,000 men.

After the war, Hindenburg paid tribute to the bravery and sacrifices of his Russian enemies: “In the Great War ledger the page on which the Russian losses were written has been torn out. No one knows the figures. Five or eight millions? We too have no idea. All we know is that sometimes in our battles with the Russians we had to remove the mounds of enemy corpses from before our trenches in order to get a clear field of fire against fresh assaulting waves.” Ten years after Hindenburg wrote, a careful analysis of Russian casualties was made by Nicholas Golovine, a former general of the Imperial army. Weighing all the evidence, he estimated that 1,300,000 men were killed in action; 4,200,000 were wounded, of whom 350,000 later died of wounds; and 2,400,000 were taken prisoner. The total is 7,900,000—over half of the 15,500,000 men who were mobilized.

Thus, the military collapse of 1915 played a major part in all that was to happen afterward. For it was the tragic and bloody defeat of the army which weakened the grip of Grand Duke Nicholas and persuaded the Tsar to take personal command of his troops. By going to the army, hundreds of miles from the seat of government, the Tsar gave up all but a vague, supervisory control over affairs of state. In an autocracy, this arrangement was impossible; a substitute autocrat had to be found. Uncertainly at first, then with growing self-confidence, this role was filled by the Empress Alexandra. At her shoulder, his “prayers arising day and night,” stood her Friend, Rasputin. Together they would finally bring down the Russian Empire.

^* Not surprisingly, those Russian soldiers who survived this maelstrom came to regard artillery as the God of War. Thirty years later, in April 1945, when Marshal Zhukov began the Red Army’s final assault on Berlin, his attack was preceded by a barrage from 20,000 guns.