ON August 19, 1912 (O.S.), Empress Alexandra wrote a letter from Peterhof to her old tutor, Miss Jackson, who was retired and living in England:
Loving thanks for yr last letter—forgive me for being such a shockingly bad correspondent. I had Victoria’s visit for a week wh. was delightful, and Ella came also for 3 days, and I shall see her again in Moscow. Ernie and family we had in the Crimea, Waldemar came for 3 days on the
If you know of any interesting historical books for girls, could you tell me, as I read to them and they have begun reading English for themselves. They read a great deal of French and the 2 youngest acted out of the
I have begun painting flowers, as alas, have had to leave singing and playing as too tiring.
Must end. Goodbye and God bless and keep you.
A tender kiss from Your fondly
Loving old P.Q. No. III
Despite the stream of visitors, the summer of 1912 was peaceful for the Imperial family. The girls were getting older: Olga was seventeen, Tatiana fifteen, Marie thirteen and Anastasia eleven. Alexis, who was eight, was a source of pride and relief. He was cheerful, mischievous and lively; he had been so well that year that Alexandra had begun to hope her prayers had been answered and he might be getting permanently better.
At Spala, six weeks after this letter was written, this hope disintegrated. That autumn, in the depths of the Polish forest, Nicholas and Alexandra were plunged into a crisis that seared them both forever.
The Borodino ceremonies mentioned in Alexandra’s letter were a centenary celebration of the great battle before Moscow in 1812 when Kutuzov’s army finally gave battle to Napoleon. For the centenary, Russian army engineers had reconstructed the battlefield, rebuilding the famous redoubts marking the positions of French and Russian batteries, and identifying the spots where infantry and cavalry charged. Nicholas, mounted on a white horse, rode slowly across the battlefield, which was lined with detachments of soldiers from the regiments that had fought at Borodino. As a climax to the ceremony, an ancient Sergeant Voitinuik, said to be 122 years old and a survivor of the famous battle, was led forward and presented to the Tsar. Nicholas, deeply moved, warmly grasped the hand of the tottering veteran and congratulated him. “A common feeling of deep reverence for our forebears seized us there,” he wrote to Marie.
The ceremonies concluded in Moscow, which one hundred years before had burned before Napoleon’s eyes. Nicholas moved through cathedral services, receptions, parades and processions. He visited museums, attended balls and reviewed seventy-five thousand soldiers and seventy-two thousand schoolchildren. As she had predicted, Alexandra exhausted herself trying to keep up. With relief, she and her family boarded the Imperial train in mid- September for the westward journey to the Polish hunting lodges of Bialowieza and Spala. They stopped only once along the way; in Smolensk they took tea with the local nobility. That afternoon, reported the Tsar to his mother, “Alexis got hold of a glass of champagne and drank it unnoticed after which he became rather gay and began entertaining the ladies to our great surprise. When we returned to the train, he kept telling us about his conversations at the party and also that he heard his tummy rumbling.”
The hunting lodge at Bialowieza in eastern Poland was surrounded by thirty thousand acres of deep forest filled with big game. Along with elk and stag, it was the only place in Europe where the auroch, or European bison, were still to be found. At Bialowieza, the Imperial family began a pleasant holiday routine. “The weather is warm, but we have constant rain,” the Tsar wrote to his mother. “In the mornings my daughters and I go for rides on these perfect woodland paths.” Alexis, not permitted to ride, went rowing on a nearby lake. On one of these excursions, while jumping into a boat, he fell. An oarlock ground itself into the upper part of his left thigh. Dr. Botkin examined the spot and found a small swelling just below the groin. The bruise hurt Alexis, and for several days Botkin made him stay in bed. A week later, the pain and swelling had dwindled and Botkin believed that the incident was closed.
After two weeks at Bialowieza, the family moved on to Spala, the ancient hunting seat of the kings of Poland. Lost at the end of a sandy road, the wooden villa resembled a small country inn. Inside, it was cramped and dark; electric lights were left burning all day so that people could find their way through the tiny rooms and narrow hallways. Outside, the forest was magnificent. A clear, fast-flowing stream cut through the middle of a wide green lawn. From the edge of the lawn, small paths branched off into the forest. One was called the Road of Mushrooms because it ended at a bench surrounded by a fairy ring of mushrooms.
Nicholas threw himself eagerly into hunting. Every day, he rode off with the Polish noblemen who came to visit. At night, after dinner, the slain stags were laid out on the grass in front of the villa. While huntsmen stood beside the beasts holding flaming torches, the Tsar and his guests came out and examined their kill.
It was while Alexis was convalescing from his original fall in the boat that Alexandra first asked Pierre Gilliard to begin tutoring her son in French. This was Gilliard’s first intimate contact with the Tsarevich. He still did not know the nature of the boy’s disease. The lessons were soon interrupted. “[Alexis] had looked … ill from the outset,” Gilliard recalled. “Soon he had to take to his bed.… [I was] struck by his lack of color and the fact that he was carried as if he could not walk.”
Alexandra, like any mother, worried about her son being cooped up in the gloomy house without sunlight and fresh air. Deciding to take him for a drive, she had him placed in her carriage between herself and Anna Vyrubova. Bouncing and jostling, the carriage set off down the sandy roads. Not long after starting, Alexis winced and began to complain of pain in his lower leg and abdomen. Frightened, the Empress ordered the driver to return to the villa immediately. There were several miles to travel. Every time the carriage jolted, Alexis, pale and contorted, cried out. Alexandra, now in terror, urged the driver first to hurry, then to go slowly. Anna Vyrubova remembered the ride as “an experience in horror. Every movement of the carriage, every rough place in the road, caused the child the most exquisite torture and by the time we reached home, the boy was almost unconscious with pain.”
Botkin, examining the boy, found a severe hemorrhage in the thigh and groin. That night, a stream of telegrams flew off from Spala. One by one, the doctors began to arrive from St. Petersburg: Ostrogorsky, the pediatrician, and Rauchfuss, the surgeon, joined Fedorov and Dr. Derevenko. Their presence at Spala added worried faces and urgent whispers, but none of them could aid the suffering child. The bleeding could not be stopped and no pain-killers were given. Blood flowed steadily from the torn blood vessels inside the leg, seeping slowly through the other tissues and forming an enormous hematoma, or swelling, through the leg, groin and lower abdomen. The leg drew up against the chest to give the blood a larger socket to fill. But there came a point when there was no place else for the blood to go. Yet still it flowed. It was the beginning of a nightmare.
“The days between the 6th and the 10th were the worst,” Nicholas wrote his mother. “The poor darling suffered intensely, the pains came in spasms and recurred every quarter of an hour. His high temperature made him delirious night and day; and he would sit up in bed and every movement brought the pain on again. He hardly slept at all, had not even the strength to cry, and kept repeating, ‘Oh Lord, have mercy upon me.’ ”
Day and night, screams pierced the walls and filled the corridors. Many in the household stuffed their ears with cotton in order to continue their work. Yet for eleven days, the most critical part of the crisis, Alexandra scarcely left her son’s side. Hour after hour, she sat by the bed where the groaning, half-conscious child lay huddled on his side. His face was bloodless, his body contorted, his eyes, with hollow black circles under them, were rolled back in his head. The Empress never undressed or went to bed. When she had to sleep, she lay back on a sofa next to his bed and dozed. After a while, his groans and shrieks dwindled to a constant wail that tore her heart. Through the pain, he called to his mother, “Mama, help me. Won’t you help me?” Alexandra sat holding his hand, smoothing his forehead, tears running down her cheeks as she prayed mutely to God to deliver her little boy from torture.
