Nicholas and Alexandra

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, Bluthners, 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