dying men back from the front. Most had had only first aid in the trenches and front-line dressing stations. They arrived dirty, bloodstained, feverish and groaning. Under the direction of trained nurses, the students washed and bandaged the ripped flesh and mangled bodies. “I have seen the Empress of Russia in the operating room,” wrote Anna Vyrubova, “… holding ether cones, handling sterilized instruments, assisting in the most difficult operations, taking from the hands of busy surgeons amputated legs and arms, removing bloody and even vermin-ridden field dressings, enduring all the sights and smells and agonies of the most dreadful of all places, a military hospital in the midst of war.” Nevertheless, wrote Anna, “I never saw her happier than on the day, at the end of her two months training, she marched at the head of the procession of nurses to receive the Red Cross … diploma of a certified war nurse.”
After a morning in the operating room, Alexandra ate a hurried lunch and spent the afternoon visiting other hospitals. Moving through the aisles between hospital beds, the tall figure of the Empress in her nurse’s uniform stirred the wounded men. They reached out bandaged hands to touch her; they wept as she knelt beside their beds to pray. Officers and peasant boys alike, facing amputations, cried from their beds, “Tsaritsa, stand near me. Hold my hand that I may have courage.
To Alexandra, this was Russia, bleeding and dying. She was the Russian Empress, the
Alexandra spared herself nothing, not even terrible, shattering wounds in the groin: “I had wretched fellows with awful wounds—scarcely a man any more, so shot to pieces, perhaps it must be cut off as so black, but hope to save it—terrible to look at. I washed and cleaned and painted with iodine and smeared with vasoline and tied them up and bandaged all up.… I did three such—and one had a little tube in it. One’s heart bleeds for them—I won’t describe any more details as it’s so sad, but being a wife and mother I feel for them quite particularly—a young nurse (girl) I sent out of the room.”
To Nicholas, at Army Headquarters, death was remote, a question of arithmetic, as regiments, brigades and divisions shriveled away and then were restored by new recruits. To Alexandra, death was familiar and immediate. “During an operation a soldier died … hemorrhage,” she wrote on November 25, 1914 (O.S.). “All behaved well, none lost their heads [Olga and Tatiana] were brave—They and Ania [Vyrubova] had never seen a death. But he died in a minute.… How near death always is.”
In November, she formed a special attachment to a young boy, mentioning him repeatedly in her letters: “A young boy kept begging for me … the little boy begged me to come earlier today … I find the young boy gradually getting worse … in the evenings he is off his head and so weak … He will pass away gradually. I only hope not whilst we are away.”
Early in March, he died. She wrote: “My poor wounded friend has gone. God has taken him quietly and peacefully to himself. I was as usual with him in the morning and more than an hour in the afternoon. He talked a lot—in a whisper always—all about his service in the Caucasus—awfully interesting and so bright with his big shiny eyes.… Olga and I went to see him. He lay there so peacefully covered under my flowers I daily brought him, with his lovely peaceful smile—the forehead yet quite warm. I came home with my tears. The elder sister [nurse] cannot either realize it—he was quite calm, cheery, said felt a wee bit not comfy and when the sister 10 minutes after she had gone away, came in, found him with staring eyes, quite blue, breathed twice—and all was over—peaceful to the end. Never did he complain, never asked for anything, sweetness itself—all loved him and that shining smile. You, lovy mine, can understand what that is, when daily one has been there, thinking only of giving him pleasure—and suddenly—finished.… Forgive my writing so much about him, but going there and all that, had been a help with you away and I felt God let me bring him a little sunshine in his loneliness. Such is life! Another brave soul left this world to be added to the shining stars above. It must not make you sad what I wrote, only I could not bear it any longer.”
The Empress’s letters to the Tsar were never meant for any eyes but his. In all, 630 letters were found in a black leather suitcase in Ekaterinburg after her death; of these, 230 were written over the period from their first acquaintance to the outbreak of war in 1914. The other 400 were written during the war years 1914–1916. They were written with no inkling that anyone else would ever read them, far less that they would one day be published and become key historical documents used to explain events, personalities and decisions on the eve of the Russian Revolution. Today, they offer this and even more: an intimate window into a soul, a unique portrait of a woman which none of her contemporaries in Russia could possibly have seen.
Alexandra wrote voluminously. She would begin early in the morning, add paragraphs during the day, go on for pages late at night and perhaps add even more the next day. In a bold, rounded hand, she wrote to the Tsar in English in the same telegraphic style she used for her friends: breathless prose with irregular spelling, many abbreviations, frequent omissions of words that seemed obvious, and punctuation largely with dots and dashes. Both the length and the style of her letters are unfortunate. Often by skipping and jumping, she gives an impression of light-mindedness on subjects about which she actually cared deeply. Similarly, the intense fervor of other passages is strong evidence of the great passions of which Alexandra was capable, but not—as some have charged—sufficient proof that the Empress was mad. The sheer length of her letters has made their interpretation difficult for historians and biographers. It is arduous to read them all and impossible to quote more than a minuscule fraction. Yet, in her case to an extraordinary extent, excerpting has been misleading. A thought whose germination has been proceeding for sentences—perhaps paragraphs—suddenly arrives full strength in a stark and damning phrase. These phrases, plucked from the mass of verbiage, make a loquacious woman seem hopelessly hysterical.
A remarkable feature of these letters was the freshness of Alexandra’s love. After two decades of marriage, she still wrote like a young girl. The Empress, so shy and even icy about expressing emotion in public, released all her romantic passion in her letters. Beneath the Victorian surface of reserve, she revealed the extravagant, flowery emotions of the Victorian poets.
The letters, usually arriving with petals of lilies or violets pressed between their pages, begin “Good morning, my darling … My beloved one … My sweetest treasure … My Own Beloved Angel.” They end: “Sleep well, my treasure … I yearn to hold you in my arms and rest my head upon your shoulder … I yearn for your kisses, for your arms and shy Childy [Nicholas] gives them me [only] in the dark and wify lives by them.” She was in anguish whenever he left for the front: “Oh, my love! It was hard bidding you goodbye and seeing that lonely, pale face with big sad eyes at the … [train] window—my heart cried out, take me with you … I gave my goodnight kiss to your cushion and longed to have you near me—in thoughts I see you lying in your compartment, bend over you, bless you, and gently kiss your sweet face all over—oh my Darling, how intensely dear you are to me—could I but help you in carrying your heavy burdens, there are so many that weigh on you.” Their burdens were much on her mind: “I … try to forget everything, gazing into your lovely eyes.… So much sorrow and pain, worries and trials—one gets so tired and one must keep up and be strong and face everything.… We show nothing of what we feel when together. Each keeps up for the other’s sake and suffers in silence. We have lived through so much together in these 20 years—and without words have understood each other.” Although her language had the fresh, gushing quality of young love, Alexandra did not deceive herself about the passing of time: “32 years ago my child’s heart already went out to you in deep love.… I know I ought not to say this, and for an old married woman it may seem ridiculous, but I cannot help it. With the years, love increases and the time without your sweet presence is hard to bear. Oh, could but our children be equally blessed in their married lives.”
Nicholas read her letters in bed at night, the last thing before going to sleep. His replies, if more restrained, were no less intimate and tender. “My beloved Sunny,” he wrote, “when I read your letters my eyes are moist … it seems that you are lying on your sofa and that I am listening to you, sitting in my armchair by the lamp.… I don’t know how I could have endured it all if God had not decreed to give you to me as a wife and friend. I speak in earnest. At times it is difficult to speak of such things and it is easier for me to put it down on paper, owing to
