preferring, it was said, to die facing friendly faces.17 The Savage Division was difficult to handle behind the lines, but when it reached the enemy it behaved with the courage expected of men who relished battle, whether on foot or on horseback. They would find themselves involved in very heavy fighting over the next months, and earn considerable distinction on that bloody battlefield. So would Michael. He would find himself coming out of it a national hero.
ALTHOUGH Michael was more than a thousand miles (1,600km) from Gatchina, the journey south to meet him was one which never daunted Natasha. It took two days to get there, over tracks made the slower by the amount of war traffic they were carrying. The first trip came at the beginning of December 1914, when she could only hope that he would be there when she arrived, and knowing that at best he could snatch no more than a few days from the front. Her destination was the former Polish city of Lvov, fifty miles inside Austro-Hungary and known there as Lemberg. The Russians had captured it in September; Michael’s headquarters were in a village 100 miles to the south-west and he could be in Lvov in a car in a few hours. Fortunately he was able to snatch a few days from the frontline, which for Natasha more than justified the laborious journey there and back to Gatchina. Indeed, she would return the following month, and then again two months later.
Apart from her natural fears for Michael’s life, what troubled Natasha particularly was her belief that he had been posted to the Savage Division in retaliation for his marriage. On her return to Gatchina she wrote to say: ‘You are naturally talked about more than the division and what pains me most of all is that they say you did not go to war of your own accord, but were sent to atone for your guilt towards Russia — so your heroism, with which you wished to surprise the world, has been totally wasted…18 In fact, it had not been wasted, but she could not know that at the time.
Nevertheless she had good reason to believe, as she would continue to do, that Michael had been sent to the most distant part of the Russian line as punishment for having married her, though Michael never seemed to care one way or another. He had come back to fight, and if that meant commanding an irregular division of Muslim horsemen, so be it. As it happened, they were very good at what they did, and that was its own cause for pride in his command.
In the New Year, he was in a sector of the front line which was quiet enough to allow him to take two weeks’ leave — effectively ten days since four days of that were spent in travelling. He arrived home on January 2, 1915 — ‘what a joy to be back with my family in lovely Gatchina’, he scribbled in his diary19 — and next day went to ‘the detestable Petrograd’ to inspect the new hospital which Natasha had organised for him in his unused palace on the English Embankment. Then, after shopping with Natasha, and calling on his mother, he went to Tsarskoe Selo to see his brother, and press him again about legitimising little George.
Nothing had been done about that in the two months since he had written to him about it, and nothing would happen this time. Nicholas avoided the subject, for it was a sore point at Tsarskoe Selo. Alexandra opposed any concessions suggesting acceptance of the marriage, and legalising George would in her mind have gone some way towards that. Michael returned home no further forward than before. It was a bitter failure. Three years later Nicholas would plead ‘a father’s feelings’ in justifying a decision about his son Alexis, but that applied only to himself. Michael’s worries were dismissed out of hand.
All too soon the leave was over and he set off back to his divisional headquarters, now at Lomna, sixty miles south-west of Lvov. ‘It is so sad to leave’, he wrote in his diary for January 11, though Natasha insisted on travelling with him as far as Lvov, which gave them almost two days extra together. On arrival they parted hurriedly, for the Austrians had launched an offensive, and the Russian line was being pushed back. ‘The fighting is unceasing’, he told Natasha in his first letter home.20 One of his colonels had been killed, and three staff officers seriously wounded, one of whom would die two days later. Sixty of his horsemen were casualties.
Michael’s headquarters had been pulled back in the fighting and in the confusion of the move all his belongings were mislaid, ‘so I do not have even a bar of soap’.21 But by January 20 he was able to report that ‘the crisis is over and the enemy is in retreat along our entire frontline. We are now dealing mainly with the Hungarian troops, who fight with great persistence. Yesterday our infantry (on our right flank) lost 1,000 men, but in my division the losses were quite small.’ 22
The Carpathians are a thick belt of mountains, with one rising above another, often with a slope of one-in- six and covered in trees. These heights dominate the passes, which were deep in snow, and each had to be fought for at the point of a bayonet. It was a savage business and no one who was there could think that war was glory. Temperatures fell to minus 17 degrees and ‘the poor soldiers, especially at night, freeze terribly and many have frostbitten feet and hands. The losses in the infantry attached to us have been very great,’ wrote Michael.23 The enemy suffered as greatly and sometimes more so. One Austrian regiment of some 1,800 men froze to death as it lay waiting to advance the following morning. Rifles locked solid by ice had to be heated over fires before infantrymen could be sent into battle. Trenches were so difficult to dig that men could often do no more than bury themselves in the snow.
The casualty figures in all armies were horrific and beyond anything known to history before. After six months of fighting the Russians had lost a million men, dead, wounded or captured. ‘Corps have become divisions, brigades have shrunk into regiments’, Nicholas confessed to Alexandra.24 The slaughter appalled Michael, who unlike his brother, could see it at first hand. He believed the war itself to be a catastrophe, entered into blindly by men who little knew what they were doing. As he told Natasha on February 16, 1915, in a letter which said much about his own political instincts:
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.’26 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’.27 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.’ 28
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’.29
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’.30 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’.31
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
