twice at Tsarskoe Selo, and had tea with his mother at the Anichkov Palace. Otherwise he spent his whole time with Natasha. They drove out in his American Packard to have picnics with friends, went to the theatre in the capital, rode in the Gatchina palace park — and then, on May 23, Michael went back to the war. Natasha this time went with him only so far as Brest-Litovsk, a large town and railway junction some 200 miles north of Lvov, now too close to the frontline to be safe.
In the month Michael had been away the war had started to go badly for Russia. Ground won on the south-west front was now ground lost. The Tsar’s victory tour of early April had been followed with a new offensive, master-minded by the Germans, and launched with an overwhelming artillery barrage which tore apart the Russian divisions facing them. Trenches collapsed and reinforcements brought up melted away as the shellfire fell on them.
Many soldiers hastily marched into the battle zone were unarmed and dependent on picking up the weapons of soldiers who had fallen. A month after the offensive began, Przemysl was recaptured and three weeks later, on June 9, 1915, Lvov fell. Caught up in the retreat, Michael’s division withdrew behind the River Dniester, but held its ground thereafter. ‘Oh, how I wish this atrocious slaughter could be over soon’, he wrote home. In two days there were 1,000 casualties.
In the midst of this, on June 6, 1915, Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich, who had died at the age of fifty-seven, was buried with great pomp in the fortress of St Peter and St Paul. The only member of the imperial family absent that day was Michael.
There was critical comment about that which upset Natasha. She wrote to him in bewilderment. ‘Darling Misha, why do you always harm yourself and why didn’t you come for K.K’s funeral. Literally all your relatives came
That brought a stinging response from an outraged Michael.
The desperate fighting apart, there was another reason for his remaining at the frontline, and he tried to explain that, too. ‘Our division is not a regular army unit, and it’s not too easy to command it; there are a lot of different things to sort out — jealousy and rivalry between the regiments, their mutual complaints, etc. When I am here, everything gets into a more peaceful vein, but without me… it is more than difficult to control.’4
Natasha, having complained about his absence from the state funeral, was plainly in a bad mood that day, for she added more personal criticism in the same letter. All the officers she saw in the capital, and when her train from the front stopped at
In contrast, Michael, a fighting general, looked shabby, ill-dressed and muddy in almost all the photographs he sent her. ‘Look how awfully you now dress,’ she chided him. ‘Your boots are horrible, you’ve done away with your aiguillettes and instead of the St George you wear a piece of some narrow ribbon…I regret to see you so changed.’5
Natasha had sent Michael a St George, made up for her at Faberge, the imperial jewellers, not understanding that the only person likely to admire the gleam of a Faberge was an enemy sniper. Personal appearance was not the uppermost consideration in the frontline, or at least in the Savage Division. As if to underline that point, Michael recorded a visit by the Ninth Army general Lechitsky to an artillery position with a large entourage of braided staff officers; it was a target too good to miss and in consequence the general and his staff ‘had to spend two hours crouching in an empty trench’. It was their own fault, said Michael, for he often went to the same position ‘without all that pomp and retinue’ and nothing ever happened.6
Someone who was certainly impressed by Michael’s appearance was the American war correspondent Stanley Washburn. When he visited Michael’s headquarters he was surprised to find the brother of the Tsar in ‘a simple uniform with nothing to indicate his rank but shoulder straps of the same material as his uniform, and, barring the St George (won by personal valour on the battlefield) without a decoration…’
What also struck him about Michael was he should find him ‘living so simply in a dirty village in this far fringe of the Russian empire’. He rated Michael highly. ‘He evinced the same stubborn optimism that one finds everywhere in the Russian army’, he commented, ‘while appearing as unaffected and democratic a person as one can well imagine.7
Washburn was right — Michael was optimistic, despite everything. ‘I feel so distressed because of Lvov’, he had written to Natasha, but adding that ‘to lose heart and think that we won’t win is just sinful. The morale of the army at the front is good, what I am concerned about is the attitude of the Russian people at large…’8
When he wrote that he had good reason to be concerned about the ‘home front’. Serious rioting had broken out in Moscow. The defeats in Galicia resulted in revenge attacks on Germans living in Moscow. Many had been there for generations, owning important businesses, and thinking themselves German only in name.
Natasha went there at the end of June, 1915, and saw for herself what had happened. ‘All that’s left of the shops and houses with German names are just bare walls, with the insides looted and burnt…It was real pillage, just organised and made possible by the indifference and inaction of the authorities and the police…’ One business friend whose home was ransacked ‘told me that members of the intelligentsia were among the rioters — obvious connoisseurs came to his house and chose the best pictures to destroy. So many wonderful paintings lost, such a shame!’9
Michael felt ‘very sorry for the unfortunate victims’ and wrote that the pogrom ‘clearly demonstrates the hatred that the Russian people have long felt for foreigners living in Russia…
He added that ‘many people now feel that I was right to have married a Russian and not a German…’10 It was not difficult for Natasha ‘to read between the lines’. His barbs were aimed at Alexandra and her circle.
Although the Savage Division suffered as much as any other as the retreat continued, by mid-July it had been pulled back to a sector which was relatively quiet, and which would remain so over the next few weeks, although on the rest of the front the fighting continued to be intense, as the Russians were pushed further and further back, with horrendous casualties. Michael took the opportunity of going back home for a brief leave — or so he thought.
In fact, having got there he went down immediately with diphtheria, dreaded as one of the great killer diseases of the age, and which he had contracted at the front just before his departure. There were no antibiotics and many sufferers died from asphyxiation as their throats closed up. The minority who survived it took a long time to recover.
Michael proved one of the lucky ones. A week after the first symptoms appeared he began to feel better and by July 30, 1915 he was well enough to have ‘played the guitar a little’.11 Six days later he was strong enough to have got up and gone downstairs for breakfast. That was encouraging, but there was little else to be cheerful about. On August 7 he grimly noted that ‘the war is so bad that I don’t want to write about it.’ Next day he tersely recorded, ‘Kovno and Novo-Georgievsk have been captured!’ Then it was to write that ‘Brest-Litovsk has surrendered. We’ve been in a bad mood for the past few days.’12
One reason for these failures, Michael believed, was that Russian strategy was wrong, as events would prove. The war was not about holding or taking territory, he told Natasha, but about destroying the enemy’s army.
