Karita went with him to Kars. He was commissioned a colonel in the Imperial army, a staff appointment was his. The arrival at Third Corps headquarters of an Englishman in the uniform of a Russian colonel was a mystery, an amusement and an embarrassment. They had not been notified of his appointment and did not know what to do with him. True, his papers confirmed his appointment, but they had no papers themselves. However, mystified or amused, they did not lack hospitality and having broken open a bottle or two they declared him a fine fellow and said he must be quartered somewhere. They found him a first-floor apartment in a commandeered house. Karita thought little of Kars and even less of the apartment. It was too small, there were only three rooms and a kitchen. She turned her nose up at the crowded living room, full of the most uncomfortable furniture.
‘You must tell them,’ she said, when they had moved in, ‘you must tell them the Tsar himself is your friend. He would never permit you to be lodged in such an ordinary place as this.’
Karita was exaggerating. She was always apt to expect more for him than he was entitled to.
For the first few days he was entirely unwanted by Third Corps staff. They were charming enough but were not disposed to use him. However, his fluent and easy command of their language, his adaptability, his equability, his love of Russia and his liking for its people, made them look differently at him after a week. They began to explain the campaign to him.
Kirby became involved in heavy and complicated staff work. It was more than welcome in that it compelled his mind to focus on things other than his hopeless love. Yet even during his busiest moments he would suddenly think of her, his mind drawing its picture of her, making it an effort to concentrate on figures again.
As for Karita, in her golden charm she was the delight of every Russian officer and man who set eyes on her. For her they would fight a million Turks. Karita asked only that they would dispose of the few they faced at present. That would help to get rid of what was only a nuisance and then they could all go and dispose of the Germans. Intrigued and infatuated officers slapped her and tickled her and pinched her. Karita would have retaliated if she hadn’t known they would consider this an encouragement. She wondered how Colonel Kirby would react if he knew she was subjected to these familiarities. She thought she had better tell him. Perhaps he could do something about it. He listened very soberly. He knew the inadvisability of showing amusement when Karita considered that something not quite proper was going on at her expense.
‘And I am black and blue,’ she finished.
‘Where?’ he asked.
‘Where?’ She was shocked. He seemed quite serious. Did he expect her to show him? ‘Where? What does it matter where? That’s my own business, I should hope, and certainly nobody else’s.’
‘Good,’ he said, ‘you take care of it, little one.’ And he patted her.
‘Well!’ Karita could not believe it. Not only was he indifferent to her problem but he had actually patted her where she had been most often pinched. It was like setting his approval on the familiarity of others. ‘Well, that’s very nice, isn’t it? I’m to be pinched black and blue while you look the other way.’
He rubbed the nap of his cap with his sleeve. It served to remind her that he was due at headquarters.
‘Don’t you like it?’ he said. ‘It’s their way with pretty girls, you know that.’
‘It’s their way with some girls,’ said Karita, ‘and what I should like to know is, do you like it? If you’re in favour of it perhaps you wouldn’t mind if I took my clothes off to let them see what they’re slapping and pinching.’
He put his cap over his face. His voice came hoarse and muffled.
‘Heaven preserve me, you’ll be my death.’ He put his cap on. Karita, seeing the trouble he was in to keep his face straight, tossed her chin disdainfully. ‘All right, sweet one,’ he said, ‘I’ll bring the subject up. Well, I’ll do something. In broad daylight I can’t imagine what and they’re not going to take me seriously. I’ll have to pose the question when is a pinch not a pinch and go on from there.’
Karita was quick to see what that might mean.
‘Ivan Ivanovich,’ she said, ‘don’t you dare discuss my person with those roaring bullfrogs.’
‘I wouldn’t dream of it,’ he said, and then pinched her on his way out.
‘Well,’ she gasped, outraged, ‘well!’
But behind the closed door she fell into fits of gurgling laughter.
Subsequently she suspected he had forgotten or dismissed the matter as soon as he left the house, because it was still happening days after.
So she put pepper in Kirby’s soup one evening and laughed until she cried when after only three spoonfuls he became hotter and hotter, redder and redder.
Karita had a sense of fun but it was always advisable to take her seriously.
The war went on. Christmas came. There were several non-festive outbreaks of violence in cold, icy cities. Kirby sent greetings to the Imperial family. Alexandra replied with a letter of thanks, gracious and kind for all its brevity. During the first week in January he received a card, posted in an envelope. It was a religious card, a print of the Nativity. On the reverse side were three penned words.
‘I love you.’
He understood. He treasured it.
Daily Karita polished the small oval gilt frame that contained a snapshot of Olga and Tatiana. He kept it on a table in his bedroom. Often Karita pressed her warm mouth to it.
The Russian winter had closed down the Western front but Grand Duke Nicholas, a stimulant to the whole of the Caucasian front, did the unexpected by launching his attack in the ice and snow of mid-January.
By this time Kirby, restless for action, had relinquished his position as a staff officer and applied for service with a unit of Caucasian Cossacks. Headquarters had been amazed. It was too much vodka. His eccentric request was granted. He told Karita that if he rode with the Cossacks he could get out of the way quicker on a horse.
‘Why do you have to get on a horse at all, why do you have to be so foolish?’ she said. ‘Is it because of people saying your country wasn’t doing enough?’
‘I’d forgotten that,’ he said.
‘Then is it because you want to get yourself killed? Sometimes you look as if you’re thinking of doing something dark and stupid.’ She was cross with him.
‘Not as dark and stupid as that, I hope. But I must do something more than desk work, Karita.’
That upset her.
‘You should not be thinking only of yourself,’ she said. She had washed her hair the night before and it was still unbraided, a mass of flowing gold. ‘You should think of me too. What will become of me if anything happens to you? Do you think of that?’
‘You’ll go back to your village, your parents,’ he said. He had no intention of getting himself killed or losing the pleasure of Karita’s company.
‘And who is to go back to Aunt Charlotte?’ It was plain that for once Karita considered him thoughtless and selfish. ‘My mother and father have each other, Aunt Charlotte would have no one at all. Someone must go back home to her from Russia. I’ll have to.’
Her outlook on this kind of thing was fascinating.
‘Karita, you are quite the loveliest person,’ he said affectionately, ‘but there’s no need to worry. Perhaps we’ll both go back to her together. We’ll see what happens. Meanwhile, you can return to your parents now—’
‘I will not!’
‘– or you can stay here and keep the apartment for me. At the army’s expense, of course, until I get back on leave. You can have whatever money you need.’
‘I shall stay here,’ she said. ‘How would it look if no one was around when you came on leave?’
‘Not very proper, I suppose,’ he said. She regarded him unsmilingly. He wore his Russian uniform with its high collar naturally enough now. It was rather nice of him, really, to want to fight for Russia but, ah, just wait until he had ridden with those Cossacks for a while. He would soon want to get back to his desk.
She was surprised at the warmth of his leave-taking. He not only kissed her very affectionately, he even embraced her. The firm physical contact created sensations so confusing that her face turned fiery.
‘Oh, goodness,’ she gasped when he released her.
‘Sweet and dear Karita,’ he said.
She sat down heavily when he had gone. Emptiness rang hollowly through the spotless apartment.
‘Oh, no,’ cried Karita, horrified to find she was weeping.
It was dreadful to feel so lonely.
Grand Duke Nicholas Nicolaievich, as redoubtable a soldier as any in the war, attacked Erzurum, about one hundred and fifty miles west of Kars. The infantry swarmed in the wake of bursting Russian shells, going in with the bayonet against Turkish positions in the valleys and on the heights, their massed waves reducing redoubts and enveloping gun emplacements. The cavalry followed on, often riding through their infantry to cut down scrambling, retreating Turks. It was a fine affair for the Caucasian Cossacks, always at their most dashing when the enemy was on the run.
Kirby rode with them. The Cossacks were tough, wiry men who rode small horses like ponies. They took little notice of Kirby. He had no doubt been dumped on them by some obtuse general who wanted to get rid of him.
In an attack on a ridge the Turks suddenly abandoned their positions. Cossacks charged at the heels of triumphant infantry up the slope. The foot soldiers yelled at them. Trust those thieving Cossacks to try and get to booty first. Bullets from retreating Turks flew and Kirby had his horse shot from under him. Miraculously he sprang clear before the wounded, screaming animal rolled on him. A Cossack pulled up. He watched Kirby mercifully shoot the agonized beast.
‘Are you hurt, Englishman?’ His grin was sarcastic, he was oblivious for the moment of Turks and sorrier for the horse than Kirby.
‘I’ve fallen off more horses than I care to remember,’ said Kirby, his coat belted, his peaked cap pulled tight over his head.
‘Ah!’ A wider, more appreciative grin. ‘Go back and get yourself another. Ayeiah!’ And he was away, flogging his mount up the slope.
The battle for Erzurum was bitter. The Russians lost men in such numbers that Kirby frequently wondered how soon it would be before his own body rode into a bullet or shell-burst. But it was the infantry which bore the greatest brunt, the Cossacks engaged only to complete a rout or hasten it.
The battle did not completely erase his thoughts of Olga, however, for at night, cold and exhausted, his mind gathered its pictures and tumbled them into kaleidoscopic fantasies until at last he fell asleep. Only by day, when there was smoke and noise, guns and bullets and whistling sabres, when fear took hold of all the senses, were memories thrust violently aside and thoughts turned solely on survival.
Erzurum fell and the Russians won a short breathing space.
The Grand Duke began the regrouping of his forces. The Turks began the assembling of their Second Army for a massive counter stroke. The Grand Duke anticipated it and before the Turks knew what he was about he had smashed their Third Army. When the Turkish Second Army did attack the Russians were in positions of strength, and held on to all the ground they had captured.
Both armies were content to take up defensive lines for the winter, although winter in these regions, with temperatures skating around the thirty degrees below zero mark, was almost as unwelcome to entrenched thousands as a barrage of red-hot steel. The conditions were as bad as men could endure and Kirby, frozen day after day, wondered if he would ever be warm again. There had been no leave, no real respite, except for the wounded, only brief rest periods behind the lines. And only the dead were at peace.
The casualties mounted here and in Europe. Germany, Austria, Turkey, France and Britain poured in their fodder. Their dead lay in heaps. And Russia? Her dead made mountains. The tragedy of Imperial Russia was that, in her apparently inexhaustible manpower, the lack of arms and ammunition did not seem important to War Minister Sukhomlinov in his peeling ivory tower.
Lenin sat in Switzerland, calculating what the Great Powers were doing to each other.
On the European front, the German generals could not ignore the Tsar’s armies, however poorly supplied they were. It had been their intention to concentrate on the defeat of the British and French while merely holding their Eastern line. But the weight, intensity and fervour of Russian efforts circumvented every German attempt to bring this plan into full and effective being. The Tsar, constant in his loyalty to the British and French, could not have served his allies better than he did.
The politicians dwelt in their temples of discourse and attacked the men they had sent to direct the battles. If they had emerged from their debating chambers to fight the battles themselves, while the soldiers went home, the war would have been over in days.
Imperial Russia moved from heartbreak on their fronts to disillusionment at home. The people had long begun to disbelieve government propaganda. Disorders increased, civil unrest flared. There were strikes in the factories at times when the military situations demanded maximum effort at home. The war was becoming less and less popular. Women, utterly appalled by the losses, wanted their men back. It was demoralizing to listen to soldiers on leave, when they could get leave.
Rasputin was on the way to becoming a greater fool than ever. Almost everything written about him, even by his enemies, gives the impression that he was an awesome mystic. But in reality he was simply psychic, a random quality given to ordinary or extraordinary persons alike, even to idiots. The idiot Rasputin was thrusting the Imperial family to the brink of tragedy. He womanized, boasted and belched, he bandied the royal names about.
He gave Alexandra the wrong political advice, undermined the Tsarism he desired to preserve and took no kind of advice himself, for he lacked all humility.
In his alliance with Alexandra he engineered the removal of any minister he took a dislike to. As no minister of any integrity could stomach Rasputin, one by one they all went. And in their places Rasputin recommended men who were greater fools than he was.
It was in early December 1916, when a unit of Turks, irritated by pin-pricking sorties from booty-collecting Cossacks, launched a quick, furious attack in the miserable grey of an icy dawn. They surprised the Cossacks, bayoneted a few, shot a few, and hauled off a number of prisoners to strip them of everything of value, even their boots. Included among the prisoners was Kirby.
He spent the next twelve months in a prisoner-of-war camp, where he found the Turks very casual and indifferent observers of the conventions.
Karita, used to hearing regularly from him, began to wonder why she now heard nothing at all. She pestered headquarters. Headquarters enjoyed her visits. She received extremely generous offers from some of the most splendid members of the staff, each man promising to dress her in diamonds at least. Karita did not want diamonds and she did not need a bed. All she required was information concerning Colonel Kirby.
It was a long time coming. He was missing.
Missing? Did that mean he was dead?
It meant he was missing.
It numbed Karita. She had always realized something might happen to him. But this. It could mean he’d never come back. It could mean he was lying out there in the snow, stiff, frozen.
She felt as if they had taken off her right arm. It was two days before her numbness thawed out and she was able to face reality. Reality was a devastating loneliness but not complete despair. There was always hope. She would not leave Kars, not unless he was officially listed as killed. So she stayed on. When headquarters tried to introduce another officer into the apartment she refused point blank to allow this. She would not co-operate in any way. She would not budge. The apartment was held in the name of Colonel Kirby, a friend of the Tsar himself, and until she heard from him or the Tsar, she would continue to hold it for him. Headquarters surrendered gracefully.
Karita worked in the military hospital and waited. She counted her beads and she prayed. She wrote to Aunt Charlotte, telling her only that the weather was awful and that Colonel Kirby was still making things unpleasant for the Turks. She thought of the Crimea and its sunshine, she thought of Walton and the river, of the cottage, the ducks and the nice old postman.
She had made many friends in Kars, and had more than a few admirers. She felt, however, that with things as they were she had to worry just as much about Aunt Charlotte’s future as her own. It was no time to become involved with any admirer.
Aunt Charlotte, busy, bustling and booming in Walton on behalf of the glorious war-wounded of Britain, would have been amazed at Karita’s concern. She was quite enjoying the war in a way. There was so much to do for the heroes.
Whatever talents Rasputin had, he set them all lower than his gifts for roaring buffoonery. He uttered his last belch at the end of December. On a very cold night in Petrograd he was silenced by Prince Felix Yussoupov and other conspirators. They poisoned him, shot him and drowned him. His bullet-ridden, arsenic-filled, lung-swamped body was found under the ice of the Neva a few days later. If this did not mean the end of Imperial Russia to Alexandra, it did mean the end of her peace of mind concerning Alexis. Without Rasputin, who had had such a mesmeric hold on the boy’s life, she did not know how Alexis would survive future illnesses. Rasputin’s death was her personal disaster.
They buried him in the Imperial Park at Tsarskoe Selo. The Emperor and Empress were there, also the Grand Duchesses and a few intimates, including Anna Vyrubova. Alexandra wept. Her tears were for the holy man and herself and Alexis. They should have been for Russia.
Yet despite her grief she displayed astounding resilience, an outward calmness and dignity that impressed ministers, ambassadors and friends alike. It was a dignity compounded of the resignation and sadness that were to be with her for the rest of her days.
In March Russia catapulted into revolution. On the 15th of that month Nicholas abdicated, not in favour of his haemophiliac son, whom he wanted to keep with him, but in favour of his younger brother Michael. But when Tsar Michael hastened to Petrograd from Gatchina he encountered such belligerent opposition that he abdicated immediately. The Romanov rule had reached its end. Workers’ councils renounced the dynasty and rejected all forms of autocracy.
The Provisional Government locked the Imperial family up in the Alexander Palace at Tsarskoe Selo, partly for their own safety. The Emperor himself arrived there on 22nd March, having taken an emotional farewell of his army. Weary but calm, he met Alexandra in their private apartments.
They had nothing left then but their love for each other.
They lost Russia not because their autocracy was ruthless but because it was indecisive.
Olga, now twenty-one, knew at last just how few friends they had. She could not believe they were as few as this. But she did not indulge in self-pity. They still had each other, they would always have each other. And no one could rob her of her dreams. She and Tatiana were closer than ever, made so by experiences shared in the joy and laughter of growing up, in the triumphs and defeats of war, and in their hospital work. Now they shared the humiliations and indignities of a family rejected by the country they passionately loved. They had never dreamed they could be hated.
‘Papa is growing so thin,’ said Tatiana one day in May, two months after the abdication.
‘He hasn’t been blessed by things which help a man to grow fat,’ said Olga, ‘but at least he’s a little happier now that they have let him plant a kitchen garden.’
They were outside, venturing on a permitted but restricted walk. Soldiers, as always, were never far away, suspicious of every move. Nicholas had been allowed to dig a kitchen garden in the lawn of the Imperial Park, and on this day he was enjoying the pleasure of sowing seed. There were a few soldiers with him, willing to help with the work. Suspicious though they were, their willingness was typical of the effect the Imperial family had on most of their guards throughout their captivity, which was to last sixteen months. Their refusal to show bitterness or to complain, their total lack of airs and graces, and their insistence that it was not they who mattered but Russia, all helped to soften men surly and hard to begin with. At all stages of the captivity there were some men who would have liked the Imperial family to go free.
Perhaps the only man who would have been totally impervious was Lenin. Lenin was Russia’s sea-green incorruptible. Such men permit themselves no emotions. Lenin, for instance, was able to sit up writing one of his interminable treatises on a night when his wife’s mother lay desperately ill in the same room. He could do nothing for her, she could do nothing for him. Therefore, it was logical for each of them to pursue their separate ways, she towards death and he towards the completion of his manuscript. He did not bother to call his wife when the death rattle came. She could have done nothing, either.
Olga and Tatiana would have found Lenin utterly incomprehensible.
‘Alexander Fedorovich,’ said Tatiana, referring to Kerensky, head of the Provisional Government, ‘has told Papa we might be sent to Livadia, to stay there indefinitely.’
‘I know,’ said Olga, ‘and he means what he says, I think.’
‘Livadia,’ said Tatiana wistfully, ‘would be infinitely better than here.’
‘More than that, much more,’ said Olga earnestly. ‘Livadia would be worth praying for every minute of every day.’
Tatiana’s expression of bright hope matched Olga’s earnestness. Tatiana was nineteen, willowy and by now the most classically beautiful of the Grand Duchesses.
‘How I’d love to be watching Papa playing tennis, seeing Mama in the sunshine,’ said Tatiana restlessly. She glanced at her sister as they slowly walked, then at soldiers who were lolling but watchful. ‘Olga, do you know where Ivan is now? Does he write to you?’
Olga looked straight ahead. The park was lovely in May.
‘We’ve never exchanged letters,’ she said. ‘Olga, how stuffy that sounds,’ said Tatiana. ‘Is it because Mama wouldn’t approve? But perhaps she would now. We’re nobodies now, you know. You should write to him, he’ll be so concerned about us. You should tell him we’re all well.’
‘Mama is even prouder now than she was before,’ said Olga quietly.
‘That isn’t to say you shouldn’t write to a friend, especially now that we don’t seem to have so many. Oh,’ said Tatiana with a sigh, ‘if it were me I’d be dashing off pages and pages every day. Olga, you’re silly to be so sensitive, to be as proud as Mama in wanting to do exactly what’s right when everything is so different now. Well, tell me, is there anything sillier than any of us now saying this or that shouldn’t be done because someone isn’t a Grand Duke or a Crown Prince? If you feel that because of Mama and Papa, Ivan isn’t to be concerned about what is happening to us, aren’t you concerned about what might be happening to him?’
‘Tasha!’ Olga was fierce in her hurt. ‘Tasha, how could you!’
‘Well, you should write to him,’ insisted Tatiana.
‘He is supposed to have written to Mama and to Alexis,’ said Olga. ‘He did last Christmas but not this. Mama hasn’t had a word from him, nor has Alexis. Tatiana, do you think he’s gone back to England? They say it’s awful in Armenia, worse than Galicia was or anywhere else.’
Tatiana did not answer that. They turned away from guards posted at the limit of their allowed exercise and retraced their steps. Tatiana could only think of one reason why Ivan Ivanovich hadn’t sent Christmas greetings to the family. It was a thought she pushed fiercely aside, a thought she could not put into words in front of Olga.
She said, ‘I think Mama would like to go to England even more than Livadia. Papa says he’ll never leave Russia, but Mama thinks he’d be safer in England than anywhere.’
‘England?’ Olga caught her breath. ‘Are they talking again about sending us there?’
‘Mama often talks about it and Alexander Fedorovich nods his head and says he’ll see.’
‘Oh, it would be the best thing until people come to their senses here,’ said Olga eagerly, ‘it’s the only place Mama and Papa would live in outside Russia. There’d be Great Aunt Alix and Grand Mama – she’d go too – and all our English cousins and—’
‘And perhaps Ivan Ivanovich too,’ said Tatiana.
‘Tasha, it’s not for myself, truly it’s not.’
‘All the same, if he were there,’ said Tatiana teasingly, ‘it would be rather nice, wouldn’t it?’
‘Colonel Kirby—’
‘Colonel Kirby?’ Tatiana laughed a little. They could all still laugh. ‘Olga, oh, how modest and coy you are. When you do see him again I suppose you’re just going to say, “Colonel Kirby, you’ve been rather a long time again, but you may kiss my hand.” Dearest, don’t you see, we really are nobodies, and Mama simply could not refuse your marrying him now, could she?’
‘Tasha, don’t,’ gasped Olga, ‘oh, that would give her one more worry when she already has so many.’
‘But that is what you’re thinking of if we go to England, isn’t it?’
‘Tasha, don’t!’
The guards watched them, two brightly attired young women walking in the sunshine of the Imperial Park, the Alexander Palace a looming edifice of cupolas and domes. One soldier followed them with sleepy eyes. His mind stirred his tongue and he coarsely expressed his preference. A comrade looked at him, spat softly and turned away.
In August, Alexander Kerensky, sympathetic towards the Imperial family, had them moved to Tobolsk in Western Siberia. He did not consider them safe while they remained at Tsarskoe Selo and was doing his best to negotiate their eventual exile to England.
In November, the Provisional Government was overthrown, Kerensky had to run for his life and the Bolsheviks took over. Lenin, who wasn’t quite the prophet Rasputin was, arrived only just in time to participate in the Bolshevik putsch. If it hadn’t been for the accommodating Germans and the short-sighted Kaiser, Lenin might easily have missed it all. However, he did arrive, full of words and pamphlets, and was in time to take his place with Trotsky as a fount of inspiration. Stalin was there too but did most of his work unobtrusively and in the dark.
In pursuit of power the orators will promise the people anything.
The autocracy of Tsarism had gone. Now the Provisional Government, which was to bring democracy to Russia, went too. The glorious Bolshevik revolution triumphed, and there emerged the new despots, no less intolerant than the old. Men fighting for the cause of Bolshevism died. But not Lenin, not Trotsky, not Stalin. Like all politicians, theirs was not to die but to encourage others to. They attacked the citadels of authority from the back. The citadels fell and they at once began to establish as cruel and oppressive a system as that which for years they had denounced. Stalin proved as merciless and bloodthirsty as any Tsar, but more hypocritical.
Such were the men who called the Imperial family butchers.
Andrei was one of the aristocrats they came for on the last night of November. He came down the stairs of his Petrograd house as they burst in. He was immaculately casual in a silk dressing gown and slippers. His hands were in the pockets. It was the usual untidy crowd. Sailors, soldiers, civilians and women, and all of them hungry-looking.
‘What is it you want, food or blood?’ he said.
‘We want your bones,’ said a man, ‘we want them for the dogs.’
Andrei saw his own servants among the intruders. They would not look at him. Nor, he knew, would they help him. The hungry ones rushed. Andrei’s right hand came out of his dressing-gown pocket and lazily, but with a little flicker of satisfaction, he shot the first man. Then, to please himself and to frustrate the rest of them, he very successfully shot himself. He was quite happy to depart. It was their world, not his. There’d be no peace for anyone.
Aleka came later. She strode into the smashed-up hall wearing a coarse black serge coat, her booted feet tramping, her hair scragged back and bound by a ribbon of revolutionary red. But for her fine pale skin she could have been a worker’s woman. She had Bolshevik comrades at her back. Tucked into a leather belt around her coat was a pistol.
She looked at the body, at the pool of blood on the shining floor.
‘Andrei, oh you fool, why didn’t you go?’ she said, but only to herself. Aloud she said, ‘Well, they all have to go in one way or another, comrades.’
But he could have escaped. She had telephoned him, implored him to get away and at once. He had preferred to stay. It was sad. She had loved him. He had loved her. But for the sake of the revolution one had to suffer some heartache.
She began to abuse the short-sighted comrades who had damaged what was now the property of the people.