Less than a year had passed since the death of Sir James Wylie when, on 24 February 1855, the news of his army’s disasters in Eupatoria reached Tsar Nicholas I. According to Doctor Mandt, the tsar’s new personal physician, this ‘stunned him and struck the fatal blow. ‘‘How many lives sacrificed in vain!’’ he murmured sadly while speaking of his poor soldiers.’
From that moment on, according to his doctor, the tsar refused to eat, and handed over almost all of his responsibilities, particularly those not concerned with the army, to his eldest son, the Grand Duke Alexander. Very shortly after this he developed a cold that turned into influenza. However, none of Doctor Mandt’s warnings that it was dangerous would stop him from going out, wearing only an overcoat, to the huge and draughty riding school to review and say farewell to a detachment of Guards Infantry about to leave for Lithuania.
The result, as Mandt had predicted, was that his virus turned into pneumonia. He asked several of his generals to come and say goodbye to him and begged the tsarevich to say goodbye for him to the Guards, the army and, above all, to the heroic defenders of Sevastopol. ‘Tell them that in the other world I will continue to pray for them. I have always striven to work for their good. If it has not always succeeded, it was not for lack of goodwill, but for want of knowledge and ability. I beg them to forgive me.’104
Nicholas I died on the morning of 4 March 1855. Inevitably rumours spread that he had poisoned himself with Mandt’s assistance, but as in the case of his brother’s death, there is no concrete evidence to support these claims. Nicholas was born in 1796, at much the same time as a young James Wylie had become his father’s personal physician. He did at least reach his sixtieth year, a lifespan twelve years longer than that of the brother he had succeeded to the throne.
Nicholas’s dying wish that his soldiers should be cared for was in part carried out by his sister-in-law, the Grand Duchess Elena, wife of his youngest brother Michael, who although unhappily married, or perhaps as a result of this, became as dedicated as Florence Nightingale, saviour of British soldiers, to nursing the sick and wounded Russians on the battlefield.
Therefore, it must be said that the human suffering and loss of life resulting from nineteenth-century European wars did at least bring enlightenment to medical practice regardless of the nationality of the doctors and nurses whose dedication saved the lives of these hitherto neglected men.