Born to Rule: Five Reigning Consorts, Granddaughters of Queen Victoria by Julia P. Gelardi

Author:Julia P. Gelardi [Gelardi, Julia P.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: C429, Extratorrents, Kat
ISBN: 9780312324230
Google: UH_YnTngHWYC
Amazon: 0312324243
Goodreads: 910147
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2005-02-24T05:00:00+00:00

For the normally indefatigable Marie of Romania, the task of rallying those around her proved daunting. In mid-December 1916, she confessed in her diary that many were coming to her, pleading for help; overwhelmed by it all, she wanted to cry out: “It is enough, it is enough!”25 But Marie forged on. She went about her hospital rounds, in her familiar nurse’s uniform, bravely facing the stench and gore that awaited her. These daily rounds were complicated by deadly outbreaks of typhoid. Spreading quickly, typhoid did not discriminate among its victims. Marie continued her visits knowing she could be struck down at any moment by the dreaded disease that had nearly killed her husband and oldest son and had already claimed the life of her youngest child. She placed her trust in God, hoping fervently that she would escape. Eschewing rubber gloves, even in the most serious cases, so as to bring as much humanity as she could when touching the infectious patients, the queen could easily have succumbed. But she was not completely careless; one historian notes that “every night she stepped fully-dressed into a tub of boiling water, only her riding boots saving her from serious burns. Then she shed her clothes into the scalding liquid to kill the typhus-carrying lice that clung to them like a gray powder.”2

Only rarely did Queen Marie let her guard down in front of others. One foreigner, Ethel Pantazzi, encountered the queen at such a moment when, dressed in her Red Cross uniform, Marie went to the Cathedral of Jassy for a service of intercession to help Romania. “She seemed to me,” recalled Pantazzi, “the symbolic victim of all the horror and suffering of these dark days—her eyes were so sombre, her face so drawn and tired.”27 With all the overwhelming problems around her, Queen Marie could easily have thrown up her hands in defeat. Instead, she chose to tackle them. To have done otherwise would have been to let the enemy win. So Queen Marie took it upon herself to be the driving force that would keep Romania’s spirits buoyed. She did so whenever she received the newly injured each morning at the train station at Jassy. Her indefatigable energy and bravery elicited many admirers, among them the French ambassador to Romania, who also had fled to Jassy. He recalled a nurse who said that “ ‘the Queen is our mascot.…Her presence immunizes us better than all the vaccines.’ “28

The queen’s devotion did not go unnoticed or unappreciated among her suffering people. On the contrary, Marie’s unflinching dedication to them and to Romania earned her accolades and, above all, love. The wounded and dying soldiers at Jassy greeted their queen reverently and admiringly. Visiting one wounded soldier, Marie was amazed: before her lay a seriously injured man, his bandages soaked in blood. When told that his queen was by his side, the man, who could not see, stretched out his hands toward Marie murmuring something. She moved closer, straining to hear

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.