The Romanov Sisters by Helen Rappaport

Author:Helen Rappaport
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781250020215
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2014-06-03T07:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fifteen

WE CANNOT DROP OUR WORK IN THE HOSPITALS

In January 1915 an additional burden of concern was placed on the shoulders of the Romanov sisters when Anna Vyrubova was very seriously injured in a railway accident on the line between Petrograd and Tsarskoe Selo. She was brought to the annexe in a desperate state with a dislocated shoulder, double fracture of her left leg, lacerations to the right one and head and spine injuries. She was not expected to live. Her elderly parents arrived; Tatiana met them in tears, and gently escorted them down the corridor. Valentina Chebotareva remembered that night vividly:

They sent for Grigory. I thought this was terrible, but I could not sit in judgment on another. The woman is dying, she believes in Grigory, in his saintliness, in [his] prayers. He arrived in a state of fright, his dishevelled beard shaking, his mouselike eyes flitting back and forth. He grasped Vera Ignateva [Dr Gedroits] by the hand: ‘She’ll live, she’ll live’. But as she herself later told me: ‘I decided to play the priest at his own game, thought for a moment and then said solemnly: ‘Thank you, but I will save her.’

Gedroits’s response did not go unnoticed by Nicholas who was home from Stavka at the time: ‘Each to his own’, he said, giving Gedroits a wry smile.1 He spoke with the doctor for some time that evening, as Valentina recalled. It seemed clear to both women that the tsar ‘without doubt did not believe in either Grigory’s saintliness or his powers, but put up with him, like a sick person when exhausted by suffering clutches at straws’. But Grigory himself had been visibly drained by the experience of willing Anna’s recovery. He always later claimed that he had ‘raised Annushka from the dead’, for against the odds she did indeed recover.2

After six weeks’ dedicated care Anna was able to return home but her recuperation was a long one and she was disabled by her injuries for the rest of her life. Meanwhile, early that year, having driven herself relentlessly since day one of the war in the face of her already unstable health, Alexandra broke down completely. Dr Botkin ordered her to bed for six weeks. ‘The nursing in the hospital and assisting at operations, tending and binding up the most hideous wounds,’ Alexandra explained to a friend, ‘is all less tiring than for hours visiting hospitals and talking with the poor wounded.’ She struggled to carry on with some of her work at the annexe, ‘Coming as privately and unexpectedly as possible, but it does not often succeed … One’s greatest comfort is being with the dear wounded and I miss my hospitals awfully.’3 When her energies failed her, Alexandra read and composed reports from her sickbed, meanwhile taking ‘lots of iron and arsenic and heartdrops.’4

For the next few weeks, in addition to their nursing duties at the hospital, Olga and Tatiana would spend their days visiting Anna and often sitting with their mother or Alexey, who was suffering recurring pain in his arms from overdoing it when playing.

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