The Tsar's Last Armada by Constantine Pleshakov

Author:Constantine Pleshakov [CONSTANTINE PLESHAKOV]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2011-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

5

In the beginning of February, Rozhestvensky became seriously ill. He developed terrible pain and was moaning through the night, unable even to doze. He spent several days in bed and took all his meals there. Doctors said that it was a bout of his old rheumatism.

Only ice applied to his joints would ease his suffering. When one night the Suvorov’s refrigerator broke down, an officer was dispatched to search other ships for ice.

Officers who hadn’t seen Rozhestvensky since Kronshtadt were saying he looked twenty years older. Some worried a lot, some grinned with glee. There was one particular reason not to like the admiral: His affair with Sivers was becoming an open secret among lonely men.

Almost every day she had lunch with him, accompanied by Rozhestvensky’s niece, Miss Pavlovskaya, also a nurse on the Orel. Men serving them gossiped that during the meal Rozhestvensky paid no attention to the niece whatsoever, talking exclusively to Sivers. After the meal, the niece would leave to have a chat with her uncle’s staff officers, and Rozhestvensky would remain with Sivers alone. Then the door to the admiral’s suite would be shut, and his orderly would not let anybody in.

January 19 was Sivers’s birthday. Rozhestvensky sent an officer with a huge bunch of flowers to the Orel and then hosted a dinner party at the Suvorov. The band was playing gay music. They drank champagne.

Every day they exchanged letters and sometimes even parcels—presumably with presents. Rozhestvensky dispatched a special cutter to take his letters to the Orel. Once, the French governor sent him an extravagant gift—an enormous plant. He immediately rerouted it to the hospital ship and later scolded the courier for a single broken branch. When the governor threw a dinner for Rozhestvensky, the gallant Frenchman made sure Sivers was invited, too.

The hospital ship, however, didn’t enjoy special privileges just because Sivers was on board. On the trip to Kaapstad, Rozhestvensky had ordered her captain to buy fresh supplies for the squadron and to pay for them from the ship’s bursary. As a result, the Orel had to apply to St. Petersburg for more money.

Seeing apathy all around, the admiral was trying to reintroduce a feeling of purpose to his fleet. Junior officers were obliged to practice daily—astronomic observations, war games, various alarms and drills. Many officers were saying with some satisfaction that when they finished the voyage their naval education would finally be complete.

Another way to practice was to send torpedo boats to attack the squadron at night. Their mission was to crawl as close to bigger ships as they could. At first, each mission was a victory for the torpedo boats and a loss for the squadron, but with each attempt it became more difficult for the hounds of the sea to get to their prey unnoticed.

On January 13, 18, and 19, the squadron went to sea for artillery practice. It was their first joint exercise since Reval. Overall results looked discouraging. In a caustic memorandum, Rozhestvensky said they were “too shameful to be mentioned.

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