The Romanov Sisters (Four Sisters) (43 page)

Aside from producing surgical bandages and other essential medical

dressings, the depots also gathered and distributed pharmaceutical

supplies, ‘non-perishable foodstuffs, sweets, cigarettes, clothing,

blankets, boots, miscellaneous gifts and religious items such as tracts, postcards, and icons’ and sent them out to the wounded.5 Soon they

were filled with the well-heeled society ladies in their plain overalls learning to work sewing machines under the supervision of seam-stresses to produce bed linen for the wounded, or sitting for hours

on end packing gauze and rolling surgical bandages.6 All the major

rooms of the Winter Palace – the concert hall and various other

large reception rooms, as well as the imperial theatre and even the

throne room – were converted into hospital wards for the wounded,

their beautiful parquet floors covered with linoleum to protect them

and filled with row upon row of iron beds. Soon, without fuss or

fanfare, the tsaritsa and her two eldest daughters were seen not just in Petrograd and Tsarskoe Selo but as far as Moscow, Vitebsk,

Novgorod, Odessa, Vinnitsa and elsewhere in the western and

southern provinces of the empire, inspecting hospital trains and

visiting many of the string of hospitals and depots set up by

Alexandra; often they were joined by Maria and Anastasia, and Alexey

too, when well. Elsewhere in Petrograd, the sizeable ex-pat. British

community also rallied to the cause, led by ambassador’s wife Lady

Georgina Buchanan who ran the British Colony Hospital for

Wounded Russian Soldiers
*
that opened on 14 September in a wing

* Edith Almedingen acted as Lady Georgina Buchanan’s Russian interpreter. The
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of the large Pokrovsky Hospital on Vasilevsky Island. Lady Georgina’s daughter Meriel was soon working there as a volunteer nurse.7

As the last days of summer faded into autumn, the streets of

Petrograd were transformed, with many buildings now serving as

hospitals and flying the flag of the Red Cross alongside the Russian

tricolour. Far fewer fine carriages and fashionable motor cars were

to be seen processing up and down the Nevsky; instead the wide

boulevard was witness to a never-ending cavalcade of ambulances

ferrying the wounded to one or other hospital and a crush of wagons

bearing supplies. Tsarskoe Selo too became a town of hospitals, its

quiet leafy streets the thoroughfare now – morning, noon and night

– for slow-moving Red Cross ambulances carrying the pale-faced

wounded, as well as numerous private vehicles, many of them made

available for this purpose from the imperial fleet of motor cars. Here as in Petrograd every available large building was commandeered

for the care of the wounded. The great gilded reception rooms of

the Catherine Palace were converted into hospital wards and
depots and more than thirty of the private summer villas of the rich were

given over for use as wartime hospitals. Such was the desperate need

for beds as the wounded poured in, that soon much smaller private

homes would be taking them in as well; in September Dr Botkin

set up an improvised ward at his own home for seven patients.

All of the military hospitals at Tsarskoe Selo came under the

supervision of Dr Vera Gedroits, a Lithuanian aristocrat who was

the senior physician at the Court Hospital, and one of the first

women to qualify as a doctor in Russia.8 The Court Hospital was

located in an extended and revamped 1850s mansion on Gospitalnaya

Ulitsa, and throughout the war it continued to serve the needs of

the local community, with an upper floor of the main building set

aside for an operating theatre for the war wounded and a ward for

200 lower ranks.9 A single-storey annexe built shortly before the

war in the courtyard garden of the hospital for the isolation of

infectious patients was converted into a fully functioning hospital

in its own right, with an operating theatre and six small wards

accommodating a total of thirty beds. One of the wards was for all

British Colony Hospital was also known as the King George V Hospital.

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ranks brought down from the Catherine Palace Hospital for oper-

ations conducted by Gedroits; the remainder was for wounded

officers. The annexe – or ‘the little house’ or ‘the barrack’ as the

girls sometimes referred to it – became the hub of Olga and Tatiana’s daily lives as Red Cross nurses.
*

During their training at the annexe under the exacting standards

set by Dr Gedroits, Olga and Tatiana came under the watchful care

of Valentina Chebotareva, the daughter of a military doctor, who

had been a nurse during the Russo-Japanese War. ‘How distant they

were at first’, she recalled of the tsaritsa and her daughters’ first days at the annexe. ‘We kissed their hand, exchanged greetings . . .

and that’s as far as it went.’10 But Alexandra soon told the staff that they were not to pay them any special attention and things quickly

changed. During their training the three women were to observe

Gedroits in the operating theatre and then graduate on to assisting

during operations, but their primary duty in the first days at the

annexe was to learn how to dress wounds. The days were particularly

long for Tatiana, as she was still completing her education and often had an early morning lesson. Immediately afterwards, and before

they started work at the annexe, the tsaritsa and the girls would stop to pray before the miracle-working icon of the Mother of God at

the little Znamenie Church located near the Catherine Palace, before

arriving at the annexe at around 10 a.m. to change into their uniforms and begin work.

Every morning Olga and Tatiana were tasked with changing the

dressings of three or four patients each (though this increased as

the war went on and the numbers of wounded went up) as well as

undertaking the many menial tasks required of them – rolling ban-

dages, preparing swabs, boiling the silk thread for stitching, and

machining bed linen. At one o’clock they would return home for

lunch and in the afternoon if the weather was fine they would

sometimes go out for a brief walk, a bike ride, or a drive with their mother, but most often they returned to the hospital to spend time

* In order to avoid confusion with the Court Hospital and the Catherine Palace Hospital, it was formally named Their Imperial Highnesses’ No. 3 Hospital. For clarity, it will be referred to hereafter as ‘the annexe’.

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with the wounded, chatting, playing board games or ping-pong with

them and in the summer months croquet in the garden with those

who could walk. Often they simply sat knitting or sewing items for

refugees and war orphans while the soldiers chatted to them; some-

times they went off and sneaked a cigarette in their rest room.

Always, inevitably, the cameras would be taken out at every oppor-

tunity and photographs taken of themselves with their wounded

officers and friends. Some of these were later reproduced as postcards sold to raise funds for war relief. Others the girls carefully pasted into albums and shared with the wounded later.11

It took a while for Tatiana and Olga to get used to being around

strangers and Tatiana in particular, just like her mother, suffered

from a sometimes crippling reserve. Valentina Chebotareva recalled

how, one day when they went upstairs in the Court Hospital together,

they had had to walk past a group of sisters. Tatiana grabbed her

hand: ‘It’s awful how self-conscious and scared I feel . . . I don’t

know who to say hello to and who not.’12 This lack of social experi-

ence tipped over into simple things like going into shops. Once

while waiting for the motor car to pick them up and take them back

to the palace, Olga and Tatiana decided to pop into the Gostinny

Dvor – a parade of shops near the hospital. They were not in uniform

so no one recognized them but they soon realized that they had no

money on them, nor did they know how to go about buying

anything.13

Until they completed their training at the end of October the

girls and their mother also had a lesson in medical theory with Dr

Gedroits at home every evening at 6 p.m., after which Olga and

Tatiana would often go back to the hospital to help sterilize and

prepare the instruments for the next day’s operations with another

nurse Bibi (Varvara Vilchkovskaya), with whom they became close

friends. Whenever the girls took a break in the corridor outside the

wards those patients able to walk would venture out to sit and chat

with them and tell them stories. The girls would always have sweets

in their pockets to share and often brought fruit and bunches of

flowers from the Alexander Palace greenhouses. In the evenings

some of the men gathered round the piano in the common room

and sang – which Olga and Tatiana particularly enjoyed – but the

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best days were festivals or holidays when they would be joined by

Maria and Anastasia, and sometimes even Alexey. On evenings when

they went back home earlier the girls would often end up telephoning

the hospital for one last chat with their favourites.14

*

The Romanov sisters and their mother were not spared any of the

shock of their first confrontation with the suffering of the wounded

and the terrible damage done to their bodies by bombs, sabres and

bullets. Joined by Anna Vyrubova in their training, they were thrown

in at the deep end, dealing with men who arrived ‘dirty, bloodstained and suffering’, as Anna recalled. ‘Our hands scrubbed in antiseptic

solutions we began the work of washing, cleaning, and bandaging

maimed bodies, mangled faces, blinded eyes, all the indescribable

mutilations of what is called civilized warfare.’15 Sometimes Anastasia and Maria were allowed to come and watch them dressing the

wounds, and from 16 August the older girls began observing oper-

ations, at first civilian ones for appendixes and hernias, and the

lancing of swellings. But soon they were watching bullets being

taken out and on 8 September a trepanning for removal of shrapnel;

five days later they witnessed their first leg amputation.16 Once

qualified they would be assisting – Alexandra usually handing the

surgical instruments to Gedroits and taking away amputated limbs,

the girls threading surgical needles and passing cotton-wool swabs.

On 25 November they saw their first wounded man die on the

operating table; Alexandra told Nicholas that their ‘girlies’ had been very brave.17

In addition to their nursing training Olga and Tatiana were

assigned important public roles in the war effort by their mother,

although being among strangers in the capital chairing committees

was something they both dreaded and never enjoyed. On 11 August

an imperial
ukaz
was issued, establishing the Supreme Council for the Care of Soldiers’ Families and of Families of the Wounded and

Dead. It was headed by Alexandra, who nominated Olga as vice-

president with responsibility for its Special Petrograd Committee

– one of numerous subsidiary committees set up in cities across

Russia to raise funds for the central Supreme Council.18 A month

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later, Tatiana was given a similar role with the establishment of Her Imperial Highness Grand Duchess Tatiana Nikolaevna’s Committee

for the Temporary Relief of Those Suffering Deprivation in Wartime.

Under its chief administrator, Alexey Neidgardt, the Tatiana

Committee, as everyone came to call it, dealt specifically with the

growing refugee problem in Russia’s western provinces – where

civilian Poles, Jews, Lithuanians, Letts and Ruthenians had now

become caught up in the fighting.

From its inception the Tatiana Committee proved to be a great

success, in no small part thanks to Tatiana’s high public profile as

an imperial daughter and her active involvement with its work in

setting up shelters, soup kitchens, maternity homes and refuges for

orphaned children. The tedious bureaucracy of her Wednesday

afternoon meetings in Petrograd was, however, a different matter,

and she found Neidgardt a pompous bore. She also disliked the

formalities, as one official recalled when he addressed her at a

committee: ‘If you should so please your imperial highness . . .’

Tatiana was visibly embarrassed: ‘she looked at me in astonishment

and when I sat down next to her again, she gave me a sharp nudge

under the table and whispered: “Are you off your head or what, to

address me in that way?”’19 She and Olga both hated such formali-

ties. ‘It’s only at our hospital that we feel comfortable and at ease’, admitted Olga to one of her patients.20 Nevertheless, they both got

on with their public duties conscientiously and without complaint,

Tatiana often having to tackle committee paperwork after long days