The Summer Day is Done (49 page)

Subsequently she suspected he had forgotten or dismissed the matter as soon as he left the house, because it was still happening days after.

So she put pepper in Kirby’s soup one evening and laughed until she cried when after only three spoonfuls he became hotter and hotter, redder and redder.

Karita had a sense of fun but it was always advisable to take her seriously.

The war went on. Christmas came. There were several non-festive outbreaks of violence in cold, icy cities. Kirby sent greetings to the Imperial family. Alexandra replied with a letter of thanks, gracious and kind for all its brevity. During the first week in January he received a card, posted in an envelope. It was a religious card, a print of the Nativity. On the reverse side were three penned words.

‘
I love you
.’

There was no signature.

He understood. He treasured it.

Daily Karita polished the small oval gilt frame that contained a snapshot of Olga and Tatiana. He kept it on a table in his bedroom. Often Karita pressed her warm mouth to it.

The Russian winter had closed down the Western front but Grand Duke Nicholas, a stimulant to the whole of the Caucasian front, did the unexpected by launching his attack in the ice and snow of mid-January.

By this time Kirby, restless for action, had relinquished his position as a staff officer and applied for service with a unit of Caucasian Cossacks. Headquarters had been amazed. It was too much vodka. His eccentric request was granted. He told Karita that if he rode with the Cossacks he could get out of the way quicker on a horse.

‘Why do you have to get on a horse at all, why do you have to be so foolish?’ she said. ‘Is it because of people saying your country wasn’t doing enough?’

‘I’d forgotten that,’ he said.

‘Then is it because you want to get yourself killed? Sometimes you look as if you’re thinking of doing something dark and stupid.’ She was cross with him.

‘Not as dark and stupid as that, I hope. But I must do something more than desk work, Karita.’

That upset her.

‘You should not be thinking only of yourself,’ she said. She had washed her hair the night
before and it was still unbraided, a mass of flowing gold. ‘You should think of me too. What will become of me if anything happens to you? Do you think of that?’

‘You’ll go back to your village, your parents,’ he said. He had no intention of getting himself killed or losing the pleasure of Karita’s company.

‘And who is to go back to Aunt Charlotte?’ It was plain that for once Karita considered him thoughtless and selfish. ‘My mother and father have each other, Aunt Charlotte would have no one at all. Someone must go back home to her from Russia. I’ll have to.’

Her outlook on this kind of thing was fascinating.

‘Karita, you are quite the loveliest person,’ he said affectionately, ‘but there’s no need to worry. Perhaps we’ll both go back to her together. We’ll see what happens. Meanwhile, you can return to your parents now—’

‘I will not!’

‘– or you can stay here and keep the apartment for me. At the army’s expense, of course, until I get back on leave. You can have whatever money you need.’

‘I shall stay here,’ she said. ‘How would it look if no one was around when you came on leave?’

‘Not very proper, I suppose,’ he said. She regarded him unsmilingly. He wore his Russian uniform with its high collar naturally enough now. It was rather nice of him, really, to want to fight for Russia but, ah, just wait until he had ridden with those Cossacks for a while. He
would soon want to get back to his desk.

She was surprised at the warmth of his leave-taking. He not only kissed her very affectionately, he even embraced her. The firm physical contact created sensations so confusing that her face turned fiery.

‘Oh, goodness,’ she gasped when he released her.

‘Sweet and dear Karita,’ he said.

She sat down heavily when he had gone. Emptiness rang hollowly through the spotless apartment.

‘Oh, no,’ cried Karita, horrified to find she was weeping.

It was dreadful to feel so lonely.

Grand Duke Nicholas Nicolaievich, as redoubtable a soldier as any in the war, attacked Erzurum, about one hundred and fifty miles west of Kars. The infantry swarmed in the wake of bursting Russian shells, going in with the bayonet against Turkish positions in the valleys and on the heights, their massed waves reducing redoubts and enveloping gun emplacements. The cavalry followed on, often riding through their infantry to cut down scrambling, retreating Turks. It was a fine affair for the Caucasian Cossacks, always at their most dashing when the enemy was on the run.

Kirby rode with them. The Cossacks were tough, wiry men who rode small horses like ponies. They took little notice of Kirby. He had no doubt been dumped on them by some obtuse general who wanted to get rid of him.

In an attack on a ridge the Turks suddenly abandoned their positions. Cossacks charged at the heels of triumphant infantry up the slope. The foot soldiers yelled at them. Trust those thieving Cossacks to try and get to booty first. Bullets from retreating Turks flew and Kirby had his horse shot from under him. Miraculously he sprang clear before the wounded, screaming animal rolled on him. A Cossack pulled up. He watched Kirby mercifully shoot the agonized beast.

‘Are you hurt, Englishman?’ His grin was sarcastic, he was oblivious for the moment of Turks and sorrier for the horse than Kirby.

‘I’ve fallen off more horses than I care to remember,’ said Kirby, his coat belted, his peaked cap pulled tight over his head.

‘Ah!’ A wider, more appreciative grin. ‘Go back and get yourself another. Ayeiah!’ And he was away, flogging his mount up the slope.

The battle for Erzurum was bitter. The Russians lost men in such numbers that Kirby frequently wondered how soon it would be before his own body rode into a bullet or shell-burst. But it was the infantry which bore the greatest brunt, the Cossacks engaged only to complete a rout or hasten it.

The battle did not completely erase his thoughts of Olga, however, for at night, cold and exhausted, his mind gathered its pictures and tumbled them into kaleidoscopic fantasies until at last he fell asleep. Only by day, when there was smoke and noise, guns and bullets and whistling sabres, when fear took hold of all the
senses, were memories thrust violently aside and thoughts turned solely on survival.

Erzurum fell and the Russians won a short breathing space.

The Grand Duke began the regrouping of his forces. The Turks began the assembling of their Second Army for a massive counter stroke. The Grand Duke anticipated it and before the Turks knew what he was about he had smashed their Third Army. When the Turkish Second Army did attack the Russians were in positions of strength, and held on to all the ground they had captured.

Both armies were content to take up defensive lines for the winter, although winter in these regions, with temperatures skating around the thirty degrees below zero mark, was almost as unwelcome to entrenched thousands as a barrage of red-hot steel. The conditions were as bad as men could endure and Kirby, frozen day after day, wondered if he would ever be warm again. There had been no leave, no real respite, except for the wounded, only brief rest periods behind the lines. And only the dead were at peace.

The casualties mounted here and in Europe. Germany, Austria, Turkey, France and Britain poured in their fodder. Their dead lay in heaps. And Russia? Her dead made mountains. The tragedy of Imperial Russia was that, in her apparently inexhaustible manpower, the lack of arms and ammunition did not seem important to War Minister Sukhomlinov in his peeling ivory tower.

Lenin sat in Switzerland, calculating what the Great Powers were doing to each other.

On the European front, the German generals could not ignore the Tsar’s armies, however poorly supplied they were. It had been their intention to concentrate on the defeat of the British and French while merely holding their Eastern line. But the weight, intensity and fervour of Russian efforts circumvented every German attempt to bring this plan into full and effective being. The Tsar, constant in his loyalty to the British and French, could not have served his allies better than he did.

The politicians dwelt in their temples of discourse and attacked the men they had sent to direct the battles. If they had emerged from their debating chambers to fight the battles themselves, while the soldiers went home, the war would have been over in days.

Imperial Russia moved from heartbreak on their fronts to disillusionment at home. The people had long begun to disbelieve government propaganda. Disorders increased, civil unrest flared. There were strikes in the factories at times when the military situations demanded maximum effort at home. The war was becoming less and less popular. Women, utterly appalled by the losses, wanted their men back. It was demoralizing to listen to soldiers on leave, when they could get leave.

Rasputin was on the way to becoming a greater fool than ever. Almost everything written about him, even by his enemies, gives the impression that he was an awesome mystic. But in reality he
was simply psychic, a random quality given to ordinary or extraordinary persons alike, even to idiots. The idiot Rasputin was thrusting the Imperial family to the brink of tragedy. He womanized, boasted and belched, he bandied the royal names about.

He gave Alexandra the wrong political advice, undermined the Tsarism he desired to preserve and took no kind of advice himself, for he lacked all humility.

In his alliance with Alexandra he engineered the removal of any minister he took a dislike to. As no minister of any integrity could stomach Rasputin, one by one they all went. And in their places Rasputin recommended men who were greater fools than he was.

It was in early December 1916, when a unit of Turks, irritated by pin-pricking sorties from booty-collecting Cossacks, launched a quick, furious attack in the miserable grey of an icy dawn. They surprised the Cossacks, bayoneted a few, shot a few, and hauled off a number of prisoners to strip them of everything of value, even their boots. Included among the prisoners was Kirby.

He spent the next twelve months in a prisoner-of-war camp, where he found the Turks very casual and indifferent observers of the conventions.

Karita, used to hearing regularly from him, began to wonder why she now heard nothing at all. She pestered headquarters. Headquarters enjoyed her visits. She received extremely generous offers from some of the most splendid members of the staff, each man promising to
dress her in diamonds at least. Karita did not want diamonds and she did not need a bed. All she required was information concerning Colonel Kirby.

It was a long time coming. He was missing.

Missing? Did that mean he was dead?

It meant he was missing.

It numbed Karita. She had always realized something might happen to him. But this. It could mean he’d never come back. It could mean he was lying out there in the snow, stiff, frozen.

She felt as if they had taken off her right arm. It was two days before her numbness thawed out and she was able to face reality. Reality was a devastating loneliness but not complete despair. There was always hope. She would not leave Kars, not unless he was officially listed as killed. So she stayed on. When headquarters tried to introduce another officer into the apartment she refused point blank to allow this. She would not co-operate in any way. She would not budge. The apartment was held in the name of Colonel Kirby, a friend of the Tsar himself, and until she heard from him or the Tsar, she would continue to hold it for him. Headquarters surrendered gracefully.

Karita worked in the military hospital and waited. She counted her beads and she prayed. She wrote to Aunt Charlotte, telling her only that the weather was awful and that Colonel Kirby was still making things unpleasant for the Turks. She thought of the Crimea and its sunshine, she thought of Walton and the river, of the cottage, the ducks and the nice old postman.

She had made many friends in Kars, and had more than a few admirers. She felt, however, that with things as they were she had to worry just as much about Aunt Charlotte’s future as her own. It was no time to become involved with any admirer.

Aunt Charlotte, busy, bustling and booming in Walton on behalf of the glorious war-wounded of Britain, would have been amazed at Karita’s concern. She was quite enjoying the war in a way. There was so much to do for the heroes.

Whatever talents Rasputin had, he set them all lower than his gifts for roaring buffoonery. He uttered his last belch at the end of December. On a very cold night in Petrograd he was silenced by Prince Felix Yussoupov and other conspirators. They poisoned him, shot him and drowned him. His bullet-ridden, arsenic-filled, lung-swamped body was found under the ice of the Neva a few days later. If this did not mean the end of Imperial Russia to Alexandra, it did mean the end of her peace of mind concerning Alexis. Without Rasputin, who had had such a mesmeric hold on the boy’s life, she did not know how Alexis would survive future illnesses. Rasputin’s death was her personal disaster.

They buried him in the Imperial Park at Tsarskoe Selo. The Emperor and Empress were there, also the Grand Duchesses and a few intimates, including Anna Vyrubova. Alexandra wept. Her tears were for the holy man and herself and Alexis. They should have been for Russia.

Yet despite her grief she displayed astounding
resilience, an outward calmness and dignity that impressed ministers, ambassadors and friends alike. It was a dignity compounded of the resignation and sadness that were to be with her for the rest of her days.

In March Russia catapulted into revolution. On the 15th of that month Nicholas abdicated, not in favour of his haemophiliac son, whom he wanted to keep with him, but in favour of his younger brother Michael. But when Tsar Michael hastened to Petrograd from Gatchina he encountered such belligerent opposition that he abdicated immediately. The Romanov rule had reached its end. Workers’ councils renounced the dynasty and rejected all forms of autocracy.

The Provisional Government locked the Imperial family up in the Alexander Palace at Tsarskoe Selo, partly for their own safety. The Emperor himself arrived there on 22nd March, having taken an emotional farewell of his army. Weary but calm, he met Alexandra in their private apartments.