Returning home to the Anichkov Palace she was naturally anxious to see Michael, albeit without Natasha, but accepted that this time he would set up home with her. There would be no further demands that they lived separately, or were not to be seen in public together. She would still be Madame Brasova, but she was also his wife, and that was a fact which it was pointless now to deny. There was also a war on. Nonetheless, there could be no question of her ever living in an imperial palace — that would be a step too far. Given that, Michael would never again live in one either.
On arriving back in the capital, Michael and Natasha had booked into the Hotel de l’Europe,28 near the Anichkov Palace but on the other side of the Nevsky Prospekt. That was something they could never have done two years earlier, but the real question now was where should they make their home?
Michael was in doubt about that: it had to be his beloved Gatchina. The Blue Cuirassiers were on their way to the front line; there would be no more insults from them, and local society would have to learn that Natasha was no longer to be reviled as before.
The decision made, he and Natasha waited until her ‘hideaway house’ at 24 Nikolaevskaya Street, securely locked up when the children had left to join them in Cannes two years earlier, was re-opened and made a home again, though it was so run-down that Natasha was ashamed of it. She would get it right eventually, but as it stood it was the last place anyone would expect to find a Grand Duke. Nonetheless, Michael liked it so much he also bought the property next door, to house guests as well as some of his staff.29
With that, he was ready to go to war.
4. WAR HERO
WHEN Michael came back to Russia he was 36, with some 16 years of soldiering behind him; he had been colonel of two cavalry regiments, the Chernigov Hussars and the elite Chevalier Gardes, and he had proved his leadership. It was remembered, after the 1911 manoeuvres, that ‘he had displayed such excellent qualities as a regimental commander that the Chernigov Hussars were unanimously found to be the smartest cavalry regiment reviewed by the Tsar’.1 That was not evidence of competence on the battlefield, but it went to his credit when, as with other peacetime commanders, there was nothing else to go on. Ten years earlier, in the war against Japan, the Russian army had proved a disaster. There had been much-needed reforms, and new men promoted to command, but it was still an army untested on the battlefield. Confidence was high, but it always was at the start of a war.
Although his brother had approved his return, the Tsar made clear that he was anything but forgiven. He would be given a high command, but it would be far removed from the world of the Guards or even the professional cavalry. His role would be to lead a newly-formed division of Muslim horsemen from the Caucasus and who had never been in the army before. Michael’s actual appointment therefore came as a surprise to the army itself. It was a public snub and intended as such. Having walked out on the Guards cavalry, he was not to think that he could walk back in, or be given a regular command.
There were two main fronts: the northern, in East Prussia, facing the Germans, and the southern, in Galicia, facing the Austro-Hungarians. On the outbreak of war, the German plan was to defeat France first, in just six weeks, leaving their eastern border manned only by a defensive ‘holding army’ until the German armies in the west could turn and attack Russia, a plan hubristically summarised by the Kaiser as ‘lunch in Paris, dinner in St Petersburg’. The counter to this, as the French were pressed back to Paris, was that the Russians should draw off the German army by launching an offensive on the eastern front, even before they were fully ready to do so. The Russians gallantly obliged, but a month after the war began they were heavily defeated at Tannenberg in East Prussia and then suffered humiliation at the Masurian Lakes. In the first thirty days they lost some quarter-of-a-million men in East Prussia alone. One of the dead was the beaten commander of the Russian Second Army, General Aleksandr Samsonov, who walked into a wood and shot himself.2 Berlin, only 150 miles away, was not going to be the cavalry canter some had boasted it would be.
Tannenberg could be explained away as a necessary sacrifice made for France and a month later there was better news on the southern front, where the Russians won important successes. Their losses were no less appalling, but they had more to show for them, advancing 100 miles across the frontier, capturing 100,000 prisoners and inflicting battle casualties of some 300,000 on the Austrians.3
Michael’s division, assigned to the Galician front in the South, facing the Austro-Hungarians, was called the Caucasian Native Cavalry; it comprised six regiments, each known by the name of the tribe or place from which it was recruited: Daghestan, Kabardin, Chechen, Tartar, Circassian, and Ingush.4 Each horseman — or rider as they were termed in the division — was a volunteer, because conscription laws did not apply to the Caucasus under the terms agreed when it became part of the empire.5
The men, natural brigands, were difficult to discipline, for they would fight each other as readily as they would come to fight the Austro-Hungarians. But they were superb horsemen, fearless in a charge and terrifying to face in battle. On a training exercise, one regiment ordered to carry out a sham attack, switched to real ammunition when they ran out of blanks. As bullets whizzed past Michael’s head, their urbane colonel murmured, ‘I can only congratulate you on being for the first time under real fire’. The brigade commander standing beside them was furious, but ‘the Grand Duke laughed’.6 Under Michael the division would prove itself to be among the very best of the fighting units in Russia, and earn such a reputation that it would be known simply as the ‘Savage Division.’7 So absolute was its loyalty to Michael that in time it would also become known as ‘the Grand Duke’s private army’.
Michael’s parade uniform was the picturesque cherkeska, the long Circassian coat which fits tightly at the waist and folds down below the knees and over the top of polished soft leather high boots. His fur cap was of grey astrakhan from a new-born lamb, and he carried a sword and a razor-sharp dagger.8 It was a far cry from the ceremonial dress of the Blue Cuirassiers and Chevalier Gardes, and when Natasha first saw it she hated it.
The officers were all Russian, mostly professionals, and many of them volunteers from the Guards, attracted by the idea of serving under the Tsar’s brother. Among them was the young Prince Vyazemsky, whose wife had become a friend of Natasha. After he was appointed one of Michael’s aides-de-camp he wrote to a nephew: ‘You cannot imagine how colourful the whole outfit is — the customs, the whole spirit of the thing. The officers are mostly adventurous souls with a devil-may-care attitude. Some of them have had a “tumultuous past”, but they are far from dull…’ As for the men, ‘they seem to think that the war is a great holiday and their Muslim fatalism precludes all fear of death. They adore the Grand Duke.’9
As headquarters chaplain, Michael recruited Natasha’s family friend, Father Popsolov, who had christened baby George in 1910. However, his most personal appointment was that of an American boxing coach; boxing was one of his enthusiasms and he saw no reason why the war should interrupt it. The commander of his Tartar regiment, Colonel Peter Polovtsov — later a senior general — remembered Michael as ‘tall, very slim, a perfect sportsman, an excellent horseman, a very good shot, and his American boxing teacher always told me that it was a pity that he was a Grand Duke, because he would have done very well as a prizefighter in the ring.’10