Michael was well pleased with the way his division had come together in its first weeks and towards the end of October 1914 he went north to the supreme headquarters, called Stavka, to meet his brother who was there on a visit from Tsarskoe Selo. The headquarters were set in a clearing inside a forest of pines and birches, just outside Baranovichi, ‘a miserable little country town,’11 but which was an important railway junction and roughly at the centre of the 500-mile Russian line.
It was the first time the two brothers had seen each other in over two years, but it was not the occasion or place for a family discussion, so there was no mention of issues which were likely only to end up in a row. Nicholas simply found Michael enthusiastic about his new command. Three days later, on October 27, Nicholas wrote to Alexandra: ‘I had the pleasure of spending the whole of Saturday with Misha who has become quite his old self and is again charming.’ A little wooden church had been built beside the railway tracks and Michael and Nicholas went there for evening service, ‘and parted after dinner’.12
Michael went on briefly to Gatchina to finalise his affairs there and, before returning to the front and the risks of the battlefield, to write to his brother about a matter which he had not raised when they met but which continued to trouble him: the fact that four years after his birth, his son George was still illegitimate. Whilst a divisional commander’s life expectancy was considerably better than that of a junior office, rank was no protection against artillery shells, snipers, or a random bullet. Michael was also not a man to hang back in the rear; as one of his commanders would say of him later, ‘the only trouble he gave us was through his constant wish to be in the fighting-line; we sometimes had great difficulty in keeping him out of danger’.13
Were he to be killed in the war, as might happen, Natasha would not inherit anything. The 1912 manifesto, by which Michael’s assets had been placed in administration, remained in force; he was still in the same position as ‘a minor or a lunatic’14 and technically without rights to the management of his estates or monies. But to leave innocent little George as a bastard was surely to take punishment beyond anything which was reasonable. He said as much to Nicholas: ‘It is very hard for me to go away, leaving my family in such an ambiguous position. I wish for my only beloved son to be accepted by society as my son and not as the son of an unknown father, as he is registered on his birth certificate…Remove from me the burden of the worry that, should something happen to me, that my son would have to grow up with the stigma of illegitimacy… You alone can do this, as it is your right… And after all, he is not to blame!’15
There was no reply, and Michael set off to rejoin the Savage Division with even more reason to hope that he would come back alive. Now judged ready for action, his regiments had moved by train to the Austrian border where the wide-gauge Russian railway ended. The Russian frontline was far forward into the Carpathian Mountains, and the division rode the rest of the way to the positions selected for it as part of the Second Cavalry Corps.16
The Austrians would have good reason to fear Michael’s Muslims in the future, but the first to do so were the unfortunate inhabitants they met as they advanced over the frontier. Finding themselves on conquered territory, the men of one regiment, quartered in an Austrian village, decided to take the spoils of war, and that first night there was chaos as excited Tartars raced around the village, chasing dishevelled girls. It was only at dawn that order was restored and the most serious offenders lined up to be flogged, twenty-five lashes being considered the usual punishment, though rapists convicted at court martial could be shot. Later, two men in that regiment would be and when they were condemned the staff at Michael’s headquarters offered to provide a firing squad from another regiment. However, the Tartars insisted on carrying out the execution themselves, the two men preferring, it was said, to die facing friendly faces.17 The Savage Division was difficult to handle behind the lines, but when it reached the enemy it behaved with the courage expected of men who relished battle, whether on foot or on horseback. They would find themselves involved in very heavy fighting over the next months, and earn considerable distinction on that bloody battlefield. So would Michael. He would find himself coming out of it a national hero.
ALTHOUGH Michael was more than a thousand miles (1,600km) from Gatchina, the journey south to meet him was one which never daunted Natasha. It took two days to get there, over tracks made the slower by the amount of war traffic they were carrying. The first trip came at the beginning of December 1914, when she could only hope that he would be there when she arrived, and knowing that at best he could snatch no more than a few days from the front. Her destination was the former Polish city of Lvov, fifty miles inside Austro-Hungary and known there as Lemberg. The Russians had captured it in September; Michael’s headquarters were in a village 100 miles to the south-west and he could be in Lvov in a car in a few hours. Fortunately he was able to snatch a few days from the frontline, which for Natasha more than justified the laborious journey there and back to Gatchina. Indeed, she would return the following month, and then again two months later.
Apart from her natural fears for Michael’s life, what troubled Natasha particularly was her belief that he had been posted to the Savage Division in retaliation for his marriage. On her return to Gatchina she wrote to say: ‘You are naturally talked about more than the division and what pains me most of all is that they say you did not go to war of your own accord, but were sent to atone for your guilt towards Russia — so your heroism, with which you wished to surprise the world, has been totally wasted…18 In fact, it had not been wasted, but she could not know that at the time.
Nevertheless she had good reason to believe, as she would continue to do, that Michael had been sent to the most distant part of the Russian line as punishment for having married her, though Michael never seemed to care one way or another. He had come back to fight, and if that meant commanding an irregular division of Muslim horsemen, so be it. As it happened, they were very good at what they did, and that was its own cause for pride in his command.
In the New Year, he was in a sector of the front line which was quiet enough to allow him to take two weeks’ leave — effectively ten days since four days of that were spent in travelling. He arrived home on January 2, 1915 — ‘what a joy to be back with my family in lovely Gatchina’, he scribbled in his diary19 — and next day went to ‘the detestable Petrograd’ to inspect the new hospital which Natasha had organised for him in his unused palace on the English Embankment. Then, after shopping with Natasha, and calling on his mother, he went to Tsarskoe Selo to see his brother, and press him again about legitimising little George.
Nothing had been done about that in the two months since he had written to him about it, and nothing would happen this time. Nicholas avoided the subject, for it was a sore point at Tsarskoe Selo. Alexandra opposed any concessions suggesting acceptance of the marriage, and legalising George would in her mind have gone some way towards that. Michael returned home no further forward than before. It was a bitter failure. Three years later Nicholas would plead ‘a father’s feelings’ in justifying a decision about his son Alexis, but that applied only to himself. Michael’s worries were dismissed out of hand.