All too soon the leave was over and he set off back to his divisional headquarters, now at Lomna, sixty miles south-west of Lvov. ‘It is so sad to leave’, he wrote in his diary for January 11, though Natasha insisted on travelling with him as far as Lvov, which gave them almost two days extra together. On arrival they parted hurriedly, for the Austrians had launched an offensive, and the Russian line was being pushed back. ‘The fighting is unceasing’, he told Natasha in his first letter home.20 One of his colonels had been killed, and three staff officers seriously wounded, one of whom would die two days later. Sixty of his horsemen were casualties.
Michael’s headquarters had been pulled back in the fighting and in the confusion of the move all his belongings were mislaid, ‘so I do not have even a bar of soap’.21 But by January 20 he was able to report that ‘the crisis is over and the enemy is in retreat along our entire frontline. We are now dealing mainly with the Hungarian troops, who fight with great persistence. Yesterday our infantry (on our right flank) lost 1,000 men, but in my division the losses were quite small.’ 22
The Carpathians are a thick belt of mountains, with one rising above another, often with a slope of one-in-six and covered in trees. These heights dominate the passes, which were deep in snow, and each had to be fought for at the point of a bayonet. It was a savage business and no one who was there could think that war was glory. Temperatures fell to minus 17 degrees and ‘the poor soldiers, especially at night, freeze terribly and many have frostbitten feet and hands. The losses in the infantry attached to us have been very great,’ wrote Michael.23 The enemy suffered as greatly and sometimes more so. One Austrian regiment of some 1,800 men froze to death as it lay waiting to advance the following morning. Rifles locked solid by ice had to be heated over fires before infantrymen could be sent into battle. Trenches were so difficult to dig that men could often do no more than bury themselves in the snow.
The casualty figures in all armies were horrific and beyond anything known to history before. After six months of fighting the Russians had lost a million men, dead, wounded or captured. ‘Corps have become divisions, brigades have shrunk into regiments’, Nicholas confessed to Alexandra.24 The slaughter appalled Michael, who unlike his brother, could see it at first hand. He believed the war itself to be a catastrophe, entered into blindly by men who little knew what they were doing. As he told Natasha on February 16, 1915, in a letter which said much about his own political instincts:
The war and all the great horror it involves cannot help inspiring sadness in every sensible person; for example, I feel greatly embittered…and most of all towards those who are at the top, who hold power and allow all that horror to happen. If the question of war were decided by the people at large, I would not be so passionately averse to that great calamity; but… nobody ever asks the nation, the country at large, what course of action they would choose.
I even sometimes feel ashamed to face the people, i.e. the soldiers and officers, particularly when visiting field hospitals, where so much suffering is to be seen, for they might think one is also responsible, for one is placed so high and yet has failed to prevent all that from happening and to protect one’s country from this disaster…’25
Two weeks earlier he had written to tell her to postpone her next proposed trip to Lvov because ‘the situation is such that it is difficult to say when we might have a few free days.’26 The fighting had not stopped since his return to the division after the New Year. It was a brutal business; on going forward to one captured position ‘we saw such horrors as I am not going to describe’.27 Yet at the same time, hoping to reassure her that he was in no personal danger, he had written that ‘most of the time I sit at home and feel miserably bored. To be at war and not even take advantage of the fresh air seems so stupid.’ 28
What he did not tell her was that the day before, as his diary noted, he had been climbing on foot through freezing snow up a mountain, identified on his map as Height 673, inspecting positions which within hours would be under heavy enemy assault, ‘with intense shooting from the front and both flanks, causing great losses.’ One regiment ‘lost 300 soldiers’.29
Despite the bitterness of the fighting, and Michael’s request on February 4 that she postpone her next visit, Natasha insisted on taking the chance of seeing him, setting off again on February 10. On this occasion she was lucky to see him at all, as he had warned. The Austrians had just regained two towns, Chernovitsy and Stanislavov, and the Russian Eighth Army commander General Aleksei Brusilov had ordered Michael ‘to straighten out the situation’.30 It involved a long cross-country move and the establishment of new headquarters in the town of Striy, forty miles from Lvov. Michael drove to Lvov to meet Natasha at the station, but it was the briefest of reunions. He wiped away her tears and left her in the Governor’s house. Shortly afterwards he sent her a note to say that ‘fighting is on and it is impossible to say how long it will last, maybe five, maybe more than ten days. Therefore I cannot ask you to stay on in Lvov and I suggest you leave at once…Yesterday there were heavy losses in the 2nd Brigade’. Then, thinking that this sounded alarmist, he added, ‘there is no need to worry about my safety, for I am far from the battle area’.31
That was not true. He was with the frontline troops, moving from village to village, finding lodgings where he could, and ‘walking with the main forces’ as they came up to the Austrians, led by their famous and rightly respected Tyrolese riflemen. Outnumbered two to one, Michael’s Tartars and Chechens, fighting on foot, met the Austrians in a forest. There was a bloody hand-to-hand battle, but the bayonets of the ‘stalwart Tyrolese’ wavered in the face of the swords and daggers of ‘the active little Tartars’, their commander proudly reported.32
Half his men lay dead among the trees, and as Michael rode up ‘he was very much impressed’ by the fight the regiment had put up, but also clearly saddened as he rode through the woods full of corpses. ‘A battlefield after a fight is not a beautiful picture,’ noted the Tartar colonel, ‘and I think that the kind heart of the Grand Duke suffered from the sight.’ 33
With that, Michael wrote to Natasha that his division had been pulled back for a rest and that they could meet again in Lvov. She arrived on March 1, and when she and Michael awoke next morning it was to find that he was being honoured with Russia’s highest gallantry award, the Order of St George, on the recommendation of his tough-minded army commander Brusilov. In contrast to the Cross of St George — which could be and was awarded in the field in its thousands by battlefield generals, the Order had to be approved by no less than fifteen Knights of the Order. No honour in Russia was so highly prized.
The award, made independently of the Tsar, was made in recognition of his conduct on the battlefield ‘during which he exposed his life to great danger, inspiring and encouraging the troops under constant enemy fire by the example of his personal bravery and courage and when resisting attacks by superior enemy forces…and later, when moving onto the offensive, he contributed to the successful development of our manoeuvres by his energetic actions…’34
The honour impressed even the cynical back-biting circles in the capital, Petrograd. Newspapers across the country published the announcement and the laudatory comments which accompanied it. Michael, wrote one war correspondent, ‘always wanted to be wherever there was danger…seeing the Grand Duke at their forward positions the ranks were ready to follow him to a loyal death’.35 He was ‘the idol of his men’, wrote another, ‘sleeping in the open with them, and living the same life as they did, without the least indulgence…’36