Bellevue Palace, Berlin
Hoffmann had stepped out into the cold air. He was aware that the deeper problem in Russia, and his possible solution, had not been discussed with Ludendorff’s.
And how could they have been, given how angry he was? Add to that his dominance and inquisitiveness over the dress rehearsal. And then there was the lack of time, given where I have to be and when.
About ready to turn around and return to brief Ludendorff, Hoffmann realized there was a car waiting for him outside the Generalstabs Gebaeude. A one-armed captain of the guards—there were a great many one-armed captains floating around Germany by this point in the war—guided him to it, while the driver held the door for him. Berlin traffic was not notably heavy at any but the worst of times. Now, at this stage of the war, civilian ownership of motor vehicles had declined by over eighty percent. Oh, there were still some private cars, but most had been pressed into military service. This car, a Daimler Mercedes, took Hoffmann swiftly—albeit coldly, given the open top—south through empty streets to the equally bare Zeltenallee, thence westward to deposit him at the Palace.
Kaiser Wilhelm already knew that watching Hoffmann eat his way through an entire lunch was not something for the faint of heart. He consoled himself at the carnage with the thought, Perhaps he eats enough for four, but he thinks enough for four thousand. He’s a bargain.
Meanwhile, between chomps, Hoffmann thought upon his kaiser. I must be careful here. What was it Bismarck said of him, before he was dismissed? Oh, yes, he wants every day to be his birthday. He is unsure of himself and arrogant at the same time. Intelligent, but without much in the way of self-discipline to make use of that intelligence. He craves the new and detests monotony. Well… perhaps I’ll have something new for him, since I couldn’t mention it to Ludendorff.
Hoffmann, still seated at the table and without recourse to notes or maps, gave the kaiser the same information he had given Ludendorff, right up until Wilhelm asked his opinion on what was coming to be called, “The Polish Question.” His concern was where the new border was to be drawn in the east, and the presumptive expense of the new German-sponsored state of Poland, which was to be ripped from the hands of the Russians.
Hoffmann demurred, or tried to, knowing that Ludendorff and Hindenburg, both, had fanciful notions of new divisions and corps of Poles, marching to shore up the western front at the stamp of a teutonic foot. He also knew, Ludendorff has forbidden us telling the kaiser anything without his approval. That was half of what this morning’s dress rehearsal was about.
The kaiser, in any case, was having none of it. “When your supreme war chief demands your opinions on any subject, it is your duty to communicate them to him quite irrespective of their coinciding with the opinions of the General Headquarters or not.”
I see no end of trouble for me from this. Nonetheless, he is right; it is my duty.
“There’s another matter I’d like to discuss, too, but to answer your question, I think we’d be fools, Majesty, to take any more of Poland and of Poles than we absolutely had to. We’ve had substantial numbers of them since your multi-great grand uncle partitioned Poland, one hundred and forty-five years ago. They’ve never really become reconciled to it.
“Yes, fine, we could use two strips, one to shield the Silesian coalfields and another on the Malwa Heights; one hundred thousand Poles, no more. Let the rest be Poles, allies if at all possible, but happy to be themselves and not ersatz, pseudo, and deeply unhappy Germans.”
Hoffmann didn’t know if the kaiser spoke truth when he said, “I’ve been thinking along the same lines, frankly; we don’t need them; we can’t use them; so why should we want them?”
“And what was that other matter?” the kaiser asked.
“It has to do with your cousins, in Russia.”
“What about them?” the kaiser asked. Wilhelm retained a good deal of annoyance toward both his cousin, Nicky, and Nicky’s wife’s beautiful sister, Ella, who had flat refused Wilhelm’s proposal of marriage decades before.
“You know they’re going to be killed, of course, Your Majesty. That’s the logic of revolution. All of them, your cousin, his wife, their beautiful daughters, and their only son.”
“I’ve tried not to think about it,” the kaiser admitted.
“We can’t avoid thinking about it any longer, Your Majesty,” Hoffmann insisted.
“What can we do then?”
Hoffmann smiled, his eyes wandering to the Christmas tree standing in one corner. “Oh, I have a couple of ideas on the subject…”
Interlude
Tatiana: Our Romanov Christmas, 1917
It’s hard to believe that it’s already Christmas. It has been both too short and too long, almost like we’ve gotten lost in time and are still trying to figure out where we are.
The road ahead of us is unclear, like riding through a snowstorm in the sledge on a moonless night. All we can see is a small circle of light from the lamp. It surrounds us, a pool of flickering safety. That’s what they told us back in July. That moving us to Tobolsk was for our own safety—the provisional government protecting us from the Bolsheviks.
But I fear that it is just an illusion, very much like that flickering light and the way it’s being cut through every second of every day by hard, cold, snow. It looks beautiful—benign even—but it can kill you. The snow can be harsh, cutting. Deadly.
Ever since we set foot in this house on the twenty-sixth of August, I have been filled with dread. No matter how much I push it down, it resurfaces.
It’s not just the changes. They put the retainers and servants across the street in the house of a rich merchant, a Mr. Kornilov. I wonder if they asked. I worry that they just showed up at the door one day and said, “We’re the masters of this house now, move out.” Or was Mr. Kornilov honored to host our entourage, to have us as his neighbors? If so, I’d like to thank him. I’d like to reassure him that he’ll be compensated. That we didn’t just take. But I cannot. So I add this embarrassment to the ever-growing list of things I cannot control, that I have no say in, that I bury alive.
It’s not my place, after all. Papa is no longer tsar which means I’m not a grand-duchess. I’m just a girl. It’s something I’ve wished for, and now that I have it, I realize that it’s not the milk and honey I expected it to be. Before, I had status but no responsibility, no power. Now, I feel as if responsibility—for things I’ve not done, did not know of, had no say in—hangs above me like the blade of a guillotine. I still don’t have power and now I don’t even have status. Except maybe that of a pawn, and everyone knows what happens to those.
Our knights remain with us: Monsieur Pierre Gilliard, our French tutor; General Tatichtchev and Prince Dolgorukov, my father’s aides; Drs. Botkin and Derevenko; Countess Hendrikova. And of course, our guard. They are soldiers from the former First and Fourth rifle regiments and have been with us for years. They were with us at Tsarskoe Selo, under the command of a Colonel Kobylinsky, who has been very nice to us.
I spoke to the men of our guard. They were, as they had always been, men with whom we shared a common past. We talked about their families, their villages. They spoke of the battles they had seen during the Great War. They still called my brother “The Heir.” I knew that he held a special place in their hearts because they would find ways to entertain and distract him.