Lendle

This volume is from !922. Below is a small portion from the book's Introduction: I have drawn up this sketch of the late Emperor Nicholas and of some of the persons and events connected with him partly in diary form because as such it gives the true impressions which I gathered from time to time during the years of war which I spent with the General Headquarters of the armies in Russia. I probably saw him oftener and knew him more intimately than most others, outside his immediate 'entourage', during the period of his command in the field, when his long absences from the capital made it also necessary for me to be the intermediary on other than purely military matters. When I was suddenly dispatched to Russia on that early day in August 1914 I had but a very sketchy idea of the country and its people. Interest, however, I had from the history of my ancestor who was ambassador there and a friend of the great Empress Catherine. On my arrival I found that there was still around one some of that halo of mystery which was attached to the days when she addressed her letters to him as ' Madame ' and he to her as ' Monsieur'. I expected to find secrecy and difficulties at every corner, and an Imperial family weighed down with care, anxieties and the fear of an anarchist's bomb or an assassin's knife. My acquaintance with the Emperor, Empress and their children revealed quite another aspect. It was that of an apparently happy, and certainly a devoted, family. Revolution, too, was a word so commonly used in the country, and the prophets of it so numerous, that possibly familiarity bred contempt, one became too sanguine, and assured that anyhow till the war was ended the country would hold together. With a pre-war population of about 83,000,000, covering an area of 8,500,000 square miles, it was possibly but little wonder that people talked of ' the Russian steamroller'. The popularity and enthusiasm evinced in favour of the Allies' cause — in marked distinction to the case of the previous war (against Japan) — gave one the hope that Russia had now found herself in a position to get through the great ordeal with a success which would not only bring glory on herself, but a closer and more friendly attitude towards those of the Allies with whom the ties of friendship had not hitherto been very marked. The granting of a Duma or Parliament had been a step in the right direction, and though it was so tied in its powers that it had become very little of a 'free institution', the hope existed of an improvement in that direction, approaching more nearly to similar institutions elsewhere. The pages which follow are neither intended for a form of apologia nor of contention with others who have written about and criticised the late Emperor. But much has been said about him by people who were not so closely associated with him as I was. Much has been adverse. One of his critics gave me — after a stay of twentv-four hours in Russia — an account of him which made me think he had spent those hours in the gutters of Petrograd, for nowhere else could he have gathered information which was as unjust as it was untrue, and as malicious as it was mistaken. This, too, was before the Revolution. Whatever the mistakes of the Emperor, they did not arise from want of devotion to his country or to the cause of the Allies. Everyone, I suppose, has shadows which pass before them at times like ' ships that pass in the night. ' To me one of the darkest of these shadows is that of the late Emperor of Russia and those who belonged to him. The sunbeams that light them up are the unfailing kindness which he always showed me in times of personal or other trouble, his sunny and cheerful nature, and his unfailing courage when things seemed to be going badly.