The Crimson Tide: A Novel

Russia learned it, too. Everywhere battalions were raised, uniformed, armed, equipped, drilled. In the streets of cities the girl-soldiers became familiar sights: nobody any longer turned to stare at them. There were several dozen girls in the officers’ school, trying for commissions. In all the larger cities there were infantry battalions of girls, Cossack troops, machine gun units, signallers; they had a medical corps and transport service.

But never but once again did they go into action. And their last stand was made facing their own people, the brain-crazed Reds.

And after that the Battalion of Death became only a name; and the girl-soldiers bewildered fugitives, hunted down by the traitors who had sold out to the Germans at Brest-Litovsk.

PREFACE

A door opened; the rush of foggy air set the flames of the altar candles blowing wildly. There came the clank of armed men.

Then, in the dim light of the chapel, a novice sprang to her feet, brushing the white veil from her pallid young face.

At that the ex-Empress, still kneeling, lifted her head from her devotions and calmly turned it, looking around over her right shoulder.

The file of Red infantry advanced, shuffling slowly forward as though feeling their way through the candle-lit dusk across the stone floor. Their accoutrements clattered and clinked in the intense stillness. A slovenly officer, switching a thin, naked sword in his ungloved fist, led them. Another officer, carrying a sabre and marching in the rear, halted to slam and lock the heavy chapel door; then he ran forward to rejoin his men, while the chapel still reverberated with the echoes of the clanging door.

A chair or two fell, pushed aside by the leading soldiers and hastily kicked out of the way as the others advanced more swiftly now. For there seemed to be some haste. These men were plainly in a hurry, whatever their business there might be.

The Tzesarevitch, kneeling beside his mother, got up from his knees with visible difficulty. The Empress also rose, leisurely, supporting herself by one hand resting on the prie-dieu.

Then several young girls, who had been kneeling behind her at their devotions, stood up and turned to stare at the oncoming armed men, now surrounding them.

The officer carrying the naked sword, and reeking with fumes of brandy, counted these women in a loud, thick voice.

“That’s right,” he said. “You’re all present–one! two! three! four! five! six!–the whole accursed brood!” pointing waveringly with his sword from one to another.

Then he laughed stupidly, leering out of his inflamed eyes at the five women who all wore the garbs of the Sisters of Mercy, their white coiffes and tabliers contrasting sharply with the sombre habits of the Russian nuns who had gathered in the candle-lit dusk behind them.

“What do you wish?” demanded the ex-Empress in a fairly steady voice.

“Answer to your names!” retorted the officer brutally. The other officer came up and began to fumble for a note book in the breast of his dirty tunic. When he found it he licked the lead of his pencil and squinted at the ex-Empress out of drunken eyes.

“Alexandra Feodorovna!” he barked in her face. “If you’re here, say so!”

She remained calm, mute, cold as ice.

A soldier behind her suddenly began to shout:

“That’s the German woman. That’s the friend of the Staretz Novykh! That’s Sascha! Now we’ve got her, the thing to do is to shoot her–”

“Mark her present,” interrupted the officer in command. “No ceremony, now. Mark the cub Romanoff present. Mark ’em all–Olga, Tatyana, Marie, Anastasia!–no matter which is which–they’re all Romanoffs–”

But the same soldier who had interrupted before bawled out again: “They’re not Romanoffs! There are no German Romanoffs. There are no Romanoffs in Russia since a hundred and fifty years–”

The little Tzesarevitch, Alexis, red with anger, stepped forward to confront the man, his frail hands fiercely clenched. The officer in command struck him brutally across the breast with the flat of his sword, shoved him aside, strode toward the low door of the chapel crypt and jerked it open.

“Line them up!” he bawled. “We’ll settle this Romanoff dispute once for all! Shove them into line! Hurry up, there!”

But there seemed to be some confusion between the nuns and the soldiers, as the latter attempted to separate the ex-Empress and the young Grand Duchesses from the sisters.

“What’s all that trouble about!” cried the officer commanding. “Drive back those nuns, I tell you! They’re Germans, too! They’re Sascha’s new Deaconesses! Kick ’em out of the way!”

Then the novice, who had cried out in fear when the Red infantry first entered the chapel, forced her way out into the file formed by the Empress and her daughters.

“There’s a frightful mistake!” she cried, laying one hand on the arm of a young girl dressed, like the others, as a Sister of Mercy. “This woman is Miss Dumont, my American companion! Release her! I am the Grand Duchess Marie!”

The girl, whose arm had been seized, looked at the young novice over her shoulder in a dazed way; then, suddenly her lovely face flushed scarlet; tears sprang to her eyes; and she said to the infuriated officer:

“It is not true, Captain! I am the Grand Duchess Marie. She is trying to save me!”

“What the devil is all this row!” roared the officer, who now came tramping and storming among the prisoners, switching his sword to and fro with ferocious impatience.

The little Sister of Mercy, frightened but resolute, pointed at the novice, who still clutched her by the arm: “It is not true what she tells you,” she repeated. “I am the Grand Duchess Marie, and this novice is my American companion, Miss Dumont, who loves me devotedly and who now attempts to sacrifice herself in my place–”

“I am the Grand Duchess Marie!” interrupted the novice excitedly. “This young girl dressed like a Sister of Mercy is only my American companion–”

“Damnation!” yelled the officer. “I’ll take you both, then!” But the girl in the Sister of Mercy’s garb turned and violently pushed the novice from her so that she stumbled and fell on her knees among the nuns.

Then, confronting the officer: “You Bolshevik dog,” she said contemptuously, “don’t you even know the daughter of your dead Emperor when you see her!” And she struck him across the face with her prayer book.

As he recoiled from the blow a soldier shouted: “There’s your proof! There’s your insolent Romanoff for you! To hell with the whole litter! Shoot them!” Instantly a savage roar from the Reds filled that dim place; a soldier violently pushed the young Tzesarevitch into the file behind the Empress and held him there; the Grand Duchess Olga was flung bodily after him; the other children, in their hospital dresses, were shoved brutally toward their places, menaced by butt and bayonet.

“March!” bawled the officer in command.

But now, among the dark-garbed nuns, a slender white figure was struggling frantically to free herself:

“You red dogs!” she cried in an agonised voice. “Let that English woman go! It is I you want! Do you hear! I mock at you! I mock at your resolution! Boje Tzaria Khrani! Down with the Bolsheviki!”

A soldier turned and fired at her; the bullet smashed an ikon above her head.

“I am the Grand Duchess Marie!” she sobbed. “I demand my place! I demand my fate! Let that American girl go! Do you hear what I say? Red beasts! Red beasts! I am the Grand Duchess!–”

The officer who closed the file turned savagely and shook his heavy cavalry sabre at her: “I’ll come back in a moment and cut your throat for you!” he yelled.

Then, in the file, and just as the last bayonets were vanishing through the crypt door, one of the young girls turned and kissed her hand to the sobbing novice–a pretty gesture, tender, gay, not tragic, even almost mischievously triumphant.

It was the adieu of the Grand Duchess Tatyana to the living world–her last glimpse of it through the flames of the altar candles gilding the dead Christ on his jewelled cross–the image of that Christ she was so soon to gaze upon when those lovely, mischievous young eyes of hers unclosed in Paradise…

The door of the crypt slammed. A terrible silence reigned in the chapel.

Then the novice uttered a cry, caught the foot of the cross with desperate hands, hung there convulsively.

To her the Mother Superior turned, weeping. But at her touch the girl, crazed with grief, lifted both hands and tore from her own face the veil of her novitiate just begun;–tore her white garments from her shoulders, crying out in a strangled voice that if a Christian God let such things happen then He was no God of hers–that she would never enter His service–that the Lord Christ was no bridegroom for her; and, her novitiate was ended–ended together with every vow of chastity, of humility, of poverty, of even common humanity which she had ever hoped to take.

The girl was now utterly beside herself; at one moment flaming and storming with fury among the terrified, huddling nuns; the next instant weeping, stamping her felt-shod foot in ungovernable revolt at this horror which any God in any heaven could permit.

And again and again she called out on Christ to stop this thing and prove Himself a real God to a pagan world that mocked Him.

Dishevelled, her rent veil in tatters on her naked shoulders, she sprang across the chapel to the crypt door, shook it, tore at it, seized chair after chair and shattered them to splinters against the solid panels of oak and iron.