I have been reading Seven League Boots by Halliburton, which has an interesting interview between the author and Ermakov. Ermakov seemed to like to take more than his fair share of credit for the massacre of the Romanovs, but his stories about the Grand Duchesses while in captivity are interesting and I quote from the book here.
'The interpreter asked how the four girls passed the day. Ermakov understood. "Oh, they had a lot of games. They played dominoes with the Czar. And they read a lot and talked a lot - I don't know about what - wasn't important. They all seemed to love Alexis. Some one of the girls was with him all the time - handsome little fellow...but a hopeless invalid...no sort of Czar for Russia.
'"Olga was the oldest daughter - nothing special. About twenty-two, maybe twenty-three. I remember Maria had her nineteenth birthday party in the prison house - one of the guards took her some cakes. She seemed to be the Czar's favourite. They always walked in the garden together. Anastasia still had long hair down her back. She wasn't more than seventeen, maybe younger. Tatiana came between Olga and Maria. I thought she was the prettiest of the four. She had lots of dignity too, and was always looking after the others. We all liked her the best."
'Tatiana! Waiting for Ermakov to recover sufficient breath to speak again, I remembered the beautiful and moving chapter about this particular princess in From Double Eagle to Red Flag. The story places her in the Czarina's war hospital in Petrograd. There, working unceasingly, never sparing herself because she was a princess, Tatiana won the unqualified respect and worshipful devotion of every wounded soldier in the place. She seemed to them more like an angel than a human being, with her clear eyes and fresh young face and generous heart. Each day she made the rounds of the wards, seeking out those who were suffering most, and touching their heads and foreheads with her finger-tips.
'And they forgot their agony, so healing was the presence of this sweet divinity. She walked beside them as they were wheeled into the operating room, and they never felt afraid. Se stood beside them when they died. Or if they lived and left the hospital, she escorted them to the door, and gave them as a parting gift some small momento which she herself had loved.
'One wounded lad, just seventeen, worshipped her as he did the Holy Virgin. He spent his hours just waiting her return...his glorious, beautiful princess. When his time came for an operation, she escorted him to the table and began to help the surgeon remove the boy's bed-dress. Shamed, horrified, at the thought that she - this immaculate and heavenly being - would see his nakedness, the poor lad fainted away.
'He left the hospital some time after, hearing only the music of Tatiana's good-bye, clutching in his hand her own prayerbook that she had given him. Inspired, he rushed back to the front, flung himself recklessly at Russia;s enemies, and in the first charge perished, for Tatiana - the same Tatiana who within little more than a year was to be held in an Ekaterinburg prison, by these savage and vindictive assassins.'
I don't know if the book Halliburton quotes from is fiction or non-fiction, but it certainly painted a moving picture of Tatiana.
