WAR MEMORIES OF A QUEEN

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXXIX, Issue 20105, 11 May 1935, Page 12

WAR MEMORIES OF A QUEEN

LOOKING BACK TWENTY YEARS LIFE OF MARIE OF RUMANIA The four years of which Queen Marie writes in the third and last volume of her autobiography entitled “The Story of My Life,” by Marie, Queen of Rumania, are the j'ears of the Great War —the four years in which Rumania, forsaking her early neutrality, went to war, was invaded, found the ground cut from under her feet by the Russian revolution, and made what Queen Marie calls “an infamous peace.” Her book is chiefly remarkable for the light it sheds on the respective abilities and ambitions of herself and her husband, King Ferdinand. Ferdinand was a Hohenzollern, his wife an Englishwoman; Ferdinand was something of a cautious diplomatist, she something of a firebrand. She herself sets down their characters with some plainness:

“I certainly felt a certain irritation at the indecision of others: womanlike, I jumped to conclusions and always seemed to have my wits about me ... At all hours of the day I felt almost electrically alive . . . King Ferdinand was of a retiring disposition, not fond of asserting himself: he was also somewhat slow when he had to make up his mind . . . wing to having been too long subjugated and oppressed. King Ferdinand needed to be continually stimulated and upheld . . . “With me nothing was ever calculated; on the contrary I was dangerously rash, and took almost deadly risks. There was nothing of the wily diplomat about me, but much of the brave soldier.” Visiting the Wounded “Spontaneous generosity,” the Queen goes on to observe, “is the key to my being.” Certainly she flung herself into the tasks that lay before her in these terrible years with a spontaneous generosity. Her diaries are packed with the details day-by-day of her service as a nurse, as a visitor to the trenches, as a confidante of statesmen, as a giver of audience. She is conscious throughout these pages of the high position she held, and of the high affection she enjoyed, and when she writes that she was an inspiration to her country she speaks no more than the truth. It was her spontaneity which won that loyalty, and it is her spontaneity that records it. The Queen’s memoirs are a curious blend of impetuosity and reticence. Her style, vivid and expressive and super-charged with emotion. Leaving a Blank Queen Marie writes, for instance: “An almost insurmountable grief came to us on the 2nd-15th of September, a staggering family tragedy Which hit us suddenly, a stunning blow for which we were entirely unprepared . . . For myself I can only say that, finding myself up against terrible odds, I knew I must fight ... At that hour I knew the lioness feeling, the overpowering ferocious tenacity of a mother-creature defending its young. Queen Marie sheds no further light on this this. It is enough perhaps for me to recall that on September 15, 1918, her son, Prince Carol, then heirapparent and now King of Rumania, contracted a morganatic marriage with Mile. Lambine, a girl pf the Rumanian middle class, at Odessa; and that the reverberations of the marriage took long to die away. The record of these four years, as Queen Marie saw them, is one of disaster after disaster. The occupation of three-quarters of Rumanian territory by German troops, the retirement of Russia from the field after the Revolution, the peace that she violently opposed, enduring violent scenes with her husband, King Ferdinand, to no purpose—she lets us feel the weight of all these tragedies as she lets us feel the pathos of her private sorrows, the death of her friends and of her son Mircea.

The Queen’s diary is remarkably outspoken on the influence of the Tsarina on Russian affairs. “How deplorable when a woman has a bad influence on a man!” she writes. “Poor Alix!” And on March 3, 1917, on hearing the news of the Tsar’s abdication, she writes: “What an hour for that woman who, because of her fanaticism, has brought about this crisis! . . . Behaving like the tyrants of old, she wished everything to be done according to her own desire, and, unfortunately, swaying the Emperor’s will . . . She was worse than blind, she was a fanatic, and her husband was as clay in her hands. And this is what she has brought upon him and her children and her country!” Si j’etais Roi! It is in this vein that Queen Marie pours out her tumultuous opinions. But it was a tumultuous life she led, for, feeling as she did that she was the rallying-point of a nation—a small nation, to be sure, and one in daily danger of extinction, but a nation—it is no wonder that her diaries are a record of constant strain, of the fury an impulsive woman must feel at any hint of surrender, of pity for the sufferings of her people, and of pride in their loyalty. In 1916 she bursts out: “Oh, sometimes I do mind being a woman. Si j’etais Roi! If I were King I would go everywhere, see everything myself and talk to the troops, be among them continually, till they would adore me and gladly go to battle for my sake. I would be a reality among them, not a name.”

But she was herself both a reality and a name. Reading her story, one might think that, to statesmen not of her way of thinking, she was sometimes something of an inconvenient reality during these few crowded years. But, “I can call them blessed years,” she writes in her last chapter, “for they brought me close to the heart of my people.”