The Paleys - An Alternative Romanov Story

Going to War

Tsarskoe Selo, Russia, 16 December 1914

Vladimir

It was still dark when Prince Vladimir Pavlovich Paley rose from his bed. He had asked his valet to wake him up at five, but there had been no need to wait for his call. In fact, he hardly slept on that dreadful night. The palace was dead quiet and he could only hear the sound of the snowflakes, tapping gently against his window. He walked the short distance that separated his bed from the window and tried to look at the garden outside, but it was still too dark to distinguish anything, except for the growing snow pile on his balcony.

After a while, he turned back and sat on the edge of his bed. He lit his table lamp and looked at his watch. It was still four in the morning, which meant it was too late to go back to sleep, but too early to go downstairs. With nothing else to do, he just stared at his pristine uniform, which one of the maids had hung beside his bed the previous evening. He didn't want to put it on yet, because he had promised his father he would wait for him to help. He was also going to be responsible for putting on his insignias, orders and epaulettes. A symbolic gesture before they said their farewells.

This wasn't the first time his military career had taken him away from his family. Although he had been born in Russia in 1897, he was the illegitimate son of Grand Duke Paul, the Tsar's widower uncle, and his mistress, Olga, who at the time, was married to one of the officers of the Grand Duke's regiment. Once his mother had received permission from the Tsar to divorce her first husband, his parents defied the rules of propriety and were married, when Vladimir was five years old.

Going against the will of the Tsar and the Imperial Family had its price, his parents were exiled, a particularly hard blow considering they both had children from their first marriages who were forced to stay behind in Russia. His father had a daughter, Marie, and a son, Dimitri, while his mother had a son, Alexander and two daughters, Olga and Marianne.

Due to his parents' exile, Vladimir had spent his childhood in Paris, along with his two little sisters, Irina and Natalia, who had been born in France, where they all lived a carefree and luxurious life as private citizens.

However, when Vladimir was just eleven years old, with little experience of the world outside Paris and Biarritz, he was sent alone with his tutor to Russia, the homeland of his parents, to start his military training at Corps des Pages. It had been a terrifying experience at first, a complete shock even. In Paris, he had his room, and private lessons with a tutor and servants to attend to his every need. He had never given much thought to how privileged his life had been until he arrived in St. Petersburg and was told he had to live in a barrack which he had to share with nineteen other boys of the same age. Although they had been all born into rich families (Corps des Pages was an exclusive military academy for the sons of aristocrats and noblemen), the boys slept in camp beds in an enormous open space which offered little protection from the bitter Russian winter. Whoever complained about it was treated to extreme punishments which included beatings from the officers or running around the building in the snow. Vladimir had never dared to complain and was a hard worker, so he became popular among his teachers and fellow cadets. All in all, even though this had been a difficult adjustment, it never felt like something real. Sometimes it could even be fun. What now awaited him at the front was entirely different.

Some of his friends were already fighting. One of his closest friends and a fellow soldier at the Corps des Pages, was Prince Andrei Alexandrovich. Born just a few days after Vladimir, he was the Tsar's nephew, the son of his sister Xenia, and had been one of the first of their class to leave, just a couple of weeks after the war had started. Andrei's uncle had sped up his promotion and graduation from the academy so that he could join his father, Grand Duke Alexander, in Kyiv, in the Ukraine. Another cousin, Prince Oleg Constantinovich, had been killed in action, just two months earlier.