[43] At the time I am writing I find what I have said fully confirmed in the following passage from an article by M. Paleologue, French Ambassador at Petrograd: _La Russie des Tsars pendant la Grande Guerre_ (_Revue des Deux Mondes_ of March 15th, 1921):
“I have several times heard the Czarina charged with having preserved sympathies, predilections, and a warm corner for Germany when she was on the throne. The unfortunate woman in no way merited these strictures, which she knew of and made her so unhappy. Alexandra Feodorovna was German neither in spirit nor in sentiment. She never was.”
“Her education, bringing-up, her intellectual and moral outlook were entirely English. She was English in appearance and bearing, in a certain element of reserve and Puritanism, in the intractable and militant austerity of her conscience, and, lastly, in many of her personal habits. In any case, that was all that was left of her Western origin. The basis of her character had become entirely Russian. In spite of the hostile legend which was growing up round her name, I did not doubt her patriotism. She had a fervent love of Russia.”
[44] It was only subsequently that I learned that, to overcome the resistance he met with at Bucharest, the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Sturmer (who had succeeded Sazonoff), had promised that Russian troops would be sent to Rumania. He had not referred to G.H.Q. first.
[45] History will one day settle what part Sturmer played. If he did not actually work for a _rapprochement_ with Germany, though everything seems to show that he did, he none the less did his country irreparable harm through his criminal negligence and utter lack of scruples.
[46] The very education of a sovereign makes him entirely unfitted for the task before him, and yet it is impossible to make good the defect afterwards. The larger the part he plays in government the less he knows of what is going on. To keep him away from his people he is given nothing but mutilated, distorted, and “cooked” reports. No one can realise the resisting power of those about a throne, the invincible apathy of a bureaucracy steeped in traditional observance and routine! Whatever strength of mind, whatever tenacity a sovereign may display in finding out the truth, does he ever really succeed? Napoleon had been through the school of life, and raised himself to a throne by sheer genius and audacity, but his fate was the same as that of other rulers. In the last years of his reign did he still know what was happening in France? Had he still a sense of reality?