This was the kind of life which went on. In July 1916 my uncle, the head of the unit, was killed by shell fire, at a moment of some very heavy fighting. The work they were carrying on was right near the firing lines.
At one time, during 1916 Nelka came for a few days to our country estate and one day I went with her to Petrograd. There she received a letter from her Aunt Martha Wadsworth. I was coming back to the country with Nelka on the train. She had the letter in her hand but would not open it for she said she felt it was bad news and she was afraid. She had a premonition of something wrong. We traveled all the way in silence and I could see how very anxious and upset she was. Feeling as I did for her, it was painful for me to see her in that state but there was nothing I could do. She did not open the letter until we reached home and she went alone into her room. It was what she had expected—the news that her beloved Aunt Susie Blow had died in New York.
Another terrible, painful shock, Nelka took it in a very hard way but with great calm and fortitude. She felt that she had failed her aunt, that she should have been with her, instead of at the war. She blames herself. She felt that being at the war was a form of selfishness of self-indulgence, when her duty should have been to remain with her aunt.
Once again a tragic and very hard blow, a blow so hard to accept because of her special devotion to that aunt.
But the war was on—she could not even indulge in her sorrow and she had to return to the front. Fighting was heavy that summer and her cavalry division was engaged and on the move. The unit was always up front, close to the fighting lines and the work was hard.
That summer I entered Officers Training School and did not see Nelka for a very long time.
On the first of February 1917, I received my commission as second lieutenant in the First Infantry Guard Regiment. This was the last promotion done by the Emperor. I was assigned to the Reserve Battalion stationed in Petrograd.
Less than a month later the Revolution broke out and I had a week of street fighting. Then chaos ensued.
Through most of the summer of 1917, I was at the front in Galicia. Nelka was somewhere at the front near the Rumanian border. We did not know where each of us was and had no communications.
Gradually the discipline in the Army, under the impact of the
Revolution, broke down and the front started to disintegrate.