Her nursing, her visits to all the Petrograd hospitals, her train trips to hospitals in Moscow and other distant towns, her battles with the Munitions Committee and the Red Cross and evasive local officials who tried to keep her from scrutinizing their operations, her reading of petitions people handed her on her trips, her collecting of cribs for the Society for Mothers and Babies (‘every baby must be cared for, as the losses are so heavy at the war’), her supervision of her workshops, of her school for nurses and housemaids, of her home for disabled sailors left her ‘dead tired,’ her chest aching and her breath coming in short nervous gasps. ‘Only sheer willpower kept her going during the first five months of the war,’ Sophie Buxhoeveden wrote of Alix. By December of 1914 she was seriously ill, and in danger of collapse.1 Nursing had to be put aside, though the invalid Alix insisted, during her months of convalescence, on knitting garments for the soldiers and preparing icons and images of her husband to be distributed to each regiment.
