Page:Ossendowski - The Shadow of the Gloomy East.djvu/202

186 at Omsk, the most popular and sympathetic of the Tsar's daughters—the Grand Duchess Tatyana. It was said that she married a humble officer whom she nursed during the war in the Tsarkoye Selo hospital, and who saved her from Bolshevik prison in Tobolsk before the removal of the Imperial prisoners to Yekaterinburg, by substituting for her a devoted girl.

The Grand Duchess visited, on her way, the hospitals situated near the railway stations, and distributed her own and the Empress-Mother's photographs.

The mysterious couple went to the East, remained for a time in Japan, and were said to have gone to the States.

All these personalities were proved on inquiry to have had relations with the monarchist party in Siberia; it may be that those relations extended even further to the die-hard monarchists of the Markov group in Berlin and the Dumbadse group in Yokohama.

For the monarchists refuse to understand that times have changed, and that their programmes are a hopeless anachronism. They still work feverishly for their political aims in all the capitals of the world, poor dreamers whom reality has long ago thrown on to the blood-stained scrapheap of history.