ABSTRACT
In late 1916, as the German army lay siege to Bucharest, Queen Marie of Romania hastily gathered her entourage and decamped to the Moldavian town of Iasi. There was little chance of refuge even here: Iasi had been beset by starvation and disease, and with the enemy advancing from the west, and her Russian ally succumbing to revolution, the prospect of defeat and humiliation became a daily anxiety. It would seem a wretched position for this English princess, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria, to find herself in. After a sheltered childhood in England, one imagines her union with Ferdinand in 1893, and exile from the royal circles of the West, had already caused severe misgivings about the marital arrangements of European dynasties. For the signs of self-pity, however, one searches her war memoirs in vain. Marie’s nostalgia for England had gradually diminished, giving way to a devotion to Romania long before the years in Iasi had begun. In awe of its cultural traditions, she had cast off the constraints of her station and gender, and had taken to cross-dressing in native costume, riding out alone across isolated country, fraternizing with troops in frontline trenches and to dining with peasants in impoverished villages. So great was her new affinity that when she wrote from Iasi of the ‘tears, sorrow and regret’ of being ‘banished’, and her ‘fearful yearning for the home I had lost’,2 it is not England to which she refers. The memoirs dwell on a separation from central Romania that had been, for her, a far more grievous exile.
