romanovsonelastdance:When the war started, part of the Czarskoe Selo Palace was made into a hospital

romanovsonelastdance:When the war started, part of the Czarskoe Selo Palace was made into a hospital. The younger daughters of the Czar, Maria and Anastasia, were made the hostesses. Olga and Tatiana were nurses at the hospital. The Czarevich used to come to see us when he would get back from the front; in fact, he used to ask the sisters to take him with them. And it was a great treat to be taken to the hospital. I was there thirteen months, and the girls came every day except when they did not behave; their punishment was that they were not allowed to go to the hospital. We all loved the boy and girls. They were so plain we could not tell them apart from ordinary children, only that they were so wonderfully well behaved. The Czarevich would play dice with us. The loser forfeited a run. He used to love that game. When the sisters were not around he would complain that it was so lonesome at the [palace]; he would look out to see if the girls were gone before he would complain, and when we did not talk to him and stand at attention, he would get angry and say, “oh you make me tired; can’t you talk to me?” When he would come to any place there was a picture of the Kaiser was, he would always destroy it. Maria and Anastasia showed us their photograph albums. I noticed a snapshot which they had taken of the Kaiser and the Czar together on a battleship. The face of the Kaiser was scratched. Maria said it must have been that the photographs stuck together, whereupon Anastasia volunteered that it was Alexis did it with his fingernails.The children used to talk Russian fluently, but very fast, and I believe the reason they spoke so fast was that they were so rarely in contact with strangers that they were always in a hurry to tell them all they knew before they would called away. The girls always sat at the bedside of the wounded soldiers and officers, playing with them in different games. They would ask us to tell them the stories of the people from the outside life. They would call “outside life” anything that was not in the [palace], and would listen intently not to miss one word. They were very well read, and what they did not know they would look up in reference books. - Captain Michael Geraschinevsky, The Ill-Fated Children of the Czar, 1919 -- source link

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