While the British prisoners-of-war were held in Petrograd at the British Colony Hospital, they were given a tour of opulent private apartments in the Hermitage.
Leonard Vining could not resist playing a few notes on the magnificent gold piano that “still had a very sweet tone”, but Emerson MacMillan was more impressed by the Tsarina’s white marble bathroom that was decorated with marine views: “Beautiful it was as skill and art could make it, complete in every detail, but there was no water”. Their guards were still royalist to the core and quietly admitted that Russia was worse now than it had been under the Tsar.
Back in the hospital, the soldiers received many offers of marriage. “If only you will marry us so that we can get over the frontier out of Russia”, they would say, “we will promise never to worry you again”. The most persistent propositions were made by English women married to Russians who pleaded with Vining and the others to marry their daughters. Captain Brian Horrocks felt “very sorry for these unfortunate women and would gladly have helped them to escape from the country. But we all realised that we could not possibly just abandon them on the other side of the frontier. So after much discussion and soul searching we had to say no”.
Rupert Wieloch 