When it became evident that his occupation of the Balkans was a strategic mistake, he had to call in old Prince Paskiewitch, the hero of his Persian War, to get him out of the scrape. Commissariat, equipment, munitions, transport, and the various subordinate necessaries for his army, were matters into which he did not deign to inquire. I do not propose to treat of the Crimean War; I will only say this much: that when I was discussing it one day, in 1863, with a Russian general, he told me that the losses suffered by the Tsar’s army in the terrible marches to the Crimea cost them more men than all the fighting put together. Want of food, clothes, boots, medicine for the sick, the robberies of commissariat and contractors, killed the soldiers by tens of thousands. I was bound to confess that our men were not much better off, until my old friend Billy Russell roused the indignation of the people. In the autumn of 1854 the Tsar declared that he looked to “le Général Février” to finish the war. It did, but not as he hoped. In the month of February, 1855, he died suddenly and mysteriously. The stories which have been published of a lingering death lasting several days, and of touching farewell interviews with the Empress and the Tsarevitch, may be dismissed as fables; I have dwelt upon this in my “Memories.” However that may be, whether he died a natural death from influenza, or whether, as many people believed, he took poison, it was a broken heart that killed him. The army that he had loved, the army that he had made and drilled, clothed and cherished, had failed him. Paskiewitch, whom he thought invincible, had been compelled to raise the siege of Silistria; the battle of Giurgevo had been lost; his troops, the bugbear of Europe, had been driven across the Danube by the Turks. The heights of the Alma, the night of Inkermann told the same tale. Sevastopol was doomed. The proud man was beaten; there was nothing left to him in this life; he laid him down and died—a man of many mistakes, but to the last the great “gentleman” that he claimed to be. Once again the angel of death was merciful. He was spared the misery of the final and supreme defeat. His impregnable fortress fallen, his button-perfect army on which he pinned his faith shattered, the whole edifice of his hereditary ambition and his pious strivings crumbled to dust! That Nicholas was greatly feared by his people must be admitted; at the same time, he was admired as something more than a man; and by those who surrounded him, though none came so often under the stinging lash of his displeasure, he was venerated and loved. His domestic life was perfect. He adored his wife—as he once said: “The first time I saw her I knew that I had met the guardian angel of my life.” She was the sister of that poor King of Prussia who was chiefly famous for his dullness and his love of champagne—le Roi Cliquot, as his Imperial brother-in-law was wont to call him.