Rescuing Nicholas Chapter 1

An Enduring Saga

It was an extraordinary secret to keep from Congress. The 28th president of the United States had just ordered arguably one of the most riveting rescue missions in world history. But he did not want anyone on “the Hill” to know otherwise.

In fact, Thomas Woodrow Wilson went to great lengths to keep this mission secret from many members of his own cabinet and the other relevant Constitutionally-mandated body of American government that he mistrusted.

In another era, subterfuge of this political intensity might have generated impeachment from within the Capitol dome, not the celebration of victory one would expect from a mission of this grandeur.

It was the Wilson mystique. It was vintage Woodrow Wilson, to say the least. It was because of the war, the President might have reasoned.

The rescue mission President Wilson had authorized was for “Cousin Nicky,” the last Tsar of Russia. The Tsars had ruled Russia for over 400 years but Nicholas was now the last. He had abdicated months earlier as the Russian Revolution, a civil war really, had fully blossomed. Nicholas’ predicament was of great concern to other world leaders. Nicky was second cousin to the King of England, George V.

Nicholas was also first cousin to yet another world leader, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany. Together, they were the grandchildren of England’s legendary Queen Victoria. And together the three cousins were engaged in a war amongst themselves that was better known as World War I. Nevertheless, Wilhelm and George V were asking themselves, how could they help Cousin Nicky? If, they could save Nicky?

The Hutsons, on the other hand, were brothers, not cousins. Young men from the coal mine region of Tennessee. Their father, a murdered lumberman from the old school, had taught them to love their country and do as they were told. In those days, you did not question authority. You did as you were instructed. Everybody did. These boys just did it a little better than the best.

The brothers had honed their survival skills as young boys playing in the back woods near their home. They played at surviving with their play rifles day in and day out until one day, as young men, their country would call them – accept them - into service. President Wilson had a mission both brothers would play a role in achieving. One brother would even earn the Purple Heart and a lifetime of uncomplaining debilitating physical challenge.

At a few days older than 18 years of age, after begging his local recruiter to let him sign up early to fight on the Mexican border, Martin was asking himself how in the world did he end up here? Half a world away, riding a train in bitter cold escorting a man in a box - alive, no less?

He had stood on the steps of a train depot only days before and spied death all around him. The pictures he took and gathered from others would last a lifetime. The images in his memory were even more traumatic. He knew people wanted this man dead, desperately. He now carried a sword from the scene of the massacre between troops loyal to his new friend and troops committed to his ouster. The sword was not so much a souvenir but a reality check of what he had actually witnessed.

Thousands of miles away, his older brother, George, was distinguishing himself in the Black Forest of Germany under the command of a very famous American general known as Black Jack. He and a number of his fellow infantrymen would earn some of the highest medals the United States would award its bravest soldiers that war.

Half a century later, their older sister, Corrine, would tell and re-tell their stories to younger generations of family members. These stories became family lore. She would always recall harassing her younger brothers for playing such dangerous survival games in the back woods of their home. But she also knew now that their expert skills kept them both alive and it was now something she was encouraging her grandsons to learn themselves.

Had Corrine Hutson Miller’s own husband, John, been a newspaper reporter rather than a newspaper pressman for The Columbus Dispatch, the brothers’ astonishing stories would most likely have been publicly told decades before. Of course, there had been a stray story printed here and there. But no one had connected all of the dots.

But as the old cliché posits, this is now and that was then. Martin and his own fellow soldiers had come into country expecting to rescue American Red Cross nurses. For crying out loud, Martin thought he would be going to Mexico, not Russia. They were soldiers in the American Expeditionary Forces Siberia.

Their train bore the now internationally known symbol of the Red Cross with giant painted letters below so that they could not be missed – AMERIKANSKI. It was the supplemental orders to kill every one in the event of capture that confused Martin greatly.

The windows were blacked out on the regal, dark blue train consisting of a line of cars and an engine with a tender box. And even though the camouflaged train of well-appointed cars with Imperial icons strategically and ornamentally placed throughout raced through the isolated countryside, past village after village, some in Russia and some in China, on winding tracks far from any obvious threats, tension ran high.

They had already unexpectedly encountered a man named, Chang, near the border where they planned to escape. The Chinese general had tried to stop the party, burned some of their cars made of wood, but upon seeing the American soldiers traveling with a Japanese General, decided to let the passengers pass. This was not a fight that needed further fighting today, at least.

Martin and his comrades had no idea Chiang Kai-shek was inside an area where he did not belong and was thus in no mood to mix it up with someone other than the enemy he knew. It meant on this night, especially considering orders, everyone would live.

The gentleman in the center “car” was friendly enough. His young daughter was even friendlier and more gregarious. She liked to play games and was quite bright. Martin enjoyed the opportunity to share the lighthearted moments when they presented themselves but even these moments were becoming far fewer. He liked everything but the tea he had to drink with the gentleman’s wife and friend, a personal aide of some type he surmised.

Bad enough a newly inducted soldier from Tennessee would have to experience what he had these past few weeks, but sadder still that a young, delightful girl not much different than his own age, it would appear, would endure even greater trauma. Still she smiled and laughed, despite the uncertainties ahead, or the experiences past. Being a war refugee, for all practical purposes, was hell experienced several times over, he thought.

It was far too early in their mission for any of the American soldiers to realize they were first-hand witnesses to the first great mystery of the 20th century, particularly, young Martin. Right now, Martin was freezing. He was exposed to the rushing night air. He had never been this cold in Tennessee. This clearly was not the Mexico he thought he would encounter. And, of course, he wondered how his charge was faring himself. The officer, as he appeared to be, albeit now dressed in civilian clothes, was better dressed for the extreme temperatures. The heavy beard had to help, too.

It was clear to Martin that the middle-aged man in front of him was lost in thought. He knew that Allied British elite forces, aided by the Germans, had supposedly taken his only son and three older daughters out of the country already and he was reasonably certain they were safe. At least that is what the gentleman would tell Martin. He also had reason to believe his wife and younger daughter would gain freedom soon as well. They were in the car just ahead with a French-speaking woman. Surely that meant freedom for them, too? Did it not?

After all, that was the deal he had struck with the Japanese, the Canadians, the British, the Czechs, and the Americans - allies, all of whom had officers riding on the train this night with him, that was numbered to symbolize an American president in a rather ironic way. There was even American and British Consul Generals aboard. Surely, he could count on them to keep their word? After all, at least the Colonel and one of the Consul Generals worked for his cousin, the King.

Not to mention, the young soldier suffering the elements with him gave the gentleman some degree of comfort. Doubtful any rouge troops could now get near him before being shot. It was good to have a capable armed bodyguard near by, even if he was only armed with a .45 and an often frozen rifle that would have exploded had it been fired. The extreme cold in Siberia was nothing to take for granted.

As the train approached the Chinese border with his young daughter safe in the car ahead, the former officer was indeed growing in confidence all of them would soon be safe, in British hands again if all went according to plan. It had already been a long and stressful journey. He had shared a few stories with young Martin, but, just a few. And, very brief when he did share, but chocked full of entertaining, controversial detail.

Fast Forward

The bones would later yield a story that history could not accept. It was and still is a story that Martin did not experience and certainly did not remember that way. The father would be found, or so the experts would claim. Of course, like all good mysteries, an argument would subsequently be made that the bones of the father were in fact from a man measurably larger than he. Another relative perhaps? A loyal friend? A stand-in who had not expected to die for volunteering his shadow role?

A daughter and son would also turn up missing, at least for a suspicious while. But the other sisters and a few trusted aides would be reported in the grave deep in the forest - the doctor, a maid, and a cook, too.

Forensic scientists would disagree about this as well. DNA would apparently not prove absolutely conclusive, especially on one daughter and the man himself. And questions would, quite naturally, yield even more questions. Reliable answers would be rare. A key forensic pathologist who dissented would conveniently die too young himself. Logic, it would seem, would not exist. Books would speculate endlessly. Related film would prove to be blockbuster hits in commercial theaters.

Rumors would say the man’s son would live out his years in Ireland.

The bearded man, the distinguished father with the accent that Martin would later say would make an Oxford professor envious, himself would be whispered to have been photographed in White Russian émigré village near Collon, north of Dublin. His wife and daughters would be said to have lived nearby as well. The youngest daughter would even be rumored to have lived a pedestrian but eccentric life in Virginia, although later DNA testing would theoretically, at least, dispel that myth, too.

And yet history convincingly told the story they were all dead, executed by troops loyal to the new revolutionary government. Burned beyond recognition or identification in another age when nuclear and mitochondrial DNA did not exist as a forensic tool and the 24-hour news cycle with exploding social media could not explore the inaccuracies of the event in a more-timely fashion.

History, it seemed, wanted the Romanov family dead. History, it seemed, needed the Romanov family dead. What makes this murder-mystery-disappearance so fascinating and perplexing, however, is what was not done when all of this drama become public many days and weeks later. There would be no credible or obvious investigation by British authorities into what happened to the murder victims.

Astonishingly, the one victim, the Empress Alexandra, was the treasured and popular granddaughter of a most legendary and highly influential Queen of England. Still five others were that same storied Queen’s great grandchildren. Did these famous and connected murder victims not merit more attention, or angst at the time of their supposed murder?

Even more intriguing to the ongoing controversy over the Romanov fate are recent disclosures that present Russian President Vladimir Putin, himself a former spy in the notorious Soviet KGB, would like to see the Russian royal family reinstated and the Tsars brought back to a more formal role in his legendary nation.

History tees up many surprises, it would appear.

But what if Tsar Nicholas II and his wife, the Empress Alexandra, were not in fact buried in that grave outside of Yekaterinburg in the early days of the Russian Revolution? What if the 1.5 percent uncertainty was in fact, fact? What if 1.5 percent meant that DNA evidence could actually be in error?

Is it possible?

What if the DNA tests conducted under the post-Soviet-era president Boris Yeltsen were forged and the Tsar’s body was not actually the Tsar’s body as history has been told? Or what if the Tsar had lived out his life in exile and his bones were eventually returned to make it look like they had been in the grave all along?

Was a cover-up of this magnitude actually possible?

What if the fabled Anastasia, the youngest daughter of the Tsar and the Tsarina, actually did indeed make her way to the United States as legend has it and settled in to an eventual quiet life as the Grand Duchess, as her maternal grandmother, the Empress Dowager once said? Could the DNA evidence have been wrong yet again?

And, if so, how?

What if her youngest brother, the crown prince of the now-overthrown Tsarist Russian Empire, quietly settled into the life of a common Irish citizen? What if he had lived despite his hemophilia? Who, then, might be the rightful heir to a 400-year-old dynasty? Is there one, can there be one, 100 years later? Does the earlier abdication still matter?

What if members of the family did escape? Perhaps Nicholas himself?

Could it be that the Romanovs escaped with the help of the Bolshevik Russians who wanted at almost all costs to get the former Tsar out their homeland? Surely, the Americans and the British would have needed the help of the Bolsheviks to pull this rescue mission off under the political and military circumstances of the times?

What if the Tsar’s relative, the King of England, George V, Nicholas’ second cousin but his wife’s first cousin, had indeed given his two cousins political sanctuary after all? What if his first cousin, the German Kaiser, Wilhelm II, cooperated with his British enemy so that Nicky could live, even though he might have appeared to die?

Could global politics of war and peace have been so ironical, so manipulating?

What if Woodrow Wilson had engineered the most successful rescue in world history with few people knowing what really happened? Could Congress have been snookered like that? Are the president’s commanding generals to be exonerated now for their actual success, as opposed to reported failures at the time?

What if the King and the President were heroes in this story, unlike history has portrayed them so far?

What if Martin Hutson had witnessed a history much different from that that was eventually recorded? What if Tsar Nicholas II and his wife Alexandria and at least one of their children cheated death and escaped Lenin’s troops, thanks to his own loyal guard?

What if the westernized villain, Vladimir Lenin, actually helped the Tsar and his family escape – did not kill them as common knowledge now alleges? Was Lenin, at least in this case, more humane and practical than we have been led to believe?

What if conclusive DNA results, obtained nearly a century later, were not conclusive at all?

What if it was not the Romanovs, after all? What if history did not tell us the truth?

Would history care?

These are all good questions. But on this night, as the Chinese border loomed and the story from Yekaterinburg fell far behind, U.S. Army Private First Class Martin Van Buren Hutson would not care about history, or rumors, or what ifs, or why his “guest” was riding in great secrecy in a box on his own train.

For on this cold, bitter evening, very far from home, Martin was focused on following instructions like those his own late father had taught him to follow years before. Martin was focused solely on safely escorting out of the country the last Tsar of Russia, his wife Alexandra, their young daughter, and treasures of an empire about to be lost to history.

Nicholas Read

Rescuing Nicholas Chapter 1

An Enduring Saga