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Authors: Pierre Berton
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the North as possible”: in short, an act of sabotage. In that same period the Romanian prime minister, Ion Brătianu, asked Boyle to go to Petrograd on his behalf on a delicate mission to assure Leon Trotsky, then Bolshevik commissar for foreign affairs, that the Jassy government wanted to avoid friction between Romania and the new Soviet regime.
Motion pictures, like stage plays, tend to be divided into three acts. The first act of The Saviour of Romania was now complete. Since every good movie requires a love interest, the second begins in March 1918, when Boyle meets Marie, the alluring Queen of Romania.
She was Queen Victoria’s granddaughter, tall, elegant, spirited, intelligent, and still beautiful at forty-three—everything, in short, that a queen should be. It was she who had stiffened the spine of her Hohenzollern husband, the weak and vacillating King Ferdinand, persuading him to put his natural inclinations aside and join the Allies in their war against the Germans and the Central Powers.
She was a romantic in the grand sense. At the moment of her greatest despair, the arrival of a bold and unconventional Yukoner gave her courage. At their first brief meeting on March 2, she had only the vaguest idea of who he was, but he was certainly impressive. “A very curious, fascinating sort of man, who is frightened of nothing, and who, by his extraordinary force of will, gets through everywhere. The real type English adventurer books are written around.”
The second meeting lasted two hours, with the Queen at her lowest ebb. The Allied missions were vacating Jassy, fearing the German advance would cut them off, and the Queen stayed up to make her farewells. It was a black night, the rain pouring down as if to accentuate her anguish. Then, into the reception hall, uniform dripping from the deluge, walked Joe Boyle. “Have you come to see me?” she asked as he advanced to meet her. “No, Ma’am,” Boyle replied, “I have come to help you.”
Queen Marie of Romania, Boyle’s friend, confidante, and reputed mistress who enjoyed striking poses like this for the camera. She was a granddaughter of Queen Victoria .
Marie’s fervent recollections of those midnight hours vibrate with the kind of passion one associates with cheap nineteenth-century novels or early twentieth-century movies. “I tried to let myself be steeled by the man’s relentless energy, tried to absorb some of the quiet force which emanates from him. I poured out my heart to him in those hours.… I do not know all that I told him, the memory is a blur, but I made a clean breast of all my grief and when he left me and I said that everyone was forsaking me, he answered very quietly, ‘But I don’t,’ and the grip of his hand was as strong as iron.”
Boyle left almost immediately for Odessa to implement the peace treaty with Russia that the Romanian cabinet had finally signed. Before he went, Marie reminded him that more than two dozen of her country’s most notable citizens—ex-ministers, politicians, industrialists, members of the aristocracy—were being held hostage in Odessa by the Bolsheviks, awaiting a prisoner exchange for Russians held in Romania. The situation was precarious. The prisoners were locked up in Turma, a heavily guarded prison fortress. Around them, something close to civil war was breaking out between leaders of the inexperienced Bolshevik regime and so-called White Russians. Under the new treaty, which Boyle himself had pressed for, the hostages were to be dispatched by rail from Odessa to Jassy while the four hundred Russians hived in Romania would get safe transport back to their own country. It was not to work out that way.
Now another remarkable woman enters the picture—a doughty Canadian, Madame Ethel Greening Pantazzi, whose husband, a high-ranking Romanian naval officer, was one of the hostages. A friendly source within the prison had bad news for her. The Bolsheviks in charge, she told Boyle, had
Motion pictures, like stage plays, tend to be divided into three acts. The first act of The Saviour of Romania was now complete. Since every good movie requires a love interest, the second begins in March 1918, when Boyle meets Marie, the alluring Queen of Romania.
She was Queen Victoria’s granddaughter, tall, elegant, spirited, intelligent, and still beautiful at forty-three—everything, in short, that a queen should be. It was she who had stiffened the spine of her Hohenzollern husband, the weak and vacillating King Ferdinand, persuading him to put his natural inclinations aside and join the Allies in their war against the Germans and the Central Powers.
She was a romantic in the grand sense. At the moment of her greatest despair, the arrival of a bold and unconventional Yukoner gave her courage. At their first brief meeting on March 2, she had only the vaguest idea of who he was, but he was certainly impressive. “A very curious, fascinating sort of man, who is frightened of nothing, and who, by his extraordinary force of will, gets through everywhere. The real type English adventurer books are written around.”
The second meeting lasted two hours, with the Queen at her lowest ebb. The Allied missions were vacating Jassy, fearing the German advance would cut them off, and the Queen stayed up to make her farewells. It was a black night, the rain pouring down as if to accentuate her anguish. Then, into the reception hall, uniform dripping from the deluge, walked Joe Boyle. “Have you come to see me?” she asked as he advanced to meet her. “No, Ma’am,” Boyle replied, “I have come to help you.”
Queen Marie of Romania, Boyle’s friend, confidante, and reputed mistress who enjoyed striking poses like this for the camera. She was a granddaughter of Queen Victoria .
Marie’s fervent recollections of those midnight hours vibrate with the kind of passion one associates with cheap nineteenth-century novels or early twentieth-century movies. “I tried to let myself be steeled by the man’s relentless energy, tried to absorb some of the quiet force which emanates from him. I poured out my heart to him in those hours.… I do not know all that I told him, the memory is a blur, but I made a clean breast of all my grief and when he left me and I said that everyone was forsaking me, he answered very quietly, ‘But I don’t,’ and the grip of his hand was as strong as iron.”
Boyle left almost immediately for Odessa to implement the peace treaty with Russia that the Romanian cabinet had finally signed. Before he went, Marie reminded him that more than two dozen of her country’s most notable citizens—ex-ministers, politicians, industrialists, members of the aristocracy—were being held hostage in Odessa by the Bolsheviks, awaiting a prisoner exchange for Russians held in Romania. The situation was precarious. The prisoners were locked up in Turma, a heavily guarded prison fortress. Around them, something close to civil war was breaking out between leaders of the inexperienced Bolshevik regime and so-called White Russians. Under the new treaty, which Boyle himself had pressed for, the hostages were to be dispatched by rail from Odessa to Jassy while the four hundred Russians hived in Romania would get safe transport back to their own country. It was not to work out that way.
Now another remarkable woman enters the picture—a doughty Canadian, Madame Ethel Greening Pantazzi, whose husband, a high-ranking Romanian naval officer, was one of the hostages. A friendly source within the prison had bad news for her. The Bolsheviks in charge, she told Boyle, had
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