Successive Life Crises
With the advent of the Balkan Wars, Prince Andrew was reinstated in the army and Princess Andrew acted as a nurse, assisting at operations and setting up field hospitals, for which work George V of the United Kingdom awarded her the Royal Red Cross in 1913. During World War I, her brother-in-law, King Constantine of Greece, followed a neutrality policy despite the democratically elected government of Venizelos supporting the Allies. Princess Andrew and her children were forced to shelter in the palace cellars during the French bombardment of Athens on 1 December 1916. By June 1917, the King's neutrality policy had become so untenable that she and other members of the Greek royal family were forced into exile when her brother-in-law abdicated. For the next few years most of the Greek royal family lived in Switzerland.
The global war effectively ended much of the political power of Europe's dynasties. The naval career of her father, Prince Louis of Battenberg, had collapsed at the beginning of the war in the face of anti-German sentiment in Britain. At the request of King George V, on 14 July 1917, he relinquished the title Prince of Battenberg in the Grand Duchy of Hesse and the style Serene Highness, and Anglicized the family name to Mountbatten. The following day, the King created him Marquess of Milford Haven in the peerage of the United Kingdom. The following year, two of her aunts, Alix, Tsarina of Russia, and Grand Duchess Elizabeth Fyodorovna were murdered by Bolsheviks after the Russian revolution. At the end of the war the Russian, German and Austro-Hungarian empires had fallen, and Princess Andrew's uncle, Ernest Louis, Grand Duke of Hesse, was deposed.
On King Constantine's restoration in 1920, they briefly returned to Greece, taking up residence at Mon Repos on Corfu. But after the defeat of the Hellenic Army in the Greco-Turkish War, a Revolutionary Committee under the leadership of Colonels Nikolaos Plastiras and Stylianos Gonatas seized power and forced King Constantine into exile once again. Prince Andrew, who had served as commander of the Second Army Corps during the war, was arrested. Several former ministers and generals arrested at the same time were shot, and British diplomats assumed that Prince Andrew was also in mortal danger. After a show trial he was sentenced to banishment, and Prince and Princess Andrew and their children fled Greece aboard a British cruiser, HMS Calypso, under the protection of the British naval attaché, Commander Gerald Talbot.
The family settled in a small house loaned to them by Princess George of Greece at Saint-Cloud, on the outskirts of Paris, where Princess Andrew helped in a charity shop for Greek refugees. She became deeply religious, and on 20 October 1928 entered the Greek Orthodox Church. That winter, she translated her husband's defence of his actions during the Greco-Turkish War into English. Soon afterward, she began claiming that she was receiving divine messages, and that she had healing powers. In 1930, after suffering a severe nervous breakdown, Princess Andrew was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia at Dr Ernst Simmel's sanatorium at Tegel, Berlin. She was forcibly removed from her family and placed in Dr Ludwig Binswanger's sanatorium in Kreuzlingen, Switzerland. It was a famous and well-respected institution with several celebrity patients, including Vaslav Nijinsky, the ballet dancer and choreographer, who was there at the same time as Princess Andrew.
During Princess Andrew's long convalescence, she and Prince Andrew drifted apart, her daughters all married German princes in 1930 and 1931 (she did not attend any of the weddings), and Prince Philip went to England to stay with his uncles, Lord Louis Mountbatten and George Mountbatten, 2nd Marquess of Milford Haven, and his grandmother, the Dowager Marchioness of Milford Haven.
Princess Andrew remained at Kreuzlingen for two years, but after a brief stay at a clinic in Meran, was released and began an itinerant, incognito existence in Central Europe. She maintained contact with her mother, but broke off ties to the rest of her family until the end of 1936. In 1937, her daughter Cécile, son-in-law and two of her grandchildren were killed in an air accident at Ostend; she and Prince Andrew met for the first time in six years at the funeral (Prince Philip, Lord Louis Mountbatten and Hermann Göring also attended). She resumed contact with her family, and in 1938 returned to Athens alone to work with the poor, living in a two-bedroomed flat near the Benaki Museum.
Read more about this topic: Princess Alice Of Battenberg
Famous quotes containing the words successive, life and/or crises:
“A sturdy lad from New Hampshire or Vermont who in turn tries all the professions, who teams it, farms it, peddles, keeps a school, preaches, edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township, and so forth, in successive years, and always like a cat falls on his feet, is worth a hundred of these city dolls. He walks abreast with his days and feels no shame in not “studying a profession,” for he does not postpone his life, but lives already.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“[The sceptic] must acknowledge, if he will acknowledge any thing, that all human life must perish, were his principles to prevail. All discourse, all action would immediately cease, and men remain in a total lethargy, till the necessities of nature, unsatisfied, put an end to their miserable existence.”
—David Hume (1711–1776)
“I am not fooling myself with dreams of immortality, know how relative all literature is, don’t have any faith in mankind, derive enjoyment from too few things. Sometimes these crises give birth to something worth while, sometimes they simply plunge one deeper into depression, but, of course, it is all part of the same thing.”
—Stefan Zweig (18811942)