and once independent states of Germany have for the despotic house of Prussia.” During WWI, Marie supervised many projected for the Russian army. She oversaw hospital trains for the troops. Albert Stopford admired Marie's efficiency and skill in organizing, claiming that Marie "spar[ed] herself no trouble" and was "quite thorough." She developed a charity to give complete outfits and money to disabled Russian soldiers who were sent home. Granted permission by Emperor Nicholas, she ran the charity with state money and money from her personal wealth. Like many other Romanovs, Marie feared that Empress Alexandra would "be the sole ruler of Russia" after Nicholas took supreme command of the Russian armies on 23 August 1915 (O.S.), hoping this would lift morale. It was widely speculated that along with her sons, she contemplated a coup against the Emperor in the winter of 1916–17, that would force the Tsar's abdication and replacement by his son Tsesarevich Alexei, and her son, Grand Duke Kirill or Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich, as regent. There is no documentary evidence to support this, though the Duma president Mikhail Rodzianko famously reported that she said that the Empress must be "annihilated". Escape from Russia Marie was the last of the Romanovs to escape Revolutionary Russia and the first to die in exile. She remained in the war-torn Caucasus with her two younger sons throughout 1917 and 1918, still hoping to make her eldest son Kirill Vladimirovich the Tsar. As the Bolsheviks approached, the group finally escaped aboard a fishing boat to Anapa in 1918. Maria spent fourteen months in Anapa, refusing to join her son Boris in leaving Russia. When opportunities for escape via Constantinople presented themselves she refused to leave for fear she would be subjected to the indignity of delousing. She finally agreed to leave when the general of the White Army warned her that his side was losing the civil war. Maria, her son Andrei, Andrei's mistress Mathilde Kschessinska, and Andrei and Mathilde's son Vladimir, boarded an Italian ship headed to Venice on 13 February 1920. Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna of Russia encountered Maria at the port of Novorossiysk in early 1920: "Disregarding peril and hardship, she stubbornly kept to all the trimmings of bygone splendour and glory. And somehow she carried it off... When even generals found themselves lucky to find a horse cart and an old nag to bring them to safety, Aunt