The mother of Prince Philip of England, great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria, Princess Alice of Battenberg was born into royalty and privilege. But in the course of her long life, Alice would suffer all the traumas of the tumultuous twentieth century. Deaf since birth, Alice learned to read lips in four languages, married into the royal house of Greece and had five children. When Greece entered the First Balkan War, Alice taught herself nursing and established frontline hospitals for the neglected soldiers. But after her relatives in Russia were slaughtered and she was exiled from Greece with her family, Alice began hearing voices and having religious visions. In 1930 was committed against her will by her own mother and diagnosed as a schizophrenic. Alice recovered enough to win her freedom again—only to see her beloved daughter Cécile killed in a terrible plane crash. Yet that trauma seemed to awaken something in Alice, something that pulled her out of the drifting mindset in which she had been existing, propelling her toward decades of service in which she hid a Jewish family from the Nazi occupation of Greece, started a religious order to help the poor, and connected with her family again.