In July 1918, the U.S.S. Olympia, a frequently patched-and-welded cruiser, plugged across the North Sea, zigzagging among decoy ships to avoid sudden death by torpedo, or the remorseless sway of a plum-colored mine. Aboard were thirteen hundred Allied soldiers, a polynational force under British command: French, Italian, Canadian, and men of the Royal Scots Regiment. Also belowdecks were Company K, twenty-five forward troops from the 339th of Detroit. They assumed with heartbreaking naïveté that they were heading to France.
Almost to a man, they throbbed with superstition and trust. The Olympia was obviously a lucky vessel to travel on, for it had seen famous service in the Spanish-American War — each doughboy had his photograph taken in front of the polished brass plaque that marked the location where Commodore Dewey had intoned, “You may fire when you are ready, Gridley,” twenty years before. In truth, the men of the 339th of Detroit were anxious to have their own famous phrases coined, to go Over the Top, even if by 1918 most of them were aware that war was no longer a guaranteed jolly rite of passage. It had turned out that war could be tremendously positive or tremendously awful, sometimes both at once. But at least it was tremendous. And when faced with the opportunity to have stories to tell for a lifetime, none of the 339th, Company K, was really going to ask troubling questions, such as “If we’re going to France, why has the quartermaster outfitted us with ham-handed mittens and fur-lined hats?”
There was an exception. The diaries of Pfc. Hugo Black, among rhapsodies to his last stateside glass of semillion, his last bite of boeuf à la chanterelle, reveal a man troubled by where exactly he was going, and moreso why. Hugo was the son of a professor at the University of Michigan. Hugo Black, pere, was a scholar of mechanics, specializing in the design of railway trains. “I am an engineer of engineers,” he had said, frequently, with the eternal hope that he might be found witty, and his son, after cringing through many summers of railway work, moved as far from home as adventure allowed: Saginaw.
Still he returned for cotillion season, tall and striking in a dinner jacket, with or without vents, irked only when his mother told him to try not to show his profile. He was as handsome as a cardinal, she said, when faced dead-on, with broad shoulders, an imperial hairline, regal bearing and deep-set black eyes that, frankly, only a mother could accuse of sparkling. But even she had to admit that, when approached obliquely, his beakish nose and weak chin made him look forty-seven years old, and hardly marriage-able.
At age twenty-five, young Hugo should have been officer material, but he had volunteered for the infantry in a burst of feeling for the common man after a drunken evening — immediately regretted — of reading aloud the poetry of Walt Whitman. His first entry aboard the Olympia quoted Karl von Clausewitz as follows: “No one starts a war — or rather, no one in his senses ought to do so — without first being clear in his mind what he intends to achieve by that war and how he intends to conduct it.” Which is lofty, a global sort of consideration, until Hugo added, as context, “So Finch and Bryzinski shouldn’t have stolen my chocolate ration. Not unless they were going to eat it. Idiots. I am full of disillusionment.”
He was disappointed by performing KP (“What black sun and scorched earth conspired to grow these limp and tortured carrots?”), by the medical staff (the only medication aboard the Olympia was the ghastly cathartic Number Nine Bullets), by the weaponry (their Springfields had been replaced with the somewhat mysterious choice of Russian Mosin-Nagant rifles, which were said to be most accurate when firing around corners).
But, most profoundly, he was disappointed by his fellow soldiers. How had the AEF found twenty-four men from Detroit with whom he had so little in common? He was disappointed that his opinions were ignored, as he deeply believed the world would be a much better place if only it followed his directions. The other men, however, insisted on discussing baseball as if arid Navin Field were 1918′s agora.
Outnumbered by a thousand foreign soldiers who had the benefit of European education, Hugo had been horrified by how the 339th, Company K, manifested civic pride. They didn’t brag about Stokowski conducting the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, or ballet nights at Ann Arbor directed by Ossip Gabrilowitsch. Instead, one evening at the mess, over sloppy buckets of M&V dribbled across unbreakable biscuit rations, a horrible little rat of a man, Pfc. Wodziczko, bragged to the British, the French, the Italians, that Detroit, Michigan, was proud home to not only the Tigers, but also — he paused to savor it — the world’s largest stove.
There was a kind of babble after that, with one side of the table — the American side — agreeing that you could keep your Westminster Abbey, your Louvre, but the world’s largest stove was something to behold; the other side, the European, was translating this late proof that their new allies were in fact a befuddled gaggle of swamp geese barely fit for the stewpot.
“Stokowski,” Hugo announced, weakly. “Have they told you about Stokowski?”
He was drowned out by Wodziczko, who cried out that it was rumored that soon they would eclipse Dayton and secure the world’s largest cash register. Detroit was a city on the move!
Hugo had been given charge of several two-reel melodramas and comedies, including “Johanna Enlists,” featuring Miss Mary Pickford. Her popularity had swollen since her divorce; she was unstoppable now that she was arm in arm with Douglas Fairbanks. To watch her laugh, it was said, was to remember the springtime hills of home. Alas, Hugo swapped away his canisters of “Johanna Enlists” to British officers, who gave him a pint of rum and a one-reeler starring Freckles the Educated Chimp. He attempted to show the chimp film to the Olympia sailors, ending up barricaded in a supply closet after the audience had knocked over the projector and set fire to the screen.
Two weeks out of the port of Newcastle-on-Tyne, with still not a speck of land in sight, Hugo remained with the linens. He slept on a bed of absurdly warm overcoats that had been stiffened with layers of grease, and listened from the cozy company of brooms, mops, ammonia, and dustpans for the ship’s F-sharp bells indicating a shore landing was nigh. He had expected savage behavior from his countrymen, but that the deprivation of Mary Pickford had caused riots by the Italians (scions of Dante!) and the French (who could gaze daily upon the “Winged Victory of Samothrace”) dismayed him.
On his last night in exile, he broke open a crate to find mustard-colored English-Russian phrase books, which he read by candlelight.
How many versts (2/3rds of a mile) to headquarters?
Skol ‘ko vyorst do shtaba?
Drop your weapons — we are soldiers!
Pozhaluysta, nie streliayte — my devstvennitsy!
He had placed his destiny in the hands of a bureaucracy that expected soldiers in the Belleau Wood to bark orders in Russian. “I am doomed,” he wrote. “I belong nowhere. Why am I here? Where am I? And why do we have overcoats? I am depressed.”
Hugo’s destination was a secret. Having the boots of two million fresh American troops ready to lay siege to the Hindenburg Line had lent a heady kind of momentum to the United States of America. President Wilson ordered the 339th Infantry Regiment of Detroit, Michigan, to invade Russia.
There were twenty thousand tons of Allied matériel stored in North Russia that could fall into German or Red Army hands. And an invasion of Russia could open a new front against Germany. And the White Russians could use help against the Bolsheviks. And so on. These were reasonable casus belli, but they were largely irrelevant. Wilson had given the subject far less public consideration than, say, sending troops to Europe in the first place. Once war had been declared, a little more war was barely something to fret about.
But in his private aide-mémoire, written with one of the legendary green Ticonderoga pencils crushed from stem to stern by his anxious molars, Wilson confessed a secret, one that gave him cluster headaches until he awoke his wife to discuss it by the bedroom fireplace, which was kept cold year-round in the spirit of wartime sacrifice. Wilson had a moral compass that pursued “north” with the strength of a Presbyterian minister — and his idea was a deeply moral one.
The Allies weren’t engaging the real Russian populace in battle, just the Leninist criminals, the gullible, and the easily led. The Bolsheviks were wild-eyed, frothing men who shouted more than they made sense, but they were men with passion, and as Wilson gently explained to Edith, he had seen footage of Trotsky, he understood his primal appeal, the crowds had no one better to follow. And in this sympathy was President Wilson’s secret hope, tucked deep within the aide-mémoire, swaddled among qualifying clauses as if nestled in baby blankets: that the mere fact of Western boots plowing the snow would leave seeds behind, causing democracy to erupt and flower spontaneously.
Part Two
Joining the 339th would be the 310th Engineers and hospital units to stand alongside Canadians and Europeans until a solid mass, an unstoppable wave of fresh men, was ready to swoop down from the north. Almost eight thousand men in total! But that would take time, and preparation, which is why U.S.S. Olympia had been sent in advance.
Pfc. Hugo Black stumbled deckside to fall into formation with his company (who still hated him) just as the Olympia passed the harbor breakwater of Archangel, Russia, twenty miles up the flinty and sulfurous Dvina River. Russia? There was no longer time to despise Hugo, for there was a wholly new and unexpected country to begin despising.
Archangel was a shoddy place. Three degrees above the Arctic Circle, cloaked under darkness six months of the year and under clouds the color of a soiled tunic for the rest, it had been discovered and dismissed by Peter the Great as a tedious disappointment. Fifty thousand tired souls lived in borrowed rags, their importance extinguished the moment Russia found a warm-water port. There were open sewers, and frightening-looking prostitutes who stood by them. Every structure from the waterfront to the factories to the lean-to government buildings looked as if it could be folded up and run off with in the middle of the Arctic night.
Muddy-looking citizens lined the wharves, and though the European troops ignored them, the men of Company K rushed to the rails. There were no guns pointing at them, but, on the other hand, Hugo couldn’t quite hear, say, howls of pleasure.
The atmosphere was tense, the city unsure if a sigh of relief was in order. A bloodless counterrevolution had just been executed. The aristocracy and the peasants had never embraced the Bolsheviks here. Further, the working class was impressed by the Allies’ promise of cigarettes, which they’d been running low on under Lenin’s brief tenure.
The landing would be relatively safe, but for one small detail: because a thorough looting of a city always took longer than expected, one last train of Bolshevik soldiers had yet to depart. It waited, black as soot, on the tracks between the dock and the warehouses, not fifty yards from where the Olympia was about to land. Cross-gates were open, and men tugged toward the cars mules and horses, wheels of cheese, tungsten blocks, spools of copper wire, and whatever antique carvings of saints weren’t nailed down. The train engineer, an Uzbek whose tertiary syphilis made him occasionally a tad grouchy, was tinkering with its wood burner.
The Olympia dropped anchor at half past eight on the fair but hazy morning of August 2. The two bluecoat sailors who jumped upon the docks to tie the pug-nosed ship’s lines were the first Allied soldiers whose heels touched Russian soil. A gangplank appeared on deck, and Hugo’s company was among those drilled in the art of the gangplank march, so they could disembark in haste without falling into the water.
On principle, the 339th resisted taking orders from the British, but they followed their drill with accuracy. Step, shuffle, step, shuffle, step and POUNCE to dry land. Hugo, who remembered childhood breakfast-nook conversations with his mother, an Anglophile, looked carefully toward the mission commander, Major General Frederick C. Poole, for the upcoming moral lecture that would explain why they were in Russia. Currently, Poole was speaking through a bullhorn about how the Allies should react with tact and decorum when greeted with “embarrassing enthusiasm” by the oppressed populace.
And yet the overwhelming murmur among the Russians squinting toward the gangplank to watch wave after wave of soldiers who disembarked in bowlegged but proud formation, was that of an audience in a puppet theater whose eyes were drawn upward along the strings. They were asking one another, “And where are the Jews?”
Soon the Americans stood in formation dockside, sandwiched among dozens of careful rows of Allied troops posed as if starched before the industrial blight of sawmills, their field hats, bedrolls, and wickedly ill-tempered new rifles piercing the air that curdled over smokestacks. There was a tang of marine waste and metal slurry, a hint of old sawdust. It reminded Hugo of the ghostliness of the hoop-and-stave works, which he and his father, the engineer of engineers, visited on Sundays. Poole stood on a platform with his bullhorn.
When, in 1907, Viscount Haldane shook the British Army by its bootstraps to eliminate the shirkers, buffoons, and muttonheads, he meant to leave only “a sharp point of finely tempered steel,” and yet, with the grip of an eighteen- stone stoat on a rooster’s neck, General Poole survived. A fan of amateur theatrics, the first to volunteer to declaim “The Faerie Queene,” and ill-poised, as if his body were made of sagging dirigibles, Poole felt the hand of God had blessed him with the gift of harangue.
So there were windy opening remarks about the making of history and aiding of empires, during which Hugo, as if counting his own teeth, remembered those breakfast discussions with his mother, and how disappointing his letters home were going to be. He noticed that there was a rail track between the warehouses and the docks, and on it, a train of a bizarre 0-6-2 wheel pattern, and a black iron cab tower that looked Gothic, as if it should be flanked by gargoyles. Why were the men tending to its hotbox looking at the assembled troops so nervously?
The meat of Poole’s speech made as much sense to the average Russian as any other political speech of the last several years. But this one was special, in that Poole had delivered it in English, without translation. However, the weather was warm, and everyone enjoyed being outside without anyone pointing bayonets at them.
On the other hand, a train full of armed men showing off wrecked teeth, smiles looking unfamiliar on sallow, unshaven faces … Hugo considered this: hadn’t the adjutant aboard the Olympia detailed how to spot the enemy? They were said to wear no single uniform, but instead to have coarse and addled features ringed by mops of unkempt hair, and clothing made of burlap or flour sacking. Further, they would sprint like bunny rabbits at the first shot fired.
The wheels of the train started to groan and turn as if breaking off a decade of rust. The departing fighters seized this final opportunity to blow kisses toward the Allies. A voice cut through the crowd, a British soldier’s, anonymous in the ranks, but a voice with a permanent impact upon the campaign in North Russia: “I say! Those men on the train! They are positive Bolos!”
Poole returned to his notes, setting a precedent against common sense, chugging toward a distant rhetorical triumph, as the Bolsheviks waved dirty handkerchiefs and the train, swaying like a drunken dowager, departed.
When the speech was over, the Royal Scots were cued, and they upended the gunnysacks of cigarettes, which caused actual Russian applause. There was a riot — momentary and polite, by current standards — and the cigarettes were gone.
The troops chattered with excitement at the introduction of “Bolo” into the fighting man’s vocabulary. As they disbanded, told to find lodging, their yells echoed up and down the emptying wharves. Bolos! The matter of epithets was crucial, for each entrant to the European War, save one, had monikers crafted by another player. So, courtesy of the English, the French were poilus, because they were very hairy. And the French called the British “Tommies,” and the Australians named the Turks “Abdul,” and the Australians were “diggers.” When the first Americans landed at Brest, the crowds, with equal measures of derision and romantic longing, called them “cowboys.” But the Americans, who were not actually Allies but Associates, disavowed the name and instead went by the mysterious, self-generated nickname of “doughboys.”
The twenty-five Americans followed Lieutenant Gordon along the railroad tracks, ignoring the calls by other units to join them. As their land legs returned, they walked with the swagger of city boys whose reputations were growing. They followed Gordon, tromping as if each step pounded in their point: Detroit made cars, tanks, ammo, stoves, and, best of all, Americans.
Gordon, with a rainwater smile, frequently plastered into sweet agreeability, was well liked by his men. He and Hugo had gone to the University of Michigan together. Hugo had taken more difficult classes and scored higher grades than Gordon. But Gordon had dressed à la mode, and was frequently covered in girls. Hugo sniffed that the only heroism he’d shown then was having mashie-nibbed out of a double-bunkered trap on the Grosse Pointe Country Club golf course. Further, Gordon had successfully grown both a mustache and a faint British accent since becoming an officer.
There was an abandoned steam shop on the second story of a rat trap quayside sawmill. The windows hadn’t been shattered, so the mosquitoes were kept out. But the platoons had hardly dropped their bedrolls and cracked open their mustard-colored phrase books before sharing a feeling that something had just been snatched from their grasp.
It was admitted the Bolos hadn’t left that fast. They didn’t expect anyone to chase them. From the steam shop, the doughboys could look out the smeared windows and see other locomotives and trains just standing there. Hugo, in exasperation at this point, reminded them that their charter was to protect Allied matériel, not to chase anyone. There was some debate as to what exactly matériel was, and if, it was surmised, with rising excitement, it was possible that matériel might be spools of copper wire.
“Then,” said Private Wodziczko, who Hugo had noted was helpful, “to safeguard it, we have to get it back.”
“No, we don’t,” Hugo responded, and was ignored. There was a discussion: what was stopping them from taking a train and hunting the Bolos down like yammering whelps?
Of course, the only thing stopping them was that none of them knew how to operate a locomotive.
Hugo, with no small reluctance, said, “My father designed locomotives.” And then, before he could stop himself, he added, “He was an engineer of engineers.” He grimaced, but then there were many calls as to how clever that phrase was, and Hugo was grabbed by the shoulders and arms and ordered by Lieutenant Gordon toward the railway yard to find a suitable locomotive to steal.
Part Three
Hugo protested that he was behind on the new technology, that diesel had displaced steam. He was unfamiliar with the type of coal they used in Russia, Lord only knew what kind of electricity was necessary, and he’d really
only worked on the tiniest shunters, shays, and switchers. But when he reached the train yard, his protests died in his throat.
There were a dozen locomotives in various stages of decay, all of them the most rudimentary design. After a moment spent in each cab, he found one that was in working order. He felt a protective tenderness toward it. It had been copied in a hardscrabble way from an 1870s American articulated-compound tender engine and reduced in scale for the three-foot, six-inch local rails. The result looked like a child’s drawing of a train, with an endearingly clumsy cowcatcher and a blunderbuss of a smokestack that flared out like an ice-cream cone. The twin domes were as dainty as a lady’s wrists, and the boiler couldn’t have held fifty gallons of water. The train was adorable.
“It burns wood,” he murmured, standing by the half-filled and rusty tender as if it contained a litter of mewling kittens. For once, he wished his father were with him.
He exclaimed that a child of nine could operate this train. Delighted that he, not Gordon, had to be in charge, Hugo directed his fellow men to examine the couplings, frail as hairpins. While the gunnery bolted a Lewis machine gun to the single flatcar, Hugo considered for a long moment whom he hated the most: Private Wodziczko. Wodziczko annoyed Hugo courtesy of his unwavering love for, in ascending order, God, his mother, the flag, the world’s largest stove, Lieutenant Gordon, his mother, and perhaps Lieutenant Gordon again. Hugo almost skipped like a schoolchild across the engineer’s duct, grabbing Wodziczko by the shoulders and forcing him to squat unblinkingly before the steam gauge in the cab, where it would be dirty, hot, and if fortune reigned, dangerous.
There were many other jobs up and down the train — tender handler, rail guard, splitter, brakeman, and so on — which Hugo, dizzy with pleasure, assigned targets for revenge. (There were Finch and Bryzinski, of the chocolate rations; Gaulfeld, who had talked about jazz as if it were music; Wassily, who had asked him which breweries made champagne; Parker and Lyons, of disparate heights, who had shamelessly tried to nickname themselves Mutt and Jeff; the list was infinite.)
The train cab was capped tightly, enclosed and stuffy. As the engine heated up, Hugo and his companions — Lieutenant Gordon, Private Wodziczko, and the others crawling past the tender — began to feel adventurous
camaraderie. That Gordon had located the previous engineers’ tot of vodka stashed above the cab’s forward window helped immeasurably.
The train rolled out of the yards and down the only set of tracks that led from town. Which was fortuitous, because the Americans had no idea where they were going. The city quickly fell away, lumber yards and train maintenance pits replaced by tumbledown peasant shacks, and then trees. Hugo felt like an expert, however, as the first distance marker, and then the second, flew past. “Those are versts,” he said with pride. “Two-thirds of a mile.”
“I know that,” said the tiny Wodziczko, whose admiration for Lieutenant Gordon admitted no light to shine on anyone else. “Everyone knows that.”
Hugo put his hands on his hips. “You keep watching the pressure gauge, Wodziczko.”
“Don’t show off, Hugo,” said Lieutenant Gordon, rocking on his heels.
“And don’t give orders, either.” Then there was agreement between Gordon and Wodziczko that everyone knew how long a verst was, and to pass the vodka.
The tender was full of stone pine, which burned with fierce heat yet took ages to consume. Hugo’s anger at Gordon’s lordly ways and Wodziczko’s desire to caddy for officers was eclipsed by the excitement of pursuit, even at such a slow pace, across the foreign territory. Hugo — who didn’t drink — was bouncing on his engineer’s chair, making noises with his cheeks that echoed the sound of the driving wheels. The trees — for that was the entirety of the view — did not whistle by in a blur, but their passage was intoxicating. Hugo pulled the whistle chain, hoping for a basso announcement to the Bolos that the United States was on their tail. Instead, the sound was swallowed as if some vast biblical sea creature had already opened its awesome and awaiting mouth.
The train was rolling through the forest, with tall and dark spruce, alders, and endless pine trees, massive, shoulder to shoulder, frowning giants whose roots clutched at trackless miles of swamp. Hugo wanted to see something else, something other than forest, and yet there was no escape. The tracks curved gently left, or gently right, but still there was no view other than what was quickly becoming unbearable. As the twentieth and twenty-fifth verst markers rumbled by, the forest had begun to work a strange and malicious magic upon the train crew. Without a word on the subject passing from man to man, they realized where the forests of fairy tales had come from.
“Hugo?” Gordon leaned against the engineer’s cab with folded arms.
“Just for the sake of asking, how do we turn this thing around?”
Hugo swallowed. He fixed his eyes forward, as if the answer were currently eclipsed among the continuously parting curtains of pine trees.
“Umm.”
“Oh God.”
Several versts ahead, the Bolsheviks were having a picnic. There had been a percussive series of explosions in their locomotive’s hotbox; then the boiler had slowed to a stop, and disagreements among them percolated about what to do. They could agree only that they were hungry. So out came the cooked chickens, and soon the men who’d taken on the engineering chores were lying shirtless in the sunlight.
The men in the cattle cars were in no mood to fix the train, either. They rolled open the cross-gates and spoke with some villagers from nearby Tundra, who began to file out of the forest burdened with trinkets and good-luck charms that they’d taken to selling to soldiers who occasionally stopped here. Further, flirtation occurred: there were plump farm girls who still had all their teeth, for whom the sight of a man with his own rifle was the height of sophistication.
A strawberry-nosed lieutenant, intoxicated by the promise of attention from one fresh-faced beauty, became bossy, and ordered four of his most handsome brethren to trot back and burn down the bridge they’d just crossed, just in case.
Part Four
So it was that the doomed train carrying the 339th, Company K, underwent several reversals of fortune. They were at first on the verge of panic, brought on by the unchanging landscape, sunlight flickering through the looming trees, which hugged them as if squeezing out their very breath.
And then — relief! The track ran straight, but the trees fell away — ahead was a canyon, and at its bottom a lovely, sinuous river, and crossing it a trestle bridge perhaps two hundred feet long. Hugo slowed the train, the better to enjoy the change in scenery. He opined, and Lieutenant Gordon agreed, that it would be good to halt here and determine how to get home.
The train eased to a gentle stop. It was a hundred feet over the riverbed, where the waters rushed around blue granite, which came up in tufts and spikes. Hugo looked hopelessly for a reverse driveshaft, examined the bizarre lettering on the dials and switches, and thumbed through his phrase book to see if it contained the words “reverse” or “backward,” which it did not.
Meanwhile, the men of Company K took their ease. They smoked on the flatcars, missing Detroit, where eternal summer was to be spent playing stickball, chatting up girls, listening to their fathers plan on Fridays for the end-of-the-shift chimes of the Moskowitz Brewery, which meant one free barrel of beer for the neighborhood. Hugo fussed with his gauges, wiping them down with his kerchief as if that gentle care would cause them to whisper their secrets to him. But he was stalling. The train would not go backward. He listened to the breeze (according to the phrase book, it was a sirokko), which was so different from the breeze off the Great Lakes. This one made him perspire. In this his reaction matched his mates’ — the alien forest landscape to which summer had come with such violent joy made them all anxious.
When Hugo could stand no more, he piped up to ask whether it was true they were simply fighting for the British, who would pay for the war with timber. Now that he’d seen a small sliver of the forest, it seemed likely.
“Shut up, Hugo,” said Wodziczko, “You’re a, a, you’re a Bolo!”
“Quite,” said Gordon, with, Hugo was sure of it, a faint British accent.
At the other end of the bridge, four grizzled men appeared, carrying bales of hay on their backs. They wore derbies, tight woolen jackets with tears at the seams, enormous trousers stolen off more prosperous men, and huge, soft felt shoes. When Hugo saw them, he waved a wobbly, nervous greeting. Hesitantly, they waved back. Then they seemed to consult one another. As if reaching consensus, they suddenly dumped their hay to the tracks and, fast as horses, ran off the way they’d come.
“That’s a queer kind of greeting,” Hugo said.
“Were those Bolos?” Wodziczko asked.
“You see Bolos everywhere,” Hugo sneered. “Why would Bolos be carrying bales of hay? Obviously, they’re peasants.”
“They were Bolos,” Wodziczko insisted.
“Your mother’s a Bolo, you toad!” Hugo turned his back on Wodziczko, who was looking in vain for someone to hold him back from attacking. “If you punch me, tiny man,” Hugo said calmly, “I’ll throw you into the river and you’ll hardly make a splash.”
Gordon looked for a moment beyond it all, lordly and noble, until, focusing his field glasses, he toppled over. “I’m fine,” he murmured, closing his eyes. The empty vodka bottle rolled from the cab and hit the tracks with a sturdy clang before dropping silently into the foaming river.
Hugo stole the field glasses away from the peaceful-looking lieutenant and left the cab. With the rapids so far below him, his head swimming with the height, he gingerly hiked along the footplate, one hand on the boiler, the other on a handrail, until he was smack atop the cowcatcher. He was glad he was not a drinker.
Wodziczko joined him, and for long moments they argued over what exactly was ahead of them. Finally, Hugo declared, “It’s a village, definitely. There’s a sawmill smokestack. You see?”
Indeed, there was now a thick black column standing at the edge of the field — it was visible even without the field glasses — but why hadn’t they seen it before?
It wasn’t a sawmill smokestack but a piece of equipment the Bolsheviks had been storing in the village grain house for several weeks: a 4.5-inch Howitzer that lobbed sixty-pound shells with reasonable accuracy.
They had dragged it on a donkey cart to its present location, had successfully loaded it, and were currently consulting the tattered field manual on how to aim it.
Hugo saw through the field glasses a flash at its tip no brighter than the lighting of a match, then heard a sound like wind rushing over a deep jug.
He yelled, “Incoming!” just as the shell shrieked overhead and passed beyond them. It landed in the river with a muffled explosion that sent a spray of shattered rock in all directions.
“Bolos!”
They were under full attack: the hills ahead bubbling over with men pointing guns at them, men of no particular uniform but united by wild aggression, shouting “Hourra, hourra!” as they charged.
The men of Company K flailed around the body of the train, looking for shelter, as the first bullets whizzed by them. Gordon arose from his swoon, vomited with some efficiency, and ushered his men as best he could. Within moments, all were safely behind the locomotive, which provided several tons of protection. “To the Lewis!” Gordon cried, and two men immediately fell to the flatbed on which the Lewis was mounted, one to fire and the other to feed the bullets through. Alas, their first volley was also their last, for there was a horrible sound of riveting and ricochets: the same locomotive that shielded them from the Bolsheviks was also directly in the line of their own fire. “Stop! Cease! Stop!”
In the silence, Hugo found his voice, and cried, as if someone might hear him and obey, “Pozhaluysta, nie streliayte — my devstvennitsy!,” which wasn’t actually effective. Instead, another deep sound, a wheeze, almost musical, and then the screech of another sixty-pound shell, which fell long again, bringing relief, but only for a moment: it had landed on the riverbank behind them. The result was a smoking crater six feet deep, and surrounding it, twisted metal still glowing with heat, the now ruined railroad tracks home.
This was when the Bolsheviks returned to their original plan of burning down the bridge entirely. The hay bales were to be distributed among the wooden beams of the scaffolding, and shouts went up for more paraffin wax with which to ignite them.
To their credit, the 339th had recovered their wits, and had begun to return fire. They were flat against the top of the engineer’s cab, and on the narrow gallery by the boiler, in excellent adaptation to the landscape. The Mosin-Nagant rifles, however, were not the weapons of choice at such distant range. As soon as the Bolos realized what was being fired, they shared a hearty laugh and went back to work without worry.
With the way to retreat a mass of smoldering ruins and the way ahead just about to be set afire, and their own arms roughly useless, the Americans fell to bickering. Eventually, it was settled that Hugo was to blame for their situation, because he hadn’t known how to make the train go backward.
He wiped his brow with his kerchief, and it came away red. He’d been grazed — by rock debris, by a bullet, it was hard to tell — and when he stared at the blood with some disbelief, that, too, caused grousing. Wodziczko rolled his eyes.
“I’m wounded!”
“You were just pipped. We’re going to die. We hate you.”
The normal soldier’s lament struck at a man’s odor or ancestry; a simple declaration of hatred was startlingly direct. As much as he felt guilty (Wodziczko’s accusations stung worse than the wound to his forehead), Hugo also hated everyone on the train. He reached a terrible conclusion. If he was going to his death, he would take them along. He released the horseshoe brakes, teased the throttle open, and felt the pleasant shudder of the wheels unlocking.
The doughboys were startled, of course — and as a bleeding Hugo smiled at them all, he pointed straight ahead. His face, darkened with dust and blood, looked as if it belonged to some minor bureaucratic demon, a Malebranchist devoted to stirring a shallow pond of fire with a short stick. “We’re going that way,” he hissed.
“Hello!” Lieutenant Gordon cried. “Yes. Yes indeed!”
Hugo looked toward him with confusion — he’d hoped for some recriminations before they died — but even Private Wodziczko was now pumping his rifle in the air.
“Over The Top!” Wodziczko yelled back to the men on the flatcars.
“We’re going Over The Top!”
They had no specific war cry, so all they did was bellow whatever guttural noise came first and best, a few of them crying the marines’ E-EEYAH-YIP! Hugo, surrendering to the madness, managed to yell his single aggressive phrase, “Pozhaluysta, nie streliayte — my devstvennitsy!”
The Bolsheviks, for their part, pricked up their ears. Then they had trouble believing their eyes. The train was coming toward them? Toward the burning hay bales? Toward two hundred troops and heavy artillery? For the first time, they began to wonder who exactly was running this train. Not the French. Perhaps the British? Impossible.
With no concern for the steam-valve pressure, Hugo brought the train to a full and majestic roar. As it passed over the bridge, Bolsheviks were flying outward like ripples across a pond. Several clung to the bridge’s superstructure, and the men of the 339th fired their rifles through the smoke, perhaps in some cases actually hitting Bolos, for there were sudden cries and hard-to-place clattering sounds.
Around the bend was the other train, Bolos above and below it on the hillside. The Lewis team fired into them like a rough-house gang, mowing down armed men without even needing to aim. It was a blur, bodies scattering with the chaos of billiard balls, the train chuffing along for a glorious several seconds, the whole of the 339th concerned with killing as many of the enemy as possible, until Hugo happened to look straight ahead, with a gasp, as they rammed directly into the last cattle car of the train parked ahead of them.
Part Five
They were going no faster than a brisk stroll. Still, the impact lifted the Bolos’ last car off its axle boots, and sent the Americans’ locomotive aslant, where it ran senselessly until Hugo fumbled with the emergency full-stop.
The Bolsheviks fell into a nonstrategic retreat. Their train cars emptied, and the men ran as fast as their secondhand boots could carry them. Within minutes, the Americans faced no enemies except the dead who were lying across the hillside. There were also two villagers who’d been machine-gunned to death by Company K.
The Americans felt terrible about this, but at the same time were so happy to be alive, and so excited to have driven back the Bolos, and, further, they were brimming with such confusion about the propriety of meeting villagers, and so nervous about speaking the Russian from their dirty yellow phrase books, that a round of apologies was never quite delivered.
Instead, it was noticed that the village of Tundra was next to a verst marker, number thirty-eight. Out came the Brownie cameras, and then, in groups of five, the men posed around it, holding aloft captured Bolo rifles, cat-fur hats, broken-backed novels in Cyrillic. The enemy ammunition for the Howitzer that had been fired at the 339th caused some consternation — each shell was stamped MADE IN USA. At first, this seemed like some sort of trick. Then it was remembered that the United States had indeed outfitted Russian troops, before the disintegration of the country and the rise of its latest ruling tide.
The men of Detroit remained in the village nervously, eyeing the bodies, waiting for recriminations that never came. Finally, Hugo, in the same bold spirit that once caused him to stride manfully across the parquet floors of the Grosse Ile debutante ball to ask the exquisite Missy Farmer to dance, approached a small knot of elders. His phrase book was gone. So he was left with his two lines of Russian, one about headquarters. He considered the other phrase for a moment, the one about being soldiers, drop your weapons, and he realized he could bisect it, and then patted his chest. He swept his hand behind him to include the rest of Company K.
“My devstvennitsy,” he said, and then modified it, “My devstvennitsy amerikanski,” as if announcing that they had an official designation, a respectable nationality, a job description, might explain that they would do no further harm.
In response, a startled silence, as if Hugo had paraded a bright-red calf before them. The village burmistr puffed through his whiskers and tried to catch his constables’ eyes without letting his surprise be seen. It was a very private admission for these foreigners. Then one ancient starosta and another whispered through cracked teeth, hiding mouths behind twisted hands, the babay veiling their words behind their stained summer scarves, that perhaps in America such a thing was discussed openly, as a sign of innocence. Weren’t the starosty proud that their own children were also virgins?
Soon there seemed to be a thaw in relations. The soldiers’ guns were nonetheless stared at, so they couldn’t quite put them down with their packs. Eventually, some of the village girls began to dance with each other, looking over their shoulders to make sure their gaiety was being noticed. A head functionary of the village tentatively asked for permission to salvage the cattle cars, and when he and his friends found food and drink and horses, they were happy enough that they even claimed that, yes indeed, they could use the antiques and spools of copper wire. For the most part, they seemed not to mind their casualties (through a combination of pidgin Russian, Polish, and hand gestures, they indicated that the dead men — two brothers — had been drunks and no one much liked them anyway), and they invited the Americans to help them feast on the remaining roast chicken.
Here ended the first battle between the United States and Russia. Of course, the 339th had to find a way home (they would walk the thirty-eight versts over the course of two days). And eventually they would lay a whole host of curses upon the Russian peasantry, but for now, there was a tentative celebration between two unlikely groups, from Detroit and Tundra. It did not last into the evening, and no one passed a jug of samogon or flung open the doors of a blockhouse to the Americans.
Hugo, among others, noted that on the outskirts was a small group of men with the blackest beards. They did not smile, they did not participate. Instead, they laid heavy cotton blankets atop the dead bodies and weighted them with small stones, in a cross formation. They kissed each rock before allowing it to join the pattern. And when they looked back up, it was to stare at the men of Company K with utterly unreadable faces.
But they were among the few, and were mostly ignored. Instead, Hugo’s diary for this day ends with a description of cheer and greetings. He mentions how stocky and underwashed, yet strong and friendly were the peasant girls (“They are as dirty and rough-skinned as potatoes, and such is their shape as well”). The entry ends with a fastidiously written and extremely bad poem on the Northern Lights (“One cannot bear malice/ Under such enlightened borealis,” etc.), and then, in a final nighttime scrawl, a note that the remainder of the 339th was on its way, with the 310th Engineers, an overwhelming force of five thousand nine hundred men to overthrow the Red Menace. “This will be so easy!” he wrote, and “Moscow by the spring!,” before falling to his bedroll on this cool, refreshing Russian evening, a month before the first spidery touch of winter.
Excerpted from SUNNYSIDE by Glen David Gold Copyright © 2009 by Glen David Gold. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
