Hugo was 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. He had disappointed his father (he of the “I am an engineer of engineers!”) by not becoming an engineer. And soon the realities of his situation became apparent. 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 Spring-fields 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? The rest of them, for instance, discussed 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!