Hugo had been given charge of several two-reel melodramas and comedies, including Johanna Enlists, featuring Miss Mary Pickford. Her popularity had swollen yet again; she was unstoppable now that she was arm in arm with Douglas Fairbanks. If she broadened his appeal, he lent her a certain joie de vivre that hadn’t yet been suspected. 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.