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.

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.