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.