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.

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.