Hugo, among others, noted that on the outskirts was a small group of men with the blackest beards. They did not smile, they did not participate. Instead, they laid heavy cotton blankets atop the dead bodies and weighted them with small stones, in a cross formation. They kissed each rock before allowing it to join the pattern. And when they looked back up, it was to stare at the men of Company K with utterly unreadable faces.

But they were among the few, and were mostly ignored. Instead, Hugo’s diary for this day ends with a description of cheer and greetings. He mentions how stocky and underwashed, yet strong and friendly were the peasant girls (“They are as dirty and rough-skinned as potatoes, and such is their shape as well”). The entry ends with a fastidiously written and extremely bad poem on the Northern Lights (“One cannot bear malice / Under such enlightened borealis,” etc.), and then, in a final nighttime scrawl, a note that the remainder of the 339th was on its way, with the 310th Engineers, an overwhelming force of five thousand nine hundred men to overthrow the Red Menace. “This will be so easy!” he wrote, and “Moscow by the spring!,” before falling to his bedroll on this cool, refreshing Russian evening, a month before the first spidery touch of winter.

4

Corporal Lee Duncan was a man of no newly erupted talents since his audition in San Francisco, unless one counted lying. Throughout basic training, when he was asked where he was from, he murmured that he was an orphan, and though it wasn’t an answer, it was a kind of answer, and his fellow enlisted men tended to leave him alone.

He smiled sometimes, to keep people from talking about him, but he was now aware that to dream did not mean to conquer. To succeed—for instance, to be for a few seconds a Four Minute Man—did not mean it would stick, the love of a mother for a son could be like turpentine, ambition was for chumps, there was no actual value to the universe, etc.

His glowering, along with his mournful guitar ballads (“Greensleeves,” and many tunes that sounded like dirges for funerals held at sea), the commanding jawline, the cheekbones, the newly serious eyes, made men and women alike think he must harbor awesome secrets.

In San Francisco, he had signed up for the Air Service, since a reptilian part of his brain still recognized that at least the uniforms were vivid. He enlisted under the name Leland Duncan to honor his father and anger his mother. He was sent to Kelly Field in Texas for basic training, and then the School of Fire in Oklahoma, where he was put in a motorboat and told to shoot a Vickers at untethered balloons while the boat made tight figure-eights. He did not hit a target even once.