The public square, such as it was, faced the cathedral. There were no trees or fountains (impossible in the winter months) or benches or public monuments, just a dirty patch of earth surrounded by empty flagpoles and a scruffy assortment of market vendors’ pushcarts. Over that long afternoon, Poole’s men put together a kiosk. A Tommy known to be a fastidious calligrapher printed in Cyrillic the exciting invitation that was finally nailed to the top: JOIN THE SLAVO-BRITISH LEGION!

This would be the first sign of a new society congealing: an army to promote its self-defense. The only Allied dissenter to this scheme had been France. Approximately fifteen minutes after Poole’s Slavo-British Legion recruitment desk had been started, a platoon of poilus assembled a much sturdier and better-painted platform. Surmounting it was an eight-color stone-lithographed poster of impressive size, declaring, in French, “Perhaps the French Foreign Legion Will Have You.” The illustration was of a legionnaire standing by a sand dune. This concept—a desert—was so alien to the locals, and the appeal so disdainful—the French deigning to let Russians into their army—that the recruiter ran out of applications by sunset.

The Slavo-British Legion, within a single day, had five thousand volunteers who could all read and write, they said, who swore allegiance to the new government, and who had to pass but a simple medical exam before their training could begin. It was such a rudimentary exam (open mouth, count teeth, open shirt, tap chest, open trousers, check for syphilis) that— fatally—no one thought to simplify it a touch further.

“This afternoon, we inaugurated the Slavo-British Legion,” Poole wrote in his next telegram. “It is imperative that we push on to Moscow. Next I will begin the government.”

The reaction among the Imperial General Staff was bemused, for they were wondering if he would next bridge the Azores and cure typhoid.

Still later that afternoon, around seven o’clock, General Poole, who did not sense his time was running short, introduced the town council to their new leaders. This was not an invasion, he explained, but a restoration of ideals. The new president of North Russia and supreme commander of Archangel was now Mr. Nicholas Chaikovsky, whom no one had heard of.

Poole stepped aside at this point (“Please cable Headquarters and tell them the government has been started, and re-emphasize the importance of Moscow by spring”), and exited with his men, for he was going to reopen the opera house. He understood that there had never been a production of Gilbert and Sullivan in North Russia—not The Mikado, not Penzance, not Pinafore—and he aimed to plant that particular flag himself.