A week into guard duty, Hugo and Wodziczko were standing the requisite six feet apart, the lonely single bright spotlight overhead casting the pine trees nearby into a pitch-blackness. Hugo had been playing breathing games, watching the jets of his exhalations turn to steam. He pretended he had been invited to dinner and a dance by a charitable organization in Grosse Pointe, and he had to avert social blunders by less fortunate comrades who drank from the soup bowl or insisted on dancing mazurkas.

Wodziczko turned away from the pine trees every so often to fix Hugo with a bright, happy smile, as if nothing better in the world would ever happen. Hugo could feel what was coming. There was no stopping it.

“There’s a place in France,” Wodziczko declared, “where the ladies wear no pants.”

This in and of itself was not so awful. It was how he then looked to Hugo for approval. Hugo spoke French, and so would understand the arch wit involved.

“You think? Yeah?” Wodziczko enticingly waggled his eyebrows. Hugo looked stone forward, and silence returned. For all of three minutes, until unable to help himself, Wodziczko said, “There’s a place in France where the ladies wear no pants.”

And so it was bound to go, for many hours, as it had all week, Hugo interrupted from (say) an imaginary petite waltz with Miss Belinda Worthington by Wodziczko’s recitation, and eventually the sun would come up on another day in Arctic paradise, and they would go to sleep and wake up, and the whole process would begin all over again.

But there was an unexpected shift in the routine. Around two o’clock in the morning, Hugo was thinking of a recipe for brioche, because in his fantasies a hostess had asked him to critique her pastry chef’s accomplishments. His breath was coming out in little puffs of cotton. The sounds of Russia were the slow creaking of trees, the warehouse settling on its wood foundations, barn owls fluttering between rafters.

And then Wodziczko said something.

“There’s a place in France,” he said, “where the ladies wear no pants.”

“Oh, dear God,” Hugo moaned.

“I wonder what we’re guarding,” Wodziczko said.

Hugo prepared to let loose terrifying invective, but then he hesitated. What were they guarding? “They didn’t tell you?”

“No. You?”

It turned out Wodziczko had apprenticed with a locksmith once. Impressively, he was able to use a piece of wire and a flattened copper shim to open the padlock. There was a click, and then the two privates threw open the huge shuttered door to the warehouse.

There were crates stacked eight feet high, in rows of ten, with narrow aisles between them. Each crate was stenciled “Cadbury’s Dairy Milk.”

They were guarding chocolate bars.

Wodziczko drew the doors closed again.

“Wait,” said Hugo, holding his arm. “Let’s look again.”

“We shouldn’t be looking.”