And what was the mission? He pored over the diplomatic essays explaining the command structure—General Poole at the top, the bizarre Mr. Chaikovsky summoned to lead the populace, the Allied troops for defense. (Was it for defense? Were we really going to graft democracy onto another country?) He combed through the recruitment goals for the new Slavo-British Legion, and then a summary of the mission objective, a folder that he ultimately took to the Embankment Gardens and closed, hand to his brow, before that monument to Arthur Sullivan.

He hated monuments. All the boles celebrating the German side of the royal line had been covered, the family name changed to Windsor. Soon there wouldn’t be an inch of unconsecrated ground upon which to build, and the statues would be left to salute one another.

The mission objective for North Russia bothered him. War was like opera: the plot could be as complex as a spiderweb, but if you could not explain the point in a heartbeat, you were lost. He wrote down, in the mar gins of the blue-and-white-banded paper, “We are in Russia because__________,” and he intended to get an answer before he boarded his boat.

He wasn’t the first to think Sullivan could never have conceived of Ypres. The bust of the lyricist was atop a stele against which a bronze muse, life-sized, nude from the hips upward, bowed her head, the effect vertkitschen. It could have been any muse, for she held Euterpe’s flute, and Thalia’s mask and Erato’s lyre were at her feet. With the passing of this man, Ironside thought the muse was sobbing, my efforts come to nothing, and never again. Naïve provincial girl.

He regarded with his infinitely sad blue eyes the remaining mission papers. There were now five columns of Allied troops strung along tentative supply routes, some of them three hundred miles deep into Russia. Why? It was complex, which was a problem, because people would not stand for complexity. It went back to Thucydides and the Hellenes: any truth, if burdened with a dependent clause, would be castrated in the market of discourse. There were the real reasons for war: fear, honor, and self-interest, and then the gratuitous casus belli. Ironside had seen enough of men and war to know that sometimes men simply want to go to war, and that desire was the chalk outline into which various cuts of meat were hurled until a body of well-reasoned justifications was declared to be found within it.

Ironside wrote “Slavo-British Legion,” and tried to commit its particulars to memory; this was the key to whether the North Russia campaign would be a success. The Allies could fight Bolsheviks forever, with troops occupying territory from the Black Sea to Siberia, without actually gaining a single foot of land, unless the populace was willing to fight for itself.

He wrote: “Is Russia our ally or our enemy?”