There were shouts outside, soldiers returning to camp. The puppies had found an open ration of M&V, and were burying their noses in it while the container scooted across the floor.

Lee would keep the letter alongside the postcard of his father, for they had arrived within the same twenty-four hours. It was the last day of the war.

“Nanette,” he said. “Come.” She dropped the bite of food in her mouth, jumped over the piles of sheets, and skidded to a halt before him. Boy continued to eat. Outside, the celebration was rolling back to camp, with the sound of car horns, bugles, drunken men banging on empty copper pots. Lee willed Nanette to ignore them. It was early, but it was also late. They had work to do.

29

On the last day of that war, three hundred men from companies of the 339th were pinned down under heavy fire in the village of Toulgas. They were surrounded on three sides by Bolshevik infantry and, worse, on the Dvina River, to the west, there were gunboats lobbing three-inch shells into the village.

The day before, it had seemed peaceful. There had been a delivery of scarves from the Red Cross, one for each Allied soldier, six-foot-long wool gray-and-red lifesavers knitted by the women of Detroit, who had heard their men were cold. It had caused joy, nostalgia, tears, then depression among the 339th.

The local topkick had declared that, since the paths were marshy, Toulgas was unapproachable by the enemy. Which was true during the day, but at night the marshes froze over, and it turned out the Bolos could bring not just themselves but far heavier guns than the light artillery the day-traveling Allies had acquired.

And so, for sixteen hours, rockets had been flying overhead, crashing into the snow, and sending it up with sizzles and pops. Bullets whined and sang past the men’s ears: the Springfields that most of the Bolos had fired with a high-pitched twang like piano wire. Occasionally, dumdums thudded against the walls.

Hugo was among those trapped in a blockhouse, face covered in sawdust and sweat, ears long since sent to tinnitus by the sounds of falling bombs. Machine guns chattered like percussion against the whizzing and breeze of incoming mortar fire. The whole of Hugo’s sight seemed to be blackened snowdrifts. Every so often, a particularly close explosion threw slush and dirt into the room, causing Hugo to spit to clear his mouth of the taste of cordite.

The blockhouse was packed with thirty men. It was made of felled trees notched together like a pioneer cabin, with slits for windows, and a stove in the center whose chimney pipe was now a ruin of twisted sheet metal that Bolo sharpshooters had taken, in the last two hours of slow dusk, to shooting at, for it made an amusing noise.