Hugo could hear everyone plainly, for the aerial bombardment had ceased. “Are we saved?” he asked, feeling embarrassed for asking the same question as everyone else.

“Don’t,” said Lieutenant Gordon, but it was too late and his instruction too feeble: two of the men had thrown open the front door and had raced outside, the better to see the array of deep-blue flashing lights that shone over the Dvina, frozen slush illuminated in streaks as the lights pulsed on and off.

Hugo was one of the men who rushed outside. He could hear excited Russian being spoken among the trees, in the dark.

“Is it over?” Wodziczko asked.

“Peut-être,” Hugo whispered.

There were three blue lights, but they were flashing in code. The message was relayed to Lieutenant Gordon, who wrote it down by moonlight, letter by letter, word by word, with the nub of a broken gray pencil. “Attention 339th at Toulgas, stop. Need immediate accounting of supplies, stop. Misallocation of sixteen dozen Red Cross scarves without authorized quartermaster invoice, stop. Return scarves, stop.”

The lights continued to flash, as the message was being repeated.

“Scarves?” someone yelled. “They want our scarves?”

Miserably, Hugo murmured, both hands hanging within his scarf, “Isn’t the war over?”

And another person was crying, “Scarves?” when the first new salvo of three-inch shells was launched with an exhale and a whine and a blast into a nearby snowbank that sent the men of the 339th back into their blockhouse.

Speaking of clothing: on November 12, the quartermaster at Archangel ordered five thousand new pairs of Shackleton boots. The British War Office dutifully billed the U.S. War Department for five thousand pairs of boots, in a transatlantic cable that caused the master-sergeant recipient in Virginia to put down his champagne glass, displace the Hello Girl from his lap, and wipe the confetti from his Serbian-style overseas cap (a memento from his timid time Over There). The war was over. Why were fresh battle supplies needed? He telephoned his export-supply liaison, who telephoned the support staff of Secretary of War Newton Baker to ask: Were there American troops in Russia? Should they still be there?

And here the interrelation of irony and diplomacy went into full play, as each governmental department could in turn claim to be shocked that men committed to guard warehouses, or support local troops within the city, or serve as liaison or something with the Czech army, were burrowed in snow almost three hundred miles into a country with whom the United States was not at war. There were a great many documents composed, all in strict passive voice. Orders were given.