Hugo and the rest in Toulgas knew nothing of this. On the fifteenth of the month, there was a blizzard that lasted most of the night. With it, an artillery barrage meant to cover the Reds’ retreat. Trotsky himself, it was said, directed the fusillade from his train car, and decided there were more important theaters for his new army. He said he knew they would be back. On the sixteenth, the sun rose as much as it could, at the edge of a clear, dim purple sky, a sky that called for ice-skating or hockey or making snow angels. Hugo was among the first to spill out of the blockhouse and into the clearing in the woods that made the village of Toulgas.

There were furrows and banks of snow, deep craters surrounded by strangely shaped humps. At first, Hugo thought these were scurf, flash-frozen pits from four days of artillery barrages, but then he saw that the snow had hands. The village was filled with dead Bolsheviks. As the 339th slowly left their quarters, clutching their rifles, they walked past the dead men, who were as motionless as sculptures. Each had an etching of snow across his face.

Hugo stared at a bearded man sitting up, white face sparkling with frost, chest bare, a tree branch having fallen in a serpentine way across him. “Laocoön,” he thought.

He and the other men of Detroit, the Polar Bears, kept walking, directionless, fanning out stupidly and without strategy. The Shackleton boots slipped under Hugo’s feet, which would normally cause him to curse. Some seabirds, squawking, cast vague purpling shadows on the Dvina.

When he looked at the river, Hugo stopped in his tracks. Some Russians had tried to cross while it was frozen at night, and had fallen halfway in. Hugo found the sight of a man’s arms in the air, beseeching, to be awful enough. But it was another body that made him finally sit down atop the snow on the riverbank. It was a pair of legs sticking up from the ice, bent at the knee, one ahead of the other, as if he’d toppled over in a full dead run. The body vanished at the hip, the rest stuck under the frozen sheet.

Hugo regarded this dead man for several minutes. He could not imagine drowning upside down while freezing. But this was not what kept him here. Instead, it was that the corpse was barefoot. And someone had stolen his trousers.

There, under the mildest wisp of sun, ice glowing and reflective, the legs of the corpse were splayed and heavy with snow, like tree branches, and Hugo clutched at himself. He did not know about Armistice Day. Looking at the bare, frozen shanks in front of him, he realized the war was never going to end. Everyone would die and be replaced by people who needed the clothes you died in. This was the future.