Around four in the afternoon, there was the briefest of summer showers, ten minutes of warm rain, whose droplets massaged the weary skin. It was like stepping through a waterfall and into a more gracious time of day. Businessmen in bowlers, carrying umbrellas by the handle in the British style, regarded the city kiosks and designated poster boards with puzzlement. A man with a rifle? Doing what?

“‘Schießen, während Sie getrunken werden’?” They muttered, “Dermuß ein Fehler sein.”

So off to the racetrack they went. Soldiers and sailors came in casual dress. Students in red caps and self-inflicted dueling scars that were kept fresh with repeated applications of salt tried to catch the eye of pretty au pairs. Wet nurses, Spreewalderinnen, in huge white headdresses and skirts that could catch the breeze, pushed strollers sturdy as battle cruisers past vendors who had set up in the aisles to sell tree cake, Pfefferkuchen, and marzipan to children who ran back and forth, smacking the tops of one another’s heads in merry games of Kaiser, König, Edelmann. The crowd yelled out for beer, for pickles, for ham on rolls, with a Pantagruelian mass appetite.

It was July 30, 1914, a Thursday, the last possible moment to watch a certain kind of era before it winked over the vanishing point of the horizon. By six o’clock, the racetrack bleachers were at capacity.

Duncan, alone in his tent, removed his comb from its jar of Blue-Vue sanitizer, swept it through his hair, splashed his face with water. He took a tug of whiskey, for luck. The noises of the crowd made his heart rise, briefly, but he knew the Kaiser had men to advise him. They would surely have told him by now, “Er ist nicht Buffalo Bill.”

At some point, Duncan had ceased to believe in fairy-tale endings and imprisoned princesses and the course of ambition. He scratched his horse Betsy between the eyes, and said aloud, “When was that, old girl?” and knew it was the moment someone had first genuinely disliked him: Emily Wheeler. He had been running by rote since then, a train stopping at stations where the towns were deserted. Or so he said now; it was hard to remember when that had actually started.

The central space on the stands, the Imperial Row, was empty. It was two minutes after six, time for the show to begin. At Duncan’s signal, the son of the farrier, a pale and dirty-looking boy with blond curls, marched onto the field. He wore an accordion on a torn leather harness. He looked ten, but was about thirteen, and he sported a blue silk stovepipe hat and a tunic with stars and stripes cut off a flag that had fallen on hard times. This was Edmund, one of the children whose parents were in the troupe.