A stream of American refugees found the Savoy: families, teachers on holiday, tourists, heirs and heiresses, adventurers, criminals. The initial queue, which looped and doubled and stretched down the Strand halfway to Embankment Park, was met at the Savoy’s Thames-side entrance by a table of a half dozen “front men,” shrewd junior clerks whose job was to be friendly, to ask a few leading questions, to size up the applicant’s demeanor, dress, needs, and belongings, and to hand him or her a blank three-by-five-inch index card. The code was a closely held discretion, but blue cards went to the honorable destitute, white cards to those who seemed solvent, and red cards to the “doubtful cases.”

Lodgings were found for those who were sleeping in the parks. Loans of ten shillings a day were made. Steamer ships and freighters and tankers were located.

Weeks passed. The queues dried up. Europe seemed to be clear of stranded Americans. There were six, then just five, then one front man by the Strand entrance, and the tables and chairs where loans were arranged were mostly put back into storage.

At noon, on a day late in September, a pair of French-made transport buses, battered and mud-stained, their bonnets wired shut and windscreens spiderwebbed and shattered, halted at the Strand entrance. The back flaps pushed aside, and out spilled children, cowboys, and Onondaga Indians.

A final passenger was removed from the cargo hold of one of the buses. On a stretcher improvised from saddle blankets and wooden pikes, his shattered visage half mummified in brownish bandages, lay a ruin: Percy Bysshe Duncan.

A blue card was tucked into the folds of the stretcher. Duncan was rushed to the medical station, a converted storage closet next to the Gondoliers Room, by the ladies’ coats. He lolled in and out of consciousness, speaking in low tones. At one point, he creaked, “Er ist nicht Buffalo Bill.”

The Onondaga Indians explained to the front man that they’d been given a beating by the German army, had their horses conscripted, their belongings stolen, then were jailed, released, jailed again, and forgotten during a transfer between prison and the newly built detention center that had arisen, of all places, at the Ruhleben racetrack. They escaped Germany on the wrong side, and had to take a freighter to Sweden, and then another to Calais, before finding their way back to London.

In the storage closet, Duncan’s bandages were changed, and his cuts and bruises cleaned, but there was nothing that could be done for him.

He was dreaming of the end of Buffalo Bill.