The money’s never quite enough, payment can be slow, and it helps to have items to pawn; but for a young man of twenty, even this erratic living is a living to be proud of.

And what stories! Kolya crosses the Danube with the Russian Army in the first weeks of the war; he interviews the victims of Ottoman cruelty; he trembles at the fierce Cossack regiments in their sheepskin burkas; he watches from hand-cut steps of ice on the frozen mountainside as General Gurko leads his spearhead into the valley of Sofia; he is a witness to the signing of the final peace in a whitewashed villa on the Sea of Marmora.

During the months of fighting, he becomes fluent in the language of war. He speaks confidently of supply lines, debouches and enfilades. Through MacGahan, who knows him from Central Asia, he moves from nodding terms to speaking terms to drinking terms with the massively bearded General Skobelev: known to his adoring troops as the ‘White General’ for his white uniform, his hat of curly white astrakhan, and the white horse that he unfailingly rides into the thick of battle.

Kolya reveals an unsuspected ability to hold his liquor, joining the general in the deepest realms of drunkenness, long after MacGahan has exercised her female privilege to cover her glass with her hand. Kolya and the general move together across the spectrum of inebriation beyond informality, hilarity, philosophy and clarity, to a strange realm where the general turns pale and weeps at the recollection of all the blood he has spilled. MacGahan and Kolya learn to leave then, with Skobelev sitting in his camp chair, muttering prayers for forgiveness in the Old Slavonic language of the liturgy. The next day, of course, it’s as though nothing has happened. The top of his cheeks freshly shaved, his eyes clear, his boots gleaming in the stirrups, he’ll simply offer a nod of greeting to them both.

On the quiet days between battles, Kolya rides with MacGahan in search of copy. ‘We just need to find him,’ she says, in a sentence that becomes a kind of catchphrase between them. ‘The fellow they’re all looking for: a passionate man with a story to tell.’

Kolya’s success emboldens him to write home more frequently. He wants his parents to be proud. What he gleans from their sparse correspondence back is that their fortunes have declined. They’ve left Kerch and moved to Kiev. His older brother has stayed behind in Crimea to sell the business. Father’s been unwell, but is better now.

At the villa in San Stefano outside Istanbul, Kolya watches the glum Ottoman signatories put their pens to the crushing terms of the peace treaty that concludes the war. Its text will be transmitted in full by telegraph to the world. Standing by a window, through which the sunshine gleams off the Sea of Marmora, Kolya allows himself a moment of reflection: less than two years ago, he was manoeuvring pickle barrels around his father’s cellar, having his head cuffed for inattention, dreaming hopelessly of the East. Today, he’s a witness to history and nursing a hangover he acquired in a drinking bout with MacGahan and General Skobelev.