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decamped with all the prisoners’ money, valuables, and personal papers, leaving them guarded by the much-feared pro-Bolshevik Battalion of Death. Instead of being taken to the railway station for the journey home, they were being pushed onto the waterfront where the steamship Imperator Trajan waited to take them away, perhaps to their deaths.
    Odessa was in a state of chaos. With Madame Pantazzi as his interpreter, Boyle hurried here and there vainly seeking a Romanian official who might be empowered to assist in an exchange of prisoners that he himself had negotiated. “I’ve been up in the Yukon and know how to deal with men like these,” he told her. “They have never gotten the best of me yet!”
    Boyle was in his element at such moments. At the dockside they found that active preparations were being made to spirit the hostages away. As they rushed off again in search of aid, Boyle turned to her with a smile. “Quite a day for a lady!” he remarked. “I like this sort of thing—do you?” And Madame Pantazzi had to admit to herself that “in spite of the anguish tearing at my heart about B. [her husband], I was surprised to find I rather did.”
    Unable to find help, they returned to the dockside. Here a series of tussles took place, with some hostages who were forced onto the ship trying to shoulder their way back down the gangplank and into the crowd while others were being driven back by guards. Members of the death battalion were firing indiscriminately into the throng, and Boyle realized that the safest place for the prisoners was aboard the ship. Pinned down momentarily by the press of people, he spotted Madame Pantazzi and shouted, “I can’t stand this. I’m going with them!” To which she replied, “Go! Or they are all dead men!” (The dialogue may seem overheated, but the story of this venture, as recorded in Madame Pantazzi’s book Romania in Light and Shadow , was confirmed subsequently by the hostages themselves.)
    Unarmed and with only the uniform he stood in, Boyle forced his way up the steep gangplank to reach members of the death battalion who were beating an old man. He seized two of the tormentors, banged their heads together, and threw them back on the dock. The ship finally pushed off with a thousand Bolsheviks on board and all the hostages lined up on deck to be counted by the meticulous Boyle, who found that nine were missing or dead.
    Where were they headed? Clearly not to Romania. After three days poking about the Black Sea and being turned away at several ports, the Imperator Trajan with its hungry and dispirited human cargo, was finally allowed to dock at Theodosia. The Battalion of Death refused to give up its prisoners—an alarming state of affairs, especially when Boyle received a whispered warning from a sympathizer aboard the ship. The prisoners, he said, were to be marched to an ammunitions shed and “accidentally” blown up.

    Boyle and the high-class Romanian hostages he rescued from the death battalion .
    Boyle moved quickly. Borrowing money from the British consul in town, he bribed the captain of a small freighter, the Chernomor , to take the group to Romania. He had already engaged twenty Chinese soldiers from the Bolshevik International Brigade ostensibly to guard the hostages but actually to keep an eye on the unreliable members of the death battalion. At the last moment as the freighter made ready to sail off, the Chinese escorted their charges on board, catching the death battalion watchmen aboard the Trajan off guard. When two rushed over to find out what was happening, Boyle suggested they board the freighter and he would explain. When they did so, he locked the pair in a cabin and the Chernomor steamed away.
    It took days of negotiation at the Black Sea ports of Sebastapol and Sulina, marked by threats, bribery, and bluff on Boyle’s part, to get his charges back to Jassy. There he found himself a national figure, cheered by thousands and decorated with