Prisoners of the North by Pierre Berton

gone,” he wrote to her in a melodramatic letter at the end of October. “Do not let me be a shadow on your life—you never owed me anything—always you gave and I am grateful and love you—remember only that.” He had written her many letters but tore them up because they were “just lonesome wails,” and Boyle was not a man to wail. She was, he told her, the “one human being that fills every spare moment of his mind” and one who also haunted his sleep. “There are nights when I am so completely worn out that I am almost dazed and the only way I can settle it is to conclude with ‘I love her and I don’t know anything more nor do I want to.’ ”
    The following spring, having set up a network of trusted followers in the Caucasus, he was off again to Constantinople and then across the Black Sea to Batum to meet Podge Hill, who was again his associate. Hill was disturbed by Boyle’s appearance. This was a sick man, “aged almost beyond recognition,” whose clothes hung in folds over what had been a robust body. The pair set off for the Georgian capital of Tiflis (modern Tbilisi) on an inspection tour, but not for long. An international economic conference was slated for Genoa, and Boyle was determined to attend it.
    The train journey to Tiflis had exhausted him. Hill noticed that he was increasingly short of breath and looked worn out. Nonetheless, he insisted on heading back on a dangerous and jolting journey through the mountains on a dilapidated train that at one point plunged headlong into a gorge. Its brakes had been tampered with by dissident anti-Bolshevik saboteurs, and the crash that followed killed the crew and many passengers. The Boyle party escaped, but Boyle’s condition worsened. His breathing was laboured and his legs were swollen so alarmingly that he had to walk with two canes. The subsequent voyage to Constantinople aboard a pitching vessel battered by a Black Sea squall only increased his suffering. Taken on a stretcher to his hotel, he was told by the examining physician that if he tried to continue on to Genoa he would be risking his life. But risk it he did by way of the Orient Express, eager to make an oil deal with the Russians who were attending the conference. When not confined to his bed in Genoa he moved about by wheelchair.
    Back in London in May, having lost sixty pounds, Boyle was examined by one of the city’s leading heart specialists who told him to put his affairs in order and abstain from worry and from any thought of travel, under which conditions he might live for two or three more years. Go straight to a nursing home, the doctor told him—don’t even bother to go back to the hotel.
    Boyle followed instructions but proved a difficult patient, holding board meetings with Shell officials and his own staff in his bedroom, to the consternation of the nurse who was now attending him. In June he stubbornly insisted on going to an international conference at The Hague, hoping to continue to negotiate with the Russians on behalf of Shell in its increasing rivalry with Standard Oil. The conference accomplished nothing, and when Shell, in effect, abandoned him, Boyle, ever litigious, turned to the courts for compensation, an action that was settled quietly by the company with Joe Boyle, Jr., after his father’s death.
    Ill or not, he could not resist embarking on one more piece of derring-do. In September, when he found out that one of his associates, Charles Solly, was locked up in a Tiflis prison, he set off again for the Black Sea, shooting off telegrams of protest en route. There he learned that Solly had been released as a result of diplomatic pressure and also, perhaps, because of Boyle’s stream of protests. He made his way from Constantinople back to London by way of Greece, where he visited with Marie’s eldest daughter, now queen of that country, albeit temporarily (she fled to Romania in mid-December). But his pride kept him from Romania. He did not want Marie