She wrote in her diary of Boyle 'A very curious, fascinating sort of man, who is frightened of nothing.' From trust grew friendship, admiration and love. Marie was the granddaughter of Queen Victoria of England, beautiful and of a romantic disposition. The meeting was brief but it changed both their lives. He served them tea, spiked with run and brandy, cut the telegraph lines and forced the driver to pull out at gun point. Boyle organized a concert for the Bolsheviks to show that they were not concealing anything. The route lay directly through battlegrounds of the civil war.Īt Vapnyarka, the station master refused permission to proceed. Boyle used his influence with the Bolsheviks to commandeer two railway cars, load them with the treasure and set out on the 2500 kilometre journey to Romania. The Romanians were anxious to get their archives, paper money, gold and (it was said) crown jewels out of Moscow, where they had been placed for safekeeping.

The Bolsheviks put Boyle in charge of delivering food and clothing to their shaky ally Romania but relations between the two countries soon deteriorated. In his usual direct manner, Boyle had whole trains pitched over embankments and had the trains moving in three days, enabling the Russians to keep some 300,000 troops in the field. Some 10 000 railway cars, stocked with supplies for the front, were bottled up in the Moscow marshalling yards. One of Boyle's most astonishing feats occurred shortly after the Bolshevik takeover in November 1917. Boyle took command of the transportation system on the southwestern front, boldly taking control of troops in a desperate situation at Tarnapol, an action for which he was decorated in the field by the Russian commander. By mid-1917 Russian transportation was in chaos and the whole country was spiraling into revolution. Too old for active duty, he got himself appointed to conduct a private mission to Russia's provisional Kerensky government.

He raised and equipped a machine gun company at his own expense. When war broke out in 1914 Boyle predictably sprang into action. He also found time to spend some of his boundless energy escorting a rag-tag crew of hockey players to Ottawa to challenge for the Stanley Cup. Boyle laid claim to a huge stretch of the Klondike River and made a fortune not only in gold but in sawing timber and generating electric power. The two men made their way to Juneau, Alaska, and were among the first to travel the White Pass route to the Klondike. On his return he started a freighting business, got married and left it all to go on the road promoting an Australian boxer, Frank Slavin. At age 17 he went to New York with his father and hopped an outbound ship, spending three years at sea. Born in Toronto in 1867 and raised in Woodstock, Ont., Joe Boyle was an extraordinarily restless young man.

Year of the Phial by Joe Boyle