The kindly-looking old man in this photograph was named Matviy Danyliuk. He died long ago, back in 1994. But he lived a very long life, reaching the age of 103. For many years, he lived in a small village in Volyn, Ukraine, where everyone knew and loved him. Among the local men, he was known as an expert fisherman and hunter. He crafted ingenious fishing gear, had a large family, and was a devoutly religious man. And, as his grandchildren recalled, he would sometimes wear a small yellow-and-blue ribbon around his wrist and jokingly greet people with the words "Slava Ukraini!" This greatly alarmed his wife, who was terrified that the Soviet authorities would arrest him. All because, many decades earlier, on January 29-30, 1918, the young military cadet Danyliuk had fought in the Battle of Kruty, near a small railway station east of Kyiv. There, units of the newly proclaimed Ukrainian People's Republic, made up largely of young military cadets, university students, and even schoolboys, clashed in a battle, amid thick fog, with Bolshevik forces advancing on Kyiv from Russia. After the battle, the Reds executed around 30 Ukrainian students who had lost their way in the darkness and fog during the retreat and fallen into enemy hands. According to some accounts, they sang "Ukraine's glory and freedom have not yet perished..." in ragged unison as they were lined up before the firing squad. The Battle of Kruty has since become famous, and the memory of the students who desperately tried to save Kyiv has been widely revived in recent decades. The battle itself has also become the subject of numerous legends. But Matviy Danyliuk survived. He went on to become the last surviving veteran of the Ukrainian People's Republic's army, and the only participant in the Battle of Kruty to live long enough to see Ukraine regain its independence. Unlike many other veterans, he was fortunate enough to escape Soviet repression. And twenty years after he died peacefully in his own bed -- in August 2014, his great-grandson, Volodymyr Ishchuk, was killed in the fighting near Ilovaisk against regular Russian troops who had invaded the Donbas without identifying insignia. In my upcoming book, I devote an entire chapter to a literary reconstruction of the Battle of Kruty, drawing on as many authentic documentary details as possible and telling the story through the eyes of the young cadet Matviy Danyliuk in 1918: how university students and cadets, barely armed and scarcely equipped, fought to save Kyiv and the Ukrainian People's Republic as Lenin's Bolsheviks marched to drown it in blood.