The Winter Soldier by Daniel Mason *****

The Winter Soldier by Daniel Mason is set during World War I. Lucius Krzelewski’s family was rich and well-connected. When the war started, he was in medical school, so he enlisted as a medical officer. Back at home, his mother was thrilled by his enlistment but felt that medical duties, out of the line of fire, would seem like cowardice. So she bought him a horse and called upon a friend in the War Ministry to cancel his commission and speed his entry into the lancers, like his father. As fate would have it, he ended up at a field hospital run by a nurse, Margarete, who was a nun and carried a rifle. Lucius was embarrassed by his family’s privilege and his shortcomings as a doctor. Margarete was his opposite. She had a modest background and was confident running the hospital. This is World War I view through the eyes of someone overflowing with humility and empathy.

Lucius was lost at the field hospital. Margarete organized the hospital (an abandoned church with a hole in the roof and a crater in the floor), operated on the wounded soldiers (mostly amputations), foraged for food when needed, and disciplined the men. For example, when they returned with desperately needed food: They brought back sheep’s cheese and hen’s eggs. Margarete interrogated them as to how they had obtained them, and when it became apparent that a lamb had been spirited away from its owner, she marched the soldiers back like guilty schoolchildren, threatening to report any man caught stealing, if she didn’t shoot him herself.

Lucius cared about the people working in the hospital and the wounded soldiers equally. He learned about their families and their hobbies. There was no emotional distance between him and the people he encountered. His downfall was Horváth, the winter soldier--a soldier with nervous shock. Rather than releasing Horváth, he kept him in the hospital to try to cure him. But nothing worked. There was no sense to the disease, he thought, no pattern in the damage to their nerves. Now he began to doubt everything. Had he even helped Horváth at all? Had the man’s recovery all been Margarete’s doing? Or did most wounds, whether of the mind or body, just heal up on their own? While Europe suffered through the war, Lucius lived with his feelings of privilege, inadequacy, and guilt.

The war changed Europe and Lucius in unexpected ways.

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