The winter soldier, by Daniel Mason

It’s hard not to hate the author, who judging from his jacket photo and blurb is young and handsome in addition to being a physician, professor at Stanford, and a very good novelist.  The winter soldier is his third novel and combines his writing skills with his background as a doctor.  Lucius is a twenty-two year old medical student in Vienna when WWI breaks out in 1914.  His aristocratic parents despair at his insistence in entering the professions rather than marrying well and upholding the family tradition of not doing much, certainly not something as low-class as working as a doctor.  However, he is socially inept and finds his calling and comfort in science and medicine.  While still a student, he is sent to a remote village field hospital in the Carpathian mountains where he meets a nursing sister, Margarete, who has been single-handedly holding the makeshift hospital together after the former physician had a nervous crisis and disappeared.  Lucius has been injured on the way there, breaking his wrist, which turns out to be fortunate as his actual contact with real patients in non-existent.  Margarete, a quick study, has learned well from the former doctor and, intuiting that Lucius is in way over his head, tactfully teaches him surgical skills and patient care.  Inevitably, they fall in love and are separated by the chaos of war.  The wartime hospital scenes are horribly convincing.  Even though a not all of the action takes place in the winter during five years the book covers, even the scenes set in high summer make the reader feel cold.  The setting in the borderlands between warring countries is very interesting in and of itself.  Recommended.  318 pp.