The Winter Soldier

Daniel Mason’s The Winter Soldier is superb. I love its wonderfully drawn characters and visual details, its sense of medical authenticity, its depiction of the convolutions of history—in this case, the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s side of things in WWI. It’s all held within a heart-wrenching narrative about a Viennese medical student assigned to a distant field hospital in the Carpathian Mountains. What he finds is a village church turned into a makeshift hospital with a single nurse in charge. The author, a physician, creates so well the terror of a medical student facing, for the first time, what his textbooks couldn’t… show more.

This harrowing description of WWI French army medical teams fighting to save lives in a remote landscape, cut off by winter conditions, threatened with enemy actions and meager supplies is, believe it or not, a love story. Describing the life of a young volunteer doctor from a well-to-do family in Paris who chooses to volunteer for this remote and hazardous post rather than find a safe job (his mother’s preference), the cold, the slogging forest denuded of summer green, the horrible injuries, madness, and futility the Hero of the story encounters will make you reach for a hot cup of… show more.