The Winter Soldier

When war breaks out in 1914, Lucius, a promising medical student, enlists in the Imperial Austrian Army and ends up stranded in a typhus-ridden outpost in the Carpathian Mountains. The other doctors have fled. There is only a nurse, Sister Margarete, who becomes his aide and teacher as he learns medicine in the act of practicing it. A soldier is brought in with no visible wounds: he won't eat or talk. Lucius and Margarete nurse him back to fragile health. Then the Hussars arrive, and their officer sees only a malingerer, a soldier with no visible wounds. The officer's brutal treatment of the patient undoes all the good that has been done: a man who was damaged only on the inside is left damaged on the outside, too. The soldier is taken away and Lucius is consumed with guilt for failing to intervene. Margarete and Lucius fall in love, but she, too, disappears. The rest of the novel is about Lucius's three-year hunt to find her.