by Daniel Mason
On the highest peaks, the last snows melted.
In the gardens of the village, the women began to sow their fields. Now a kind of giddiness settled over the men. There were about thirty then, and they began to joke that they had been forgotten. Medical duties became few—the dying had died, and many of the others had recovered. Slowly, the hospital seemed to transform itself into a little village of its own. There was a carpenter among them who led the men in repairing the church. They finally secured the hole in the roof of the north transept and raised pallets in places where floor had turned to mud. There was even a cobbler, Austrian, in his late forties, forehead dented like a tin can, blind in one eye and missing an ear, who spent hours cursing the High Command for their carelessness in shoe construction as he mended the others’ boots.
Cautiously, small patrols slunk into neighboring villages. 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.
Still they prowled. In an abandoned country house in a neighboring valley, they found a hidden cupboard with old vintages of Romanian wine and stores of sugar, and a private library with the promising titles of Ten Beauties of Munich and The Touch of Satin, though the former turned out to be a travel guide and the latter about home furnishing. Back in Lemnowice, the wine was washed down with horilka. Krajniak, newly rheumy with the arrival of spring pollen, baked a cake. Nightly, there was singing; a soldier who had been a clarinetist in civilian life cobbled together an instrument of ingenious construction from trench wire and ammunition tins. There was an outbreak of gonorrhea, contracted from God-knows-where.
Rats returned. Briefly, typhus flared, taking two soldiers, then Rzedzian.
Lucius was sleeping when Margarete came to share the news. The orderly had been ill for scarcely three days, insisting it was just a flu.
“One should not grow attached to other people, Doctor,” said Margarete, when he came to the door, and he didn’t know if she was speaking for him or for herself. Her eyes were red, and he wanted to comfort her, but he couldn’t think of what to say. He had thought he was inured to death by then, even prided himself on the calmness with which he absorbed the news of the most recent passing. He who had once stared in shock at the frozen soldier without a jaw. But the great Rzedzian’s body seemed horribly small, the stiffening fingers too familiar, and the way his lip drew back over his teeth reminded him of the corpse of an animal.
They buried him beyond the blossoming pears in the graveyard behind the church. As his duty as the orderly’s commanding officer, Lucius wrote a short letter to his widow and daughter, struggling to capture all that Rzedzian had brought, his impious humor and excess of sentiment, his extraordinary way of lifting the soldiers, which seemed, at times, to transfer some of his strength to them.
He was my friend, he wished to write, but the words were too painful, and he told himself that such familiarity wasn’t befitting of a commanding officer. He was a friend to many.
For a day, Zmudowski disappeared, returning reeking of horilka, his thick beard matted with dirt, his eyes red, knuckles on both hands bruised and swollen.
It rained. A rat’s nest was discovered beneath the chancel. Margarete set about on a campaign to mate the village cats. She tied a female to a chair in the sacristy and then conscripted all the local tomcats, one by one. The queen mauled four in quick succession before she was overpowered by a golden tom, “Tatar-style.” The patients planted a garden, planning for the winter to return.
An evacuation detail arrived at the end of June. There was space only for ten men in the wagon, so the others stayed. Later, zeppelins were sighted on their way to the east, and the men who could stand helped carry the others outside to watch. Lucius stood beside Margarete, in the crowd of the others, aware of the brush of her habit against his arm, waiting for her to notice his touch and move away. She didn’t. Instead, together they stared upward, watching the pair of giant fish drift slowly across the sky.
At the end of July, a small company of Austrian dragoons passed through. In the courtyard, they set out a table and the officers joined them for the midday meal, while a half-dozen kittens batted the tassels on their boots.
The men shared news from the front. Since the May breakthrough in the Russian lines near Gorlice, Przemyśl and Lemberg had been retaken. Now they expected even Warsaw to fall. Everything was shifting north. They should prepare themselves to move.
For weeks Lucius waited for new orders. They finally came in August, carried by a lone horseman from the north. Germany, fed up with the ineptitude of the Austrian High Command, had taken control of operations on the Eastern Front. The church, farther from the front lines, would be reclassified as a Second-Level Field Hospital, given more doctors, an X-ray machine, a laboratory, more drugs. It was, thought Lucius, what he had imagined when he first enlisted. It likely meant a larger kitchen, books, a regular post, sheets on the officers’ beds.
“This is good, no?” said Margarete.
“Yes…good,” said Lucius. They were sitting in the garden, eating pears, sweeter than any he had tasted in his life. A kitten rubbed itself against his leg. He wondered if at a Second-Level Field Hospital the nurses might be kept apart. But then another month, then two, passed without any news.
In late October, the first snow fell, a light dusting that vanished instantly. Then it was winter again, and Russia invaded Bessarabia and the Bukovina, places which once had been but the mystical words of map edges, now just over the mountains to the east. Once again snow filled the valley, and once again the wounded began to come. It was as if time were repeating itself, he thought, and it might have, had not one February evening a man appeared out of the cold.
7.
It was late afternoon when a whistle at the entrance announced a new patient had arrived.
Lucius found Margarete outside the church, with a peasant draped in a giant sheepskin cloak.
A coating of hoarfrost glistened on the wool like finely shattered glass. Steam rose from a great grey beard, which he had tucked into his collar. Over all: a cape, also of sheepskin, and atop this mountain, a black sheepskin hat.
“Look,” said Margarete. The man leaned over and pulled back a blanket covering a wheelbarrow to reveal a body, curled up among a pile of roots. “Alive,” said the man. “From over the valley. But it doesn’t move. It doesn’t speak.” His Polish was halting, heavy, thick with Ruthenianisms, all throat and hum.
Snow was falling. They replaced the blanket and led the peasant through the gate and along the beaten path to the quarantine. By then Zmudowski and Nowak had arrived. As the orderlies prepared a fire, the visitor hooked his thumbs inside the hempen belt that bound his cloak. He spoke. It was his wife who found the soldier. They had been up by the pass, searching the woods for brukva—Lucius didn’t know what this was—when they came across a wagon. It must have been abandoned only recently, as it had yet to be stripped for firewood. Intact, too, no sign of shell-strike, just abandoned. A Christian truck, the man said, with a big red cross on its side. Inside were the men. All dead, nine of them, all but this one, buried at the bottom, beneath the other bodies. No life anywhere nearby but this one, and barely life at that. They had brought him here, for reward.
“Did he say anything when you found him?”
“No. No speak. No move. Breathe, just. If no breath, we don’t know it was alive.”
By then the orderlies were ready. Again, Margarete removed the blanket. Before them the soldier in the barrow was completely still, the only movement the flickering deliquescence of the snowflakes dusting his coat. For a terrible moment Lucius thought that between the church and the quarantine house, the man had died.
Then a wisping of a piece of dried grass on his lip betrayed his breath.
Gen
tly, Lucius touched his fingers to the man’s shoulder. “Soldier?”
Instantly, the man recoiled. In truth, he only twitched, but the suddenness of it, and the stillness of the moment that preceded it, made it seem as if a small explosion had just detonated in the barrow. His head turned, his arms drew across his chest. Lucius stepped back. The man’s eyes were wide, whites visible around a pair of dark brown irises. His nose flared as he tried to take in breath. But no words, nothing save the flinch, the stare. Unbidden came the memory of the rabbits pilfered by the hussar on their journey to Lemnowice, ears back, too terrified to move.
“There,” Lucius said. “There, there. You’re safe. You’re in a hospital. You’ll be okay.”
Still the eyes.
“Hospital,” Lucius repeated, in German. Then again in Polish, Hungarian, Czech. He could have gone on. These words now part of him in so many tongues. Doctor, hospital. Quiet. Still.
“We should get him warm and dry,” he said, looking to Margarete.
She knelt then, stroking the soldier’s hair. This time he didn’t draw away. His eyelids were puffy, his cheeks reddened from exposure, the swelling giving them a slight cherubic quality. A fine beard covered his cheeks, and a wing-shaped blur of mud ran down the flank of his nose. Gently, Margarete cleaned pine needles from his eyebrows, his lashes, brushed his forehead clean of dirt. She looked at Lucius to signal that it was okay to touch him. He knelt and showed the man his empty hands before beginning to palpate around his head and neck. He tried to assess his back, but the barrow was too tight.
“Gently now.”
Zmudowski had joined them. Fearing an injury to his spine, they tried to lift him from below, but the barrow’s walls sloped inward, like a coffin’s, and they couldn’t get their hands around him. It didn’t matter. The man’s limbs were clenched so tightly that they could lift him almost by his arms alone.
They set him on the stretcher, where he remained in the same position. “There,” said Margarete at his side. She hushed him, though he wasn’t making any noise. Again she stroked his hair. In a soft voice, in Polish, she said, “You’re cold, your clothes are wet. We will check you for lice, get you new clothing. Nothing bad will happen. Now you’re safe.”
The sound of words seemed to calm him, whether or not he understood.
Again she looked up to signal they should start.
Slowly they began to strip his clothes, first the greatcoat, heavy, stuffed with what seemed to be paper. Then a second, thinner mackintosh, two sweaters, a blanket. Two layers of long underwear. The man inside was moist and pale, like the pulp of a nut. Both hands, pink with chilblains, were swollen up like gloves.
Zmudowski carried off the clothing to be disinfected, as Krajniak approached with the cresol and began to spray. For a moment the man was naked, while Margarete searched his skin for any signs of lice, her fingers swift, making no concessions to modesty. They wiped him down, covered him in a blanket, his body still coiled tight. “Soldier,” she asked, “who are you? What’s your name?”
But he only stared back, eyes dark above the red sheen of his cheeks.
“Doctor, look.” Across the room Zmudowski crouched over the pile of clothing, disinfectant bucket in one hand. He rose as Lucius approached. “Look.” He had extracted a sheaf of papers from the lining of the coat. They were wet and matted, stained with ink, now dusted with clotted lime. Lucius took a stack and gently began to peel them apart. They were sketches, of men, soldiers, trains, mountains, all drawn in the same skilled hand. Then others: children, a woman, naked, then details of her hand, her breasts, her legs.
“You drew these?” asked Zmudowski, looking at the soldier. There was no answer. He waved one of the nudes. “Can I keep it?” he asked, smile flashing within his beard. He lifted the coat and pulled out another clump of papers, then another. Lucius was still amazed by what the men stuffed into their coat linings for insulation. Military circulars, billiard felt, love letters, scavenged newsprint. He could have made a museum by now, he thought. The 1915–16 Lemnowice Exhibition of Material Used for Warmth.
Now he remembered the peasant in his furs, still waiting just inside the door.
“Thank you,” he said, turning to the man, and then to Krajniak: “See what you can find in the kitchen. Some onions maybe, a bottle of schnapps.”
The Russians paid in meat tins for their wounded, said the sheep-man.
“Please,” said Margarete. “You’d be lucky if they let you keep your coat.”
By the time Zmudowski had returned, they had dressed the winter soldier in the same clean clothes that had been worn by several dozen men.
The peasant counted the onions.
“You can stay the night,” said Lucius, but the man only grunted, and with the rank, wet smell of stable, he was off.
Lucius turned back. “I thought I was generous.”
“Very generous,” said Margarete. “There is more belly beneath that cloak than on all of us combined. We should be asking him for food.”
She turned back to the silent soldier. “Now, this one. Shall we bring him to the church?”
“Please, Sister,” said Lucius.
“Diagnosis?”
“No wound? For now, we call it Nervenshock, I guess.”
“Yes, Doctor. This is also what I thought.”
Nervous shock: but what did this even mean? Back in Vienna he had never heard of the condition. No mention by Wagner-Jauregg, Professor of Psychiatry and Neurology, Great Crown Counselor to the King. No word of it in the textbooks, nor the military manuals distributed by the Medical Service. All he knew came from Brosz and Berman. A new disease, born of the war, they told him. No sense to its symptoms, which seemed to simulate damage to the nerves, without yielding anything on autopsy. No agreement as to cause. The penetration of the skull by microscopic particles of ash or metal? A concussion of air? Or the effect of terror? In the field stations, in the regimental hospitals, they couldn’t even agree on a name.
Granatkontusion. Granatexplosionslähmung. Kriegszitterung. Kriegsneurose.
Shell-contusion. Shell-explosion paralysis. War-trembling. War nerves.
It was even worse in the west, they told him: an epidemic, like some kind of virus first stirred up in Flemish soil, now come east.
And treatments? he had asked them then. There the two had laughed. How do you treat something when you don’t know what it is? But he was earnest and they tried to answer. Many of the men got better just with rest. And the others…In the beginning, the sicker cases were sent back to Budapest and Vienna, for rehabilitation, which might take months. But now there were new cures, electricity applied to the limbs to stimulate movement, to the throat to get mute soldiers to talk. It was not clear if the electricity worked because it caused their frozen muscles to contract or because it also hurt and scared them. Sometimes they attached it to the eyes or testicles. Dr. Muck of Essen had devised a metal ball to drop down the throat of soldiers who had lost their speech, the sensation of suffocation causing them to gag, gags turning to sounds, then sounds to words.
“These men are cured?” asked Lucius, and Brosz raised his finger. “Ah, but since when was our goal to cure them? It’s to return them to the front.”
In Lemnowice, his first case of Nervenshock had been in late February, scarcely two weeks after he’d arrived. An Austrian private, one Georg Lenz of Wiener Neustadt, one of three men to survive when a shell struck his foxhole near Dolina. He had arrived pockmarked with tiny bits of gravel but otherwise unscathed. Except that his legs had ceased to work. His knees buckled when they tried to walk him, and when they asked him to move his toes, he stared at them with a strange indifference, as if his feet belonged to someone else. But his reflexes were normal, as was the function of his bowel and bladder. From an anatomical perspective, the injury was impossible, and yet Lucius couldn’t bring himself to diagnose Lenz as faking. There was something to the soldier’s terror, the way he watched the others, his screams at night, that could
n’t be feigned. They had found bits of the other soldiers in his hair and pockets. He had stayed just three days before he was evacuated to the rear.
The others followed similar patterns. A shell-strike against a foxhole, a trench, a transport vehicle. And then, sometimes after hours, the symptoms. The tremors, the paralysis, the twitching, lurching gaits, the bizarre contortions of their arms.
But there wasn’t always a blast. In May, a young Czech sergeant had been found wandering across the battlefield after he shot a dog for food and found a child’s hand inside its mouth. It had taken days before he said what happened. By Lemnowice, he was hollow-eyed, emaciated, gagging every time he tried to eat.
They kept the men in Heads, on the assumption that the injury was to the nerves, to the brain, but also because the other soldiers, with their missing hands and feet, didn’t take well to men without a wound. As they were often the only soldiers medically stable enough to make the journey back across the pass to a second-level hospital, they usually didn’t stay long. But when they did, and when duties were light, Lucius returned to their bedsides, intrigued, to repeat their exams, to try to wrench from them the story of what had happened. He wrote to Feuermann, then at a regimental hospital in Gorizia, and received similar stories in return. Feuermann subscribed to a psychological explanation for the injury, that the horror of the fighting produced a disruption in the fibers of the brain. But Lucius wasn’t satisfied by this. The horror? he replied. Since when was this a scientific term? And a disruption in the fibers? Brosz and Berman said the autopsies on men who’d later died showed nothing; their brains looked like everybody else’s. What was the mechanism? he asked Feuermann. War and fear had been with them forever. But cases like these had never been described.
It is like the mystery we once searched for beneath the microscope, he wrote, aware that his words were getting lofty, but unable to hold back. Or that I once was seeking with my X-rays and my dogs. Something beneath the skin, imperceptible, waiting to be found.