4 Stars

The year is 1914. Lucius is a young medical student in Vienna, when the war breaks out and he immediately becomes a “War Doctor.”

Lucius is sent to Lemnowice in the Carpathian Mountain, where the conditions are barbaric: Amputations, Gonorrhea, Lice and Typhus - to name a few. The “Hospital” is infested with rats and the situation is deplorable. Truth be told, he is completely unprepared. Thankfully, Sister Margarete, the nurse on the premises, teaches him everything she knows and it is because of her, that he becomes “a doctor.” Years later, Lucius get separated and ends up back at the University, working at the Hospital. He is however, forever haunted: by thoughts of Lemnowice, of a former patient named Horvath and by Margarete.

“The Winter Soldier” is a novel about the tragedy of war, human nature, love, loss and forgiveness. It is about accepting one’s limitations and about finding peace within. Though this novel was a bit long and was a bit hard to read at times, (based on the atrocities of war) I found it to be quite well done. There was a moment where tears fell from my eyes quite unexpectedly, it happened almost out of the blue and I was not prepared. That may sound silly considering that this is a war story, but in truth, most of the novel wasn’t “touching” per se, but then there was this incident and I just lost it, and I was verklempt. Even now, thinking about it, tears form in my eyes. The characters here, Lucius, Margarete, and a few others, they creep into your heart and your soul and make a mark. In my case, they are still here.

A huge thank you to NetGalley, Little, Brown and Company and Daniel Mason for an ARC of this novel in exchange for an honest review.

Published on NetGalley, Goodreads, Amazon, Twitter and Instagram on 9.23.18.

Already on indie next list. If I had read earlier I would have recommended it! Mason is a wonderful author.

Persevere- it’s a slow start introducing Lucius and his character, but it picks up and the slow rise gives way to some great storytelling.
Distinctive details of maladies and surgeries, mental illness and barbaric torture aren’t for the weak of stomach. However, the warmth of romance is definitely for the weak of heart. Trials, forgiveness, peace and redemption are sought, for “these soldiers without (visible) wounds”, and coming home doesn’t always mean a homecoming, but fellowship with those whose stories you intimately share. Those are the ones who know the real you, with those are where you can find your forgiveness and redemption, even if it’s not where you thought it would be.
Definitely a thorough read, what a story!

Wow! No sepia colored historical fiction here. We are talking graphic. The writing here will have you squirming. The scenes etch themselves into your brain.

It’s the beginning of World War I. I’ve always considered WWI a complicated mess of a war. It’s known for its high casualties and gruesome war fare. The 1915 winter campaign in the Carpathian Mountains was a disaster for the Austrio- Hungarian forces fighting the Russians. Ill equipped for battle, let alone winter, they struggle to hang on to their frontline.

Lucius is a young medical student who gets sent to the front as a doctor before he has graduated medical school. Instead of the regional war hospital he envisions, where he expects to learn from real doctors, he finds a “freezing first aid station with an armed, half mad nurse and an operating table salvaged from the pews” of the church the building formerly was. He is the only “doctor”. He’s never operated on anyone prior to his arrival. He struggles to deal with typhus, frostbite, lice, rats and what we now call PTSD.

Sister Margarete, the nurse, is an angel, a strict disciplinarian and a great teacher. She wields a gun to shoot the rats and is capable of performing an amputation.

With the new methods of fighting, “war nerves” were seen in ever greater numbers and at a level of intensity previously unknown. The army was loath to acknowledge the problem and the doctors had no idea how to treat them. Some of the cures were probably worse than the problem. Mason himself is a physician and associate professor of psychiatry. He helps us to understand what the soldiers and their doctors were dealing with.

What makes this book work is the characters. You come to care for each of them, just as they come to care for each other.

The book deals with hubris, guilt and the ability to forgive oneself. It’s a well paced book with enough tension to keep you flipping the pages. It would make a great book club selection, especially as we come up on the 100th anniversary of Armistice Day.

My thanks to netgalley and Little, Brown for an advance copy of this book.

The Winter Soldier is a lyrical yet brutal account of war behind the lines – the suffering of the wounded and dying and those who care for them. Medical personnel as asked not to heal, but simply to mend men sufficiently that they can be sent back into battle. Characters are complex and compelling, and the novel explores the psychological toll of war, the desire for control in a world gone mad, and the far-reaching and unpredictable effects of our choices on others.

In addition to being beautifully written, the novel is a welcome addition to an overlooked war: the First World War and its Eastern Front. It’s also one of the few Great War novels whose central character is an Austrian soldier, although the story emerges as the war is seen through numerous perspectives, broken and fragmented. Young refugee boys remember the startling sight of man with a bloody, broken face; soldiers fight local battles with no sense of a larger strategy (if there is one), and medical personnel see only casualties of war. Yet in the midst of so much brokenness, everything and everyone is interconnected in a web of cause-and-effect so tangled that it can never be fully understood.

At one point, the Austrian soldier-physician is asked, “God in Heaven, Lieutenant…. How did you get here?” His response is telling: “For a moment, Lucius thought of his march through the mountains, then of Margarete and the river, then Horvath, his winter surgeries, the church, the hussar leading him through the snow. Then Nagybocsko. Debrecen. Budapest. Vienna. How far back do you wish to go?

A superb novel, the Winter Soldier should appeal to those who enjoy literary fiction, as well as historical fiction and military history.

Well-written historical novel of war. War is not only about the soldiers, but the doctors and the people who assist without the benefit of being glorified. Mason has written a dark emotional story of a young Dr. trying to mentally survive the situation he is in. Highly recommend to readers of Kevin Powers.

Lucius Krzelewski, born to a wealthy Polish family, has been raised in Vienna. He chooses to study medicine instead of living a pampered life. Lucius lives and breathes medicine. After six semesters of study, he wants to examine and treat patients. He has yet to use a scalpel. With two years of study remaining, the Archduke of Sarajevo is assassinated. In 1915, during the Great War, medical students are offered early graduation if they enlist. Physician shortages mean that students like Lucius can become medical lieutenants and be offered positions in garrison hospitals serving entire regiments.

Lucius enlists and arrives at his post in Lemnowice in the Carpathian Mountains with a broken wrist. Discovering that he will be the only doctor and will work with only one nurse, a nun named Sister Margarete, he feels that he has been sent to a "...freezing, first-aid station with an armed, half-mad nurse and an operating table salvaged from the pews" (of the church) Why tote a gun? he asks. To shoot the rats! For months, Sister Margarete has performed amputations and dealt with lice and typhus with limited medical supplies. Lucius watches and learns from Margarete until his wrist heals. Doctors and nurses are ordered to "patch and send" men back to the front as quickly as possible. A new patient arrives from the battlefield in a wheelbarrow. He is in a fetal position and is unable to communicate. No injuries are visible. Lucius's diagnosis is "nerve shock". What treatment plan can Lucius use to help Jozsef Horvath, a soldier suffering from shell shock (PTSD)? Lucius dreams of being able to see how Jozsef thinks.

"The Winter Soldier" by Daniel Mason is a work of historical fiction that takes us to makeshift hospitals and first aid stations where we view the devastating injuries suffered by soldiers and the complications created by doctor shortages and inadequate medical supplies. The emotional upheaval as suffered by Jozsef Horvath is arguably representative of many returning from the front. Lucius's decisions consume his very existence as he tries to atone for a misjudgement. Love and war are strange bedfellows. Can a wartime romance be rekindled after the war? Author Daniel Mason has written an excellent, insightful, very moving masterpiece.

Thank you Little, Brown and Company and Net Galley for the opportunity to read and review "The Winter Soldier".

Military casualties suffered during World War I were among the highest in history. The Winter Soldier brings to life the chaos, brutality, and suffering experienced by people living in the Austro Hungarian Empire during this time.

Lucius Krzelewski was a young medical student when the war began. Lucius and several friends volunteered to serve as medical assistants at the front lines. Lucius arrived at his assigned post only to discover that he would be the only “doctor” there. He soon began to rely on the extensive experience of his nurse and assistant, Margarete, to help him treat the severely injured patients.

In the aftermath of the war, Lucius sets out to find Margarete who disappeared as the war ended. This is a novel about resilience, love, hope, and medicine, amidst the hardships and deprivations of war.

Thank you to Netgalley, Little, Brown & Company, and author Daniel Mason for giving me the opportunity to read the ARC of this novel.

Lucius Krzelewski is the main character in Daniel Mason's historical novel, The Winter Soldier. Lucius is a 22-year-old medical student in Vienna. He comes from a privileged family where loyalty to country and tradition rule. Lucius is a dedicated student who wants nothing more than to learn everything he can about medicine, particularly in the neurological field where his interest moves toward the possibility of seeing more of the brain with the new invention of
x-rays.

The Great War breaks out and Lucius, at first, decides that his medical studies are too essential to leave. His two best friends enlist, and finally, Lucius also sees the possibilities of gains in his medical knowledge by serving at the front. After a few errors in the inefficient war bureaucracy, Luis lands in a far-flung hospital, or first-aid station, in the Carpathian Mountains. He faces a situation far different than the ones he friends promised him. His hospital is in a church with a giant crater in the middle and run by a stern young nursing nun, Sister Margarete. She carries a gun with her at all times, running an organized ward divided into groups with fevers, head wounds, amputations, infectious quarantines. Lucius soon learns that he knows very little about patient care, surgery, and amputations.

Patiently, Margarete teaches the young doctor everything he needs to know and the operation runs as smooth as it can under the dire circumstances. The nurse and the doctor become friendly, to a degree, and take their meals together with the cook and the porter.
The routines become a way of life, and Lucius is learning more through his hands-on work with suffering men than he ever could in the medical libraries of Vienna.

I agree with other readers that the novel has a Dr. Shivago like mood. We see through the author's eyes the unspeakable horrors of what humans do to each in the name of patriotism. The novel is well written, and the irony that World War II will once again ravage most of Europe is sobering. I enjoyed reading this novel for the geography and cultural aspects and learning more about clinical medical practices in a war zone 100 years ago.

I received an advanced copy of this novel from the publisher through NetGalley.

All the stars for this gorgeous, haunting novel.

It’s 1914, and a great war is exploding across Europe. Lucius is a brilliant but awkward young medical student from a wealthy Viennese family who, lured by tales of heroic battlefield surgeries, enlists in the army, expecting to be assigned to an organized field hospital. Instead he finds himself in a remote village in the forbidding Carpathian Mountains, where he is the only doctor on site, assisted by a couple of gruff orderlies and a mysterious young nun. Lucius is woefully unprepared, and terrified by what he encounters – gruesome battle injuries, both visible and not. Thankfully, Sister Margarete is more than capable, and quickly yet kindly helps Lucius find his way among his patients. Lucius is forever changed by the time he spends in this tiny village, finding courage and strength he didn’t know he had. As Lucius and Margarete become closer, their world is shattered by one special patient whom Lucius is determined to save, but perhaps at too great a cost.

This book was phenomenal. I loved reading a WW1 novel from a different perspective. Lucius was a sympathetic and likable character, and my affection for him grew throughout the book. I absolutely loved the setting, and the historical facts, which I admit I don’t know nearly enough about. Sister Margarete was a fascinating character; her way with words and her “bossiness” had me chuckling even amidst the tragedy of their situation. Mason is a wonderful writer; his prose deeply evocative of place and time. (I find myself itching even now as I remember his descriptions of the lice!) The medical information was really interesting and the battle scenes appropriately terrifying. And the relationship between Lucius and Margarete was so tender and pulled at all the right heartstrings. Brilliantly written, I know this one will stay with me for a long time.

Highly recommend!

It is 1914 in Vienna, Austria. Talk of war surrounds the privileged as well as the poor. Lucius is still in medical school, and wants nothing more than to be a doctor, even if it means joining the army and automatically becoming one. Up to this point he has only cut on pigs and has all most no hands on experience.

Sent to the remoteness of the Carpathian Mountains, where he should find a well stocked medical unit,he finds a church turned into a hospital being run by nuns. One nun in particular. Sister Margarete has had more experience than any doctor and proceeds to teach Lucius the ropes.

The conditions are grim and yet he finds himself drawn to the nun and yet still wondering about her past and her honesty.

This wasn't so much about the War. This was about the people impacted by that war. And the choices the people make when their backs are against the wall. 

I wasn't that interested in the beginning of the book or at the end. Not that it wasn't written well, I just felt it dragged a bit.

Netgalley/ September 11th 2018 by Little, Brown and Company

When this book opens we meet a man on a train heading to a hospital where he is to serve the Polish army. We then take a step back to discover he is 22, Polish, and has been studying to become a doctor. With the battles of WWI approaching Lucius Krzelewski has enlisted to help fill the need for medics. He is immediately commissioned as a medical lieutenant and assigned to a very remote field hospital. When he arrives he discovers an old church with a nursing sister in charge. The sister, Margarete, proceeds to tell him of the typhus and the infestation of lice that she managed to contain after the previous doctor abandoned the place. It is in this ill equipped “hospital” that Lucius begins to really gain his medical experiences.

This book is raw and brutal and Lucius has many second thoughts and regrets. The story, more about character than plot, moves slowly and describes many of the horrors of war. Saying you enjoyed this book feels a little awkward because of the subject matter but I did love the perspective and the author’s ability to deliver this story in a sensitive and engaging way. I found the second half of the book to be more appealing than the beginning.

If Gavrilo Princip had not fired the shot that started World War I, Lucius Krzelewski would have had to slowly make his way through the ranks of the endless Austro-Hungarian medical bureaucracy to become a doctor. Instead, he enlists as a medical lieutenant and is shipped to a field hospital somewhere in the Carpathian mountains. The Winter Soldier, by Daniel Mason, follows him from his days as a student to the hospital to the end of the war, as he grows from the textbook definition of a callow youth into an emotionally battered field surgeon.

Lucius, when we first meet him, is the privileged youngest son of an aristocratic family living in Vienna. He doesn’t know how to make small talk. He definitely doesn’t know how to talk to women (including his mother). He stutters under pressure. The only thing that brings him pleasure is scientific observation. Medical school is pure joy for him, once he finally convinces his parents to send him and pay his tuition. Study does start to wear a bit thin when he realizes that the extremely stratified bureaucracy above him means that he will barely be allowed in the same room as patients for ages. It doesn’t take much wheedling from his closest friend to encourage him to enlist when war breaks out.

Because the Austro-Hungarian Army is desperate for anyone with any kind of medical knowledge, Lucius is readily accepted and sent to a field hospital near the Eastern Front. On arrival, Lucius learns that all of the previous doctors and medical personnel are dead or fled. The only one who knows anything about medicine is a nursing sister called Margarete. Without her, it’s a wonder anyone would have survived either in Lucius’ hands or during the doctor interregnum. There are scenes in the first half of the book that reminded me strongly of A Young Doctor’s Notebook, which is based on the life of Mikhail Bulgakov who found himself in a similar situation as an untested doctor in a remote part of the Soviet Union. Lucius slowly becomes a competent surgeon and field doctor under Margarete’s roughly diplomatic tutelage.

In addition to Lucius’ growth, a major theme of The Winter Soldier is the growing problem of what we now recognize as post-traumatic stress disorder. One soldier, named Horvath, is the first case Lucius has a chance to observe in his field hospital. We never learn what Horvath saw, but his condition is so extremely debilitating that Lucius fights to keep him from being re-conscripted by a sadistic Austrian officer. At the time, “shell shock” was viewed as cowardice or malingering. Men with this condition were subject to horrific punishments and “treatments,” in order to get them back into the fight. Lucius’ intervention has awful consequences, deepening The Winter Soldier from bildungsroman to a more complicated portrait of a naïve man caught in the middle of a collapsing empire at war. His intervention also means that his romance with Margarete takes a sharp turn towards tragedy.

The Winter Soldier is one of the best contemporary novels I’ve read about World War I. Characterization is fully-realized, which I appreciated. What I loved about this book, however, was the way Mason recreated the last years of the Austro-Hungarian empire and its catastrophic end. The book highlights the divisions between the empire’s ethnic groups which became fracture lines by the end of the war. Many of the recruits did not speak German (the empire’s official language) well enough to follow officer’s orders. There are shortages of everything. Transportation is a mess. All of that comes through sharply through Lucius peripatetic attempts to find Margarete in the later half of the book.

I would strongly recommend this book to readers looking for a good read about World War I.

A beautifully written book set in a remote field hospital in Poland during World War I. A newly minted Doctor, a Nursing Sister and the horrors of war and its aftermath move the story along to it's inevitable sad conclusion. But the books language is so lovely and the atmosphere that is created makes this just a wonderful read.

I DIdnt like this book, and couldn’t finish it. I have read about a quarter of the book and found it too boring to go on and a waste of my time.

Lucius, is a young medical student when WWI erupts. Hoping to gain more experience, he enlists. He is sent to a field hospital in a remote valley. The previous doctor and nurses have left, save one, Sister Margarete. Quickly realizing that he has no idea what he is doing, he relies on Sister Margarete to teach him the fundamentals of battlefield surgery. Together, the two run the field hospital. When a soldier is brought in with shell shock, Lucius is fascinated by the disease and does his best to cure him. Lucius keeps the soldier long past the time he should, resulting in devastating consequences.

This was a pretty good book. Lucius was a realistic and likeable character. His relationship with Sister Margarete, the patients, and medicine was interesting to watch. I would definitely read another book from this author. Overall, well worth picking up.

Well written, a story told well of a terrible time of history. WWI was a horrific war and Mr. Mason's tale doesn't sugarcoat his telling of the story of a doctor on the front lines in Europe. A great story with a satisfying ending. Thank you, Mr. Mason for a really good book!

The Winter Soldier is the wonderfully written story of WWI. Medical student Lucius, son of a wealthy Viennese couple, enlists, and is sent to a remote field hospital in the Carpathian mountains to care for wounded soldiers. Even though he has not completed his medical training, he is the only physician there, and is expected to know what to do. Margrete, the convent nurse there, does know what to do, and teaches him along the way about battlefield medicine. Among other things, they battle lack of supplies, winter, and impossible injuries - including mental trauma. His decision about the treatment of one soldier has far reaching repercussions that will change his life. This was slower paced than I expected, but so worth the read. This is a beautifully atmospheric and vivid novel that will drop you practically on the front lines of the Eastern front, and give you a front row view of war-time medicine, a tragic love story, and war-worn Vienna. Many thanks to NetGalley and Little, Brown and Company for the e-arc. 4+ stars!

Thank you net galley for the advance read copy of this novel. This was a historical fiction piece set in WWI about a doctor, Lucius, struggling to care for the soldiers left at the remote field hospital he has been sent to. Parts of the novel were a bit much for me in terms of medical descriptions but overall I liked the authors novel.

Daniel Mason’s The Winter Soldier is a strongly written novel set in field hospital on the Eastern front of World War One.  Lucius is a young man from a family of means who finds medicine an escape from the obligations of his birth. When war breaks out with and only a couple of years of medical school under his belt, he enlists to shun a favorable assignment his parents might have procured for him. The result is a commission that sends Lucius to a church that has been turned into a ward now manned a few stalwarts, those who have not died or run off, including Sister Margarete. A young woman who tests, helps, and ultimately provides the impetus for a vast change in the main character.

Mason’s phrasing and diction is exceptional; he has a way of illuminating vast details of a character in only a few sentences. His research of war and the medicine of the times creates a thoroughly convincing atmosphere. The reader is throw on the table during the bloody amputations and the horrors of shell shock. Yet, I found the story to be lacking. The pacing was off and I was confused as to the central conflict because it fell off and wasn’t able to sustain a necessary tension.

The Winter Soldier is a novel that I had high hopes for, especially after reading Mason's The Piano Tuner. While Mason’s writing is as effectual as ever and the premise is enticing, the overall arc of the story didn't manage to hold up throughout the narrative. I loved the characters, the romance, and the look into The Great War, yet felt the thread was lost about three-quarters of the way through the book.

Thank you to NetGalley, Little, Brown, and Company, and Daniel Mason for the advanced copy for review.