The lorry was waiting outside the church.
Snow dusted the hood and canvas shelter. A pair of village children, carrying firewood, had stopped to watch them. Lucius followed the evacuees outside, where they saluted him, one after the other, and climbed into the back. The canvas door was buttoned shut. Were it not for the faint coughing of the Polish private, there would have been no sign of any life inside.
The driver knelt before the engine and turned the crank. The engine wheezed, then failed to catch. Again the driver tried. This time it didn’t make any sound at all.
He rose, cursing. “The hoses have frozen. I’ll need hot water.”
He went back into the church, leaving the patients behind. Lucius remained outside, uneasy that the men had just been left out in the cold. And this driver seemed careless, he thought, and he didn’t like how small and vulnerable the lorry looked. Inside the canvas shelter, the benches were bare; the men would have nothing but their blankets, and one another, to stay warm. What if the Polish private’s pneumonia worsened again? Was this why he was coughing? And the Czech officer—he still grew confused at times. And now the sun was setting. What if they had to stop at night?
At least Horváth wasn’t among them, he thought. Yes, he tried to reassure himself: he was relieved he’d kept Horváth behind.
But the others… He had half a mind to unfurl the canvas door and get his patients, when the driver returned, lugging a pot of steaming water that heaved and splattered on the earth.
That night, paces away from József Horváth, Lucius poured the remaining Veronal out onto a piece of paper.
Sixteen tablets. Eight days before they began to lose him again; nine, ten if one counted the pills that had turned to dust.
8.
And he was right. The front was far away. In Latvia and Byelorussia, Italy and Mesopotamia and Verdun. Throughout the winter, fighting had continued in Galicia and the Bukovina, but these were smaller skirmishes, a seemingly endless back-and-forth for snowy country, downed bridges and open craters, pastures. Little lost, and very little gained.
One day in the middle of March, they thought they heard shelling, and slipped cautiously outside the church. But it was just a village woman, her face red with exertion, replacing a fencepost with the booming flat of her axe.
Occasionally, evacuation lorries stopped to drop off soldiers injured on the plains. They were mostly from Hungarian regiments, trying to transport the wounded back across the mountains to hospitals in Munkács and Máramarossziget, only to be held up by the snow. There were more cases of war nerves among them, soldiers beset by shakes and twisted postures, who tumbled when they tried to walk. Like Horváth, they had no wounds that he could see, and like Horváth the palsy followed no known pattern. But they were different, more like the cases described by Brosz and Berman. They ate, and spoke, and wept, and their movements were purposeful; some scurried beneath their blankets with the slightest sound.
Lucius was tempted to try to give them Veronal, which had been resupplied the week before. But Horváth now needed ever larger doses just to keep him from tensing up, and again Lucius feared running out of pills. Now, with Horváth’s stay approaching a month, he found himself increasingly pessimistic, even angry, though he didn’t know toward whom.
At the end of the month, a conscription detail appeared on horseback.
The commanding officer was a lieutenant called Horst. A tall man, accent from Upper Austria, with pale, almost lashless eyelids, a dark-brown moustache trimmed neatly above unusually white teeth, and a scar on his forehead in the distinctive shape of a third, tiny eye. He wore a black cape trimmed with red ribbon over his broad shoulders, and grey trousers tucked into a pair of steel-tipped boots. From Margarete’s look of disgust, Lucius sensed this was the same man who had appeared last winter, whom she had cursed so viciously. But Horst gazed right through her. He was accompanied by a pair of Hungarian batmen, granitic specimens, each a good hand taller than Lucius and likely twice his weight.
Inside the church, the batmen sat sullenly at the table and drank from bowls of soup while Horst explained. A year and a half of war had taken a heavy toll on the armies, he said. In Vienna, the draft was expanding. Now they were canvassing the hospitals for men well enough to fight.
“No one here is well enough to fight,” said Lucius, looking past the lieutenant into the dim light of the nave. “An evacuation convoy just passed through two weeks ago. They took fourteen patients to the rear. The rest are still too sick to leave, let alone return to battle.”
“There are new orders about what constitutes battle-readiness,” said Horst, taking another spoonful of soup. “Certain doctors do not understand the needs of a fighting army. What constitutes illness in war is not the same as peace.”
A hush had descended over the hospital, and Lucius could sense Margarete watching him. He knew that further protest would only raise Horst’s suspicions. “Whatever Herr Lieutenant thinks,” he said.
Horst downed the last drops of his soup and rose, saber clattering against his chair. From his pocket, he removed a leather case and extracted a cigarette, which he handed to one of the batmen to light.
They began in Limbs, in the nave, beneath the gilded image of Saint Michael.
One by one the men lifted their stumps for him. Horst moved quickly, stopping only to inspect a wound. He seemed impatient, Lucius thought, even annoyed to find so many amputees. Halfway down the second aisle, Horst stopped. “Where are the neurological diseases?”
“Over there,” said Lucius, pointing toward the south transept. “We haven’t many. But they’re all quite ill.”
Horst drew on the cigarette and tapped the ash free. “And I told you I’ll decide.”
The first two patients both had head wounds; both were comatose and didn’t stir when Horst shook them with his foot. In the third bed was an Austrian private named Berg, a former sapper who’d been buried in his tunnel. His sight had failed him, though Lucius could find no sign of injury to his eyes or brain. At night he woke up screaming, and when they sat him up to eat his meals, he couldn’t keep his head from drooping down. He had been there two months, having missed the last evacuation due to a passing bout of dysentery.
But Lucius knew that none of this was likely to protect him from the conscription officer. “He’s blind,” he said.
“Blind?” Horst crouched, and tilted the man’s head back. “His eyes look fine.”
“Of course, but on proper ophthalmic exam…”
“Stand,” said Horst.
The soldier didn’t seem to hear him.
“I thought you said he was blind,” said Horst. “Not deaf.” He nodded to a batman, who hauled Berg up to his feet.
Berg stood trembling, in half-genuflection, as if he didn’t know whether to sit or stand. His chin hung to his chest.
“What’s wrong with his neck?” asked Horst.
For a moment, Lucius paused, trying to gauge how best to respond. “Shell-blast kyphosis,” he said at last. He reached out and turned Berg roughly by the shoulder, as if to show that he, too, was no sentimental fool. He ran his thumb over the soldier’s spine. “Probable compression of the vertebrae secondary to the explosion. For a time, we suspected a subdural hematoma. I thought I would have to open his skull.”
This was all, of course, a lie. But the medical language seemed to give Horst pause. As he walked on, Margarete helped Berg back into his bed.
The next patient was one of the new Hungarians, named Virág. According to the story, he had been talking to his commanding officer when an errant bullet from a soldier cleaning his gun burst through the C.O.’s eye. Two days later, out of the blue, Virág had dropped to the ground, screaming, clawing at his own face, saying it was burning. For his first few days in Lemnowice, he kept trying to flee into the cold.