His chest heaved. Still the image of the man’s surprised expression hung before him. He drew his hand over his eyes as if to wipe the vision away and found it red with blood.
Ahead of him a soldier was beckoning. Lucius didn’t know if it was to him, but he followed, up and over a giant mound of earth. He reached the top just as it erupted with gunfire beneath his feet, and tumbled down the other side. Around him gunners manned machine guns behind an earthwork, firing through gaps of light. Still he didn’t stop. It seemed impossible that but a few hundred meters now separated him from the officer with his bleeding neck.
Now, as he continued his retreat, a vast field camp unfolded before him. Soldiers carrying ammunition ran up to the machine gun nest, while others carrying buckets and entrenching tools fanned out through the forest. A cavalry platoon rode past, flags flapping on their lances. He stared. Where had all this come from? The front was supposed to be far off, still on the plains. Advancing soldiers were staring at him with horror; he realized how gruesome he must have looked covered in blood. A medic approached, but he waved the man away. Around him: munitions trucks, stacks of shells being unloaded. Ad hoc stables. First-aid tent. A field kitchen. Safety, at last.
It was only then that he stopped to catch his breath, chest heaving, hands on his knees.
So that was war, he thought. For two years, in Lemnowice, he had thought he had come to know it, but it was only through its wounds, its scars, its vestiges. Never truly war itself.
Then suddenly he straightened up. Lemnowice. He had to get back to Lemnowice, to Margarete, before the fighting got there first.
At a communications center set up inside a farmhouse, dozens of wires hung down from the ceiling to a rank of radios. In the back, a man in tall boots paced. He wore a cape and a fur shako decorated with a high plume and a silver death’s-head. A captain. For a second he took Lucius in, his expression less one of shock than irritation that someone so bespattered had the nerve to enter his tent.
Lucius saluted. “Medical Lieutenant Krzelewski, sir. Of the Austrian Fourteenth, based at a field hospital in Lemnowice.”
The captain took in his medical uniform, the blood and mud. “Where?” The skull staring down unnervingly from his forehead.
“Lemnowice, Captain.”
“Never heard of it.”
“Field hospital, Captain. South of Nadworna.”
“God in heaven, Lieutenant.” The man whistled. “How did you get here?”
For a moment, Lucius thought of his march through the mountains, then of Margarete and the river, then Horváth, his winter surgeries, the church, the hussar leading him through the snow. Then Nagybocskó. Debrecen. Budapest. Vienna. How far back do you wish to go?
“I am sorry, sir. Where is here?”
“Here? A stinking Ruthenian dunghill not fit for a shitting leper, which somehow Vienna sees fit to defend.”
This wasn’t the answer Lucius was looking for. But the captain didn’t give him time to ask him more. Instead he turned to a batman, who had appeared protectively at his side. “Show the doctor back to Field Headquarters. I suspect men like him could be of use.”
They set off down the road. The mist was retreating across the plains, revealing a landscape of farms and shallow valleys, patches of green and yellow and dun. Little black quadrangles lay like blankets in the distance, revealing themselves on closer inspection to be advancing Russian companies. It seemed impossible that they could be there, in sight, and he here, walking. Like the little regiments in his father’s paintings, bristling postage stamps that rode across the plains while peasants tilled their field. But here, the peasantry didn’t seem so indifferent. The roads were filled with people, some in packs, some traveling alone, all retreating from the rising sun. They carried bundles of belongings, children, chickens. A woman nursed a baby as she walked, blue flies dancing about its mouth.
To the east Lucius could see trails of smoke rising through the sky. Early harvest lay stacked by the roadsides, smelling sweetly of cut grass. A soldier was sitting, struggling with puttees that had come undone.
He looked back over his shoulder. There, the mountains lay beneath their dark green forest. They seemed so quiet. Somewhere, he thought, there, was Lemnowice, Margarete. Less than half a day had passed since he’d heard the church bells in the night.
They stepped out of the way for an infantry regiment coming up the road, their coats faded to different shades of blue. Farther along he could see a scab of town, a train depot. Around them rose strange towers whose purpose he didn’t understand, thin, tapering pyramids with boxy heads, like ancient effigies of armless men.
“Oil derricks,” said the aide, following his gaze. “The town is Sloboda Rungurska, on the line to Kolomea.”
They had been encamped there for two weeks, the man told him. He was in the Twenty-Fourth Austrian Infantry Division, under von Korda. Or what was left of it. The army was in tatters, the men exhausted. Since the Russian offensive at the beginning of the month, they had been forced to retreat across the Pruth. It was worse in the north. Lutsk had fallen the week before. And to the south, Czernowitz was under siege, with reports coming in that it had fallen, too. Now they were concentrating defenses in the foothills, afraid that they would lose the oil fields, or worse, that the Russians would take back the mountain passes they had last held during the first months of the war.
He stopped. He knew well that if he let the aide take him to Field Headquarters, they could reassign him on the spot.
“Corporal, I must return to my hospital. How?”
“Your hospital, Doctor Lieutenant? But the captain said—”
“I heard the captain’s instructions. But I need to get back to my hospital. They have no doctor. How can I get there?”
“The captain—”
Now Lucius looked at him directly. In the batman’s eyes, he could almost see the reflection of the captain with his skull and crossbones. “Corporal—if you take me to Field Headquarters, I will tell them that you tried to bribe me for a medical exemption.”
The man’s face turned red. “But—but I’ve said nothing!”
“You said you were exhausted. That you would do anything to go home.”
The aide bit his lip. For a moment, he considered this.
“Your captain won’t even know,” said Lucius, trying to sound confident. “I think that I’m the least of his concerns.”
“You said it was near Nadworna?” the corporal said at last. “Then I would go to Kolomea and then take the train to Nadworna from there.”
“Oh, but that will take too long. How are the roads?”
“What do you mean? To walk directly there? You would have to be mad. You’ve seen our line. By tomorrow, those roads will be swarming with Russian cavalry.”
Lucius looked uneasily across the valley to the encamped armies, then down at the little town below. Now another long line of soldiers was heading up the road. He closed his eyes and tried to conjure up the map. Northeast to Kolomea, west to Nadworna, south along the valley to Lemnowice, this on foot. So: to travel one leg of a rectangle, he would have to travel three.