“I am deploying,” Lucius said.
“Then show me your orders.”
“But I don’t have specific orders. I told them yesterday, they said nothing. I’m a doctor. I have to get back to my hospital.”
“And I told you that you need orders. You’re a doctor? Medical Office. Kazimierzowska Street, across town. The train is delayed anyway; if you hurry, you’ll catch it when it leaves this afternoon.” And he turned back to the crowd.
Outside the station, Lucius looked futilely for a fiacre. Of course: all horses were on the front. So he walked through the old town, breaking at times into a trot, asking for directions along the way. Stanislau was the first city of any size that he had been in since deployment, and alongside his growing crescendo of panic, he found himself disoriented by its mass, the solidity of the apartments, the great paved square.
He, child of the Imperial City: what had the mountains done?
Kazimierzowska was a long street that led out of town. He had walked nearly twenty minutes before he began to doubt his directions. He stopped a Jewish grocer in a kaftan who was pushing his cart. The man nodded with recognition when Lucius asked for the district medical office. But it wasn’t on Kazimierzowska Street, it was on Gołuchowskiego Street. He sent his son to lead Lucius, a little boy with long payess who discharged his duty with great solemnity, saluting Lucius when they reached the door.
The building was at the edge of a barracks stretching for several blocks. He was sent to three different offices until he finally found himself before the right man, a surgeon major named Karłowicz with a long forehead and eyeglasses scarcely larger than his eyes. He listened thoughtfully as Lucius told him how he had been separated from his hospital, how he needed to get back. To Lucius’s relief, the man agreed this was “important.” If he could just have a minute… Then he rose and left Lucius alone.
On the wall was a map, with the locations of field hospitals and a schematic for evacuation that must have been planned by someone extraordinarily optimistic about the constraints of geography: the road from Lemnowice to the Hungarian interior ran straight over the massif, as if there weren’t any mountains there at all. He thought how the soldiers, with their dark humor, would have laughed at this. But the map also clearly showed the advancing Russian salient, and none of it seemed so funny now.
Outside it had begun to rain.
The door creaked behind him. Karłowicz. Again, he sat.
“Lebowice has been evacuated,” he said.
“Lemnowice,” said Lucius.
“Yes, of course, the same. We received the updates yesterday. With the fall of Kolomea, they have evacuated all hospitals in the sector. They’ve been completely overrun.”
Lucius felt his thoughts spin out, unable to absorb the news. He looked back at the map as if in supplication. The fall of Kolomea? It couldn’t be—he’d been there two days before.
“Evacuated,” he repeated, his voice breaking, but trying to sound calm. Visions now: the evacuees, the distant fires, the shouts and flashing sabers of the Cossack advance. “You’re certain? But you would know if the hospital had been captured before they got the personnel out, right?”
“I can’t speak to every little field station,” said Karlowicz. “The district was evacuated. That’s all they tell me.”
“But do you know where they were taken?”
“The patients?” Karłowicz looked through his papers. He shook his head. Perhaps south, he said, truly trying to sound helpful. Back over the passes. Or north, to Stryj or Lemberg. Or west, to Munkács. “Not east, I’d think.” It wasn’t clear whether he meant this in jest.
“And what about the personnel? The nurses.”
The man looked up, a quizzical expression on his face. “Do I know where the nurses are?” He laughed. “The High Command can’t find the Fourth Army.”
“Please,” said Lucius, not acknowledging the joke, just desperate now.
Karłowicz threw up his hands. “Look, if anyone knows about individual medical personnel, it would be the office of the regional commander of your Army Group. In your case, Kolomea.”
“But I thought Kolomea fell,” said Lucius.
Karłowicz paused, seeing the error. “We’ve been through this. I’ve told you what I know…” But now Lucius must have looked so miserable that Karłowicz stopped. “Listen,” he said. “Do you know at least which regiment she was assigned to?”
Lucius paused. Until then he had spoken in generalities. Personnel. The nurses. But Karłowicz must have understood.
He saw no use to hide now. “She is a volunteer, with a religious order.”
“A religious order? Oh!” Karłowicz smiled briefly at the smell of scandal. He removed his glasses and rubbed his palm over his face before replacing them. “Then no one knows, my friend. Check with the Pope.”
He pushed a document forward.
Lucius didn’t touch it. “What’s that?” he said.
“Your redeployment.”
Lucius shook his head. “I’m sorry… I can’t. Not yet. I must get back there.” His voice had risen. “I must find them. I said I would return.”
Now Karłowicz replaced his glasses. “She must be quite pretty, Lieutenant. But I said the hospital is gone. Kaputt. You’ve been redeployed. Your transport to Przemyśl leaves this evening. There you will be assigned to an evacuation train. Be grateful—we could have sent you to the front.”
13.
He became, then, two men.
In Przemyśl, given his months of service, he was promoted to Oberarzt, Chief Physician, of a ten-car ambulance train. He was given a new uniform and saber, a raise in salary, and the same copy of the drill book he had been given in Graz, two years before. Under his command were two assistant physicians, three orderlies, and ten lay nurses.
According to the papers he had been ceremoniously provided, the train was a state-of-the-art evacuation hospital converted to care for soldiers with advanced injuries. He had seen enough of the war to be skeptical, but even skepticism didn’t prepare him for the moment, on the day of his departure, when the district medical officer led him across the railyards. There were no windows; half the doors were missing. Were it not for the giant red crosses painted on the siding, he would have thought she was destined for scrap. In the hollowed-out carriages, the “wards” consisted of rows of double-bunked litters hanging on springs from the ceiling. The supplies, in dented metal cabinets, were as scant as in Lemnowice; rat droppings littered the floors of the latrine. His bunk, behind the engine, consisted of a horsehair mattress that had begun to spill its stuffing. There was a ceramic basin, no mirror, and an abandoned shaving razor that the district medical officer pocketed with embarrassment. The closet opened only with a kick.
In the beginning, they were based out of Kraków, leaving weekly for distant cities, where they picked up patients who had been collected from casualty clearing stations along the Galician front. Slowly, screeching, the train moved through southern Poland, past abandoned fields and sprawling army camps. The light sockets were all empty, and when night came, the train was lit by kerosene lamps, until a jolt sent one crashing into a stack of bedsheets. From then they rode in darkness, the ceiling flickering with the light of distant fires. There was no oil for the wheels, which screeched so loudly they could hardly hear each other talk. His assistants were a Moravian village dentist and an overeager medical student from Vienna who had just finished his fifth semester and had so little understanding of practical medicine that Lucius couldn’t let him out of his sight.