Winter Soldier, Mason - B +

                                               This excellent novel is set in the midst of the Great War in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Lucius Krzelewski is the sixth child of a wealthy Polish family living in Vienna. He is in his second year of medical training when the war breaks out. He is commissioned as Lieutenant Doctor and sent east. There he has the good fortune of learning all that he needs to know from Sister Nurse Margarete, a nun who has seen it all and knows how to take care of just about everything. They become an effective team managing their field hospital in a church. In their second winter, after she almost dies of fever, they became lovers. They become separated in the fog of war. He is assigned to a medical train that travels the country. He takes every opportunity to look for her, but fails. After two-and-a-half years at the front, he returns home in Feb. 1917 when one of the afflictions he observed in the east affects him. He can't sleep, screams when he does and begins to walk the streets of Vienna at night. His family's intervention affords him the opportunity to work in Vienna at a large rehabilitation hospital run by his old professor.  Armistice brings new borders,  conflicts and a discharge. That summer, he travels east to the Carpathians in an attempt to find Margarete. He returns to their old hospital, but it is empty.He finds her a few days later. She had done all she could to find him, but eventually gave up hope and married one of their old patients, the one they had called the winter soldier.