"Vienna, 1914. Lucius is a twenty-two-year-old medical student when World War I explodes across Europe. Enraptured by romantic tales of battlefield surgery, he enlists, expecting a position at a well-organized field hospital. But when he arrives--at a commandeered church tucked away high in a remote valley of the Carpathian Mountains--he discovers a freezing outpost ravaged by typhus. The other doctors have fled, and only a single mysterious nurse named Sister Margarete remains. But Lucius has never lifted a surgeon's scalpel. And as the war rages across the winter landscape, he finds himself falling in love with the woman from whom he must learn a brutal makeshift medicine. Then one day, an unconscious soldier is brought in from the snow, his uniform stuffed with strange drawings. He seems beyond rescue, until Lucius makes a fateful decision that will change the lives of doctor, patient, and nurse forever"--Provided by publisher.

Lucius, a young Viennese medical student, enlists, hoping to serve at a field hospital in the first World War. But he finds a freezing outpost the other doctors have fled. A single nurse remains, and Lucius has never lifted a scalpel. When an unconscious soldier is brought in from the snow, his uniform stuffed with strange drawings Lucius makes a fateful decision that will change lives forever.