Lucius is a young medical studen when World War I explodes acros Europe. Enraptured by tales of battlefield surgery, he enlists, expecting a position at a well-organized field hospital. But when he arrives, at a commandeered church in the mountains, he discovers a freezing outpost ravaged by typhus. The other doctors have fled, and only a single, mysterious nurse remains. But Lucius has never lifted a surgeon's scalpel. And as the war rages, he finds himself falling in love with the woman from whom he must learn a brutal makeshift medicine. Then one day, a wounded soldier arrives, seemingly beyond rescue until Lucius makes a fateful decision that will change the lives of doctor, patient, and nurse forever. From the ballrooms of Imperial Vienna to the forests of the Eastern Front, The Winter Soldier is a story of war and medicine, of family, of finding love in the sweeping tides of hisotry, and, finally, of the mistakes we make and the precious opportunities to atone.