“The Krylovs’ izba burned down last month. Is it cold there? The winter’s been terrible here. You should see Grisha—he looks just like you.”

“He’s almost six now,” said the soldier.

“Sonnechka had her baby, a girl. The rye looks good, and the wheat, too, though harvest’s the devil without you.”

He examined his remaining foot, thick-nailed, and sighed. “At least I’ll be home. A thousand thanks, miss.” He took the letter and folded it, put it back into his boot.

I moved to the next bed, the occupant already waiting for me. All of them had something they wanted to tell me, more than region, district, village, profession, married, children. They showed me letters, pictures. They were shy about discussing their wounds, but their bodies spoke for themselves. Trench foot spoke of water-filled ditches where they stood for days and weeks. Their coughing told stories of battlefield gas. Suppurating wounds under dirty bandages gave testimony to the lack of care the nation gave its conscripts. How could we make wounded men sleep in such foul surroundings, such narrow beds? With stale sheets and pillowcases. Everything yellow and gray—walls gray, the floors yellow. And the inescapable heat. My dress was already soaked. I kept thinking that these could be the very men Volodya described in his letters. He spoke of their bravery, their camaraderie. I tried to flag nurses as they bustled about so importantly, yet no one had time to change a man’s bandages, get him a glass of water.

Though filthy and neglected, the men who were not racked with pain or delirious with fever were for the most part surprisingly cheerful, happy to share their information, whether they were likely to be discharged or would be healed only to be sent back. I tried to get them to talk about the war, but they wanted to talk about their villages: Kuda and Polovodovo, Tarkhanskaya Pot’ma, Sosi, Gus’, Veliky-Dobrovo. A soldier from Ryazan Oblast, patched about the head and left eye, asked if I might write a letter to his wife. He was exceedingly polite: “A thousand pardons, miss, but it would mean everything to her.” I had an entire ward to get to—Miss Haddon-Finch was already way ahead of me—but I saw no point in bustling around like these nurses, too busy to get a man a glass of water. We would finish the ward today or we’d come back tomorrow. Meanwhile, I would attend to this man. I tore a sheet from my own notebook and took his dictation. He watched me, head cocked to better view the page, the way children watch a magician performing.

Annoushkha, little bird—

I’m here in the capital, I got caught between the devil and an Austrian. That eye’s never going to be any good, but God be praised I’ll be coming home soon. Don’t worry about a thing. I think of you…

He paused. Awareness of my youth and station prevented him from saying more. “You say the rest.”

“I think of you every day, the sun in your hair,” I said.

“Yes, say that. The sun in her hair… she’s got such pretty hair, too. Blond braids like that.” He showed me with his big hands, his fingers could hardly close around them.

“How should I sign it? What does she call you?”

From the expression on his face, the sly grin, it was probably dirty. “Say Senya.”

“With all my love, Senya.”

I continued to the next bed, and the next. Men from villages whose names sounded like fairy tales told me their specifics. How sheltered I’d been. I could really see how Volodya must have changed since leaving us to fight with these men, for here was Russia, here in these beds. These eyes, clear or red or yellow or bandaged, these men young and not so young. The giant wounded body of Russia. What did I know of these lives? I felt my privilege, my foreignness as a girl from Petersburg, with its quays and canals, its classical buildings, its foreigners and colonnades, its seafront. Compared to the Russia of these men, this was Finland, Paris, a polonaise, a tango, dueling pistols at dawn. It was silver and lilac, Great Peter’s dream.

Big men tossed in fever or lay listless, laughed off the loss of a leg, an arm, yet still believed in the emperor and the healing power of the holy icons worn beneath their dirty shirts. I thought about the poet Walt Whitman, whom Balmont had translated into Russian. It was said he’d served as a field nurse in the American Civil War.

My comrade I wrapt in his blanket, envelop’d well his form…

And buried him where he fell.

Where was our Whitman? I wondered, imagining he was here somewhere, in a trench or a hospital like this one, putting it all into words that would reach across time to break your heart. Maybe this Brusilov Offensive would be the thing to break through and end the war. But the looks of this ward made me wonder. I asked a few of the men about the offensive, how it seemed to be going, but none of them had any idea. They went where they were told; they trusted in God.

I gazed back at the crowded ward, like a terrible mirror house. How many men lay mangled in wards like this in Russia right now, their bodies ruined? Could we really afford to lose so many? Wouldn’t we run out of arms and legs? Though they said we were winning, I couldn’t help wondering what losing would look like. I thought of Volodya… but there were no officers in these wards, only common soldiers. Bad luck to think it. He’ll be fine…

And why did I think Volodya and not Kolya? He could have been shot just as easily. And yet somehow I felt he would be protected—if not by God or the Virgin or spirits then by his own buoyancy. Surely he, if anyone, would know how to evade the bullets and grenades. Yet I knew this was childish thinking. Kolya Shurov was only a man like any of these, blood and muscle, with arms and legs that could be lost, flesh that could be torn, eyes that could burn. Charm couldn’t dissuade bullets or bayonets, land mines or poison gas. But still, I couldn’t quite believe it. Volodya was heroic, an officer of cavalry, the type who could be killed defending somebody else, could trip a land mine. He would be the one to lead any charge. I prayed God to bring him back, safely and soon.

When I told Varvara what I was doing with the wounded men, she shook her head slowly, said the only cure for what was going on in this country was to end the imperial nightmare and agitate for a socialist state. She told me to read Das Kapital. “Better to work for change that affects everyone.” I knew she was right, yet what about the man in this bed, groaning, his body in plaster? Sometimes simply holding someone’s hand was better than all the Hegelian dialectics in the world. Varvara had not seen the glow in a man’s wounded face as I approached his bed, how happy he’d been to be asked the most mundane questions, how glad to simply have been sought out and addressed as a man.

I moved to the bedside of a soldier with a blond beard. His leg had been amputated at the knee, and the smell was nauseating. Sick as he was, his letter to his sweetheart brimmed with affection and humor:

Dearest Olya,

I’m here in the capital enjoying the fine life. Only the big tankards of kvas, the dancing girls. They send us violins to sing us to sleep. If I hadn’t lost that leg, it’d be a holiday.

The man in the next bed smoked a twisted cigar. “She’s probably sleeping with the foreman, brother,” he interjected. “Women don’t wait, and that’s the truth.”

I flushed, thinking of the boys I’d kissed when I thought Kolya had forgotten me. Wait for me…

“Shut up, Yid,” the blond man said.

“I bet you get back, there’ll be another kid who looks nothing like you.” The cynic was reading a book. The first literate man I’d seen here.

“Keep it buttoned, or I’ll shove your face in,” said my soldier. “She’s a treasure, barynya. She’s my angel.”

“Should I put that in?” I asked. “My treasure, my angel?”

“Yes, write it all down.”

I added these to the other phrases. “What else?”

A tear rolled down his cheek into his beard. “Tell her I’ll be back soon, I’ll warm her up and how…” Then he remembered who he was talking to, a sixteen-year-old studentka. “A thousand pardons, barynya. Forgive me, I’m not used to fine company.”

I wanted to see the title of the volume the other soldier held in his hands. “What are you reading?” I asked him.

“Nothing for you,” he sneered. “Barynya.”

My eyes watered as though I’d been slapped in the face. The other men had been so grateful… he obviously had a poor opinion of women.

“Bedbug! Louse. Don’t listen to him, barynya.” My bearded private defended me, though he could barely lift his head for fever. “If I could get out of this bed, I’d beat his Yid head in.”

Finally I could see the title of the man’s book. Chernyshevsky’s radical Chto Delat’? What Is to Be Done? It made me all the more curious about this rude fellow to see that he was reading the same book Varvara was so fervent about. “You’re not an officer?”

“Don’t be stupid,” he said, smoking his twisted cheroot. “If I were an officer would I be here? No, I’d be in Tsarskoe Selo on a featherbed, eating eggs on toast.”

“You got that right,” said my bearded man.

I finished his letter and moved to the bedside of the literate man. The smell of his cigar was sharp and bitter.

“Mind if I ask you some questions?” I asked. He wasn’t an amputee and probably would be sent back to the front, but he interested me.