Kostya was fed up.
Having been assigned to the officers’ wards, and being in uniform, it was perhaps obvious what might happen. Five nationalities’ worth of men from the upper ranks of society, and he, an orphan from one of Krovt’s largest workhouses of visible youth and relative vigour, were not going to get along.
Signing up to get out of a frustrating, bullying apprenticeship to a brewer who took his trade rather too seriously, Kostya was a number of years removed from being a pathetic pauper child. But he had been born just a few months too late. By the time he had turned eighteen, and was old enough to sign up, they had stopped having to throw men at the problem and started diverting them to trying to clean up the mess the war had left behind it. No more trains packed full of excited volunteers or anxious conscripts left from stations crowded with women and children wondering whether they would ever see their husbands, sons and brothers again. When Kostya had applied, they had told him they needed cleaners for the hospitals, people to go out into the country to requisition food, and reservists to garrison recaptured towns and return them to habitability. The final push could be accomplished without vast numbers of raw recruits. Kubice was still not liberated, and beyond the Rivers Kila and Berezovka, Syevirmetyevo was still well-fortified. But it could only be a matter of time.
At least he’d had a choice. But every time he handed a glass of water to a man with no leg, or mopped the brow of someone in a fever, or was pushing a mop through the aisles, he copped it. “Shouldn’t you be at the front? What’s wrong with you that you’re not? Plenty of young men giving their all for us, and you’re standing around doing women’s work!”
However much he tried to explain, what the staff sergeant had said when he enlisted, it made absolutely no difference whatsoever.
About a month after he arrived, however, word got out that they had relieved a particularly infamous prisoner-of-war camp. He had heard, from those who were polite enough to tell him what was going on and from the reports in the illustrated newspaper, Okno k Miru, Window on the World, that on more than one occasion liberators had been greeted with a massacre of the entire village. Even the excitable press did not have the stomach to print the details of the aptly named Mogilyovka, Gravestown. From talking to whatever nurse would give him the time of day as they turned down spare beds and cleaned floors, it was a miracle that the hospital would not simply be turned into a morgue.
The first trains began arriving on that evening. Men were lifted out of wagons with translucent skin covering protruding bones, basically dead or unlikely to survive much longer. A few walking wounded staggered out too, dressed in fetid, decayed uniforms or shapeless pyjamas, probably taken from the imperial supplies.
Kostya was detailed to stoke the furnaces and stoves at the hospital so hot that the flames licked out of the ovens and singed the grates. When he returned to the orderly’s sitting room he barely had time to wash before he and his colleagues were ordered to make up rows of beds and turn any men out who could be visibly considered to have recovered.
“The insane will have to be shipped out to the civilian infirmary,” one of the doctors said. “The sick need our help – no man ever died from gunshock.”
Kostya didn’t get to bed until the small hours of the morning.