A low-flying German plane chugs over the treetops, and our sergeant sinks to his knees, clutching at his throat. His eyes are desperate, but they are still the eyes of a living man. I’ve already bandaged several wounded—a skill I probably acquired from my older sister—and I know the glassy look in the eyes of the dying. The sergeant isn’t dying. “Those fucking Fritzes,” he whispers. A shard of iron must have pierced his throat without severing anything vital, a piece of luck every soldier hopes for. Being wounded means spending time at the hospital, which comes with the almost impossible perk of getting away from the front, from the Martians with their alien weapons, from the cold, from the hunger, from shitting in your pants. I press a cotton pad to the sergeant’s wound and wrap a bandage around his throat. Then I haul him up to his feet, and with most of his weight on my shoulders, we set off hobbling to the makeshift hospital about three kilometers away.

What a strange place it is, this road between the rear and the front, between life and death. It is as wide and crowded as an avenue, the Nevsky Prospekt of war. We are walking away from the front, along with other wounded, drawn on sleds or piled onto an occasional truck. Toward the front crawl tanks, horse-drawn carts, and trucks filled with weapons and food. The new soldiers marching past are wearing military capes over their shoulders that make them look like hunchbacks, as if they had already been damaged.

We lumber past the everyday life teeming on the sidewalks of this avenue. The sergeant’s embrace is suffocating, but I know I am the one without the shrapnel wound, so I don’t complain. It is so cold that your spit turns into an icicle in the air before it hits the ground with a ping. We pass two soldiers sitting on a military cape spread across the snow, sawing a frozen loaf of bread into pieces with a two-handled saw. I can taste that frozen bread in my mouth, a piece of hard candy you have to roll on your tongue until it thaws. They scoop up the sawdust of bread crumbs and divide them equally.