That night, in the mess, I realized that Pyatigorsk truly was a place of reunions: sitting at a table with some other officers, I saw Dr. Hohenegg, the good-natured, cynical pathologist I had met in the train between Kharkov and Simferopol. I went up to greet him: “I see, Herr Oberstarzt, that General von Kleist surrounds himself only with the best people.” He got up to shake my hand: “Oh, but I’m not with Generaloberst von Kleist: I’m still attached to the Sixth Army, with General Paulus.”—“What are you doing here, then?”—“The OKH decided to take advantage of the KMV infrastructures to organize an interarmy medical conference. A very useful exchange of information. Everyone competes to describe the most atrocious case.”—“I’m sure that honor will fall to you.”—“Listen, I’m dining with my colleagues; but if you like, come by afterward, have a brandy in my room.” I went to dine with the officers from the Abwehr. They were realistic, sympathetic men, but almost as critical as the officer in Mozdok. Some stated openly that if we didn’t take Stalingrad soon, the war was lost; von Gilsa was drinking French wine and didn’t contradict them. Afterward I went out to walk by myself in Tsvetnik Park, behind the Lermontov gallery, a curious pavilion of pale blue wood, in a medieval style, with pointed turrets and Art Deco windows tinted pink, red, and white: an utterly disparate effect, but wholly in keeping here. I smoked, absent-mindedly contemplating the faded tulips, then climbed back up the hill to the sanatorium and went to knock on Hohenegg’s door. He welcomed me lying on his sofa, his feet bare, his hands crossed on his large round belly. “Excuse me for not getting up.” He made a sign with his head toward an end table. “The brandy is over there. Pour me one too, will you?” I poured two measures into the glasses and held one out to him; then I settled into a chair and crossed my legs. “So what’s the most atrocious thing you’ve seen?” He waved his hand: “Man, of course!”—“I meant medically.”—“Medically, atrocious things don’t interest me in the least. On the other hand one does see extraordinary curiosities, which completely revise our notions of what our poor bodies can endure.”—“What, for example?”—“Well, a man will catch a tiny piece of shrapnel in the calf that will slice through the peroneal artery and he’ll die in two minutes, still standing, his blood emptied into his boot without his noticing. Yet another man might take a bullet through the head, from one temple to the other, and will get up on his own to walk to the first-aid post.”—“What an insignificant thing we are,” I commented.—“Precisely.” I tasted Hohenegg’s brandy: it was Armenian, a little sweet but drinkable. “You’ll excuse my brandy,” he said without turning his head, “but I couldn’t find any Rémy-Martin in this town of barbarians. To go back to what I was saying, almost all of my colleagues have stories like that. And it’s not new: I once read the memoirs of a military doctor in Napoleon’s army, and he talked about the same things. Of course, we’re still losing far too many men. Military medicine has come a long way since 1812, but so have the methods of butchery. We’re still lagging behind. But, little by little, we’re getting better, and it’s true that Gatling has done more for modern surgery than Dupuytren.”—“But still you perform real wonders.” He sighed: “Maybe. The fact is I can no longer bear to see a pregnant woman. It depresses me too much to think about what’s in store for her fetus.”—
