To read or not to read Daniel Mason's The Winter Soldier

For the first 50 or so pages I found Daniel Mason's novel The Winter Soldier (2018) nearly unbearable, in part because of Mason's skills as writer and in part, not. The novel follows the life of the eponymous soldier, a young physician (or medical student, actually) who volunteers to serve in the Austrian medical corps at the outset of the first World War. Bringing us to that point, Mason (a physician himself) gives us an incredible amount of detail about medial training a century ago and also about the primitive, painful medical practices of the day, in particular in the army where resources and equipment (as well as skill and experience) are scarce - tough going for any reader, as Mason intends. But I also felt that this was a novel going nowhere - a canvas on which Mason could show that he's the smartest guy in the room, a well-researched book that gave me far more information than I need if I'm interested in this book as a novel (someone interest in WWI or in medical history might feel otherwise). As I've noted in other posts, I'll always give a novel at least two days of reading before abandoning the ship, so to speak - and I do have to admit that chapter two ends on a promising note, as the physician at last arrives at the field camp where he will begin his military service and learns, to his surprise, that he's the chief medical officer. That opens some possibilities and puts the narrative at a crossroad; if Mason can use this opening material to develop a character and a plot, so much the better, but if I's about to embark on more detailed, gruesome accounts of makeshift medical practices, amputations, wounds, injuries, etc. then, well, it'll be time to move on.