More powerful scenes from the last days of WWII in Serge's Unforgiving Years

Section 3 of Victor Serge's novel Unforgiving Years (1947/1971 pub date) continues with its harrowing account of people struggling for survival in an unnamed German city, possibly Berlin?, in the final days of the 2nd World War. It's an unusual perspective, especially for a left-wing activist novelist, but he does build sympathy for many of the German citizens, and who knows what complicity that had during the war? He shows no sympathy, however, for the German army, intent to the end on discipline and corporal punishment. Part of the chapter focuses on some prisoners who expect to be executed, even though the war is likely to end in a matter of days. The most powerful sections concern the frantic life in the make-shift military hospitals, with doctors overwhelmed by the vast number of trauma cases arriving from the ever-approaching front; this section reminded me of the contemporary novel, The Winter Soldier, which was entirely set in a military hospital - very powerful material. In part we follow a character named Alain, who is scrounging for food of any sort - and who ends up breaking into the apartment of the nurse, Brigitte, who was the focus of the first part of this section; Serge's plot is not the easiest to follow, to put it mildly, in particular as most of his major characters have numerous names and aliases (some are involved in espionage) and also because he works in dream-like, vivid, almost hallucinatory patches of prose rather than in a straightforward narrative line or arc. I would recommend for anyone starting on this novel a careful reading of translator Richard Greeman's excellent intro to the NYRB edition. (I rarely read the intro before reading the novel, but this case is an exception to that rule.)