The Lost Prince (50 page)

There were few goods being shipped in or out. The proud jewel of a grand empire for five hundred years, Trieste now found itself under new
ownership, only weeks before claimed by the Italians. The citizens of Trieste had stood around in confusion when a cruiser from the Italian navy arrived and announced that the port had been liberated. “Liberated from whom?” was the question on nearly everyone’s mind. Now, because the occupying Italians already had a thriving Adriatic port in Venice, the once-vibrant docksides sat idle, and the people walked the empty streets more in shock than with any sense of liberation.

“What is most ironic,” Jodl said, “is that this city that became the cause of all the fighting bears no sign of the war.”

Their immediate business was to find a way to get to the Isonzo River only thirty or so kilometers to the west. It took them most of a morning of searching to come upon a Slovenian truck driver with an automobile in good working order who was willing to drive them, and even he showed little interest until he saw the American dollars. The car was one abandoned by the Austrians, he explained. “Petrol is the problem,” he said pointing to the bills, “but those will help.”

He delivered them to Monfalcone, the point at which the Isonzo River flows into the Adriatic. “Much death on this river,” the driver said in broken German as they stood at its bank. “The Italians wanted to possess it, and the Austrians wanted to keep it. Over there just a few kilometers distant, a horrible stalemate. To what use?” He made a gesture of exasperation with his upturned hands. “Three years, twelve battles, and one million souls lost. To what use?”

“There is no spot on the Isonzo not ruined by the shells,” Jodl had said, a fact he knew from his countless prisoner interviews. The closer they got to the river, the more they saw the effects of war, and the more even the hardened Jodl became silent. He shook his head and explained that he had known the area well in his younger years. “I grew up thinking this one of the most beautiful of places, ‘the greenest spot on earth,’ my father called it. We came here on vacations when I was a boy. My wife and I were here on our honeymoon.” He recalled that the Isonzo had been called the Green Beauty for its famous turquoise color as it flowed down from the Alps into the farmlands of the Friuli plain.

It seemed even more ironic to both of them that the land around Trieste, the main reason for the struggle, remained untouched, but now, only
a few kilometers away from this seaside city all the way up into the Alps, they were entering the periphery of the devastation. They walked through Monfalcone, the street still mostly abandoned, the buildings pockmarked by the occasional bullet and shrapnel. They stopped one of the passersby, an old man with no teeth, and asked for the first address on Freud’s list. The man and Jodl spoke briefly, and the retired policeman nodded with comprehension as the passerby pointed out the direction. Then he thanked him, and they walked away.

“I did not understand one word of that,” Eleanor said.

The serious Jodl smiled. “In this region there are many dialects, the meeting point of Teutonic, Slavic, and Latin, the three great cultures: German, Russian, Roman. People in one village sometimes do not understand the language of a neighboring village. It has been this way for centuries.”

“Did you understand where we need to go?”

Again Jodl smiled. “What is there to not understand in pointing?”

They walked in the direction the toothless man had indicated, and found an old stone church that had only recently been returned from its temporary manifestation as an infirmary to its peacetime use, although some of the pews were still out of place, and the whole building still carried the telltale smell of iodine. The priest they found in the chancel told them that all patients who survived had either been sent home, “the lucky ones,” he said, or moved to a collection further inland, another makeshift facility, a palazzo closer to the fighting.

“Are there other hospitals?” Eleanor asked him.

“A number,” he said, “further up the valley, but I think that they too have been abandoned. The region tries to recover.” He told them of specific locations, adding that he did not know which ones still held patients.

“The woman is an American,” Jodl explained, as if to signal neutrality. “She searches for a friend, an Austrian officer, lost during Caporetto.”

“He could be anywhere,” the priest said, with a tired look on his face, shaking his head but not questioning the oddity of the travelers. And as they thanked him and turned to leave, he added, “The palazzo at Gorizia, madam. That is your main hope. That is the repository of lost souls.” And then he added, “From all sides.”

GORIZIA

G
orizia, Görz in its Slavic iteration, the main city on the Isonzo, lay twenty kilometers north of the Adriatic coast. Eleanor recalled that Arnauld had called the area “the Nice of Austria,” where Viennese aristocrats spent summers enjoying its warm climate and streets lined with stately mansions and rose gardens. The palazzo, in the old medieval town center, had been requisitioned as a hospital from the first months of the fighting. The family who had owned it going back to the fourteenth century had possessed a number of estates in the region, and so they had moved out into the country, but Contessa Carolina maintained a residence in the vast urban structure and continued to run things before and after the hospital’s heavy use before the Battle of Caporetto, at which time the Austrians had taken over control of the region.

With its ancient claim to property, the contessa’s family had loyalties on all sides of the conflict, and it was known that many of the patients, especially the badly wounded ones, were both Italian and Austro-Hungarian. “At this stage of desperation,” the contessa said, “it doesn’t really matter which side one fought on.” Then she added ruefully, “It seems that both sides have forgotten them.”

The palazzo had been intended originally as a temporary center, requisitioned by the Austrians for their wounded before they were shipped home, but when the Italians overran the city during the sixth battle of the Isonzo, the family’s loyalty shifted supposedly to the Italians. The stream of wounded seemed to acknowledge even then no such loyalty,
although some now expected to be treated as prisoners of war. With the armistice and the ensuing chaos of troop movements and the uncertainty of borders, the hospital space had been turned into an undiscriminating limbo. “People know to bring the wounded here. Soldiers who had only months before been fighting each other hand to hand, overrunning trenches, facing each other’s withering machine-gun fire and hated barbed wire, now lie side by side,” Contessa Carolina had explained.

Now that the armistice had been reached, the area would be taken over by the Italians, which seemed to make no difference at the palazzo. She greeted Eleanor and her Viennese friend with a warm politeness, obvious in her pleasure in seeing an American. “I have been to New York many times,” she said. And she listened with concern and interest as Eleanor told her their mission, she too not questioning what affair of the heart would bring an obviously well-bred lady all the way from Boston searching for an officer from Vienna.

“We have many badly wounded boys,” she said before turning them over to the nurse administrator. “Here and in places like this, you might find the lost man you are looking for.”

When they had arrived at the palazzo, the driver had gone off on foot to seek out information about gasoline. There was a great commotion outside. A crew of men, all speaking some unique local dialect that sounded like both German and Italian, some in military uniform and some in workmen’s clothes, were conversing intermittently with the hospital staff. It appeared that an unexploded artillery shell that had been partially exposed near the hospital, in the palazzo’s garden area, was finally being dealt with. “We have known it was there for a long time, since the barraging of the city,” the admitting nurse explained to them. “They will either dismantle it or detonate it on the spot, bury it completely, then set it off. It should not interfere with our day, but they wanted us to be alerted.” Then she added for reassurance, “They know what they are doing. There is, unfortunately in this region, much opportunity for such experience.”

The nurse ushered them to the first room of patients. “I trust that you are prepared,” she said with a grimace.

Eleanor nodded. “We have already seen much,” she said, and followed the nurse, with Jodl behind her.

In spite of her preparation, Eleanor had no way to anticipate what was
to follow. The palazzo was a large sprawling structure with a spacious walled garden in back, and all the rooms on two floors had been converted to hospital space, including a large living room, a ballroom, and a vaulted chapel on the ground floor. The space once too small to hold all the wounded who came through was now more sparsely filled, they were told, the beds now in neat manageable rows. “All the remaining patients are those too ill to move or those whose identity had not been established,” the contessa had told them. “The abandoned ones.”

“There are so many of them,” Eleanor whispered to Jodl as they entered the first room. “I thought there would be fewer.” Jodl only nodded.

“You will hear some groaning, some muttering indistinguishable syllables,” the admitting nurse who had taken over their tour said, “but most of them, you will see, are silent.”

“Why have they not been shipped home?” Eleanor asked.

“These are the unnamed and unknown, the hopeless cases,” Jodl said as they entered. “I have heard about these. They are the detritus, too badly wounded to travel, even if they did remember where home is. You have to remember the numbers,” he said. “In even one of the battles of the Isonzo, there were tens of thousands of casualties. Just imagine trying to clean up and restore order.”

“I fear that we have been forgotten,” the nurse who showed them into the main room said, echoing the common theme. “There is too much disorder. We were already full and then came the Battle of Vittorio Veneto.” A look of utter exasperation came onto her face. “Chaos,” she said. “Wounded soldiers making their way home, overcome by infection and delirium, unable to take care of themselves. They are brought here. Some die, some linger on.”

In a separate room, there were men who seemed physically intact, but who for one reason or another could not speak in such a way as to identify themselves, the “disturbeds,” they were called. There were a few dozen of them, some sitting, some wandering around the room, all of them aimless, some mumbling. They looked unkempt, ill shorn, staring blankly, all of them victims of the carnage they had been drawn into unwarily and unable to get back out of, and certainly unable to describe what it was that pushed them over the edge. “The army doesn’t know how to handle such cases,” Jung had warned Eleanor in a rare dark moment. “Their society doesn’t know how to handle them. They are the seriously disoriented,
damaged by the horror they have seen and done, most of them beyond repair, some without a single wound on their bodies, some missing limbs, testimony to the horror and the folly of war. They will serve as reminders for generations, out on the streets begging for coins, but very few will heed the message, certainly not the commanders and the politicians who were responsible for sending them into the nightmare to begin with. They are the shadow men.”

The religious nurses, doctors, and priests at the palazzo, understaffed and undersupplied from the start, had done the best they could to sort out and calm the patients, a daunting task. “We keep hoping for relief,” the admitting nurse said, grim-faced. “In the beginning we looked to the Austrians for our supplies, then to the Italians. Now, who knows where to look. And occasionally someone does come, some messenger from Vienna or Rome. But then more bodies arrive too, coming from both sides, with these.” She gestured to the beds in front of her. “Contessa Carolina’s family has been most helpful. They have provided the place.”

At first, fresh from battle, the nurse explained as they walked from room to room, the wounds had been life threatening because of loss of blood or the compromise of bodily functions, but now, the battles long over, the healthy troops sorted out and shipped home, the main challenges, along with the hopeless task of identification, were those of infection and the complications of amputation and surgery. Throughout the vast infirmary space, as would be the case in all the hospitals they were to visit, there were the strong medicinal smells vying with the stench of urine, rotting flesh, and death.

Eleanor and Jodl had been greeted positively, as if these two visitors from the upper world, dressed as they were in clean fresh clothing, would somehow contribute to the relief the staff prayed for. “She searches for her Austrian brother, an officer,” Jodl said, to simplify matters, adding, “She is very determined,” as Eleanor passed out of earshot.

“I am afraid that here we are very far past distinguishing between officers and the conscripts,” the nurse said. “Very far past any such distinctions,” she added, casting a sympathetic eye toward Eleanor.