The Veteran (20 page)

“I was on a carrier back then. We had a great sanatorium for the injured.”

“You were lucky. Here the men lay where the stretcher-bearers placed them. Americans, Algerians, Moroccans, British, Frenchmen and the hundred worst-injured Germans. They were really placed here to die. At the end there were 220 of them.”

“And the young surgeon?” The faded man shrugged.

“Well, he went to work. He did what he could. He had three orderlies assigned to him by the Surgeon-General. They raided local houses for mattresses, palliasses, anything to lie on. They stole sheets and blankets from all around. The sheets were just for bandages. There is no river running through Siena but centuries ago the Sienese built an intricate grid of underground aquifers to bring fresh water from mountain streams right under the streets. That provides access wells into the flowing water. The orderlies ran a bucket chain from the nearest right into the courtyard.

“A big kitchen table was taken from a nearby house and set up right there, in the centre, between the rose bushes, for operating. Drugs were scarce, hygiene shot to hell. He operated as best he could through the afternoon and into the dusk. When night fell he ran to the local military hospital and begged for some Petromax lanterns. By the light of these, he went on. But it was hopeless. He knew the men would die.

“Many of the wounds were terrible. The men were all in trauma. He was out of painkillers. Some patients had been torn by mines exploding under a comrade a few yards away. Others had shell or grenade fragments deep inside them. There were limbs shattered by bullets. Soon after dark the girl came.”

“What girl?”

“Just a girl. Local, an Italian girl, he presumed. A young woman, early twenties maybe. Strange-looking. He saw her staring at him. He nodded, she smiled, and he went on operating.”

“Why strange-looking?”

“Pale, oval face. Very serene. Short hair, not bobbed as in the fashion of those days, but sort of pageboy cut. Neat, not flirtatious hair. And she wore a kind of cotton shift of pale grey.”

“She helped out?”

“No, she moved away. She walked quietly among the men. He saw her take a cloth, dip it in one of the buckets of water and wipe their brows. He went on working as each new case was brought to the operating table. He went on even though he knew he was wasting his time. He was just twenty-four, hardly more than a boy himself, trying to do a man’s job. Dog-tired, trying not to make mistakes, amputating with a bone-saw sterilized in grappa, suturing with domestic thread greased with beeswax, morphine running out, had to ration it. And they screamed, oh, how they screamed ...”

The American stared at him hard.

“My God,” he whispered. “You were that surgeon. You’re not Italian. You were the German surgeon.”

The faded man nodded slowly.

“Yes, I was that surgeon.”

“Honey, I think the ankle’s a bit better. Maybe we could still see the end of the show.”

“Quiet, hon. Just a few minutes more. What happened?”

In the Piazza del Campo the parade had left the arena and its participants had taken their places in the allotted stands fronting the palazzos. On the sand track only one drummer and one flag-bearer from each Contrada remained. Their task was to show their skill with the banner and staff, weaving intricate patterns in the air to the rhythm of the tambours, a final salute to the crowd before the race and a last chance to win the silver chalice for their own heraldic guild.

“I operated through the night and into the dawn. The orderlies were as tired as I, but they brought the men to the table one by one and I did what I could. Before dawn she was gone. The girl was gone. I did not see her come and I did not see her go.

“There was a lull as the sun rose. The stream of stretchers coming in through that arch let up and finally ceased. I was able to wash my hands and walk among the wounded to count those who had died in the night and ask that they be removed.”

“How many were there?”

“None.”

“None?”

“No man died. Not that night, nor as the sun rose on the morning of 1 July. In that corner over there were three Algerians. Chest and stomach wounds, one with shattered legs. I had operated on them all in the small hours. They were very stoical. They lay in silence, staring upwards, thinking perhaps of the dry hills of the Maghreb whence they had come to fight and die for France. They knew they were dying, waiting for Allah to come and call them to Him. But they did not die.

“Just there where your wife is sitting lay a boy from Austin, Texas. When he came in his hands were across his belly. I pulled them apart. He was trying to hold his own entrails inside himself through the torn stomach wall. All I could do was push the intestines back inside where they should have been, clamp and suture. He had lost a lot of blood. I had no plasma.

“In the dawn I heard him crying, calling for his mother. I gave him until noon, but he did not die. After dawn the heat increased even though the sun could not shine directly over those roofs. But I knew when it did, this place would become an inferno. I had the operating table moved under the cloister to the shade, but for the men outside there was little hope. What the blood loss and trauma had not done, the sun would do.

“Those under the cloister roof were the lucky ones. There were three Tommies there, all from Nottingham. One asked me for a cigarette. My English was very poor then, but that word is international. I told him that with lungs torn by shrapnel a cigarette, which he called a gasper, was the last thing he needed. He laughed and told me when General Alexander arrived, he at least would give him one. Crazy English humour. But brave too. They knew they were never going home, but could make silly jokes.

“With the stretcher-bearers back from the battle zone I commandeered three more. They were exhausted and truculent but thank God the old German discipline prevailed. They took over and my original three orderlies just curled up in a corner and passed out.”

“And the day went by?” said the tourist.

“The day went by. I ordered my new men to raid all the surrounding houses here for string, cords, ropes and more bedsheets. We strung the cords across the yard and draped the sheets over them with clothes pegs to create a bit of shade. And still the temperature rose. Water was the key. The suffering men croaked for water and my orderlies ran a bucket chain from the well to the yard, handing out cups as fast as they could. The Germans said “Danke”, the French whispered “Merci” and the dozen Brits said “Ta, mate”.

“I prayed for a cooling breeze or the setting of the sun. No breeze but after twelve hours of hell the sun set and the temperature dropped. In the mid-afternoon a young captain from Lemelsen’s staff had come in by chance. He stopped, stared, crossed himself, muttered “Du Liebe Gott,” and ran. I chased after him, bawling that I needed some help here. He called over his shoulder, “I’ll do what I can.” I never saw him again.

“But maybe he did something. An hour later the Surgeon-General of the Fourteenth Army sent a handcart with medications. Field dressings, morphine, sulpha. Just as well. After sundown the last fresh casualties arrived, all German this time; about a score of them to bring the final number to around 220. And in the darkness, she came back.”

“The girl? The strange girl?”

“Yes. She just appeared, as the night before. Beyond the city walls the artillery seemed to have stopped at last. I presumed the Allies were preparing for their final, shattering push, the destruction of Siena, and I prayed we might be spared but knew it was hopeless. So it was quiet in the yard at last, apart from the groans and cries, the occasional scream, of men in pain.

“I heard the swish of her gown near me as I worked on a panzer grenadier from Stuttgart who had lost half his jaw. I turned and there she was, soaking a towel in the freshwater butt. She smiled and began to move among the men on the ground, kneeling beside them, wiping their foreheads and gently touching their wounds. I called to her to leave the dressings alone, but she just went on.”

“She was the same girl?” asked the American.

“The same girl. None other. But this time I noticed something that I had not seen the previous night. It was not a shift that she was wearing but a sort of habit, as for a novice nun. Then I realized she must have come from one of the several convents in Siena. And there was a design on the front of the habit, dark grey on pale grey. It was of the cross of Christ but with a difference. One arm of the cross was broken and hung down at forty-five degrees.”

From the great piazza a new roar rolled across the roofs. The standard-bearers had finished their displays and the ten horses, sequestered until then in the courtyard of the Podesta, were being led out onto the sand. They had bridles but no saddles, for this is a bareback race. In front of the judges’ stand the hoisting of the actual Palio for whose ownership they would run brought a further giant cheer.

In the courtyard the tourist’s wife rose and tested her injured ankle.

“I think I can walk slowly on this,” she said.

“A few moments more, honey,” said her husband, “then I swear we’ll go and join the fun. And that second night?”

“I operated on the last twenty, the last of the Germans, then with my new equipment went back to try to make a better job of some from the night before. I had morphine, now. Antibiotics. Those most in pain I could at least help to die in peace.”

“And some did?”

“No. They hovered on the brink of death, but no man died. Not that night. All night the young nun walked among them, saying not a word, smiling, swabbing their faces with fresh cool water from the well, touching their wounds. They thanked her, tried to reach out and touch her; but she smiled and eased away and moved on.

“For twenty-four hours I had been chewing benzedrine to keep awake but in the small hours, with nothing more I could do and my supplies gone, the orderlies asleep over there by that wall, my smock, hands and face smeared with blood of other young men, I sat at the operating table where once a Sienese family had taken their meals, put my head in my hands and passed out. I was shaken awake by one of the orderlies as the sun rose. He had been scavenging, brought back a billy full of real Italian coffee, hoarded somewhere since the start of the war. It was the best cup of coffee I have ever had in my life.”

“And the girl, the young nun?”

“She was gone.”

“And the men?”

“I quickly did a tour of the whole courtyard, looking down at each. Still alive.”

“You must have been pleased.”

“More. Stupefied. It was not possible. My equipment was too little, the conditions too basic, the wounds too terrible and my skill too small.”

“This was July second, right? Liberation Day?”

“Right.”

“So the Allies threw in their final attack?”

“Wrong. There was no attack on Siena. Have you heard of Field Marshal Kesselring?”

“Nope.”

“In my view he was one of the most underrated commanders of the Second World War. He got his marshal’s baton in 1940, but back then any German general could win on the Western Front. Being defeated, always in retreat against superior forces, is harder.

“There is one kind of general can lead a glorious advance, another kind can plan and execute a fighting retreat. Rommel was the first, Kesselring the second. He had to fight backwards from Sicily to Austria. By 1944 with complete control of the skies, better tanks, limitless fuel and supplies, the local population on their side, the Allies should have swept up Italy by the midsummer. Kesselring made them fight for every inch.

“But unlike some he was not a barbarian. He was cultured and he was a passionate lover of Italy. Hitler ordered him to blow the bridges of Rome across the Tiber. They were and remain architectural gems. Kesselring refused, which helped the Allied advance.

“While I sat here that morning with my coffee, Kesselring ordered General Schlemm to pull the whole First Parachute Corps out of Siena without firing a shot. Nothing was to be damaged, nothing destroyed. What I also did not know was that Pope Pius XII had interceded with Charles de Gaulle whose Free French were tasked to take the city and asked him not to destroy it. Whether there was a secret compact between Lemelsen and Juin we will never know. Neither said so, and both are dead now. But each received the same orders: save Siena.”

“Not a shot fired? Not a shell? Not a bomb?”

“Nothing. Our paras began the pull-out in the late morning. It went on all day. In the mid-afternoon there was one hell of a clatter of boots in that alley out there and the Surgeon-General of the Fourteenth Army appeared. Major General von Steglitz had been a famous orthopaedics man before the war. He too had been operating for days, but in the main hospital. He too was exhausted.

“He stood in the arch and stared around in amazement. There were six orderlies in here with me, two on water duty. He looked at my bloody smock and the kitchen table, now back out here in the light for better vision. He looked at the smelling pile of amputated limbs in that corner: hands, arms, legs, some still with the boots on.

“What a charnel house,” he said. “Are you alone here, Captain?”

“Yessir.”

“How many wounded?”

“About 220,
mein General.
”

“Nationalities?”

“One hundred and twenty of our boys, about a hundred mixed Allies, sir.”

“How many dead?”

“So far, sir, none.”

“He glared at me, then snapped, “
Unmoglich
.”

“What does that mean?” asked the American.

“It means ‘impossible’. Then he began to walk down the lines of mattresses. He did not need to ask, he could tell at a glance the type of wound, severity, chance of survival. There was a padre with him who knelt right there and gave the last rites to all who would die before sunrise. The Surgeon-General finished his tour and came back to this point. He stared at me for a long while. I was a mess: half-dead with tiredness, smeared with blood, smelling like a polecat, not a meal in forty-eight hours.

“You are a remarkable young man,” he said at last. “What you have done here cannot be done. You know we are pulling out?” I said I did. Word spreads fast in a defeated army.