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.”
48
GORIZIA
Gorizia, 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 indistinguishabl
e 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.
They were told upon arrival, as they would be at each such hospital, that the casualties had been high, staggering in number actually, too much for the system to handle, and that the suffering and death had mostly gone unnoticed and uncelebrated by the vanquished military of any country. Many of the patients were abandoned and nameless, hopelessly unable to find their way home. The task was impossible, the patients unrecognizable.
Countless boys had died with no one knowing where they were or where they belonged, “unknown soldiers,” they would be called later, each one representing a soul dear to someone back home, someone who would perhaps never know the fate of the young man full of promise who had left for war months, maybe years before, maybe even with a sense of adventure. “Some of these are deemed too ill to move,” one Sister of Mercy said to them, “but most are the great unknowns. No one knows where to move them. No one cares anymore for which side they were fighting.”
As they moved among the beds, surrounded by the suppressed moans of the wounded and dying, Jodl allowed Eleanor to walk in the lead, following behind her at a respectful distance. They both knew her task, to approach each soldier and make what she could of eye contact, to search each contorted face and to leave no face unexamined. Occasionally, when she would come to a face so completely bandaged that it made recognition impossible, she would ask for a name.
Each young man would react to her, some appealing for help, some in a form of anger, some just grateful for the receipt of a warm maternal smile. As she approached one young man sitting on the edge of his bed, he tried in vain to rise on his one good leg. “Oh please, do not rise,” Eleanor said.
The nurse said something to him, and held out her hand. The soldier responded by sitting back down.
“He does not wish for anyone to see him like this,” she said to Eleanor. “He says he used to play football.”
“And I am sure you were quite good at it,” Eleanor said. “I hope you will soon be going home.” The nurse translated for her.
“He has no home,” the nurse said. “He wishes for no one to think ill of him.”
“Please tell him that I am sure he has loved ones who are awaiting his return,” she said.
“I wish that were true,” the nurse said on her own without translating as they walked away from the bed. “I intend no offense, madam. But such thoughts are from a world very far from this one.”
“I know it is true,” Eleanor said with conviction. “I know he will be going home again.” And she turned and left the soldier sitting as he had been on the bed.
“It is heartbreaking,” she whispered to Jodl. Her companion did not speak. He looked back at the boy on the bed, and perhaps thought of his two sons.
They moved on to the next room, a spacious one, the grand salon of the palazzo, in which the windows were stained glass. With great purpose, Eleanor walked up to each patient, looked into each face, searching for some strand of recognition, some hope that the blank stare or anguished brow or expectant returned gaze might have the slightest resemblance to the face she so longed to see. When she came to a missing limb or a heavily bandaged upper torso or face, she passed on quickly, remembering Freud’s ironclad logic: Arnauld would emerge, if he emerged, without any physical signs of his desperate plight. And yet, with each new soldier, young or old, no matter how wounded, she began with hope before passing on in disappointment, only to come upon another face and another resurgence of hope.
At one moment in the first minutes, she would falter, obviously overcome and light-headed. At those crucial moments Jodl would simply step forward without sound or ceremony and support her arm, holding her firmly until the moment passed and she could continue. In those instances, as if following a predesigned choreography, she would turn and look him in the eye, signaling wordlessly her ability to continue.
As they reached the far end of the room, a sudden and loud explosion shook the windows, and they could hear the sound of breaking glass, and then a deathly silence. Everything in the palazzo hospital stopped. “The bomb squad,” the nurse said, laying a firm grip on Eleanor’s arm, for a moment reassuring even herself, unable to hide her concern, this woman who had seen so much in the past two years. Then she pulled herself back to calm control. “This is not good.” She looked
around at her patients, who had flown into wildness, and then she rushed to the window. “Oh, no,” she said with despair, and hurried out of the room.
The explosion had caused an immediate eruption of moans and cries from the wounded, startling the two visitors. Men who had been sitting quietly on their beds or in nearby chairs were now on their feet, dashing about, most of them with looks of wild agitation on their faces. An older nun and a male assistant had entered the room in haste and were grasping at patients, trying to restore order. “We apologize,” the older nun said to the visitors, barely pausing beside them as she rushed past. “It will take time to regain our calm.”
When they reached the room of the “disturbeds,” it was clear that the explosion had created more than a little turmoil, and some of the patients had run about, a few even fleeing the room.
“This is exactly what these poor souls do not need,” another nurse said, as she rushed past.
“These especially do not wish to hear explosions,” Jodl said, pulling Eleanor away. “And the raining of the shrapnel,” he added with concern. “Once you have heard the sound, you never forget it.”
Then, calm restored, Eleanor stepped forward to continue, having done what she could to calm even her own panic. She walked slowly up to a few stationary patients, the ones who had returned to their places, and made eye contact, smiling at each with motherly concern, examining each face, exchanging a word or two. But obviously their visit was ruined.
As always, Jodl stood silently behind her, at the ready to step forward if there appeared the least sign of need or threat. “These are not the best conditions for your task,” he said as she turned from the last patient. “I am not certain it is wise to continue.”
The Lost Prince Page 36