“It is as good as can be expected,” Eleanor said, now visibly pale and shaken. “And I think we have seen enough.”
As they were leaving the palazzo, in the last room there was great commotion. One of the wounded men from the garden had been brought inside and transferred to one of the beds near the door they would pass through. There was a flurry of activity. One tall thin doctor and two nurses were huddled over him, working feverishly, trying to stop the bleeding. To leave, they could not help walking close to the bed.
From what Eleanor and Jodl could see at their distance, the man’s arm was gone along with much of his shoulder and fragments hung off the edge of the bed, and his face was bloody and much of one side torn away. His one good eye was open, frozen in terror. One of the nurses was leaning close to the distorted face, speaking words of encouragement to him as the others worked. None of the group looked up as the two guests passed through the room into the hall leading to the reception area.
The nurse who had been on duty when they arrived spotted them and left the side of the injured man, rushing toward them. She had blood spotting the front of her white uniform.
“This has been terrible for your visit,” she said. “The war continues its destruction.”
“We did not wish to be in the way,” Eleanor said, even more pale, obviously disappointed in herself but also obviously in a hurry to get outside.
“I hope you saw what you needed to see.”
“We did, and we thank you,” Eleanor said quickly.
“Do you know of another such hospital?” Jodl would always ask, and Eleanor and her companion would take careful note of the responses, always leaving with another destination in mind.
“Arnauld is not here,” she said quickly as they departed, with a fateful certainty.
Then, when they had passed out of sight of the hospital staff, Eleanor stopped and leaned over, pulling her long skirt out of the way, and retched violently. Showing not a trace of surprise, Jodl stood as if at attention beside her and reached out a hand to her arm until she had finished and signaled with a nod that she was ready to continue. They moved on to the waiting auto.
49
GONE TO UDINE
They were directed to the large Franciscan monastery only a few kilometers to the north, out away from the destruction of the city, where the imposing mountain range rose sharply beyond the valley, beyond the piles of rubble and the treeless plain and the river, still clear and aquamarine. “It has been heavily damaged by shelling,” their driver said as they approached the ancient monastery, “but it still serves as a hospital, I believe.”
They drove up a winding road to the large tile-roofed structure. It was sprawling and comprised a number of separate buildings, one of which was nearly demolished.
A number of brown-robed monks were walking around the front of the largest part of the complex of buildings, and one greeted them as they moved away from the automobile. “We are looking for a missing soldier,” Jodl said after they had introduced themselves, “an Austrian officer.”
“The hospital has moved,” the monk said. “We used to have quite an operation here, but it has been moved to Udine.”
“Would the wounded from Caporetto have been here?” Eleanor asked.
The monk paused to think. “Yes,” he said, “we had many wounded from last October, especially the badly wounded.”
“Austrians?” Jodl asked.
“Austrians, of course, and Czechs and Romanians and Hungarians, and then later Italians. And many of those who could not identify themselves and could not be identified. There was much confusion, especially among the severely wounded, those who needed surgery especially. We were supposed to treat the Italians as prisoners, but no one paid much attention to that.”
“And there were many of those unidentified?” Eleanor asked.
The monk looked at his two guests as if they were from another world. “Oh my, yes.” He stopped and examined the American woman before him. “There were twelve battles here, thousands and thousands of dead and dying. This damage was done in the sixth of those battles, the Battle of Gorizia, it has been called.” Then he paused and looked around. “Now it is so peaceful,” he said, gesturing to the large monastery building and its now-quiet surroundings. “It is difficult to recall the horror. God’s peace has returned.”
“And what of the wounded?”
“Little by little, they were shipped elsewhere, those who survived. Some were fortunate and were transported home by train. Some to Udine.”
“To Udine?” Jodl said. “You will direct us?”
“Yes, signor, there is a large hospital near the command headquarters. I believe it is still open and still holds many wounded, especially the severely wounded.”
That first night, the travelers found a hotel that Contessa Carolina had mentioned being not far from the edge of the city. “Their restaurant still has a well-stocked larder, I am told,” she said, “a rarity in these times.”
They were happy for a place to stay with a bed and a meal, arriving late in the evening as would become their pattern, too tired and weary to enjoy a glass of wine and informal conversation. Jodl would escort Eleanor to her room, leave her with a word of encouragement and a commitment to awaken her at dawn, which was rarely necessary as Eleanor, having slept lightly, was usually up and dressed before he knocked on her door. “You must get rest,” Jodl would say to her each night, always with a look of concern. “Tomorrow will bring better luck.”
The day following the journey between hospitals the two companions pressed on, neither Eleanor nor Jodl admitting that their hope could be faltering. During the days, they would spend much time together, and Jodl would explain the conditions. “This is a near-impossible task,” he said to her. “This whole area was ravaged by war, and everyone with any sanity moved out. When the Italians occupied territory, they suspected many of the local people of being spies, and there were many arrests, often for no offense at all. Many people suspected of disloyalty have been deported to concentration camps in Italy.” There was an unmistakable bitterness in his voice. “For little more than a drunken public statement that Italy might lose the war. The Italians do not trust anyone Slavic, and they use the term loosely.”
The whole length of the Isonzo River was the scene of most of the fighting on what was called the Italian front, the battles in the area having raged for nearly the full duration of the war, from 1915, when the Italians entered on the side of the Allies, to the present armistice. Evidence of the enormous toll was everywhere in razed buildings and land now barren of foliage, no trees, no shrubs, no undergrowth.
“The war is over,” one town official said in Italian. “Because both sides have lost their will to fight. This town was Austrian. Our young men were conscripted to fight and die for the empire, shipped far from here to fight the Russians in Galicia. Few came back. Few of those came back healthy or unmaimed.”
It had been policy in the Austro-Hungarian army for centuries to ship recruits far from their homelands, to areas where theirs was not the native language, to discourage fraternization and desertion. “But the Austrians have lost,” he said with no form of joy, “and now we are to be Italian again.” He stopped and gave a rueful smile. “Such is fate. Everyone here is too weary to care.” Very few of the towns and villages along the river remained untouched or intact. Some of them were destroyed, their important buildings razed by artillery shells from both sides. What had been beautiful, wooded rolling hills were now open treeless, barren land, filled with craters and exposed rock that looked more like the surface of the moon than the former bucolic countryside.
They had a plan. They would follow the course of the retreating Italian army from the mountain town of Caporetto, high in an Alpine valley, down through the mountains to the city of Udine, where the Italian command had been established for three years. They would travel all the way to the Piave River, north of Venice, where the Italian army had formed a line of defense they had held for twel
ve months, from the previous October until the end of the war a year later. It was from this westerly position that the Italians launched their face-saving attack in the last days just before the armistice, when the Austrian army was in disarray and they were able to round up their three hundred thousand prisoners of war. “The Austrians had stopped fighting, their empire dissolved,” Jodl said caustically. “The Italians, suddenly very brave, swept through them and declared victory.” On the first night of their journey into Friuli, Eleanor and Jodl stayed in a small town outside Udine.
From Caporetto on the upper Isonzo River, they tried to locate the spot where Arnauld had been assembling prisoners and had been hit by artillery fire. As Jodl had learned from his eyewitness reports, the incident had occurred at a railhead, so if prisoners were taken in the attack from Caporetto, the nearest railway depot was back near Gorizia. Prisoners would have been marched there and put on trains or forced to continue marching to the prison camps in Austria. But first they would be rounded up near the battlefield, and it was there that the shells would still be flying, from both sides. “It would have been anywhere out there,” Jodl said as they stood at the side of the road, pointing down into the open plains leading to the flat land of Friuli.
On the way to Udine, they located the site of a second hospital on Freud’s list, forty kilometers up the mountains, smaller, less populated than those in Gorizia, in a converted parish hall of an old church, and the third hospital was no more than a large open room in what had been a town hall; once again it had been filled with bodies, in all states of disability and disorientation, always the disoriented being almost as numerous as the wounded and dying. “Everything has moved to Udine,” they heard again.
So on they went, and they found the permanent hospital in Udine, an old Roman city important in the region for millennia. Before Caporetto, Udine had become the seat of the Italian high command. “The Italians called this city their capitale della guerra.” Jodl said, “Their war capital. After the retreat to the Piave, over a year ago, it was occupied by Austrians until after the Battle of Vittorio Veneto just past, when the noble and brave Italians—I believe they say now—took it over again.” The hospital there had been solidified by the Austrians all last year, he observed, pulling together the various field hospitals in the area.
By now they knew what to expect. The men lay or sat up in beds in big open spaces with that unmistakable rank odor, some seemingly unmarked by their injuries, many of them heavily bandaged, some so heavily that they were completely unrecognizable.
Eleanor and her companion were greeted by a nurse who seemed to be the chief administrator, and as before she was impressed and immediately cooperative when she realized that Eleanor was an American looking for an officer. This nurse told a familiar story, with a certain irony. “We were Italian,” she said, “then we were Austrian. Now we are Italian again. As a result, we have a collection of war’s unfortunates.” And, as before, she explained that it really made no difference which side the poor souls had been wounded by. “Some here were wounded by their own artillery. Some merely collapsed trying to get themselves home.”
“Are some from the Battle of Caporetto?” Eleanor asked.
“Way back then, yes,” the nurse said. “And some from just now.”
“Are some unnamed?” Eleanor then asked.
“Oh my, yes,” the nurse said. “We try to keep track, but as you can imagine, there is much confusion.”
She led them through the first large hall, allowing Eleanor to walk into the heart of the room, understanding from the beginning her purpose. “These are the worst injuries,” the nurse said with a tired voice. “They are barely alive and perhaps will never recover.”
As had become her habit, Eleanor approached each bed, examined every face. If the patient looked at her and made eye contact, she offered a cheery greeting and then offered a “Please get well soon” as she departed and moved on to the next bed.
And then, as before, there were some with little damage at all, but vacant and distant looks on their faces and little apparent ability to acknowledge the nurses in any way. “These disoriented ones,” a nurse said to Eleanor, “will end up in the asylums. There seems little hope for them.”
After Eleanor had moved past each and every bed, her Viennese companion close behind her, she turned to the nurse administrator and said, “The man I am looking for is not here.”
“I am very sorry, signora,” the nurse offered. “We have many visitors, and all of them leave as you are now leaving. I wish you Godspeed in the rest of your journey. May you find your friend. Yours is a difficult and emotionally demanding task.”
“As is yours,” Eleanor said. “I hope all of our loved ones, and these poor souls, find themselves home soon.”
“That does not seem likely,” the nurse said in what was probably a rare moment’s weakness. “But we shall see.”
“We shall see,” Eleanor repeated.
On the way out to the car, she stopped suddenly and turned to Jodl, allowing in an instant the deep disappointment to overcome her. “He is not there,” she said, the full weight of despair in her voice. “I was so hoping.”
Jodl, aware along with Eleanor that this one hospital because of its size and location had held the promise of success, offered special condolence. “I am sorry, Frau Burden. I too was hoping.”
“Could he be one of those ghastly lifeless faces?” she said in despair.
“I do not think so, Frau Burden,” her partner said, trying to be helpful. “I think you will know.”
Eleanor stood motionless, allowing herself to feel, her shoulders bowed as if by a great weight. Then she pulled herself upright and said, “It is just a setback,” and strode off toward the car and the waiting driver with her loyal companion in tow. “We still have much to do,” she said.
50
A ROUGH BUNCH
Throughout their travels, they passed through scruffy-looking bands of war’s human detritus. “These men are stragglers, far from home, left to find their way on their own,” he said.
“One has to sympathize,” Eleanor said. “They are abandoned, much like modern vagabonds, with no way to get home.”
In medieval Europe, she knew, when a peasant army was taken to a foreign land, they were encouraged to live off the land, and in the end, even if their effort brought victory, the king would not provide transportation home, leaving the peasant force to fend for itself and find its return passage as it could, often leaving behind bands of vagabonds living off the land and creating havoc for the local population. In that regard, things had not changed much in five hundred years, it seemed.
“I would not be too sympathetic,” Jodl said coldly. “They are a rough bunch. I am not sure they are even trying to get home.” But accustomed now to the watchful companionship of the retired policeman and preoccupied by their task, she gave little thought to her personal safety.
They had found a hotel in the center of town that the owner had kept open, in spite of the loss of the back wall of the building, a gaping hole in the bricks, crudely boarded up. The owner, a seedy-looking Italian who walked with a limp, with one eye, in only slightly better shape than his building. He showed no enthusiasm when the pair of guests walked in, but his face lit up when he saw the American dollars, and he was unctuous in showing them two undamaged rooms.
“These will be safe,” he said. “My wife will cook you dinner, if you wish.”
Eleanor nodded approval. “That would be very generous of her,” she said, not wanting to offend the man but from the looks of him and his submissive wife not entirely eager to accept. Jodl nodded only slightly. Weary beyond words, the two travelers would have found moving out to a restaurant difficult, even if they could have found one.
She and Jodl sat for a long time after a dinner of actually quite edible cabbage and sausage and drank the good cheap wine of the region. After the meal, they both seemed content to sit in silence.
“All this must make you t
hink of your sons,” Eleanor said after a time.
Jodl looked wistful for a long moment. “Oh, yes, they are never far from my mind.” The former policeman was silent, as if finished, but Eleanor said nothing, sensing that her reserved partner might continue. “Ivan, the youngest, went first. Like his brother, he was eager to join the army. He had no idea what he would see. That was in Galicia, against the Russian guns. He wrote a few letters home and described some of the ordeal, but I am sure he kept most of it to himself, sparing his mother. It is hard to describe what one sees at the front, always horrifying. Then an explosion in his area.” The stolid retired policeman paused again, tears now coming for the first time. “He was young and naïve. Theodore, his older brother, was more the cynic,” he said. “Theodore got swept up in the fury at the beginning; they all did. We all did. But unlike our young Ivan he lived through most of it. He was a cagey soldier. We saw him back home twice, when his mother was dying. He seemed to have grown in years. I think he was hardened and a good fighter. He got all the way to the Piave River, just a few months ago. There was a letter. Then no word. I am glad that his mother did not live to be in this uncertainty. The not knowing is worse in some ways than the sudden jolt of knowing, as we had with our younger son. In the end, we heard, there was much chaos and much retribution. Many died and many were taken prisoners. There were some executions, we heard.” He took a deep breath and let go a sigh, one of the few signs of emotion she had seen from him. “I hope my son is among the living,” he said finally, “among the prisoners. The Italians have hundreds of thousands of prisoners, you know. Perhaps we will never know the fates of all of them. The Italians are arrogant and resentful, in no mood to cooperate.”
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