The Veteran

by Frederick Forsyth

  ‘You never saw her again?’

  ‘No. Never. Just after sunrise I saw flags begin to flutter from all those high windows over there. Not the eagle of the Reich, not any more. The Sienese had patched and stitched together the flags of the Allies, especially the tricolour of France. They broke out all over the city. About seven o’clock I heard footsteps coming up the alley outside. I was frightened. Remember, I had never seen an Allied soldier with a gun before, but Hitler’s propaganda had taught us they were all murderers.

  ‘After a few minutes five soldiers appeared in the arch. They were dark and swarthy, uniforms so stained with earth and sweat I could hardly work out which unit they came from. Then I saw the Cross of Lorraine. It was the French. Except they were Algerians.

  ‘They shouted some words at me but I did not understand. Either French or Arabic. I smiled and shrugged. I was wearing my bloody smock over my Wehrmacht shirt and trousers, but beneath the smock they must have seen my boots. Distinctive. Wehrmacht boots. They had taken heavy casualties south of Siena, and here I was, the enemy. They came into the yard, shouted and waved their rifles under my nose. I thought they were going to shoot me. Then one of the Algerian wounded called softly from that corner. The soldiers went over and listened while he whispered to them. When they came back their mood had changed. They produced a truly horrible cigarette and forced me to smoke it as a sign of friendship.

  ‘By nine o’clock the French were flooding through the city, assailed on every side by ecstatic Italians, the girls smothering them with kisses, and I stayed here with my friendly captors.

  ‘Then a French major appeared. He spoke a little English; so did I. I explained that I was a German surgeon, left behind with my charges, some of whom were French and most were Allies. He charged among the men on the ground, realized there were twenty of his fellow countrymen, apart from British and American Allies, and ran out into the alley shouting for help. Within an hour all the wounded had been taken to the by now almost empty main hospital, where only a few unmovable Germans remained. I went with them.

  ‘I was held in the matron’s room at gunpoint while a French colonel-surgeon examined them all, one by one. By this time they were on clean white sheets and relays of Italian nurses sponged them clean and spoon-fed them whatever nourishing foods they could take.

  ‘In the afternoon the colonel-surgeon came to the room. He was accompanied by a French general, name of De Monsabert, who spoke English. “My colleague tells me that half of these men should be dead,” he said. “What have you done to them?” I explained that I had done nothing but my best with the equipment and drugs that I had.

  ‘They conferred in French. Then the general said, “We have to keep the records for the next of kin. Where are the dog tags of the ones who died – all nationalities?” I explained that there were no dog tags. Not a man brought into that courtyard had died.

  ‘They talked again, the surgeon often shrugging his shoulders. Then the general said, “Will you give me your parole, and stay here to work with my colleague? There is much to be done.” Of course I did. Where would I run? My country’s army was retreating faster than I could walk. If I got away into the countryside the partisans would kill me. Then, from lack of food and sleep, I just passed out right on the floor.

  ‘After a bath, twenty hours of sleep and a meal, I was ready to work again. All the French wounded recovered by the French in the previous ten days had gone south to Perugia, Assisi, even Rome. Those in the Siena hospital were almost all from this courtyard.

  ‘There were bones to be reset and plastered, sutures to be reopened and internal damage to be properly repaired. Yet wounds that ought to have gone septic and killed their owners were amazingly clean. Torn arteries seemed to have sealed themselves; haemorrhages had ceased to bleed. That colonel was an ace from Lyons; he operated and I acted as his assistant. We operated without a break for a night and a day and no man died.

  ‘The tide of war rolled north. I was allowed to live with the French officers. General Juin visited the hospital and thanked me for what I had done for the French. After that I was assigned simply to look after the fifty Germans. After a month we were all evacuated south to Rome. None of the Germans would ever fight again, so repatriation was arranged through the Red Cross.’

  ‘They went home?’ asked the American.

  ‘They all went home,’ said the surgeon. ‘The US Army Medical Corps took over their boys and shipped them out of Ostia back to the States when they were ready. The Virginians went home to the Shenandoah and the Texans to the Lone Star State. The boy from Austin who had cried for his mother went back to Texas, his innards still inside him, his stomach wall healed up.

  ‘The French took theirs and brought them home after the liberation of France. The British took theirs and took me with them. General Alexander was touring the hospital in Rome and heard about this courtyard in Siena. He said if I would extend my parole I could work in a military hospital in Britain with German wounded until the war ended. So I did. Germany had lost anyway. By the autumn of 1944 we all knew that. Peace came with the final surrender in May 1945 and I was allowed home to my native but shattered Hamburg.’

  ‘Then what are you doing here thirty-one years later?’ asked the American tourist.

  The screams from the Piazza del Campo were clearly heard. One horse was down, leg broken, jockey unconscious as the remaining nine raced on. Despite the sand covering, there are bone-jarring cobbles beneath, the pace is frenzied and terrible crashes are frequent.

  The faded man raised his shoulders and shrugged. He looked slowly around.

  ‘What happened in this courtyard in those three days was, I believe, a miracle. But it was nothing to do with me. I was a younger and eager surgeon, but not that good. It was about the girl.’

  ‘There will be other Palios,’ said the tourist. ‘Tell me about the girl.’

  ‘Very well. I was sent back to Germany in the autumn of 1945. Hamburg was under British occupation. I worked at first in their main hospital and then the Hamburg General. By 1949 we had our own non-Nazi republic again and I moved to a private clinic. It prospered, I became a partner. I married a local girl, we had two children. Life became better, Germany prospered. I left and founded a small clinic of my own. I treated the new wealthy and became wealthy myself. But I never forgot this courtyard and I never forgot the girl in the nun’s habit.

  ‘In 1965 my marriage ended after fifteen years. The children were in their teens; they were distressed but they understood. I had my own money, I had my freedom. In 1968 I decided to come back here and find her. Just to say thank you.’

  ‘So you found her again?’

  ‘In a way. Twenty-four years had gone by. I presumed she was in her late forties, like myself. I supposed she was still a nun, or, if for any reason she had left the order, a middle-aged married woman with children of her own. So I came that summer of ’68 and took a room at the Villa Patrizia and began my search.

  ‘First I went to all the nunneries I could find. There were three, all different orders. I hired an interpreter and visited them all. I spoke to the Mothers Superior. Two had been there during the war, the third had come later. They shook their heads when I described the novice nun I was seeking. All summoned the oldest sister in the convent, but they knew of no such novice, then or ever.

  ‘Of particular note was that habit she had worn: pale grey with a darker grey device stitched on the front. No-one recognized it. None of the orders had pale grey habits.

  ‘I spread the net wider; perhaps she came from an order outside the city, had been visiting relatives during that last week of German occupation in 1944. I roamed across Tuscany looking for the convent from which she came. No success. With my interpreter losing patience I researched all the types of habits used by orders of nuns, past and present. There were several of pale grey but no-one had ever seen the device of the cross with the broken arm.

  ‘After six weeks I realized it was hopeless. No-one had ever he
ard of her, let alone seen her. She had come into this courtyard on three consecutive nights twenty-four years earlier. She had swabbed the faces of dying soldiers and comforted them. She had touched their wounds and they had not died. Perhaps she was one of those blessed with the gift of healing by touch. But then she had disappeared into the teeming mass of war-torn Italy, never to be seen again. I wished her well, wherever she was, but I knew I would never find her.’

  ‘But you said you had,’ remarked the American.

  ‘I said “in a way”,’ the surgeon corrected. ‘I packed to leave, but I tried one last recourse. There are two newspapers in this town. The Corriere di Siena and La Gazzetta di Siena. In each of them I took a quarter-page advert. It even had an illustration. I drew the device I had seen on her shift and this drawing appeared with the text of the advert. It offered a reward for any information that anyone could provide about this strange design. The morning I was due to leave, the papers appeared.

  ‘I was in my room packing when the reception rang to say there was someone asking for me. I came down with my bags. My cabwas dueinan hour. I never needed that cab and I missed my flight.

  ‘Waiting in the hall was a little old man with a fuzz of white hair in the garb of a monk, a dark grey habit circled at the waist by a white rope, sandals on his feet. He had a copy of the Gazzetta in his hand, opened at the page of my own advert. We adjourned to the coffee lounge and sat down. He spoke English.

  ‘He asked who I was, why I had placed the advert. I told him that I had been seeking a young woman of Siena who had helped me almost a quarter of a century earlier. He told me that his name was Fra Domenico and that he came from an order dedicated to fasting, prayer and learning. His own lifelong study had been the history of Siena and of its various religious orders.

  ‘He seemed nervous, agitated, and asked me to narrate to him exactly how I had come across this particular design on a habit worn by a young woman in Siena. It’s a long story, I told him. We have time, he replied, please tell me everything, so I did.’

  The great piazza erupted in sound as one of the horses crossed the finish line just a half-length ahead of the next. The members of nine Contrade groaned in despair while those of the tenth, the Contrada called Istrice, the Porcupine, exploded in screams of joy. In the guildhalls of the losing nine the wine would flow that night but with much regretful shaking of heads and lectures on what might have been. In the guildhall of the Istrice District the celebrations would be a riot.

  ‘Go on,’ said the American, ‘what did you tell him?’

  ‘I told him everything. That was what he wanted, insisted on. From start to finish. Every tiny detail, over and over again. The cab came. I dismissed it. But with all that, I forgot one detail until the end. Then I remembered it. The hands, the girl’s hands. At the end I told him about seeing, in the moonlight, the dark stains on the back of each hand.

  ‘The monk went white as his snowy hair and began to run a rosary through his fingers, eyes closed, lips moving silently. I was a Lutheran then, I converted later. I asked what he was doing.

  ‘“I am praying, my son,” he replied. “What for, Brother?” I asked. “For my immortal soul and also for yours,” he said. “For I believe you have seen the work of God.” Then I begged him to tell me what he knew, and he told me the story of Catherine of Mercy.’

  FRA DOMENICO’S STORY

  ‘“Do you know anything of the history of Siena?” he asked.

  ‘“No,” I said, “almost nothing.”

  ‘“It is very long. This city has seen many centuries come and go. Some have been full of prosperity and peace, but most have seen war and bloodshed, dictators, feuds, famine and plague. But the two worst centuries were from 1355 to 1559.

  ‘“These were two hundred years of endless, pointless and profitless warfare at home and abroad. The city was incessantly raided by marauding mercenary companies, the dreaded condottieri, and lacked firm government which could defend its citizens.

  ‘“You must know there was no ‘Italy’ in those days, just a patchwork quilt of princedoms, dukedoms, mini-republics and city-states often lusting to conquer each other or actually at war. Siena was a city-republic, always coveted by the Dukedom of Florence, which eventually absorbed us under Cosimo the First of the house of Medici.

  ‘“But that event was preceded by the worst period of all, 1520 to 1550, and that is the time of which I speak. The government of the city-state of Siena was in chaos, ruled by five clans called the Monti who feuded between each other until they had ruined the city. Up till 1512 one had dominated. Pandolfo Petrucci led the strongest of them all and ruled in a brutal tyranny but at least gave stability. When he died, anarchy was let loose inside the city.

  ‘“The city government was supposed to be by the Balia, a permanent council of magistracy of which Petrucci had been a skilful and ruthless chairman. But every member of the Balia was also a member of one of the competing Monti and instead of collaborating to run the city, they fought each other and brought Siena to its knees.

  ‘“In 1520 a daughter was born to one of the lesser scions of the house of Petrucci, which, even though Pandolfo was dead, still ruled the roost on the Balia. But when she was four the house of Petrucci lost its hold on the Balia and the other four Monti fought unchecked.

  ‘“The girl grew up as beautiful as she was pious and a credit to her family. They all lived in a large palazzo not far from here, protected from the misery and chaos of the streets outside. Where other rich and indulged girls became headstrong and wilful, not to say licentious, Caterina di Petrucci remained demure and dedicated to the Church.

  ‘“The only rift with her father was on the question of marriage. In those days it was common for girls to wed as young as sixteen or even fifteen. But the years went by and Caterina rejected suitor after suitor to the chagrin of her father.

  ‘“By 1540 a vision of hell was being wreaked upon Siena and the surrounding countryside; famine, plague, riots, peasant revolts and internal divisions harassed this city-state. Caterina would have been immune to most of this, protected by the walls of the palazzo and her father’s guards, dividing her time between needlework, reading and attending mass in the family chapel. Then in that year something happened that changed her life. She went to a ball. She never arrived.

  ‘“We know what happened, or we think we do, because there is a document written in Latin by her father confessor, an old priest retained by the Petrucci family for their spiritual needs. She left the palace in a coach with a lady-in-waiting and six bodyguards, for the streets were dangerous.

  ‘“On her way her carriage was blocked by another which was drawn askew across the street. She heard shouting, a man screaming in pain. Against the wishes of her duenna she raised the blind and looked out.

  ‘“The other coach belonged to a rival family among the Monti, and it seemed an old beggar had stumbled in the street, causing the horses to shy and swerve. The enraged occupant, a brutish young nobleman, had leapt out, seized a cudgel from one of his guards and was beating the beggar most savagely.

  ‘“Without pausing, Caterina also jumped out into the mud and slime, ruining her silken slippers, and screamed at the man to stop. He looked up and she saw he was one of those young nobles her father had wished her to marry. He, seeing the shield of the Petrucci on her coach door, ceased what he was doing and climbed back into his carriage.

  ‘“The girl squatted in the mud and held the torso of the filthy old beggar, but he was dying from his beating. Though such people must have been alive with parasites, stinking of mud and excrement, she held him in her arms as he died. The legend is that as she looked down into the exhausted, pain-racked face, smeared with mud and blood, she thought she saw the face of the dying Christ. Our old chronicler records that he whispered as he died, ‘Look after my people.’

  ‘“We will never know what really happened that day, for no eyewitnesses ever spoke of it. We just have the words of an old priest writing in a lonely m
onastic cell years later. But whatever happened, it changed her life. She went home and, in the courtyard of the palazzo, burned her entire wardrobe. She told her father she wished to renounce the world and enter a nunnery. He would have none of it and expressly forbade her.

  ‘“Defying his will, something unheard of in those days, she toured the nunneries and convents of the city seeking admission as a novice. But messengers from her father had gone ahead of her and she was refused by them all. They knew the residual power of the Petrucci.

  ‘“If her father thought that would stop her, he was wrong. She stole from the family treasury her very own dowry and, after negotiating secretly with a rival Monte, secured a long lease on a certain courtyard. It was not much; it belonged to and abutted the towering walls of the monastery of Santa Cecilia. The monks had no use for it: about twenty metres wide by thirty metres long, with a cloister running down one side and lying in the shadow of the high walls of stone.

  ‘“To ensure that separation would be total, the Father Superior installed a great timber door of oaken beams in the only arch that led from the monastery into the courtyard and sealed it with heavy bolts.

  ‘“In this yard the young woman set up a sort of refuge or sanctuary for the poor and the destitute of the streets and alleys. We would call it a soup kitchen today, but of course then there was no such thing. She cut off her long and lustrous hair and fashioned a simple shift of grey cotton, walking barefoot among the filth.

  ‘“In that yard the poorest of the poor, the outcasts of society, the halt and the lame, the beggars and the dispossessed, the evicted pregnant serving girls, the blind and even the diseased, most feared of them all, could find sanctuary from the hell of the streets.

  ‘“They lay in their filth, among excrement and rats, for they knew no different, and she swabbed and cleaned them, tended their wounds and sores, used her remaining dowry to buy food and then begged in the streets for money to keep going. Her family disowned her, of course.