Page 57 of The Veteran

‘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 two hundred and twenty, 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, “Unmöglich.”’

‘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.

‘He gave his orders to the men behind him. Columns of stretcher-bearers came from the alley. Take only Germans, he told them, leave the Allies to the Allies. He walked among the German wounded, selecting only those who might be able to stand the long bumpy ride across the Chianti hills and up to Milan where they would at last get the best of everything. Those Germans he deemed to have no hope at all he told the stretcher-men to leave behind. When he had done, seventy of the Germans had been removed. That left fifty, and the Allies. Then he came back to me. The sun had dropped behind the houses, heading for the hills. The cool was returning. His manner was no longer brusque. He just looked old and ill.

‘“Someone should stay behind. Stay with them.”

‘“I will stay,” I said.

‘“It will mean becoming a prisoner of war.”

‘“I know, sir,” I said.

‘“So, for you a short war after all. I hope we will meet again, back in the Fatherland.”

‘There was nothing more to be said. He walked into that arch, turned and threw me a salute. Can you imagine it? A general to a captain. I had no cap on, so I could not reply. Then he was gone. I never saw him again. He died in a bombing raid six months later. I was left alone here, with a hundred and fifty men, mainly scheduled to die if help did not come quickly. The sun went down, the darkness came, my lanterns were out of gas. But the moon rose. I began to pass out panni

kins of water. I turned round, and she was back again.’

The sound in the Piazza del Campo was a continuous shout by now. The ten jockeys, small wiry men and all professionals, had mounted up. Each had been issued with his crop, a vicious quirt made from a dried bull’s pizzle, with which they would hack not only at their own horses but at steeds and jockeys coming too close. Sabotage is part of the Palio race, which is not for the squeamish. The bets are mind-numbing, the lust to win beyond restraint and, once on the sand track, anything goes.

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