The Lost Prince (52 page)

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 twelve 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.

A ROUGH BUNCH

T
hroughout 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 think 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.”

Eleanor nodded, not wanting to stop the flow from this man who
rarely said more than a few words. “You have lost much,” she said. “Too much.”

“None of us knew,” he said quickly, as if more would open up wounds he did not wish opened.

“I will speak for Frau Jodl,” Eleanor said, not wanting to appear too sentimental. “She would want you to retain hope. Your Theodore is with those prisoners. You will see him again.”

“As you will see Herr Esterhazy again.” There was a kind of weary determination in this first affirmation from Jodl, one dogged combatant talking to another, as if raw determination and action could overcome the obvious hopelessness. It was the first time he had mentioned Arnauld by name. “I do not even know your connection to him,” he said.

“I met him in Vienna twenty years ago. We wrote letters over the years, and then he came to Boston to teach at my husband’s school. He has been a guest in our home many times, and he is dear to me and to my children.”

“But why all this?” Jodl, the expert at questioning, could not help asking. “Why this search?”

“He is close to my family and to me. I know he cannot be dead,” she said, making it clear that this was as far as she would go. “It is as simple as that.”

“And you are a very determined woman.”

She looked down then, and Jodl did not press further, giving no indication in his poker face if to the former police investigator the answer was even close to satisfactory.