There was a roar across the summer sky as, out of sight, the last of the parading Comparse entered the Piazza del Campo. Each of the rival Contrade was parading once round the giant sand racetrack laid over the cobblestones. An even louder shout greeted the arrival of the carroccio, the ox-drawn cart bearing the lusted-for banner itself, the object of the day’s pageantry, the Palio.

‘The German force in this sector was the Fourteenth Army, commanded by General Lemelsen. On paper it sounded great, but many of the units were exhausted by months of fighting and way under strength. The main contingent in it was General Schlemm’s First Parachute Corps and Schlemm threw everything he had got from the sea to the mountains south of Siena. That was his right wing. On the left, further inland, the tired-out 90th Panzer Grenadier Division tried to hold off General Harmon’s US First Armored.

‘Right in the centre of Mark Clark’s Fifth Army, and facing Siena city, were the Free French of General Juin. He was flanked by his own Third Algerian Infantry and Second Moroccan Infantry. These were the forces held by the Germans in five days of vicious fighting from the twenty-first to the twenty-sixth of June. Then the American tanks smacked through the panzers and Siena was outflanked, first on the east, then by the French on the west.

‘Units of the retreating German companies pulled back, bringing their wounded with them. There were grenadiers, panzer men, Luftwaffe Field Division men and paratroopers. On the twenty-ninth of June, south of the city, there was one last and final clash before the Allied breakthrough.

‘It was violent and hand-to-hand. Under cover of darkness the German stretcher-bearers went in and did their best. Hundreds of wounded, both German and Allied, were brought back into Siena. General Lemelsen pleaded with Kesselring for permission to straighten his line, seeing as he was outflanked on both sides and risked being encircled and captured with the entire First Parachute Corps inside Siena. Permission was granted and the paras pulled back into the city. Siena bulged with soldiers. So many were the wounded that this courtyard beneath the walls of the old nunnery was commandeered as a temporary shelter and field hospital for about a hundred of the last-arriving Germans and all the Allied wounded. The newly arrived young surgeon was given sole charge of it. That was on the thirtieth of June 1944.’

‘Here?’ said the American. ‘This was a field hospital?’

‘Yes.’

‘There are no facilities here. No water, no power. Must have been rough.’

‘It was.’

‘I was on a carrier back then. We had a great sanatorium for the injured.’

‘You were lucky. Here the men lay where the stretcher-bearers placed them. Americans, Algerians, Moroccans, British, Frenchmen and the hundred worst-injured Germans. They were really placed here to die. At the end there were two hundred and twenty of them.’

‘And the young surgeon?’

The faded man shrugged.