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The Miracle (Storycuts)

Frederick Forsyth

The Miracle

The Miracle

SIENA, 1975

The sun was a hammer in the sky. It beat down on the clustered roofs of the walled Tuscan city and the medieval tiles, some pink but mostly long baked to umber or ashen grey, shimmered in the heat.

Shadows dark as night were cast along upper windows by the overhanging gutters; but where the sun could touch, the rendered walls and ancient bricks gleamed pale, and wooden sills cracked and peeled. In the deep and narrow cobbled alleys of the oldest quarter there were restful pools of further shade and here the occasional sleepy cat sought refuge. But of local humans there was no sign, for this was the day of the Palio.

Down one such alley, lost in a maze of tiny cobbled ways, hardly wider than his own shoulders, the American tourist hurried, red as beef. Sweat trickled down to soak his short-sleeved cotton shirt, the tropical-weight jacket felt like a blanket dangling from his shoulder. Behind him his wife tottered painfully on unsuitable platform sandals.

They had tried to book far too late for a hotel inside the city, in this of all seasons, and had finally settled for a room in Casole d’Elsa. The rented car had overheated on the road, they had eventually found a parking slot beyond the city walls and now scurried from the Porta Ovile towards their goal.

They were soon lost in the labyrinth of alleys dating back 500 years, stumbling on the hot cobbles, feet on fire. From time to time the Kansas cattleman cocked an ear towards the roar of the crowd and tried to head in that direction. His well-upholstered wife sought only to catch up and fan herself with a guidebook at the same time.

‘Wait for me,’ she called as they hurried down yet another defile of brick between town houses that had seen Cosimo of Medici ride by, and been old even then.

‘Try to hurry, honey,’ he called over his shoulder. ‘We’re going to miss the parade.’

He was right. A quarter-mile away the massed crowds in and around the Piazza del Campo were straining to catch the first glimpse of the Comparse, the parade in medieval costume of the seventeen great guilds of Siena who once ruled and administered the town. According to tradition, ten of the seventeen Contrade would race their horses that day for the honour of carrying away to their guildhall the painted banner, the Palio itself. But first, the parade.

The American had read aloud from the guidebook to his wife in their hotel bedroom the previous evening.

‘The Contrade or Districts of Siena were created between the end of the twelfth and the beginning of the thirteenth century,’ he read.

‘That was before Columbus,’ she objected, as if nothing had happened before the great Cristobal sailed from Palos, on the River Tinto to head west into oblivion or glory.

‘Right. That was in 1492. This was three centuries before Columbus. It says here they started with forty-two Contrade, reduced three hundred years later to twenty-three, then in 1675 to the seventeen we will see marching tomorrow.’

Out of sight, the first ranks of the hundreds of brightly caparisoned drummers, musicians and standard-bearers of the Comparse pageant were emerging into the Campo itself. Its sixteen palaces were hung with banners and ensigns, crammed with the privileged at every window and balcony, as 40,000 of the populace roared inside the race-ring.

‘Hurry, honey,’ he called behind him as the tumult ahead rose in volume. ‘We’ve come a long way for this. I can see that darn tower at last.’

And indeed the tip of the Mangia Tower was just visible above the roofs ahead. That was when she tripped and fell, her ankle twisted by the cobbles and the shoe. She cried out and collapsed in a heap upon the stones. Her husband turned and ran back to her.

‘Aw, honey, what have you done?’ He was creased with concern as he bent over her. She clutched one ankle.

‘I think I twisted it,’ she said and started to cry. It had started out so good and turned into such a bad day.

Her husband looked up and down the alley but the ancient timber doors were locked and barred. A few yards away was an arch in a high wall that enclosed the alley on one side. Sun shone through as if there was an open space there.

‘Let’s get you in there, see if we can find a place to sit,’ he said.

He hauled her off the cobbles and she limped down to the arch. It gave onto a flagged yard, with tubs of roses and, Lord be praised, a stone bench in the shade of the wall. The American helped his spouse to the cool stone, where she sank with great relief.

Far away the tail end of the Comparse parade was leaving the Piazza del Duomo as the head of the column entered the Campo itself and the civic judges keenly studied the turnout, comportment and flag-waving skills of the standard-bearers. Whoever won the coming horse-race, the best-accoutred Contrada team would be awarded the masgalano, the finely chased silver salver. It was important, and all present knew it. The tourist bent to examine his wife’s ankle.

‘Can I be of help?’ said a quiet voice. The American started and turned round. The stranger stood above him, framed by the sun. The tourist stood up. The man was tall and rangy, with a calm lined face. They were both of an age, mid-fifties, and the stranger had greying hair. In faded canvas slacks and denim shirt he looked like a wanderer, a hippie but no longer young. His English was cultured but with a hint of an accent, probably Italian.

‘I don’t know,’ said the American with some suspicion.

‘Your wife has fallen, hurt an ankle?’

‘Yup.’

The stranger knelt on the flagstones of the yard, eased off the sandal and slowly massaged the damaged ankle. His fingers were gentle and skilled. The man from Kansas watched, prepared to defend his wife if need be.

‘It is not broken, but I am afraid it is twisted,’ said the man.

‘How do you know?’ asked the husband.

‘I know,’ said the man.

‘Yeah? Who are you?’

‘I am the gardener.’

‘The gardener? Here?’

‘I tend the roses, sweep the yard, keep it right.’

‘But it is the day of the Palio. Can’t you hear?’

‘I hear. It will need strapping. I have a clean T-shirt I could tear into strips. And cold water to stop the swelling.’

‘What are you doing here on the day of the Palio?’

‘I never see the Palio.’

‘Why? Everyone goes to the Palio.’

‘Because it is today. The second of July.’

‘What’s so special?’

‘It is Liberation Day also.’

‘What?’

‘On this day, thirty-one years ago, the second of July 1944, Siena was liberated from German occupation. And something happened here, in this courtyard, something important. I believe it was a miracle. I’ll go for the water.’

The American was startled. The man from Topeka was a Catholic: he went to mass and confession; he believed in miracles – if they were endorsed by Rome itself. Much of his entire summer tour of Italy was to see Rome at last. Siena was an afterthought. He gazed around the empty courtyard.

It was about twenty yards by thirty. On two sides it was bounded by high walls, twelve feet at least, with one arch, gates drawn open, through which he had entered. On the other two sides the walls were even higher, fifty feet or more, blank but for a few slits, topped with roofs, the outer walls of a massive building centuries old. At the far end of the yard, set into the wall of the huge edifice, was another door. It was made not of planks but entire beams bolted together to withstand attack and it was closed tight shut. The timber was ancient as the city itself, long bleached by sun save for a few dark blotches.

Along one side of the court, from end to end, ran a colonnade or cloister, the leaning roof supported by a row of stone columns and casting deep, cool shade inside. The gardener came back with strips of cloth and a pannikin of water.

He knelt again and firmly strapped with bandages the injured ankle, pouring water into the fabric to soak it and cool the flesh. The American’s wife sighed with relief.

‘Can you make it to the Palio?’ asked the husband.

The wife rose, tested the ankle, winced. It pained her.

‘What do you think?’ asked the tourist of the gardener. He shrugged.

‘The alleys are rough, the crowds dense and very rowdy. Without a ladder or a raised position you will see nothing. But there will be celebrations all evening. You will see the pageantry then, in every street. Or there will be another Palio in August. Can you wait on?’

‘Nope. I’ve got cattle to run. Gotta go home next week.’

‘Ah. Then . . . your wife could walk, but gently.’

‘Can we wait a bit, honey?’ she asked.

The tourist nodded. He glanced round the courtyard.

‘What miracle? I don’t see no shrine.’

‘There is no shrine. There is no saint. Not yet. But one day, I hope.’

‘So what happened here thirty-one years ago this day?’

THE GARDENER’S STORY

‘Were you in the Second World War?’ asked the gardener. ‘Sure. US Navy. Pacific theatre.’ ‘But not here in Italy?’

‘No. My kid brother was. He fought with Mark Clark.’

The gardener nodded, as if staring into the past.

‘All through 1944 the Allies fought their way up the Italian peninsula, from Sicily to the far north and the Austrian border. All that year the German army fought and retreated, fought and retreated. It was a long retreat. At first they were the allies of the Italians, then after the Italian capitulation the occupiers.

‘Here in Tuscany the fighting was very fierce. Field Marshal Kesselring commanded. Facing him were the Americans under General Clark, the British under General Alexander and the Free French under General Juin. By early June the fighting front had reached the northern border of Umbria and the south of Tuscany on this western sector.

‘South of here the terrain is rugged, range after range of steep hills, valleys holding hundreds of rivers and streams. The roads wind along the mountainsides, the only possible passage for vehicles. They are easily mined and can be raked by gunfire from across the valley. Hidden spotters on the peaks of the hills can drop the artillery shells from behind them right onto the enemy with great accuracy. Both sides took heavy casualties.

‘Siena became a big medical centre. The Wehrmacht’s Medical Corps set up several hospitals here and they were always full. Towards the end even they overflowed and several nunneries and monasteries were requisitioned. And still the Allied tide rolled on. Kesselring ordered all wounded well enough to be moved to be sent north. Columns of German ambulances rolled north day and night. But some could not be moved and had to stay. Many died of their wounds and are buried outside the city. The pressure on space eased for a while; until the last ten days of that month. Then the fighting redoubled, and it was close. In those last ten days a young German surgeon was drafted in here, fresh from college. He had no experience. He had to watch and learn and operate as he went along. Sleep was short, supplies running dry.’

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.

‘Well, he went to work. He did what he could. He had three orderlies assigned to him by the Surgeon-General. They raided local houses for mattresses, palliasses, anything to lie on. They stole sheets and blankets from all around. The sheets were just for bandages. There is no river running through Siena but centuries ago the Sienese built an intricate grid of underground aquifers to bring fresh water from mountain streams right under the streets. That provides access wells into the flowing water. The orderlies ran a bucket chain from the nearest right into the courtyard.

‘A big kitchen table was taken from a nearby house and set up right there, in the centre, between the rose bushes, for operating. Drugs were scarce, hygiene shot to hell. He operated as best he could through the afternoon and into the dusk. When night fell he ran to the local military hospital and begged for some Petromax lanterns. By the light of these, he went on. But it was hopeless. He knew the men would die.

‘Many of the wounds were terrible. The men were all in trauma. He was out of painkillers. Some patients had been torn by mines exploding under a comrade a few yards away. Others had shell or grenade fragments deep inside them. There were limbs shattered by bullets. Soon after dark the girl came.’

‘What girl?’

‘Just a girl. Local, an Italian girl, he presumed. A young woman, early twenties maybe. Strange-looking. He saw her staring at him. He nodded, she smiled, and he went on operating.’

‘Why strange-looking?’

‘Pale, oval face. Very serene. Short hair, not bobbed as in the fashion of those days, but sort of pageboy cut. Neat, not flirtatious hair. And she wore a kind of cotton shift of pale grey.’

‘She helped out?’

‘No, she moved away. She walked quietly among the men. He saw her take a cloth, dip it in one of the buckets of water and wipe their brows. He went on working as each new case was brought to the operating table. He went on even though he knew he was wasting his time. He was just twenty-four, hardly more than a boy himself, trying to do a man’s job. Dog-tired, trying not to make mistakes, amputating with a bone-saw sterilized in grappa, suturing with domestic thread greased with beeswax, morphine running out, had to ration it. And they screamed, oh, how they screamed . . .’

The American stared at him hard.

‘My God,’ he whispered. ‘You were that surgeon. You’re not Italian. You were the German surgeon.’

The faded man nodded slowly.

‘Yes, I was that surgeon.’

‘Honey, I think the ankle’s a bit better. Maybe we could still see the end of the show.’

‘Quiet, hon. Just a few minutes more. What happened?’

In the Piazza del Campo the parade had left the arena and its participants had taken their places in the allotted stands fronting the palazzos. On the sand track only one drummer and one flag-bearer from each Contrada remained. Their task was to show their skill with the banner and staff, weaving intricate patterns in the air to the rhythm of the tambours, a final salute to the crowd before the race and a last chance to win the silver chalice for their own heraldic guild.

THE SURGEON’S STORY

‘I operated through the night and into the dawn. The orderlies were as tired as I, but they brought the men to the table one by one and I did what I could. Before dawn she was gone. The girl was gone. I did not see her come and I did not see her go.

‘There was a lull as the sun rose. The stream of stretchers coming in through that arch let up and finally ceased. I was able to wash my hands and walk among the wounded to count those who had died in the night and ask that they be removed.’

‘How many were there?’

‘None.’

‘None?’

‘No man died. Not that night, nor as the sun rose on the morning of the first of July. In that corner over there were three Algerians. Chest and stomach wounds, one with shattered legs. I had operated on them all in the small hours. They were very stoical. They lay in silence, staring upwards, thinking perhaps of the dry hills of the Maghreb whence they had come to fight and die for France. They knew they were dying, waiting for Allah to come and call them to Him. But they did not die.

‘Just there where your wife is sitting lay a boy from Austin, Texas. When he came in his hands were across his belly. I pulled them apart. He was trying to hold his own entrails inside himself through the torn stomach wall. All I could do was push the intestines back inside where they should have been, clamp and suture. He had lost a lot of blood. I had no plasma.

‘In the dawn I heard him crying, calling for his mother. I gave him until noon, but he did not die. After dawn the heat increased even though the sun could not shine directly over those roofs. But I knew when it did, this place would become an inferno. I had the operating table moved under the cloister to the shade, but for the men outside there was little hope. What the blood loss and trauma had not done, the sun would do.

‘Those under the cloister roof were the lucky ones. There were three Tommies there, all from Nottingham. One asked me for a cigarette. My English was very poor then, but that word is international. I told him that with lungs torn by shrapnel a cigarette, which he called a gasper, was the last thing he needed. He laughed and told me when General Alexander arrived, he at least would give him one. Crazy English humour. But brave too. They knew they were never going home, but could make silly jokes.

‘With the stretcher-bearers back from the battle zone I commandeered three more. They were exhausted and truculent but thank God the old German discipline prevailed. They took over and my original three orderlies just curled up in a corner and passed out.’

‘And the day went by?’ said the tourist.

‘The day went by. I ordered my new men to raid all the surrounding houses here for string, cords, ropes and more bedsheets. We strung the cords across the yard and draped the sheets over them with clothes pegs to create a bit of shade. And still the temperature rose. Water was the key. The suffering men croaked for water and my orderlies ran a bucket chain from the well to the yard, handing out cups as fast as they could. The Germans said “Danke”, the French whispered “Merci” and the dozen Brits said “Ta, mate”.

‘I prayed for a cooling breeze or the setting of the sun. No breeze but after twelve hours of hell the sun set and the temperature dropped. In the mid-afternoon a young captain from Lemelsen’s staff had come in by chance. He stopped, stared, crossed himself, muttered “Du Lieber Gott,” and ran. I chased after him, bawling that I needed some help here. He called over his shoulder, “I’ll do what I can.” I never saw him again.

‘But maybe he did something. An hour later the Surgeon-General of the Fourteenth Army sent a handcart with medications. Field dressings, morphine, sulpha. Just as well. After sundown the last fresh casualties arrived, all German this time; about a score of them to bring the final number to around two hundred and twenty. And in the darkness, she came back.’

‘The girl? The strange girl?’

‘Yes. She just appeared, as the night before. Beyond the city walls the artillery seemed to have stopped at last. I presumed the Allies were preparing for their final, shattering push, the destruction of Siena, and I prayed we might be spared but knew it was hopeless. So it was quiet in the yard at last, apart from the groans and cries, the occasional scream, of men in pain.

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