Errors of Night: The Silent Trial of Gen. Julian von Wille

By RONALD J STEWART

Former Nazi Gen. Julian von Wille makes a pilgrimage to Italy in search of atonement for his theft of a valuable poem his soldiers took from the wounded body of a prominent Marchesa. He seeks to speak with her, to explain himself, and to ask her forgiveness, but because of a stroke she is unable to speak. She has her own regrets for lea

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ronald Joe Stewart
• Release date: Nov 18, 2022
• ISBN: 9780996544139

Book preview

1

The Marchesa

THE SUN PEEKS through the open window, but I feel a chill. As it usually is with April, when pilgrims stir, the weather teases like a child, cool and then warm; sunny and then a sky of gray. I will ask Fina to latch the shutter when I no longer can bear the cold. For now, I would rather see the pines, the cypress, the boxwood, the garden, and its perfect stairway, so badly in need of repair.

Fina can arrange me more upright when she returns.       She says Attilio will be here tomorrow at eleven. Attilio, my dear old gardener, named for a saint who no longer has the favor of the church. He is a saint to me, a dear one who thinks of our dinner when he harvests his zucchini or his tomatoes. He wants to discuss the arrangement of the hedges north of the parapet. I will listen; of course, I will listen. I am determined to have ordered, neat aisles of manicured boxwood. Not too tall, not too wide. Even small children should be able to see over them at clever places along the path, or through them in secret peepholes. Hedges should be trimmed with a child’s capacity for delight in mind, their eyes on each other, shrieking more than speaking, understanding each other at the most elementary level before waves of adult complication arrive.

Children. One word, and my mind pivots, and there, welcomed or not, are memories like scalloped photos in a tattered album. We had fifty-three orphans in 1944. Fifty-three faces, fifty-three small bodies, fifty-three souls. I remember them arranged on the stairway, the scalinata, as the Italians say, posed for a photo Bernard took. The younger ones kneeled, the older ones, dear Fina among them, latticed up the stairs and posed like a large family. Rosalba stood at one end with her usual downturned and unsmiling mouth, thin-lipped and stern, her comportment betrayed by the comfort of her warm bosom into which the children often cried. And I, a widow thanks to the war, stood at the other end, vaguely aware of the fragile dependence the children and we two women had on one another, our cautious smiles so broad no viewer could imagine what lay ahead. And he, dear Bernard, now only a memory, stood before us with a camera and tripod, like a sentinel in peaceful purpose. The picture was taken on a bright, sunny day, before we took them across a battlefield.

Even as I think of my garden, I see a child, a child as a winged angelic being, mythical, an attendant of God. I see children sailing on imagined waters, galloping on imagined snow-white steeds, running through imagined woods with squeals of glee. The war interrupted their innocence. The memory of it will not go away. Nor does the guilt dissolve. It is the dreadful intrusion of guilt that I shoulder still. Oh yes; I know the war was not my doing. I know Carlo used his influence as much as he could. We took in the orphans out of good will, and we cared deeply for them. But I did not keep the war away from them. I could not. I failed to protect them, and I am left with haunting memories of their innocence, of dependence, of trust that children place in adults who control their world.

It is a promising April morning, and I wonder why I dwell on this yet again. Will I need the waters of some imaginary river to erase memory? I need to forget, but I lie here ruminating. Perhaps the garden will divert my thoughts. Like an unmade bed, it suggests neglect. I shall rebuild it. Virginia Woolf said most matters with aesthetics can be productively addressed when viewed from the perspective of a child. Who can do better than a child’s words, their simple exclamations upon rushing into a room where their mothers sew, or upon seeing a bird alighted on a garden branch, or a dropped feather in sudden flight? Picasso affirmed it when he said it took just a few years to learn the masters’ strokes, a lifetime to paint like a child. What are the perspectives of the children? If a great painter and a great writer acknowledge the joy of a child’s point of view, I should benefit as well. Mahler had his ideas of heaven: How his melodies swung from din to decay to delight as he tried to put to music to a child’s vision of heaven. Ideas of children are straightforward, often wise, and uncomplicated. Adult ideas wander self-consciously at the fringe, too complicated to discover truth within them. Virginia said she preferred a simple word such as the odd one she liked so much, yelp. Understanding children is a doorway to understanding life. We need to understand children because there is so much to learn. Simplicity can say more than a pretentious display of phrase. The works of the great poets and great artists and great writers and great composers all allude to the understanding of innocents, the beauty of young, inexperienced life. Virginia understood a child’s deficiency of words to be an asset, a mere yelp, a sincere expression.

Do I complicate? Do I dwell? I lie here mute and paralyzed, thinking of them. Am I in this condition because of punishment meted out by an angry god? Why not? A sufficient explanation; what other? Do I want vindication, or is it punishment that to me seems just? I want wrongdoing to suffer long in open spaces, exposed and naked. The occupiers schemed to frighten the partisans by hanging ones they captured in the squares until their necks frayed and their rotting corpses dropped to the street. Like that: Some public display, some horrific, suitable display of the Code of Hammurabi: eye for an eye. Maybe my condition is not so much a punishment as an ironic recompense. I have time to think, only to think, a sentence of thinking. I find memories, loop them in thoughts, and then wish to send them away, only to begin again.

How will I convey my wishes for the garden? If I could speak, words would do the job, punctuated with smiles and hand gestures, the language the body conveys when it shifts, a lifted eyebrow expressing volumes. Fina will help me. We will find a way. When I would speak, I was often profligate with words. Now, each is precious. How often did I waste a moment of communication with a flippant remark when I could have selected the proper word and placed it in a precise phrase and then presented the freshest idea with a smile or an inviting expression of curiosity? We live with regret. I lie here and wish for just one of those opportunities, while I sense a moment of ironic inconsequence: The boxwood will be presented informed or not by my old woman’s ideas.

I long for control. I push the button under my hand, the fail-safe buzz that will summon her to my room. I must see her now, at the juncture of these thoughts. She must be occupied with some chore, for I wait, and she does not arrive. I do what I always must do; I wait.

When she finally enters the room, I keep my eyes straight ahead as if to scold her. To no avail, for she does not notice, nor should she. I have saddled the poor girl with my troubles, and she is such a dear to care for me. The injury left me paralyzed, and now my speech is gone. Oh, how I wish to speak. We make do with eye signals. It is as tedious for her as it is for me; she is patient. She has her voice; I have my eyes.

When she helps me sit upright, I strain to see across the valley where the Roman pines stand like soldiers at ease, their thin trunks like the torsos of young men. For a moment, I picture them as soldiers, but my mind flashes to the war years again, and I see them lying dead on the road, their narrow hips and wide shoulders limp, their wounded heads and dark hair matted with blood.

Suddenly she breezes into the room light as a feather, agile as a bird.

Are you comfortable? Fina says.

I smile at the simple, kind inquiry. I could not be more miserable, but there is no benefit in saying so (as if words are mine to use). It is not the bed, her action or inaction, the air or anything else that conspires to discomfort. It is the tyranny of memory. I blink once: yes.

You have a letter, she says.

A letter? The idea of a letter settles imaginatively on the heavy desk in Carlo’s old study on the third floor. I imagine it placed face up, then imagine the dark grain of the chestnut around it, oiled with Carlo’s hands and stained with spots of dark ink, his carelessness stamped like postmarks wherever he worked. His face enters my unfocused mind, and he is smiling, an almost embarrassing display of his teeth yellowed from cigarettes, red wine, and black espresso. I imagine him asking as Fina did, Are you comfortable, dear? and me hurling a pillow in his direction with childish delight. Carlo was playful like that, despite the seriousness of his work in our village and on our farm. He loved the children as much as I, and comforted them as much as Rosalba, his presence like a rock in their troubled lives. Oh, how I dreaded the day he joined our forces, aligned as they were with a lost cause, with a dictator and, as we knew once the curtains were rent, an evil despot.

Would you like me to open and read it? she asks.

Read what? Oh, yes; the letter. My eyes move to her round face and clear, safe eyes. I notice the iris highlighted at the outmost edge with black as if outlined in ink. Near her pupils, the irises turn brown like a marcescent leaf. She is in her thirties now, and her eyes have avoided the telling clouds of age. There are few benefits to my condition, to be sure, but one is the ability to notice, and again this morning I see beauty in her eyes. Beauty has no existence if not noticed.

I blink slightly with what I am sure is a vague expression of self-pity, as if I care to imply that I might instead leap from my bed, snatch the letter from her hand, and rip it open myself. She gives me a look of forced understanding. I think she might like to poison me.

"Dear Marchesa," she begins.

The astonishing formality nudges me from my momentary indifference. The title is rarely used anymore. She reads on while I try to grasp the time frame. A man wants to see me, she says. He thinks he was here, during the war. Perhaps I recall. Of course, I do not recall; I will not recall! A German man, an officer.

I avert my eyes to find the window, and beyond, the pines. I study them with curiosity; how similar they are, unsettling. I do not want uniformity; I look for differences. I want to find the marks of each pine’s individuality, the discoverable indicators of independence. Their needles of course are unique, their layers of bark arranged with distinction, their roots woven through captive pebbles in unique presentation, a spider racing up the furrowed bark of one but not the other, each alone, each precious, each like any of us sentient ones. I study them because I wish to run away from this letter, the memories. I want refuge in any growing thing, any limb reaching for the sky, any trunk spreading roots, any leaf soaking sun, any ear listening to the singular caws of crows.

I return to Fina’s voice. She is asking how she should reply. Regardless of how she is phrasing the question of reply, I find only one way to mull it: Do I care to welcome a strange man from a wearisome time of my life? I am grateful for my absence of speech; I cannot imagine how I might babble on in search of an answer to this unexpected question. I mull it over like a refrain: A strange man, a wearisome time. Even the phrase is odd, mysterious, clouded, and unpromising, like a dreadfully dull novel. What benefit could possibly come from it?

I shudder at the frightening thought that springs from some vague level of consciousness: The predator which patrols the fringes of memory has been loosed. I do not want to recall, but I do, often. I ask, who might this man be? I return grudgingly to the years of the war, the peasants and their children prostrating themselves to avoid the crossfire, the conflicting radio reports, the soup of ideas that stirred in my valley, my country, unidentifiable and zealous, without plausibility. I think of the old ways organized and lived for centuries, how we adjusted naturally, like flora, to seasons of change because we knew change was cyclical, temporary, and hopeful. Then came the rolling destruction of war and its hapless power of ardor and of zeal, of false pride, of ideas of revenge and vindication, of greed, of the illusion of greatness and dominance, cloaking all like a pelisse. How happy I am that of necessity my ideas do not at this point become words. I lie here serving bare things of silence, an acolyte of inconsequence. The best compartment for regret surely is silence. I return to those happier days of clarity before the war, the ideas frothing as on a lathered horse weary from the track. How much energy there was! And now I indulge the profound company of silence, the fatigue and eventual immobility of zeal. Now a letter reminds of the great intervention, that unwelcome incursion, like a beast charging from the mountains, ravenous and uncontrollable.

He says there is something he has that may be yours.

What did Fina just now say? Now the strange man wants to return something of mine? How does he have this possession? Why would he care to return it? Perhaps he has the bones of the pigs they stole and slaughtered for their own bellies; maybe he has the artwork they stole from the parlor, perhaps the root crops from the cellars of our peasant farmers, the tires from their tractors. Perhaps he has the souls of the dead peasants, their hysterical wives, or their bent and bleeding children. Perhaps he has Bernard. I fear he’s nothing but an old man with clouded memories, a demented old fool seeking clarity. I shrink from the notion that seems most reasonable and most likely: He is a soul in search of redemption. I think he would do better take his possession to a cathedral and present it to his confessor.  He wants understanding and he fails to look within. Who of us finds courage to look within? We prefer to blame others, avoid responsibility. He is here to wash, to displace his shame.

(Of course, I do not know what he wants. I project my perplexities on him, a phantom. I should be less quick to judge.)

Fina calls my name. I turn my eyes to hers and blink once in the affirmative, and she says she will respond to this man’s inquiry. I hear her ask when, and then she takes the board and points to an M and we begin the tedious process of spelling out my wishes. With double blinks, I discard T and W, and we settle on F -- Friday next, a week.

2

The General

THE MARCHESA will receive me on Friday. Her daughter has cautioned that my visit must not be long, because the Marchesa’s health is not ideal. She apparently is paralyzed and mute because of some trauma or brain injury; something has taken her speech. If she cannot speak, how will I know her reaction to the many things I must tell her? How can I explain the events on that day when the orphans were killed? Words alone bridge the gap between regret and recompense, and she is silent. I want to speak; words and phrases have collected like sands before a wave, but I may be standing before her as if behind a curtain, within a confessional.

I have planned for these words, the organized defense of Gen. Julian von Wille, to be made in the presence of the woman whose villa I commandeered, whose wounded body my medics evacuated from the battlefield just meters from her home, on her own land, and whose possession I have kept for my own treasure.  She surely has judgments, and I have carefully planned what I will say. I have structured a premise, ordered a presentation, imagined how my confession will proceed. I have rehearsed my conversation in dark moments in Germany, in my garden, at my desk, while sipping coffee on chill mornings, with the comfort of schnapps at night, merely imagined, but now I need this woman’s reaction. I have anticipated her winces, shifts in her chair, her comments, her admonitions, nervous tapping of her fingers, needless examination of her fingernails. Instead, I find a paralyzed woman who cannot speak. I am ready for her judgment, and now I learn she will not pronounce it?

If my military career were not blemished with this single moment of poor judgment, I could avoid the loop of self-incrimination. I must have relief, while time remains. Again and again, I begin a narrative with myself. I make my case to my own judge and jury within my mind. My story is complex, my life a collection of turns, of ironies. If I were presenting to my colleagues, or to a war-crime tribunal at Nuremberg, I would easily don a stern mask and stride like an actor into a large, overdecorated room with neatly rowed chairs occupied by shaved, clean faces stiffened with proper, public-ready postures. I would hear my accusers; I would make my defense. My bearing would be professional and my responses curt. But this inner conversation -- this is no performance; there is no mask; I am both my accuser and my defender. This is a trial from deep inside where I question my decisions, repetitively second-guessing my choices. It is as if I write a memoir for an audience of one. I am not alone in self-incrimination, or in self-defense. I have read the writings of Allied generals Clark¹, and Alexander. After the abbey was bombed there was the question of blame for that destruction. There was no military advantage; Clark erred, but others share the blame. Clark had his own regrets; he acknowledged without equivocation that bombing the monastery was wrong. Does he mull his errors as I have? Did he seek recompense? So far as I know, neither Churchill nor Roosevelt acknowledged error in destroying the monastery. Clark did, and I at least feel a kinship with his regret. I saw no tactical benefit in bombing the monastery. It only angered the world toward the Allies. It benefited my armies’ military purposes when the monastery lay in rubble. When it stood as a neutral edifice on a promontory overlooking much of the Cassino battlefield and was declared a safe zone, it had no benefit to me. What’s more, I respected the Abbot and the work of his monks; I was deeply saddened when the monastery was bombed. But its destruction is not mine to regret; that is for the consciences of the Allied generals and supreme commanders. I knew the Abbot; I made sure to greet him and to pay respect when I arrived in the area. I even attended mass at the monastery chapel. I assured him the abbey was safe, and he trusted me. He believed the monastery would be spared from the fighting; I did as well. And then in February came the Allied bombers dropping hundreds of tons of explosives, and the monastery was reduced to rubble. Thankfully Abbot Diamare escaped, and how well I remember him, carrying a crucifix at the front of a procession of his monks and many of the refugees who had sought safety in the abbey before it was bombed. His was a humble procession, resolved rather than angry, a procession of innocents caught in war, wanting nothing other than to be left alone in peace. And, oh, how like that procession of his -- his monks and his innocent peasants and their children -- how like they were to the Marchesa and her procession of children across the battlefield where I presided as commander. There lies my regret, and the haunting that results from my error. It was my order to clear the evacuation route of partisans. But the children were there, too, along with this Marchesa, like the Abbot, trekking to hoped-for safety. And then among the corpses, my medics found the satchel on the Marchesa’s person, injured but alive. They brought it to me, thinking it might be useful intelligence. But I knew what it was; I suspected its