The General of the Dead Army Read online

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  Copyright © 1970, 2011 by Editions Albin Michel

  English-language translation copyright ©1971, 2011 by W. H. Allen and 2000, 2011 by The Harvill Press

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

  Arcade Publishing books may be purchased in bulk at special discounts for sales promotion, corporate gifts, fund-raising, or educational purposes. Special editions can also be created to specifications. For details, contact the Special Sales Department, Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018 or [email protected].

  Arcade Publishing® is a registered trademark of Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.®, a Delaware corporation.

  First published in Albania in 1963 as Gjenerali I ushterise se vdekur by Naim Frasheri Publishers. First published in French in 1970 as Le General de l’armee morte by Editions Albin Michel. First published in the United States of America in 1972 by Grossman Publishers. This translation has been revised in light of the definitive edition of the text as published by Librairie Artheme Fayard in 1998.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the work of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  ISBN: 978-1-61145-418-5

  Look, I have brought them back.

  The going was rough, and the weather

  was on our backs all the way.

  PART 1

  1

  RAIN AND FLAKES OF SNOW were falling simultaneously on the foreign soil. The concrete runway, the airport buildings, the soldiers guarding them were all soaking wet. The plain and the surrounding hills were covered in melting snow and the water had made the black asphalt of the road shine. At any other time of year this monotonous rain might have been thought a dismal coincidence. But the general was not really surprised by it. He had come to Albania to search for the remains of his country’s soldiers killed in various parts of Albania during the last world war and to supervise their repatriation. Negotiations between the two governments had begun the spring before, but the final contracts had not been signed until the end of August, just when the first grey days normally put in an appearance. Now it was autumn. And autumn, the general was aware, was the rainy season. Before leaving, he had looked up the country’s climate. This time of year, he had discovered, was usually damp and rainy. But, even if his handbook had told him that the autumns in Albania were ordinarily dry and sunny, he would still not have found this rain untoward. Quite the reverse. He had always felt in fact that his mission somehow required bad weather as a precondition of its success.

  He had spent much of the journey gazing out of the plane window at the menacing mountains. He felt that one of their sharp peaks was bound to rip open the plane’s belly at any moment. Jagged rock on every side. Sinister escarpments sliding swiftly back into the mist. At the bottoms of those abysses and on those abrupt slopes, beneath the rain, lay the army he had come to unearth. Now that he was seeing it for the first time, this foreign land, he was suddenly much more clearly aware of the vague fear that had always begun coalescing inside him whenever he tried to confront the feeling of unreality that seemed bound up with his mission. The army was there, below him, outside time, frozen, petrified, covered with earth. It was his mission to draw it up from the mud, and the mission made him afraid. It was a mission that exceeded the bounds of nature, a mission in which there must be something blind, something deaf, something deeply absurd. A mission that bore unforeseeable consequences in its womb.

  The land that had at last come into view, below him, far from inspiring him with a certain feeling of security - simply because of its reality - had on the contrary served to increase his apprehension. It had merely added its own indifference to the indifference of the dead. But it was not only indifference, it was something more than that. Those racing peaks just visible through the mist, those contours seemingly torn into jaggedness by grief, expressed nothing but hostility.

  For a few moments he felt that the accomplishment of his mission was an impossibility. Then he tried to pull himself together. He tried to neutralize the effect of that seemingly hostile earth, and above all of the mountains, by consciously evoking the feeling of pride that this mission inspired in him.

  Passages from speeches and articles, fragments of conversations, hymns, sequences from films, ceremonies, pages of memoirs, bells, a whole treasure trove of elements buried beneath the level of awareness and now slowly rising to the surface. Thousands of mothers were waiting for their sons’ last remains. And it was his task to bring those remains back to them. He would do everything in his power to acquit himself worthily of such a sacred task. Not one of his fellow countrymen should be forgotten, not one should be left behind in this foreign land. Oh, it was indeed a noble mission. During the journey he had repeated to himself the words a very great lady had spoken to him before his departure: “Like a proud and solitary bird, you will fly over those silent and tragic mountains in order to wrest our poor young men from their jagged, rocky grip.”

  But now the journey was almost over, and, since they had left the mountains behind them and begun flying over valleys and plains, the general had felt a slight sense of relief.

  The plane touched down on the streaming runway. The red and mauve lights slipped by on either side. Bare trees. A soldier in his heavy cape. Another, more stock still than the first, all seemed to be fleeing in a panic. Only the dignitaries who had come to meet them were walking in a tight cluster towards the plane.

  The general emerged first. The priest accompanying him on his mission followed. A damp wind struck them violently in the face and they turned up their coat collars.

  Fifteen minutes later the whole party was being driven swiftly towards Tirana in two cars.

  The general turned his head towards the priest who was seated beside him with a face devoid of all expression as he gazed in silence through the car window. The general felt he had nothing to say to him and lit a cigarette. Then he turned his eyes back to the world outside. His eyes perceived the outlines of this foreign land refracted, distorted by the rivulets of water snaking down the glass.

  A train whistled in the distance. The railway track itself was hidden by an embankment and the general wondered in which direction the train would pass them. Then he saw it emerge from the cutting and gradually overhaul the car as it picked up speed. He continued to watch it until the guard’s van was no longer visible through the mist. Then he turned back towards his companion; but the priest’s features still seemed to him as immobile as before. Again he felt he had nothing to say to him. And, what was more, he realized, he had nothing left to think about. He had exhausted every possible subject of meditation during the journey. In any case, what was the point of reflecting further just now? He was tired. Enough was enough. Wiser just to check in the mirror that his uniform was in order.

  Dusk was falling as they drove into Tirana. There seemed to be a
thick fog suspended just above the buildings, above the street lamps, above the naked trees in the parks. The general began to feel more himself again. Through the window he could make out quantities of pedestrians scurrying through the rain. “They have a lot of umbrellas in this country!” he observed aloud. He felt he would have liked to exchange a few impressions now; the silence in the car was beginning to weigh on him. But he didn’t know how to set about breaking through his companion’s taciturnity. Beyond the pavement, on his side, he noticed a church, then a mosque. On the priest’s side there were buildings still in the course of construction, corseted with scaffolding. The cranes, their lights blazing, looked like red-eyed monsters moving in the mist. The general called the priest’s attention to the proximity of the church and the mosque.

  But he showed not the slightest interest. The general concluded that for the moment there was absolutely nothing he could do to arouse his companion from his apathy. As for himself, he was now feeling in a somewhat better humour; but who was there for him to talk to? The Albanian official sent to escort them was sitting in the front seat, over on the priest’s side. The politician and the ministry representative, who had met them at the airport, were following in another car.

  Once they had disembarked at the Hotel Dajti, the general began to feel more at ease. He went up to the room that had been booked for him, shaved, and changed his uniform. Then he asked the hotel switchboard to put through a call to his family.

  After that he rejoined the priest and the three Albanians, who had settled themselves around a table in the lounge. Various subjects of no particular interest were discussed. Everyone avoided broaching political or social topics. The general succeeded in being both affable and grave. The priest spoke little. The general made it clear that he was the more important of the two emissaries; although the priest’s reticence nevertheless allowed a certain doubt to subsist in this respect. The general alluded to the pride that humanity has always taken in the ceremonial interment of its warriors. He instanced the Greeks and Trojans, who concluded truces solely for the purpose of ensuring that their dead received the funeral rites that were their due. The general made it clear that he was filled with a great zeal for his mission. It was a pious task, an arduous task, and one that he intended to carry out successfully. Thousands of mothers were waiting for their sons. They had been waiting for twenty years now. It was true that their expectation had altered somewhat in its nature. They were no longer expecting living sons to come home to them. But is it not equally possible to anticipate the return of the dead? It had fallen to him, the task of bringing back to all those grieving mothers the remains of the children those idiot generals had lacked the wit to lead properly into battle. He was proud of the fact, and he intended to do everything in his power not to disappoint them.

  “General, your call…”

  He rose briskly to his feet.

  “Excuse me, gentlemen,” he said, and strode off towards the hotel offices with loping yet majestic steps.

  He returned with the same lofty bearing. He was radiant. His companions had ordered coffee and cognac. The conversation had livened up. The general let it be known once again that he was in charge of the mission, while the priest, though holding the military rank of colonel, was in fact merely a spiritual adviser.

  He was the leader, and as such it was his privilege to direct the conversation onto the subjects he cared to discuss, such as brands of cognac, the differences between various capital cities or certain makes of cigarette. He suddenly felt filled with confidence there in that lounge, warmly protected by those thick curtains, listening to the foreign, the very alien music. In fact he was rather astonished himself at this abrupt attachment he perceived in himself for physical comforts, for all the things he could see around him in that place, from the padded armchairs to the pleasant gurglings of the café-filtre in front of him. Except that it was perhaps less of an attachment and more a sort of foretaste of regret for something he would shortly be saying goodbye to for a long while.

  Yes, the general was radiant. Even he himself was unable to understand the reason for this unexpected wave of wellbeing. It was the joy of the traveller luxuriating safely in some haven after a perilous journey through rough weather. The little amber glass of cognac was gradually erasing the memory of those menacing mountains that even now, as he sat there at the table, were coming back - occasionally, disturbingly - into his mind. “Like a proud and solitary bird! …” He was suddenly suffused with a sense of his own power. The bodies of tens of thousands of soldiers buried beneath the earth had been waiting so many long years for his arrival, and now he was here at last, like a new Messiah, copiously provided with maps, with lists, with the infallible directions that would enable him to draw them up out of the mud and restore them to their families. Other generals had led those interminable columns of soldiers into defeat and destruction. But he, he had come to wrest back from oblivion and death the few that remained. He was going to speed on from graveyard to graveyard, searching every field of battle in this country to recover those who had vanished. And in his campaign against the mud he would suffer no reverses; because at his back he had the magic power conferred by statistical exactitude.

  He was the representative of a great and civilized country and his work must be greatly worthy of it. In the task he was now undertaking there was something of the majesty of the Greeks and the Trojans, of the solemnity of Homeric funeral rites.

  The general drank another glass of brandy. And from this night onwards, every day, every night, far though he was from his country, all those awaiting his return would be saying as they thought of him: “At this moment he is searching. We are here, out strolling for our pleasure, going to the cinema, to restaurants, while he is over there, leaving no path untrodden in that foreign land in order to recover our unhappy sons. Oh, truly that man’s task is a heavy one! But he will make a success of it. He will not have been sent in vain. And may God be with him!”

  2

  THE EXHUMATION OF THE ARMY began on 29 October at 1400 hours.

  The pick sank into the ground with a dull thud. The priest made the sign of the cross. The general gave a military salute. The old roadmender, lent to them by the local government association, raised his pick and brought it thudding down a second time.

  There, the task has begun, the general thought to himself with emotion as he watched the first clods of damp earth roll to a halt at their feet. It was the first grave to be opened, and all those involved were standing around it in silence, like figures of stone. The Albanian expert, a blond and elegant young man with a very thin face, scribbled in his notebook. Two of the other workmen were smoking cigarettes, a third had a pipe in his mouth, and the last, the youngest, wearing a roll-neck pullover, was leaning on the handle of his pick and simply observing the scene with a pensive air. All four were closely following the opening of this first grave so as to learn the correct procedure to be observed in their work - the exhumation procedure described in detail in the contract: appendix 4, paragraphs 7 and 8.

  The general’s eyes remained fixed on the steadily growing pile of clods at his feet. They were black and friable, and as they crumbled they gave off faint wisps of vapour.

  So there it is, that foreign soil, he said to himself. The same black mud as everywhere else, the same stones, the same roots, the same vapour. Earth like earth anywhere. And yet - foreign.

  Behind them, on the road, the cars flashing past occasionally sounded their horns at one another. The cemetery, like most military cemeteries, flanked the road with one of its sides. Beyond the road there were cows grazing, and occasionally one would send a peaceful moo floating across the valley.

  The general was uneasy. The pile of earth was perpetually growing, and now, after half an hour, the old workman was buried up to his knees in the trench. He climbed out to rest for a moment, just long enough to allow one of his comrades to shovel out the earth he had just loosened with his pick, then he climbed back into the hole.<
br />
  High in the sky a flight of wild geese passed over their heads.

  A lone villager, leading his horse by the bridle, walked solitarily past along the road. Apparently unaware of the nature of their labours, he shouted down: “Keep at it!”

  No one replied, and the peasant continued on his way.

  The general gazed in turn at the dug earth and the calm, grave faces of the workmen.

  “What can they be thinking of all this?” he wondered. “Five of them, just five, and they are about to dig up a whole army.”

  But there was nothing to be learned from their expressionless features. Two of them lit further cigarettes, the third pulled yet again on his pipe, and the fourth, the youngest, still leaning on the handle of his pick, was looking on with the same absent gaze.

  The old roadmender, now only visible from the waist upwards, was listening to the expert explaining something. After a few moments’ discussion he resumed his task.

  “What did he say?” the general asked.

  “I didn’t quite catch it,” the priest answered.

  The entire group resumed its deathly silence.

  “We shall be lucky if it doesn’t rain!” the priest remarked suddenly.

  The general raised his eyes. The mist concealed the horizon on every side, and it would have been impossible to say whether the darker shapes distinguishable in the distance, far in the distance, were thicker banks of mist or enormous mountains. As he continued to dig, the workman sank deeper and deeper into the earth. The general kept his eyes fixed on the snowy head as it moved back and forth in time to the blows of the pick.

  You can see he knows his job, he thought to himself. Naturally.

  If he didn’t they presumably wouldn’t have given him to us as a foreman. But the general would have liked to see the old roadmender dig even more quickly, to see all the graves opened up as quickly as possible, and all those dead men found. He was impatient to see the other workmen begin digging too. Then he would be able to take out his lists and start covering them with little crosses - one little cross for every soldier found.