The General of the Dead Army Read online

  At that moment the general saw the colour of those eyes as somehow the same as the television screen at the other end of the lounge. The colour of a television that never lights up! the general said to himself. Or rather of a television screen perpetually showing the same utterly incomprehensible programme. He looked down for an instant into his now colourless glass as he twisted it round and round in his fingers.

  “And what else should I be doing, in your opinion?” he asked with a certain amount of irritation. “What advice have you to offer me? Should I be taking photos to show to my wife when I get back, or keeping a diary and making notes of all the places of interest? Eh? What do you think?”

  “I didn’t say that. I simply pointed out that you are perhaps drinking a little too much.”

  “Whereas I find it astonishing that you don’t drink. Very astonishing in fact.”

  “I have never drunk alcohol,” the priest said.

  “That’s no reason not to drink it now. Do as I do: drink every evening in order to forget what you see all day long.”

  “And why should I forget what I see during the day?”

  “Because we come from the same country as all these poor wretches,” the general said, tapping with his finger on his brief case. “Don’t you feel sorry for them?”

  “Please don’t attack me,” the priest said. “I am just as attached to my country as you are.”

  The general smiled.

  “Do you know something?” he said. “I’ve noticed that our conversations during the past three days or so have the oddest way of sounding like dialogues from some of the modern plays I’ve seen. Extremely boring ones, I might add.” The priest smiled in his turn.

  “That is in the nature of things. Any conversation is bound to bear a resemblance to the dialogue in some play or comedy.”

  “Do you enjoy the modern theatre?”

  “Yes, to a certain extent.”

  The general looked into the priest’s eyes for a long moment before averting his gaze. “My poor soldiers,” he said suddenly, as though waking from a dream. “It tears at my heart when I think of them. I feel like a foster father trying to make it up to children that others have abandoned. You can sometimes feel even fonder of other people’s children who have been left by them than of your own. But what can I do for them? How can I avenge them?”

  “It tears my heart too,” the priest said.

  “We are so powerless. We have nothing but lists and reports in our hands. All we can do is hunt out their graves. And one by one at that. It is sad to have been reduced to such impotence.”

  “That is fate.”

  The general nodded.

  Again just like a play! he thought to himself. He acts as though he’s made of metal, that priest. But I’d be curious to know, all the same, whether he was as metallic as this when he was alone with Colonel Z.’s beautiful widow. And he tried to picture to himself how he would have to pull up his cassock in order to kneel down in front of her. Did she just find him attractive, or was there an ulterior motive that made her encourage him? Did anything really happen between them …? But, after all, of what interest is it to me?

  A voice emerging from the television in the lounge drew his attention. He turned his head to listen. Albanian struck him as a harsh language. He had heard it spoken quite a lot by this time by the country people who came to help with their excavations in the local cemeteries. And those dead soldiers, he thought, they must certainly have heard it too - a fatal tongue for them.

  This must be the news now by the sound of it, he thought. And then he did in fact begin to catch familiar syllables: Tel-Aviv, Bonn, Laos …

  So many cities scattered all over the face of the earth, he thought to himself, and his mind harked back once more to all those soldiers who had come to Albania from so many different countries, to the inscriptions on the rusty metal labels, to the crosses, to the marks on the earth, to the clumsily printed names.

  But most of the graves had no distinguishing marks over them at all. Worse still, the majority of the dead men they were seeking hadn’t been given proper burial. They had simply been piled up in common graves, thrown into hurriedly dug trenches, just dropped into the mud. And there were some who had even been deprived of that muddy ground as a resting place - those that existed solely in his lists. They had found the remains of one of their soldiers in a museum case in a tiny little town towards the south. The museum had been founded by a little group of citizens passionately proud of their native town’s history. In a deep dungeon below the ancient citadel, among other vestiges of the past, they had unearthed some human remains. For weeks on end, sitting in a local café, these amateur archaeologists had argued over their conflicting theories as to the origins of these remains. Two of them were even in the process of writing an article for a magazine, expressing their learned and audacious theses, when the little group of bonehunters arrived. Having wandered into the museum quite by chance, the expert had of course recognized the skeleton immediately for what it was by the regulation medallion. (In their article, the local archaeologists were advancing two possible hypotheses on the origin of this object: it was, they said, either a coin or a personal adornment dating from Roman times.) But the expert’s visit to the museum put an end to all such conjectures. Only a single point remained to be elucidated: how had the soldier managed to find his way into the impenetrable labyrinth beneath the citadel, and why?

  He asked the priest, but he had no clear recollection of the episode.

  “You’re right,” said the general. “One remembers so many stories, and many of them are strangely similar, just as the names are. Really the lists are too long, and sometimes I feel I don’t remember a thing.”

  “He was just a soldier, no different from any of the others,” the priest said.

  “What is the good of all these names, all these cards covered in details and descriptions?” the general said. “When all is said and done, can a pile of bones still have a name?”

  The priest shook his head as though to signify: There is nothing we can do. That is the way it is!

  “They should all have the same name, just as they all wear the same medallion round their necks,” the general went on. The priest did not reply.

  The sounds of the band were still reaching them from the basement. The general continued to chain-smoke.

  “It’s horrible, the number of our men they managed to kill,” he said as though in a dream. “It is indeed.”

  “But we killed a lot of theirs too.”

  The priest remained silent.

  “Yes, we certainly killed a lot of theirs,” the general said again. “You see their graves everywhere too. It would have been depressing and humiliating to see nothing but lonely cemeteries filled with our own soldiers everywhere.”

  The priest made a movement of the head, but without making it clear whether he was agreeing with the general or not.

  “A meagre consolation,” the general added.

  Once again the priest made that movement of the head that seemed to say: There’s nothing we can do about it.

  “What do you mean?” the general said. “Do you think their graves are a consolation or not?”

  The priest spread out his hands.

  “I am a man of religion. I cannot approve of homicide.”

  “Ah!” the general said.

  The engaged couple had got to their feet and were leaving the lounge.

  “We fought one another like wild beasts,” the general went on. “Those devils really were savage fighters.”

  “There’s a reason for that,” the priest said. “It’s not a matter of conscious courage with them. It’s ingrained in their psychology.”

  “I don’t understand you,” the general said.

  “There’s nothing difficult about it,” the priest continued. “In war, some are guided by their reason, however reliable or unstable it happens to be, others follow their instincts.”

  “Yes!”

  “Th
e Albanians are a rough and backward people. Almost as soon as they are born someone puts a gun into their cradle, so that it shall become an integral part of their existence.”

  “Yes, you can see that,” the general said. “They even hold their umbrellas as though they were guns.”

  “And by becoming from earliest childhood an ingredient of their very being,” the priest went on, “a fundamental constituent of their lives, the gun has exercised a direct influence on the Albanians’ psychological development.”

  “How interesting.”

  “But if you cultivate what amounts to a sort of religion around any object, then naturally you feel a desire to use it. And what is the best use to which you can put a gun?”

  “Killing, of course,” the general said.

  “Exactly. And the Albanians have always had a taste for killing or getting themselves killed. Whenever they haven’t been able to find an enemy to fight they’ve turned to killing one another. Have you heard about their vendettas?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s an atavistic instinct that drives them into war. Their nature requires war, cries out for war. In peace, the Albanian becomes sluggish and only half alive, like a snake in winter. It is only when he is fighting that his vitality is at full stretch.”

  The general nodded approvingly.

  “War is the normal condition of this country,” the priest went on. “That’s why its inhabitants are so wild, so formidable, and why when they have once begun to fight there is no limit to how far they are prepared to go.”

  “In other words,” the general said, “if what you say about this thirst for destruction - or rather for self-destruction - is true, then as a people they are doomed to disappear from the face of the earth.”

  “Of course.”

  The general took another drink. He was beginning to have slight difficulty in articulating his words.

  “Do you hate the Albanians?” he asked suddenly. The grimace the priest gave was intended as a smile. “No. Why do you ask?”

  The general leant forward to whisper into his ear. The priest gave a tiny start of revulsion as he smelt the alcohol-impregnated breath.

  “What do you mean, ‘Why?’?” the general said very quietly. “I know perfectly well that you do hate them. Just as I do. But you’re right, it’s not in our interests to go round saying so just now.”

  4

  WHEN THEY HAD WISHED one another good night and the general had closed the door of his room behind him he sat down at a little table lit by the light falling from a shaded lamp.

  Despite the late hour he did not feel sleepy. His briefcase lay on the table, and he stretched out a mechanical hand to pick it up.

  He pulled out the lists of dead soldiers and began leafing through them. They made a big bundle, stapled together in batches of four, five - up to ten sheets. He glanced through them, re-reading for the hundredth time the headings typed in capitals at the beginning of each list: “Old Glory Regiment”, “Second Division”, “Iron Division”, “3rd Alpine Battalion”, “4th Regiment of Guards”, “Victory Division”, “7th Infantry Division”, “Blue Battalion” (a punitive unit) … He paused for a moment over this last one. The first name on the list was that of Colonel Z., followed by the names, listed in alphabetical order, of all the other dead, officers, N.C.O.s, privates, all classified according to their troops and companies. “Blue Battalion” - a pretty name, the general thought to himself.

  The typing of the lists had been started in the spring. Young girls, their hair and clothes strictly in accord with the latest fashions, had sat in the long offices at the Ministry, by the tall windows, tapping at the keys of their machines with slender fingers. It was almost as though, beneath the indifferent stares of those mascaraed eyes, the soldiers were being machine-gunned down yet again.

  He laid aside the master lists of names and drew out another bundle, this time copiously annotated and bearing occasional little red crosses in the margins. These were the lists containing all the available facts that might be of help in the search for the remains. On these lists the dead soldiers were no longer grouped according to regiment, division, etc., but according to the places where they had fallen; and beside each name there was a set of co-ordinates referring to one of the maps, together with the man’s height and a description of his dentition. The names of those already recovered were marked with small red crosses; but these were still very few in number.

  I ought to transcribe these results onto the master lists and work out the figures of our first tour, the general thought to himself, but it is very late.

  Unable to think of anything else to do, almost without thinking he continued his perusal of the lists. On those giving the location details, all the place names were followed by translations in brackets, and the names of all those valleys, passes, plateaux, rivers and towns seemed to him somehow extraordinary and macabre: the Deaf-mute’s Ditch, the Bride’s Brook, the Five Wells, the Church of Psalms, Sheho’s Mother’s Tomb, the Screech Owl’s Crevice. He had the feeling that these places had shared out the lists of dead men among themselves, each taking a different quantity, and that he was now here to wrest the bodies away from them again.

  Once more his eyes came to rest on one of the lists. It was the “Missing” list, and again Colonel Z.’s name stood at the head of it. Six foot one, right number one incisor gold inlay, the general read, and continued right on to the end: five foot eight, two premolars missing; five foot five, upper molars missing; six foot two and a half, incisors on metal bridge; five foot eleven, dentition complete; six foot ten … ! He must certainly be the tallest on the list, the general thought. I wonder how tall the tallest soldier in our army was. I know quite well how small the smallest will have been: five feet, because that’s the regulation minimum. The tallest are usually from the 4th Guards Regiment, the shortest from the Alpine Regiment. But really, why am I sitting here letting all this absurd nonsense run through my head like this?

  He switched off the light and lay down. Sleep wouldn’t come. Oughtn’t to have drunk that damned coffee so late in the evening, he thought ruefully. He lay staring up at the white ceiling of his room, watching the headlights of the passing cars sweep across it. Penetrating the still partly open blinds, the light was projected onto the white surface in a fan of wheeling stripes, and he felt he was gazing up at an X-ray screen upon which an endless succession of strangers was appearing and demanding to be examined.

  He thought of the lists lying scattered on the table and shuddered. I ought to have brought my wife with me, he thought. We should be lying here side by side now in the darkness, we should be talking in low voices, and I could tell her all my worries. But she would be afraid, the way she was those last days before I left to come here.

  Those last few days had been very different from his usual way of life, filled with an element of the unexpected and the unknown. The fine weather had broken and he had scarcely got home from their holiday at the sea before the first visitor had presented himself at his home. He was reading in his study when the maid came to tell him that someone was waiting to see him in the drawing-room.

  The man was standing by the window. Outside, the day was waning and the shadows, moving shapes, wandered haggardly about. Hearing the door open, the visitor turned towards the general and greeted him.

  “I apologize for disturbing you,” he said in a deep, hoarse voice, “but I have been told that you are about to leave for Albania in order to bring home the remains of our countrymen still buried there.”

  “That is quite true,” the general answered. “I expect to leave in a fortnight.”

  “I have a request I’d like to make to you,” the man went on, and he pulled a crumpled map of Albania out of his pocket. “I fought in Albania during the war, as a private. I was there for two years.”

  “Which unit?” the general asked.

  “Iron Division, 5th Battalion, machine-gun section.”

  “Go ahead,” the general said.
r />   The stranger leaned over the crumpled map he had unfolded and after studying it for a moment laid his forefinger on a particular spot.

  “This is the place where my battalion was wiped out during a big attack by the Albanian partisans. It was the middle of the winter. Those of us who escaped being killed dispersed in all directions as soon as darkness came. I had a wounded soldier with me, a friend. He died shortly before dawn, just as I was dragging him towards a deserted village. I buried him as best I could on my own, just behind the little village church, and then I left. That’s all. No one has any idea the grave is there. That’s why I’ve come to see you. I want to beg you, when you go that way, to search for his remains.”

  “His name must certainly figure on the ‘Missing’ list,” the general said. “The lists are extremely accurate. But nevertheless you did well to come and see me, since the chances of finding missing bodies are always slight. Success in such cases is often simply a matter of luck.”

  “I have also made a little sketch, as well as I could,” the man said, pulling out of his pocket a scrap of paper on which he had scratched out something with a fountain pen that vaguely resembled a church, and then, just behind it, two arrows with the word grave written in red ink below them. “There’s a fountain not far away,” the man went on, “and further still, on the right, two cypresses about here,” and he made a fresh mark on the map, near the church. “Good,” the general said. “Thank you for your help.”

  “Oh, it is for me to thank you,” the other said. “He was my best friend.”

  There was something else he wanted to say, perhaps some further detail about the position of the grave, but the general’s stern and serious air prevented him from doing so. He took his leave without the general having even asked him his identity or his profession.

  And that had been just the start. Every afternoon he would hear the doorbell ring again and again as more and more visitors came pouring into the drawing-room. They were people of all sorts, from every walk of life - wives, aged parents, ex-soldiers - and they all had the same timid air, the same reserved expression on their faces. Then others began to filter in from the more distant towns and provinces. These newcomers waited in the drawing-room with an even more embarrassed air than the others and had great difficulty getting out what they wanted to say, especially since the information they were able to provide about their relations or their friends killed in Albania was usually both very limited and unreliable.