The General of the Dead Army

R
AIN 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.