The General of the Dead Army (4 page)

“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!”

“The 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.”

W
HEN 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.

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.

The general made notes of everything that was said to him and then told them all the same thing:

“Don’t worry. The lists drawn up by the War Ministry are extremely accurate, and with the detailed information they provide we cannot fail to find all those we are looking for. But I have in any case made a note of the information you have brought me. It may prove useful.”

They thanked him, they left, and next day the whole thing began all over again. Another batch would appear, in dripping raincoats. It didn’t matter how carefully they picked their way across the thick carpet, they still left footprints on it. Some were afraid that their relations weren’t included on the lists, others brought telegrams received from commanding officers during the war bearing the date of death and the name of the place where the soldier had “fallen for his country,” still others - the old parents especially - unable to believe that their sons could be recovered solely with the help of the information provided by the lists, left in despair, having once more begged the general to spare no effort in his search.

All had their little story to tell, and the general listened to them patiently, each in turn, from the wives who had now remarried and wanted to do their best for their first husbands without their new husbands knowing, to the young twenty-year-olds in sweaters and duffle coats who had never known the fathers who had died in the war.

The last week before his departure, the number of visitors had increased even further. When he came back from his headquarters at mid-day the general would find his drawing-room crammed with people. The room had the air of a hospital corridor filled with patients waiting to be examined; but the silence here was even more complete. The visitors remained utterly silent for hours on end, sitting with their eyes fixed on the patterns in the carpet. Some, country people who had come a long way, appeared with bundles in their arms, which they then set down at their feet. And the general always knew they were waiting for him, even before he got out of his car, because of the bicycles leaning against the railings, and sometimes a strange car parked outside. He would go directly into the drawing-room, where the bitter odour of damp wool from the peasants’ thick clothes, mingling with some elegant woman’s scent, would make him catch his breath. At his entry they all respectfully rose to their feet, but without saying a word, knowing that this was not yet the moment to speak to him.