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', 'Second Army Corps', 'Iron Division', '3rd Alpine Battalion', '3rd Special Division', '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 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. 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 trees in the garden looked like huge haycocks draped in shadow. Hearing the dcx)r 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.'
'What 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 and bring them back with the others.'
'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 beIow them. 'There's a walled spring 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 as they sat waiting on the big sofa to be received. 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 trench-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, raising their heads only when a newcomer entered and stood looking round for somewhere to sit. 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.
'Daddy,' his children asked him, after he had taken off his greatcoat and was sitting down to eat with them in the dining-room, 'what are all those people doing here?' The general laughed and tried to evade their curiosity with a joke. But they insisted.
'Are they going away to war, Daddy?' his son asked.
'No, they've already been.'
'Then what have they come for? What do they want?'
They have relations serving in the army, and they want to send them letters and parcels.'
Then, when lunch was over, he would go through into the drawing-room and one by one the visitors would put their cases before him. How little the stories differed! The things they said to him had soon become so familiar that each day seemed like no more than a reliving of the previous day in his mind. Often there were women whose grief over their lost sons or husbands was such that they could not restrain their sobs, and that made the general even more on edge than
ever.
'Now that's enough of that!' he cried one day to one of these weeping women. This is not the place to bring your tears! Your son fell on the field of battle, fighting for his country. And he fell bravely.'
'Then curse his bravery,' she muttered in reply.
Another day there was a tall man who had scarcely entered the room before shouting :
'This mission of yours is nothing but a hoax ! ' The general turned white with anger.
'That is traitor's talk! Get out of here ! '
Towards the middle of this last week, among the visitors waiting for him he noticed a very old woman accompanied by a little girl. The old woman looked as though she was in a state of exhaustion, so he went over to her first.
'My son is still over there,' she said in a faint voice, 'my only son.'
And taking a little bag out of her pocket she pulled it open with trembling hands. It contained a telegram, yellowed with age, which she held out to him. His eyes flicked through the usual phrases employed by commanding officers to convey the news of a soldier's death to his relatives, but stopped abruptly at the words: .... fell on the field of battle at Stalingrad.'
He tried to explain to her :
'I'm very sorry, my dear, but it's not Russia I'm going to,
it's Albania.'
The old woman rested her dulled eyes on him for a moment, but apparently without having grasped the meaning of what he said. 'There is something I want to ask you to do,' she went on.
'Could you manage to find out where he died, and how?
And who was with him, who brought him water, and what his last wishes were ? '
The general attempted once more to make her understand that he wasn't going to Russia, but the old woman, still unable to understand, simply went on repeating her request while all the other occupants of the room eyed one another in silence.
'Set your mind at rest, my dear lady,' someone gently interrupted at last, 'the general will do everything he can to help, you may be sure.' And at that the old woman thanked him and left, bent almost double, supporting herself with one hand clutching her stick and the other on the shoulder of the little girl beside her.
Another afternoon, two days later, a man with a particularly sombre look about him waited till everyone else had gone.
'I was a general once too,' he said in a tone that betrayed suppressed anger, 'and I took part in the Albanian campaign.'
The two men looked at one another for an instant with mutual contempt, the one because he was looking at a defeated general, the other because he was dealing with a mere peacetime soldier.
'What is it you want?' the general asked his visitor.
'Nothing at all, really. Because I'm not expecting you to get very far anyway. To tell you the truth I have no confidence in you, and also I find this whole scheme basically ridiculous. But given that you've taken it on, this mission, well it might as well be done properly, damn it!'
'Could you explain yourself more clearly?'
'I have nothing more to say. I simply wanted to warn you.
Be always on your guard. Keep your head high, and never let them see you bow it. They will try to provoke you, they may try to make a fool of you, and you must know how to answer them. You must be on the alert all the time. They will try to insult our soldiers' remains. I know them too well. They often jeered at us. They didn't give a damn even then! Imagine what they will be capable of now!'
'I shall not tolerate such behaviour under any circumstances,' the general said.
The ex-general looked at him with an air of commiseration, as though he was just on the point of saying: 'Poor fellow!', then he suddenly turned and walked out without even taking his leave.
For the next three days, the last before he was due to leave, the general's drawing-room was packed with people the whole time, and the general himself, worn out by these preliminaries, longed only to leave as soon as possible. Meanwhile, his wife had become extremely nervous and agitated.
One evening, as they lay side by side talking, she told him what was really on her mind :
'Why can't you just refuse to go on this mission? I feel . . . I feel as though death has come into the house.'
He soothed her as best he could. But that night he scarcely slept a wink himself. He had the feeling that he was going into battle next day. He received the last visitor of all on the very morning of his departure. He was up just after daybreak, because he had to be at the airport very early. As he went out through the garden to open the garage doors he noticed figures outside. They were squatting down asleep against the railings, wrapped in a thick blanket—an old man and his young grandson. They had come from one of the most distant frontier districts. The journey had taken them several days and they had only arrived on the last train the night before. Since they hadn't dared to ring the bell at such an hour they had simply huddled down on the pavement outside and
dozed off while waiting for the dawn.
The general repeated for the last time the words he had uttered so often: 'The lists have been drawn up with the utmost care, don't worry, we shall find them.' The old countryman thanked him with a nod of the head, then bent to pick up the blanket that he and his grandson had let fall at their feet when startled into wakefulness by the squeaking garage door. That had been all. And that was how the general's two weeks at home, after returning from his holiday by the sea, had been spent.