THE NOTES STOPPED THERE. THE DATE 7 SEPTEMBER 1943
had been written after the last entry, but then crossed out. Apparently he had decided not to continue the diary. Per haps he had nothing in particular to say, or had simply grown tired of it.
The general tossed the exercise book on to the seat with a grimace of distaste.
'Is there anything interesting in it?' the priest asked. 'The diary of a sentimental idiot, and a self-pitying one to boot.'
The priest picked up the exercise book and opened it at the first page.
'You won't find his name in it,' the general said. 'Only his height: six foot one.'
'Really? Exactly Colonel Z.'s height!' the priest said. Their eyes met for a moment then disengaged.
'Does he mention his regiment and battalion anywhere?' 'No, only his division, the "Iron Division". There is no other information. He wrote down the dog's name, but not his own.' 'Strange!'
'And there are one or two mentions of the "Blue Battalion" too. But nothing about Colonel Z.'
'The entries are all for 1943,' the priest said, having leafed through the book. 'In which month does he mention the "Blue Battalion"?'
'At the beginning of the diary, then again at the end. In February and in September that's to say.'
'In September the colonel was already dead,' the priest said.
'Yes, of course.'
The priest began reading the diary.
The general, remembering the old miller's story, sat trying to imagine how the story in the diary might have ended. The 'Blue Battalion' had passed through the district, raging under the sting of defeat; some of them had suddenly appeared at the mill one afternoon, having no doubt been informed that there was a deserter hiding there, and they'd searched until they found him, hidden under the sacks, white under his white covering of flour, as though already wrapped in a shroud. They had taken him outside, pushing him ahead of them with the barrels of their sten-guns, and like that, backing, backing, he had reached the mill-stream. He would have fallen backwards into it, but when he was two steps from the edge someone fired: he had fallen backwards, and only his head had slumped backwards into the water. Then a little eddy had formed around it, as though it was a big stone, and the gentle current had spread his hair downstream, waving like strange black weed.
And that must have been that, the general said to himself, drawing on his cigarette. What other end could there be for a deserter?
'Well?' the general asked about an hour later, as the priest closed the book in his turn.
The priest shrugged.
'A diary no different from a hundred others,' he said. 'True,' the general agreed, 'there's nothing in it of any interest. I told you: just a lot of self-pity!'
'Two of the other diaries were more interesting,' the priest said.
'It was a foregone conclusion we could never win the war with soldiers like that,' the general said angrily. 'Idiots who throw their rifles into ditches and then start making goo-goo eyes at the first girl they meet .. .' He snorted. 'A fine soldier!' 'These soldiers' diaries all have elements in common,' the priest said.
'That's natural enough, when you think they were all writ ten by men in uniform. And yet they are all different too, fundamentally. Do you remember the first one we found? What a warlike spirit there! You could sense the hand and brain of a true soldier in every line.'
The priest gave a nod of assent.
'Of course there were little things here and there that were rather contemptible, but on the whole it was the fighting spirit of the fellow that came out most strongly.'
'When I said they had something in common I was thinking of the form,' the priest said. 'All the diaries we've found are naturally different. Only the ends overlap--in other words the one thing the writers couldn't write.'
'Yes, I agree. It is only death they have in common.'
'Even though this wretched fellow, instead of being killed honourably, in an attack, ended up being shot as a deserter and falling with his head in a ditch,' the priest said.
'Have you read what he says about the canals?' the general asked.
'Yes of course,' the priest said.
'He was looking for salvation in them. But it was really death waiting for him down there.'
The general lit a cigarette.
'Perhaps that boy in the road was Christine's son,' he said. The priest did not answer.
The driver sounded his horn vociferously. A long flock of sheep was crossing the road in front of them. Two shepherds armed with long crooks were trying to make an opening to let the two vehicles through.
'They've brought them down from the mountains for the winter,' the priest said.
The general looked out at the tall mountain men with the hoods of their thick, black, sheepskin cloaks pulled up over their heads.
'Do you remember those two lieutenants who were reduced to looking after sheep in that Albanian village? What division were they from? Weren't they from one of the alpine regiments?'
'I don't remember,' the priest said.
'What an odd phenomenon that was,' the general mused. 'And it happened right through our forces in Albania. Really curious. Or rather shameful, I should say!'
'You mean our soldiers working as menials for the peas ants here in order to survive?'
'Yes. And after the capitulation, you know, the thing took on really massive proportions. I read a report on it once back at Headquarters, and it was a quite incredible thing.'
'I know, I know,' the priest said. 'Some quite ridiculous things happened.'
'And think how often we have stumbled upon cases of that
kind ourselves. Think how many times we've had to blush with shame while someone told us how our soldiers had sunk to doing washing or looking after chickens for Albanian peasants. That shepherd or miller, or whatever he was, two hours ago-he made my blood boil.'
The priest once more nodded assent.
'You say ridiculous things happened. But they are worse than ridiculous these incidents, they are depressing.'
'In war it is always difficult to say exactly what is tragic and what is grotesque, what is heroic and what is depressing.' 'Some people try to explain such things away,' the general said. 'They try to justify the attitude of our troops when they were left behind here, marooned after the capitulation. "There were no ships," they say, "there was no way of crossing the sea. What were the unfortunate fellows to do? After all, they had to survive somehow." Survive, yes! But surely they could have done that without dragging the dignity of their country in the mud!' the general cried with anger. 'An officer in a great army like ours, even in defeat, agreeing to look after chickens! It's unheard of!'
'In the beginning many of them sold their weapons,' the priest said. 'They sold them or sometimes bartered them for a little sack of maize or beans.'
'Were you here then?'
'No. But I've been told all about it. Apparently revolvers were given away for just a hunk of bread and a little wine, because the Albanians set much less store by pistols and so on than rifles. The rifles fetched much more-sometimes as much as a sack of bread. As for machine-guns, sten-guns, grenades, they were given away almost for nothing-for an egg, a pair of torn opingas, a couple of onions, or if they were lucky a pound or so of curd cheese.'
'How contemptible!' the general said.
The priest was about to go on, but the general spoke again : 'And it's the reason the Albanians are so ready to jeer at us. You saw how that shepherd or miller, whatever he was, insulted me.'
'They worship weapons. They can't conceive how anyone can sell his rifle for a piece of bread.'
'And the heavy arms?'
'They had almost no market value at all, and anyway most of them had been captured by the partisans. You could ex change a mortar for perhaps a chicken at the most.'
'How shameful!' the general said. 'What you're saying in fact is that the first few days after our capitulation in Albania were just one big arms fair.'
'Yes, precisely, an arms fair, that's it. The Albanians have always had a sort of passionate avidity for arms, and of course the war had fed it. I think their ancestors must have been dreaming of such a fair for centuries.'
'They say that more than ten thousand rifles were sold or bartered for food.'
'Possibly even more,' the priest said.
'It was one of the oddest aspects of the war, there's no doubt of that.'
'And you know there were more really appalling accidents in Albania that year than ever in the past,' the priest went on. 'The children were using real weapons as toys, and some times, after a quarrel, they would blow their brains out with a grenade or something. Sometimes the women in a street would squabble during the day and end up abusing one an other from their windows, the way women do, but then at night the men would get up into the windows or the lofts with their machine-guns and there would be a blood bath.'
'You must be exaggerating.'
'Not in the slightest. Everyone here was in the grip of a terrible psychosis. The Albanians behaved as though they were drunk in some way; all their ancestral instincts were allowed to run completely wild, and they became more dangerous than ever.'
'Perhaps because they were caught in the crossfire of battle, and wounded what's more,' the general said. 'Lions go crazy like that as soon as the first bullet hits them.'
The priest was about to comment, but the general went on:
'And besides, at that time the Albanians were presumably very much on the alert for new dangers. Their neighbours could perfectly well have rushed in and overrun them at any moment.'
'The Albanians always exaggerate the dangers that are threatening them,' the priest said.
'There's one thing I really don't understand though,' the general said, 'and that is why they didn't just tear us to pieces after the capitulation. Because in fact they did the exact opposite; they protected our wretched troops against our former allies, who were shooting our men out of hand whenever they could lay their hands on them. Do you re member?'
'Yes, I remember,' the priest said.
'In fact there's a document on the subject,' the general went on. 'I mean that appeal the partisans put out to the whole Albanian people at the time of our capitulation. They asked them all not to let our soldiers die of hunger, because at that time there were tens of thousands of them wander ing all over Albania like beggars in rags. I read a copy of that appeal once myself, and it's always seemed to me an enigma. What could have caused them to behave like that, men who hated us so much? Or was it quite simply a piece of political calculation?'
'Political calculation entirely,' the priest said. 'I was very surprised myself by their attitude.'
'We were sworn enemies,' the general said. 'As long as we were at war they were at our throats at every opportunity, and then without any warning they suddenly put out an appeal like that.'
'Yes, yes,' the priest murmured pensively.
'What a deplorable epilogue to a campaign it was,' the general went on, 'that period after the capitulation. All those soldiers in uniform, with their weapons, their badges of rank, their braid and medals, transformed into domestic servants, menials, farm labourers. I feel myself blushing when I think of the tasks they were reduced to doing. Do you remember how they even told us in one place about that colonel who did laundry and knitted socks for an Albanian family?'
'Yes,' the priest said. 'I have sometimes wondered whether perhaps Colonel Z. too didn't go into service with a peasant family somewhere. Perhaps he is still with them, guarding a flock of goats somewhere.'
'I wonder what Betty's reaction would be, seeing him like that,' the general said with a laugh.
The priest did not answer, contenting himself with a smile at the seat in front.
They talked on for a short while, but most of their journey was passed in silence. The roads were strewn with yellow or rotting leaves. The yellow ones flew up, fluttering to and from in the wind of their passing, but the others stirred only sluggishly then sank back into inertia, weighed down pre sumably by their burden of water and mud, scattered over the road, withered, as though waiting patiently for death.
The two vehicles sped on over them.
The car and the lorry were nearing the outskirts of the capi tal. Modem farm buildings began to appear now and then on the sides of the road, then a small aerodrome with a few helicopters standing on its tarmac, then the aerials of a radio transmitting station.
Suddenly the two vehicles turned off the main road and continued more slowly along a muddy secondary road to the right. The landscape had changed dramatically. They were crossing an area of flat, waterlogged wasteland sparsely dotted with bushes. Sticking up out of this bare expanse stood a long shed roofed with grey asbestos tiles. The two vehicles drew up outside it. A long-haired dog out side the door began barking.
The door slowly opened and a tall man dressed in a long threadbare overcoat emerged coughing. He was the store keeper.
The workmen unloaded the big crates from the lorry. The expert walked inside the shed with the storekeeper. The general and the priest climbed out of the car and followed them.
It was cold in the shed. The feeble light that did manage to find its way in through the windows fell on the rows of nylon bags arranged on the long wooden shelves.
The workmen carried the crates into the shed. The store keeper began removing and counting the nylon bags from the crates. Then he laid them out along the shelves, muttering their numbers to himself as he did so.
'Not that one,' he said when the workmen brought him the heavy coffin the miller had handed over to them on the road. The expert tried hard to make him change his mind but the storekeeper was adamant.
'No,' he said, 'It is against the clauses in the contract.'
The workmen carried the coffin out and loaded it back onto the lorry.
When it was all finished the storekeeper opened a drawer and produced from it a thick ledger with a dirty cover. He opened this book, blew on his fingers, then began clumsily leafing through it.
'Here's the place,' the expert said.
He wrote something then put his signature underneath.
Delivery had been completed.