The General of the Dead Army Read Free

the distance, were thicker banks of mist or enormous mountains. As he continued to dig, the workman sank deeper and deeper into the earth. The general kept his eyes fixed on the snowy head as it moved back and forth in time to the blows of the pick.
    You can see he knows his job, he thought to himself. Naturally.
    If he didn’t they presumably wouldn’t have given him to us as a foreman. But the general would have liked to see the old roadmender dig even more quickly, to see all the graves opened up as quickly as possible, and all those dead men found. He was impatient to see the other workmen begin digging too. Then he would be able to take out his lists and start covering them with little crosses - one little cross for every soldier found.
    Now the pick was striking the earth with a muffled sound that seemed to spring from the very bowels of the earth. The general suddenly felt alarm run through every fibre of his being. What if they didn’t find anything down there? What if the maps were wrong and they were obliged to dig in two, three, ten different spots? Just to find a single soldier! “What if we don’t find anything?” he said to the priest.
    “We tell them to dig somewhere else. We can pay them double if necessary.”
    “It’s not a matter of money. The only thing that counts is to find all the bodies on our lists.”
    “We’ll find them. We can’t afford not to.”
    After a moment the general spoke again, perplexedly:
    “It’s as though there had never been a battle here, as though this ground had never been trodden by anything but those brown cows grazing so quietly over there.”
    “One always has that impression afterwards,” the priest said.
    “Remember, more than twenty years have gone by.”
    “Yes, it was a long time ago, it’s true. And that’s what worries me.”
    “Why? Why should it?” the priest asked. “The earth here is firm enough. Anything buried in it wouldn’t move for a great many years.”
    “Yes, that’s true too. But I don’t know, I just can’t get used to the idea of them being down there at all, so close to us, only six feet away.”
    “That’s because you were never in Albania during the war,” the priest said. “Was it really so terrible?” The priest nodded.
    The old workman had by now almost completely vanished into the earth. The little circle had tightened more closely around him. The Albanian expert, doubled over at the waist, continued to pour instructions down into the trench.
    The shovel produced a harsh, dull sound as it scraped against the pebbles. The general felt as though he were hearing fragments of the stories he had been told by the ex-soldiers who had come to see him before he left, hoping to be of help to him in his search for the graves of their comrades, dead and buried here in Albania.
    The noise of my dagger grating against the pebbles made me shudder. But no matter how hard I tried I could make no impression on the ground with my makeshift tool. After a tremendous effort all I’d managed to get out was a wretched fistful of dirt, and I thought to myself sadly: “Ah, if only I’d been sent to the Engineers I’d have a shovel, and then I could dig faster, really quickly!”, because only a few yards away my best mate was lying on his belly with his legs sticking out over a ditch half full of water. I pulled out the dagger from his belt too and began digging again with both hands. I wanted the hole to be really deep, because that s what he’d asked for. Hed said to me: “If I’m killed when I’m with you
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then bury me in the ground as deep as you can. I’m afraid those dogs and jackals will find me. Like that time outside that little town. Tepelene wasn’t it called? You remember those dogs there?” “Yes, I remember them all right,” I answered, taking a drag at my cigarette. And now he was dead, and I kept saying to him as I went on digging: “Don’t worry, don’t worry, your graves going to be deep, really deep!” And