The General of the Dead Army Read Free Page A

when I’d finished everything I flattened the earth down as best as I could, making sure not to leave any clues behind, for fear someone might just notice something and dig his body up again. And then, turning my back on the machine-gunfire, I made off into the darkness and, after I’d walked a little way, I turned just once to look back into the blackness where I d just left him, and I said to him in my mind: “Don’t be afraid, they won’t find you.”
    “Still nothing, apparently,” the general said, failing to disguise his nervousness.
    “It’s still too early to say,” the priest answered, “but there’s no reason to give up hope yet.”
    “All the same, it’s unusual in wartime to bury the dead so deeply.”
    “Perhaps this was his second burial. They were sometimes exhumed and reburied a second, or even a third time.”
    “Possibly. But if all the graves are as deep as this we shall never finish.”
    “We’ll have to take on extra workmen sometimes, that’s all,” the priest said. “Even if it is only for short periods.”
    “But what are they doing, for goodness sake?” the general broke out after a pause. “Haven’t they found anything yet?”
    “They have reached the maximum depth,” the priest said. “If there is anything to be found, it is now or never.”
    “I’m afraid we’re off to a bad start.”
    “Perhaps there has been a subsidence of the subsoil,” the priest said, “though the map doesn t show any seismic zone.”
    The expert leaned even further down into the trench. The others moved closer.
    “Here we are! I’ve found him!” the old workman cried in a voice that came up to them sounding cavernous and muffled, for he had shouted the words with his head lowered, into the bottom of the grave.
    “He has found him,” the priest echoed.
    The general uttered a deep sigh. The other workmen emerged from their torpor. The youngest, the one who had been standing so pensively leaning on the handle of his pick, asked one of his companions for a cigarette and lit it.
    The old workman began depositing the bones, shovelful by shovelful, on the edges of the grave. There was nothing very impressive in these remains. Mixed with the crumbling soil they looked like pieces of dead wood. All around there hung the aroma of the freshly turned earth.
    “The disinfectant,” the expert cried. “Bring the disinfectant!”
    Two workmen hurried over to the lorry parked behind the car on the side of the road.
    The expert, who had found a small object of some kind among the bones, held it out to the general, gripped in a pair of pincers.
    “It s an identity medallion,” he said. “Please don t touch it.”
    The general brought his face closer to the object and with difficulty made out the figure of the Virgin Mary. “Our army’s medallion!” he said in a low voice.
    “Do you know why we wear this medallion?” he said to me one day. “So that they’ll be able to identify our remains if were killed.” And there was irony in his smile. “Do you really imagine theyll bother to look for our remains? O.K., so let’s suppose they do search one day. Do you think I get any consolation out of that thought? Theres nothing more hypocritical, if you ask me, than going around looking for bones when the war s over. It’s a favour I can certainly do without. Let them just leave me be where I fall, I say. I shall chuck this rotten medallion of theirs away. “And that’s what he did in the end. One fine day he just threw it away and never wore one again
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    The disinfecting done, the expert took the measurements of each bone in turn, spent a short while making calculations in his notebook, his pen held aslant in his long, thin fingers, then lifted his head and said: “Height five foot eight.”
    “Correct,” the general said, after checking to see that the figure tallied with that on his list.
    “Pack the bones!” the expert told the workmen.
    The general followed the roadmender with his eyes