The General of the Dead Army Read Online Free PDF Page B

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,