f slow-burning candles, and there were also plenty of extra candles in the squad depot. Kerosene lamps and big candles, flames in the night air, created a romantic mood and who knows what someone might have thought when seeing so many flames flickering in the dark barracks. More eyes might have been watching than we knew. Hence the difference between us and “them”: they always knew more about us than we about them, especially when it came to numbers. Whatever the case, the next morning we found a dead raven. One of its legs had been crushed, its wings snapped, its beak plucked out. The soldiers pressed around it, shouted and cursed. They were more unsettled by the dead bird than by the latrine sentry murder. “Whoever they are, they’re not human,” said one soldier, “they’re monsters and they deserve to die!” “Now!” shouted other soldiers and gathered around the commander when he came over to see what was up. They pointed to the raven, but apparently the commander was not as alarmed; he told them to pull themselves together. “Our men are out in the forest,” said the commander, “and until they return, no one moves, understand?” The soldiers mumbled something conciliatory and returned to their duties. The sun beat down mercilessly, most unusual for the time of year, and some of the soldiers quickly tanned to a bronze, but there were others whose backs, arms, and shoulders, and, I should add, faces became a mass of blisters. “We won’t be sleeping tonight,” thought the commander, but then the cry went up: “Here they are, they’re coming!” When the commander ran over to the checkpoint there they were: the squads had apparently each lost a man. In each, the two surviving soldiers were carrying a third. They toiled up the hillside and we, while they were still far away, could hear their labored breathing and choked coughs. Each squad reached the barrier at almost exactly the same moment, and someone remarked that somehow, somewhere in the forest, each must have taken a wrong turn: each returned to the same side of the checkpoint from which they’d left. But when the men were told, they insisted doggedly that they could not remember one path intersecting another nor that they were ever in doubt about which way to go. “The forest was hushed,” said one of the soldiers, “and we took care to honor the quiet. Had we run into the other squad, our conversation would have sent out shockwaves like a bomb blast.” This may explain why both soldiers were killed by arrows, an old-fashioned yet deadly weapon, the fletching still protruding from their chests. The commander fumed and swore up a storm, using curses even the worst drunks and bastards would have been proud of, though, obviously, nobody could blame him. Everything might have been different had we known why we were there, what we were protecting, from whom. What could possibly have been the point of a checkpoint on a road that no one ever traveled, which may have run in a circle? Or was its sole goal an illusion of passage, a chimera of progress, a launching pad for new victories, yet a trap, bait for the gullible, a carbon monoxide van to swallow souls, inside which people died from a surfeit—not a shortage—of air. Or, as one soldier put it, everything is so unreal precisely so that we won’t figure out that “our side” was actually attacking us, unaware, perhaps, that we’re “theirs.” Who is “our side” in this war, anyway, where we’re making this guest appearance, where even we have no idea what we’re up to? Wouldn’t it make more sense for us to march home and put this all behind us? “No, no, and no,” scowled the commander. “There will be no homeward march. And besides,” he asked, “where would we march to, and how—does anyone know? The telephone lines are down, the radios dead, we have no carrier pigeons to take our messages out, and even if someone were to set out for the headquarters, which road should they take to get there? Is there such a road?” The commander summoned the clerk and issued his order for the next day: we were to spend the whole day searching for a solution to our outlandish predicament. “We owe this to those who’ve died,” announced the commander during our modest repast: a big roll and a small tin of sardines for each of us. During dinner something else happened, a story flew from ear to ear that men from one of the squads, only two of them, had caught sight of village dwellings in the distance through a haze across a clearing. One of them even swore he heard cows mooing and dogs barking. It was still early, wisps of fog swirled among the trees and over the meadows, but from the chimneys of the houses rose puffs of smoke, the household was up and about, probably at breakfast, and they’d soon be going out to tend to their morning duties. The soldiers, the two, even saw a front door slowly open, but then the order came to move on and off they went. They quickly told the squad leader, and he heard them out but wouldn’t go back. That, he said, as the two soldiers reported, would give the advantage to whoever was following them, and there definitely were people, sad to say, who were out to ambush them without mercy. The commander heard the rumors and called the two men over. He asked the corporal who’d escorted them to step away because he didn’t want any part of their conversation to leak out. He questioned the soldiers closely about the houses and farmyards they’d seen, and he even sketched a house in a few quick strokes to see if it resembled what they’d seen, despite or because of the fog, which had enticed them with its swirls. Once the soldiers had told him what they knew, the commander, as they later said, took from a drawer a map that had been folded and refolded many times, smoothed it out, placed a compass on the table, and gauged something for a time with the compass and a protractor. Of course, he might be mistaken, but if we gave him the benefit of the doubt, he said, then where those two soldiers said they’d seen houses and outbuildings, there was nothing, or, and now this really was strange, said the commander, there once had been houses like the ones they described, but—here he stopped and stared away into the distance—the whole area had been flooded a little farther north to make a reservoir for a hydroelectric dam that was never, said the commander, put into operation. Are you sure, he asked, now standing in front of the entire company, that the houses you saw weren’t under water? But the soldiers were quick to dismiss this idea, and that what they’d seen might have been a mirage. Both laughed aloud as if they’d spent a whole evening practicing this in tandem. Someone said, “Let Mladen have a look,” and they all hastened to concur. Mladen knew how to survive in the forest, so he’d know where to look and what to see. A spat later flared up about whether he should go alone or with an escort, but the commander interrupted this as it ended—or almost ended—saying we were out of time. A person alone is always more efficient than two or three. “In the old days,” said the commander, “many an expedition floundered because the leader would have to keep track of an oversized crew: cooks, dog handlers, natives, masseuses.” Then he suggested we ask Mladen whether he needed an escort. As far as he was concerned, said Mladen, an assistant might be helpful, but he was better off on his own. He’d be speedier and more effective, with no worries about what to do if his assistant were hit or, god forbid, killed, or, worse yet, captured and interned. “Well then,” said the commander, “get ready and off you go. The sooner we know the truth about the houses and village, the sooner we can wrap this up.” But a few soldiers noticed discrepancies between what the commander said before and his sudden tale of a power plant, and all this while waving the mysterious map. Where had it all come from is what the soldiers and others wanted to know. If he was commander, he couldn’t be oblivious one minute, and then all talk the next as if he were a history expert. Then they all clammed up because Mladen appeared. Though nightfall was still hours away, he’d smeared his face with black paint; nothing gives a person away, he said, like moonlight shining on your face. Several soldiers came over to plead with him to take them along. Mladen urged them to go to the commander but they refused. One said he’d go with Mladen no matter what. “They’ll shoot you between the eyes,” said Mladen, pointing at the soldier’s forehead and pulling an imaginary trigger. “I am, too, going,” said the soldier, who raced off to pack, and no one ever saw him again. His disappearance was only noticed when Mladen came back to the checkpoint and asked what had happened to that pushy soldier who’d wanted to go with him no matter what. He’d thought of the man, said Mladen, when he sank into quicksand and tried to squirm free without losing his boots and weapons. He’d have given anything just then to have the young man along so he could reach out with a branch, but since the soldier wasn’t there, Mladen struggled on his own. Luckily, he was mired in quicksand shallows, or whatever they’re called, and bit by bit, inch by inch, he wriggled out onto solid, grassy turf. He lifted first one foot and then the other so we could see the mud caked to his boots. It took him only one night to reach the spot the two soldiers described, but he stayed there till daybreak to corroborate their story. Aha, said the commander, what did he see? He saw the house, like the soldiers said, but no smoke puffing from the chimney and the front door was not even open a crack. A window was open and curtains swayed in gusts of wind. He waited, said Mladen, till the sun climbed high in the sky but nobody appeared, not a soul stepped out of the house, not a farm animal left the barn; just when he thought it was time to return, he noticed a duck followed by an orderly trail of ducklings. The duck waddled over to the front door and Mladen could see it lift its beak; it was probably summoning someone, the person who, he assumed, regularly came out to feed them. “But the water?” asked the commander. “The water and the lake?” “No water, no lake,” said Mladen. “Just carnage.” The duck was quacking to someone and that persuaded him to venture out to see. No road led there, or he hadn’t yet found it, so Mladen scrambled down a steep slope from the meadow, stepped across a gulch over a little brook, probably a seething torrent in the spring and summer rains, spilling over its narrow streambed. Hence the quicksand into which he’d so haplessly plunged. That’s when he mentioned the soldier who’d wanted to tag along and only then did we realize the soldier was missing. The commander wrung his hands and sobbed with the breathy gasps of a woman, and then he pulled himself together and said he’d organize a rescue team and comb the terrain. “Absolutely not,” said Mladen. “too late now, anyway. If he’s alive, he’s too far off to hear us, and if he’s dead, all we can do is raise him a monument.” “Forget it,” called one of the soldiers. “Tell us what happened at the house!” First he came across a dog that had been gutted, Mladen told us, then he saw a cat with its spine broken, and in the barn he found two dead cows and a crazed horse. If animals were treated this way, wondered Mladen, what happened to the people? He thought it was time to go back, his assignment was only to see whether the houses did, in fact, exist, and not to find out what happened to the people who’d been living there. Then he heard moaning and forgot everything else. He hopped over a twisted fence, slowly approached the side of a building, and looked into the backyard. There he saw a ghastly scene: on a large wooden table lay two bodies: an older man, already dead, and an older woman, still alive and groaning in pain. Their bellies were slashed from side to side, partly disemboweled, their intestines dangling off the table. Mladen turned, he said, and when he went into the house he found the rest of the family: two young men, a woman, and a little girl. They had all, apparently, been raped and strangled or shot dead with a bullet to the head. Nothing in the house was touched, as if the marauders had taken care to be tidy. Judging by the few flies and no stench, Mladen figured the massacre must have happened the night before, and this made him especially cautious; he gave up looking further at other houses. And besides, he said, he didn’t know whose side the victims were on, and who the murderers were fighting for. He’d called them murderers, he said, because if he were to call the people who’d perpetrated the atrocities by any other name, or referred to them as soldiers, he’d be insulting all those who’d respected treaties and conventions in wars. And nothing he’d seen hinted at who the perpetrators might be? asked the commander. The soldiers howled, saying they didn’t even know whom they were up against. Maybe, said the soldiers, they were a buffer force sent to a conflict near their country’s border, though maybe, said others, this is actually a civil war and they, as an official armed force, were dispassionately helping to subdue the conflicts. The commander stood, waited for the soldiers to quiet down, and then said he wished he could explain things to them, but he, too, was in the dark. “In the old days,” he said, “this happened often; the kingdoms were vast and heralds had to travel for days to bring news to distant provinces of the end of a war. In the Second World War, on the little islands scattered across the Pacific, there were Japanese fighters who thought the war was still on for decades, and they’d shoot at every American who came near. Our situation is not as bad as all that,” said the commander, “though our ignorance is appalling.” But what could he do, he asked, when he was woken that night, as we were? He’d barely had time to pull on his uniform and rush downstairs to the jeep waiting for him out front. At the assembly point they’d said everything would be explained over the radio; the trucks were ready and required the cover of darkness. Well, sure, recalled the commander, he’d been handed an envelope with a map, the rosters of fighters, and lists of issued weapons and equipment. The lists were full of errors, said the commander, so he’d already made his own list of the things missing from the lists. The map was no good or out of date as we could see from Mladen’s report and the stories of the soldiers who’d seen the house, where, according to the commander’s map, there was supposed to be a reservoir. The commander looked like someone always on the verge of tears, but though we found this disturbing we didn’t know how to help. Is the forest enchanted? mused someone. Is what we think to be happening nothing but an illusion? Who believes in magic? asked others, though no one could gainsay the possibility that hallucinogens had been used, but narcotics can’t replace a magic wand, this we knew. Ever since our arrival, said the commander, he’d been doing nothing but juggling lists and making new ones. “It’s all rife with errors,” said the commander. “Not just the lists, the world. Wherever we go we’ll find errors, most of all when they insist there aren’t any.” What he’d like, said the commander, was that there be no errors in the new roster he started yesterday, and he’d like that roster to stay brief, he sincerely hoped it would though he knew that no one, except just maybe He who was on high—here he stopped and raised his eyes to the heavens, and all of us looked upward after him—knows in advance just how long that roster will be. All of us, of course, understood what roster he had in mind, just as we all knew it held, so far, four names: the sentry killed in the latrine, the two men shot by arrows while patrolling the forest, and, finally, the soldier who set out on his own after Mladen. A hush. We were prepared to honor the victims of a war that, like every war, is pointless, but each of us was also hoping the next name wouldn’t be his own. We said nothing and darted dirty looks at one another as if we were sworn enemies, but what else can you think of someone who hopes to see you dead? “I don’t want to die,” blurted one of us and we all burst out laughing, not that we were laughing at death, but with relief at the thought that all of us felt the same way. No one wanted to die. Even for such a noble cause as defending the homeland. What co