The Girl Who Played Go

12

New orders have reached us. We have to burn the stores in all the villages so that the terrorists will have no source of supplies.

A village we have ransacked seems as forlorn as a grave. The wind’s howl mingles with the weeping of the peasants as they prostrate themselves before the ocher flames and black smoke.

For three months now the snow-clad forest has cut us off from the outside world. There is more and more violence among my men, who spend their time getting drunk and quarreling. The white, the gray, the reflected light and the endless marching are all slowly driving us mad. The day before yesterday a corporal took all his clothes off and fled. He was found unconscious in a ravine, and now we have to tie him up and pull him along by a rope round his neck. I can hear in his curses and his piercing laughter the echo of many of the ideas spinning round and round in my own head like a refrain.

We have to keep on advancing, through the snow, towards the snow.