Twenty years after the end of the Second World War an Italian general is despatched to Albania to recover his countrys dead. Once there he meets a German general who is engaged upon an identical mission & their conversations brings out into the open the extent of their horror & guilt newly exacerbated by their present task. As they descend from the callous trivialities of their gruesome business past & present to suffering self-disgust the author gives us glimpses of the lives of the people whose graves they are unearthing.