We find ourselves in an imaginary Empire. It might possibly be the Victorian, but it might also be one that fits precisely into our own time – all the symptoms seem clearly to indicate it. A people’s uprising in a province has just been put down by the Army in bloodiest fashion. The General is dictating a dispatch on the victory to the Emperor, matter-of-factly and professionally. Soldiers in the canteen are getting drunk. A Deserter is led before the General. The man is not given a chance to speak and is expeditiously condemned to death. Here, too, the General is in no way brutal but is simply clear-cut, impersonal, matter-of-fact and without a show of understanding for human weakness or for human beings. In the City Hall, a reception is given for the General and his comrades, with laurel wreaths, festive speeches and toasts to the Emperor. Simultaneously, we see the Deserter in the guardroom as he tells the detachment in charge of his execution, awaiting the dawn with him, about his childhood and about the panic that drove him to flee the battlefield and attempt to return home. Meanwhile, the General has left the celebrations. On returning to his tent, he finds a doctor there who tells him in circumstantial fashion that he is suffering from an incurable illness that will lead to total blindness. There is no medicine to cure the illness. It is the result of an earlier wound and must be borne stoically, tolerated as an inescapable fate. The General despairs but controls himself and continues to work. An orgy of Officers and prostitutes runs rampant in City Hall.

The General cannot work and departs for the battlefield to view the suffering. He meets a Young Woman and an Old Woman who are searching the dead for objects and for the Young Woman’s husband; she does not realize that he is the Deserter.

Meanwhile, the barracks’ square is decorated, the new Governor arrives, the regimental colors are paraded, and the victors are all together for the celebrations. The General is preoccupied – absentminded – as if paralyzed by what he has just seen and experienced on the battlefield. The memory of the suffering people gives him no peace of mind, and he returns to the battlefield. The Governor and officers follow him, and he is arrested when he tries to rescue the Young Woman, who, on orders issued earlier by the General himself, is to be shot as a corpse-plunderer. Moments later, on the banks of the river, the group of officers with the handcuffed General come upon the Old Woman, who has tried to escape and save herself and her grandchild. She too meets her death as she tries to escape by way of the river’s turbulent waters. At the command of the officers, the soldiers empty their guns while shooting her down. The General, helpless, has to watch the proceedings. He curses the Governor. His voice has now become the voice of protest. Very soon, his name is being written on the walls of houses as a symbol of freedom.

Even this mild show of rebellion is nevertheless sufficient to spread some hope among the people. The General is silenced – he is locked in an insane asylum. One of his previous subordinates (his name is Soldier 2) manages to gain entrance into the asylum. He finds the General and describes to him what is going on in the world outside: arrests, states of emergency, torture and the disappearance of people without a trace. The air is full of mistrust and fear; unemployment and hunger are rife. What will happen? What can one do? The Soldier begs the General for advice and help, but the latter gives an evasive answer, as if incarceration has made him lose touch with reality. He seems to have hallucinations; he seems, in fact, to have gone crazy. With empty hands, Soldier 2 leaves him.

There follows a visit of the Governor to the insane asylum. The Emperor has sent him to ask the General to resume his military service. The General’s prestige would help relieve the crises of the Empire. The situation looks very bad; the Empire is crumbling on all sides, and even the most brutal suppression is not enough to hold back the coming revolution. The General scornfully and indignantly turns down the Emperor’s request, and we now see that the General is far from being insane. But he has no concept, no sense of reality, no moral motivation within himself that would bring him to the point of taking action or dealing with the situation. In spite of his insight into the actual conditions which he had achieved, in reality, only through the sudden appearance of his own vulnerability – it is nevertheless impossible for him to make a decision. His attitude is one of evasive delaying, of hesitating ambiguity. He no longer belongs in the category of the powerful; nor does he wish to belong. But he knows no way to join the side of the strugglers and the suppressed; nor does he seek one. He persists in the contemplation of his own suffering; he begins to be something of a hypochondriac; he believes that inaction will bring about the least harm to himself and others.

His shifting attitudes and his inability to help the rebels also mean that the revolutionaries can achieve autonomy only by learning to help themselves. The General has become an anachronism. Even his recent insights cannot lead to action when he learns that Soldier 2, after his visit to the General, shot the Governor, and thereafter, the Soldier and his family were killed. The General is overcome by a hysterical outburst of despair and again feels himself to blame. Even his policy of inaction has not been able to prevent the flow of blood and, in fact, brought about the bloodshed. He is one who brings death. He now wishes that he would really become insane or blind or that he would die. He tries to blind himself, but the asylum orderlies overpower him, put him in a straitjacket and chain him to the stone block.

Meanwhile, the Emperor, a relaxed young gentleman surrounded by beautiful young girls, not unlike the type of an Oxford-educated Indian prince, has learned of the murder of one of his Governors. It is presumed that the subversive General imprisoned in the insane asylum is behind the murder, for it is known that the murderer visited him there. The young monarch relates a legend about an old emperor who, at the end of his life, having accomplished 999 deeds, retired to become a hermit, and his thousandth deed was to repair the broken staff of Buddha. Next day, the Emperor died.

The young, precocious Emperor identifies with the legendary emperor and decides that his thousandth deed, his last, should be to render the General harmless. Two hired thugs arrive at the asylum and carry out the Emperor’s command; they blind the General. Thus was the prediction of the doctor fulfilled, though in a way not expected, and it becomes clear that the illness and blinding of the General are metaphors and not only steps in the dramatic development. In the very moment of the blinding of the General, the scene changes, in transcendental fashion, and the victims of the General appear. It is as if their lives had never ended: the Deserter comes home and embraces his wife, his little son and the Old Woman; Soldier 2 and his family are reunited. They appear to the General as in a vision. He wants to speak to them, but no one notices him. It is as if he were no longer there. And yet, the level of reality is not abandoned; to the contrary, it is emphasized through the presence of the insane inmates, who have been afraid of the disfigured General and have felt threatened by him. They push him from the stone block to which he is still chained, suffocate him under broad, white sheets and cry that they are drowning him in the river. The formerly suppressed persons have neither seen nor heard any of this; they continue singing their song to the child. It is a song of hope and of a better future. Their singing, in which more and more voices of more and more liberated people join, ends with the words:
We stand by the river.
If there is no bridge we will wade.
If the water is deep we will swim.
If it is too fast we will build boats.
We will stand on the other side.
We have learned to march so well that we cannot drown.