“This book makes claims to the strictest historical truth, but not to historical completeness. It is not a scientific composition. Moreover, it is written by a person who was fortunate enough to breathe in the tragic air of the front, dismissing with disdain every profane imagination, every indiscreet mixing of the fictional.

The campaign of 1940-41 is rich enough in content to require no supplementary staging. However, this campaign, which everyone calls 'the Epic', has this paradox: it is an unknown epic; I mean unknown in its warm aspects, in its human essence.

A psychological and historical phenomenon that was unexpected, a creation of a unique moment, it was overshadowed by subsequent events, the overflow of experiences: the Occupation, the Resistance, the December Movement, the early post-war years, the awakening of a new world, the world of the nuclear age, came to cover the moment of Albania.

This chapter of Greek history, one of the most important, was closed and placed in the archive before it was memorialized. Not that there are no stories of the Greco-Italian War: there are, and they are remarkable. But what is missing is a book without pretensions, accessible to the average reader, the untrained in military and diplomatic affairs, and that reads comfortably.

I do not know if I have managed to provide it. I must say that I wanted to act before the generation of fighters departs from life and thus irretrievably loses the essence of the people who made History. Because History is always made up of two elements, which time separates: a series of events and a scent of an era. The first, the events, can be restored even after centuries. The second cannot; it is lost, carried away with the moment. Even those who felt it—as much as anyone feels the present—even they lose the sense of it when the winds of time take it away.”