The southist cannon immediately fell silent; immediately, 500 lost children57 launched themselves towards it, scattering into a long line to neutralize, as far as possible, the effect of the land-mines that they would encounter en route. Scarcely 200 reached the cannon, but that was enough; the chloroformed artillerists were lying on their munitions; the northists had time to turn the piece around and fire on Papagayo before Phileas Fogg’s troops were able to move forward to save their cannon.
To render the approaches to Papagayo even more difficult to cross and to put the besiegers’ forward batteries out of action, Fridolin created a new and admirable invention, a steam-driven 500-horsepower pneumatic aspirator58 with a range of six kilometers. Constructed at intervals in exposed spots, these aspirators were activated one morning in front of the general staff. The one in the port of Segovia, under the guns of a northist battery, sucked up everything in front of it with frightful violence, and the terrain was stripped bare; trees, cannons, gabions59 and locomotives, torn up, uprooted and overturned, were engulfed in the enormous tube along with 100 northists.
That same day, the Times correspondent almost perished as a victim of his duty as a reporter; at the moment when the aspirator went into action, he had he imprudence to lean over the immense orifice in order to observe the vicissitudes at closer range; the fearful air-current plucked him up like a feather and swallowed him up instantaneously. A terrible scream resounded. Everyone, officers and mechanics alike, thought that he was doomed.
Fortunately, the chief mechanic was able to extract him from the machine five seconds before the arrival of the cannons and locomotives aspirated from a league away. Even so, the accident had terrible consequences for him. A bachelor when he went into the aspirator tube, he emerged married!
This is how it happened: a lady, Miss Barbara Twicklish, the editress of the Women’s Rights newspaper of New York, attached to Sir Phileas Fogg’s general staff, happened to be standing beside the Times correspondent; at the moment when the latter disappeared, carried off by the aspirator, she grabbed hold of his coat-tails and was dragged off with him. For two seconds they whirled together inside the tube with vertiginous rapidity. Fortunately, the rotundity of Miss Twicklish’s figure cushioned the impact considerably. Did the Times correspondent, in the effusiveness of his gratitude, make Miss Twicklish some feverish declaration of love? No one knows. At any rate, before they emerged from the machine, the ever-practical young woman obtained a signature at the bottom of formal promise of marriage, inscribed in her notebook.
The long-range aspirators functioned so successfully that the besiegers were constrained to pull back their lines again. In the early days, Phileas captured an entire railway train—a pleasure excursion bringing inhabitants of Cayman city, the northern capital, to watch the bombardment of the southern capital.
As the operations of the siege dragged on, the German scientist conceived the idea of adapting the cannons on the ramparts into high-pressure music machines to entertain the troops. To the sounds of this powerful orchestra they danced every evening in the covered trenches, and the soldiers were able to forget the fatigue of the siege in the delight of a rapid polka or a languorous waltz, sheltered from the chloroform bombs.
The southist scientist and the northist scientist continued their contest with striking inventions, some more sublime than others. Fridolin, during a night of insomnia, thought he had found another marvel; he launched canisters of smallpox, constructed on the model of ancient machine-gun canisters, which released their noxious variola miasmas after exploding.60 Farandoul simply had his army vaccinated and retaliated with a Bixbyan invention of a continuous jet of bombardment, driven by steam and alimented by projectiles transported by a railway.
In any case, the moment was approaching for the famous plan elaborated by Farandoul and Bixby to be put into operation. For a month, immense preparations had been under way, as secretly as possible, in a little bay north of Papagayo.
Disdaining henceforth the railway war and banal siege warfare, Farandoul wanted to inaugurate submarine warfare! The fish-rich coasts of Nicaragua had furnished first class auxiliaries: fish of the swordfish family, light, swift-moving and easy to tame, which, once provided with a special harness, became excellent mounts for a corps of submarine cavalry.
The old cavalry officers of the northist army, having become captains of armored locomotives, had changed their destiny once again; Farandoul, in spite of their primitive objections, ordered them to organize the submarine cavalry under the supreme direction of General Mandibul.
When everything was ready, a general review of the new corps took place on the road. The northist general staff, the military attachés of various powers and the reporters embarked on an ironclad monitor and put out to sea. Those who were not in on the secret were racking their brains to guess the reason for this marine excursion when, all of a sudden—by courtesy of an order sent via a telephone whose wires plunged into the water behind the vessel—4000 suited divers astride 4000 swordfish emerged abruptly from the waves in four parallel lines, each comprising a squadron of 1000 men. At the head were General Mandibul and his aides-de-camp, the general staff and the music.
To the strains of the national anthem the squadrons performed maneuvers and filed in front of the monitor in admirable order. Each squadron of submariners was composed a company of sappers solely armed with hatchets and four companies of 200 men provided with powerful breech-loading compressed-air carbines.
After different maneuvers and a charge in columns the submarine cavalry, instead of returning to the large barracks-dock where it was stationed, headed out to sea and disappeared beneath the waves.
No one knew Farandoul’s plan of attack. Convinced that submarine operations would begin immediately, however, a French journalist—Monsieur Guy de Beaugency, the correspondent of Le Figaro—resolved to follow them no matter what. In addition to his morning-suit and white cravat, his revolvers and his flannel vests, the prescient journalist, a man well used to all the expedients and accidents of great reportage, had a diving-suit in his luggage, which he immediately put on. While the fourth squadron of submarine cavalry filed past the monitor, a man leapt smartly on to the back of an officer’s mount and disappeared with him under the waves. That man was Guy de Beaugency.
The submarine cavalry arrived that same evening at the coast of Papagayo; six meters beneath the surface, on the very rocks of the fort commanding the pass, the regiment paused to give the men and the swordfish a few hours’ rest.
A few tacticians reproached General Mandibul for having neglected to order an immediate reconnaissance of the port by a platoon of divers. The reproach was merited; without that negligence, Papagayo might perhaps have been taken without a shot being fired. General Mandibul, in a pamphlet published in the United States a year later, replied to that criticism by saying that, at the time, he was afraid of advertising his presence before the moment of the attack and thus losing the benefit of a nocturnal surprise.
The brave general did not know that, for their part, Phileas and his scientists had thought of the possibility of an attack by sea, and that, in order to thwart any such attempt, they too had organized a corps of submarine cavalry charged with keeping watch on the depths of the bay. Perhaps the idea had been suggested to them by a northist turncoat; at any rate, the southist submariners were on watch.
At midnight, the hour fixed by his instructions, Mandibul telephoned his orders. The regiment moved off, sappers at the head. Each man, on departure, had fixed a little red headlight on his mount, with a reflector that gave it a range of a dozen meters in advance.
They passed the forts bordering the entrance and arrived without incident in the harbor proper. A southist guard-post was distinctly perceived, poised on the embrasures of an advance fortification. The sound of swimmers operating at a depth of only five or six meters seemed likely to reach them. Mandibul thought briefly about taking the post; nevertheless, he passed it by without giving the order. Thi
s, it was realized later, was a big mistake.
As they entered the port the terrible howls of a steam-driven alarm siren transformed the profound silence of the bay into an infernal racket. The obscurity of the night disappeared; 20 jets of electric light pierced the thickness of the waves with their beams. Hundreds of submarine mines exploded. At the same time, Mandibul’s sappers collided with an immense net extended across the channel leading into the port.
The attack having been discovered, it was necessary to break through all the obstacles. They hurled themselves upon the net. Suddenly, Le Figaro’s reporter set off at top speed on the officer’s mount, the latter having been blown away by a mine. He told Mandibul that a second net had just been raised alongside the southist post they had previously observed, blocking the exit from the port. Only two squadrons had got into the channel, and were now imprisoned between the two nets, which were now being drawn together, dragging with them everything they encountered.
Mandibul telephoned an order to retreat, and the submariners, swiftly turning back, brought all their efforts to bear on the second net. Assembled in a confused mass by the continuous approach of the two drag-nets, the submariners had difficulty moving; from one moment to the next the mêlée became more compact, and the time was fast approaching when the two squadrons, gathered into a single heap, would be entangled in the meshes.
Finally, a hole was made in the fatal net by the sapper’s hatchet-blows; they enlarged it furiously, and through that hole escaped a torrent of riders deprived of mounts and mounts without riders. They were just in time; the nets, drawn together by powerful machines, were lifted up with their prey—200 or 300 divers, mingled with a few uprooted blocks of stone.
The pass was scarcely open again when 2000 southist submariners, commanded by Phileas in person, raced after the retreating northists. The collision was brutal. Mandibul’s two intact squadrons had moved into the front rank and gave the enemy horde a furious reception.
An epic and grandiose battle was joined in front of the southist forts; begun with rifle-shots, the fight soon took on the character of a hand-to-hand mêlée in which sabers alone held sway. The electric light, like a submarine fire, illuminated the combatants; the southists recognized one another by their blue lights while the northists, as we have said, wore red ones.
Little by little, the northist squadrons were driven back by the efforts of the southist submariners. Submarine batteries, opening a terrible fire on their flanks, carried away entire lines, while a squadron of southist submarine lancers cut into the left flank of the North’s soldiers with a forceful charge.
General Mandibul saved the main body of his army by means of a splendid maneuver. The debris of his two squadrons was reformed in the rear of the battle between the rocks of the pass and the transatlantic cable. Having got their breath back, they suddenly fell upon the southist submariners from that strong position with a frightful fury, and resumed the battle.
By virtue a stroke of genius, Mandibul had telephoned new instructions to his sappers; the latter skillfully directed all their blows at the air-tanks of the southist divers. This tactic was completely successful; hundreds of southists, put out of action, were soon abandoning the struggle and returning to the surface to breathe.
Phileas accomplished prodigies of valor in vain. The transatlantic cable was taken and retaken six times over. Le Figaro’s reporter, clinging to the cable, victoriously resisted all their charges; having attached a little pocket apparatus to the cable, he set about telegraphing rapid notes to his paper describing all the phases of the battle.
In the end, the cable remained in the possession of the northists. The latter, recovering the ground they had lost, came back into the harbor after the southist squadrons.
Phileas, in desperation, was momentarily tempted to hang himself with the transatlantic cable, but Le Figaro’s reporter, dreading that his communications might be interrupted, precipitated himself upon him, revolver in hand, and prevented him from putting his fatal project into execution. Phileas beat a retreat to the port; the debris of his squadrons reformed briefly at the place where the main sewer emptied out into the huge basin, and defended the entrance energetically; the northist submariners were still advancing, and a fierce battle soon developed in the dark and filthy waves of the southists’ last refuge.
It was in that supreme peril that the heavens came to their aid. A violent storm had been raging for hours, accompanied by a veritable deluge of rain; the city’s gutters were pouring furious torrents into the drains, and the main sewer was subject to a sudden surge which, falling upon the combatants, swept them abruptly out into the basin. Only Phileas, with a handful men, was able to set foot in an upward-sloping tunnel and get back into the town, where his first concern was to take all possible measures to barricade the main sewer.
The northists had rallied at the outlet of the sewer to let the torrent pass. Unfortunately, when it had all run through, Mandibul found the southist troops strongly barricaded within the central sewer, and numerous batteries established in all its subsidiary tunnels. Given the impossibility of forcing these positions with weary submariners, he contented himself with hastily fortifying the conquered section and sending a few couriers to Farandoul to ask for the immediate dispatch of the second and third submarine brigades, commanded by Generals Tournesol and Escoubico.
The couriers did not have far to go. Farandoul, at the head of the Tournesol and Escoubico brigades, arrived at the entrance of the pass at the same time as two large monitors attacked the forts with chloroform bombs. Informed of Mandibul’s situation, he telephoned an order to him to maintain his position.
Dawn had broken; while the submariners, descending from their mounts, advanced step by step through the obstacles strewn in their path, taking the southists’ submarine batteries one by one, the two monitors, directed by Horatius Bixby, maneuvered so as to extinguish the fire from the forts without approaching close enough to be hit by the 300-kilogram shells launched by their giant cannons.
The chloroform bombs having already been employed during this operation, two forts had fallen silent, their artillerists put to sleep for 48 hours beside their pieces.
In Papagayo, people gave way to despair. The fall of the city was all too certain, and the civilian population followed the final phases of the battle in anguish. The worthy Fridolin Rosengarten held council with Phileas and the remaining generals. Supreme resolutions were made. As the enemy made further progress, the decimated regiments retreated.
The courtyards of the barracks and armories filled with soldiers to whom the commissariat distributed provisions of food for a few days. Finally, mysterious preparations were made in the main arsenal, which an anxious population surrounded without daring to approach.
About noon, when six more forts in the pass had been put out of action by the chloroform bombs and Mandibul was already attacking the batteries in the main sewer, Phileas and Fridolin Rosengarten arrived at the arsenal on horseback with the last troops. The crowd awaited the completion of the preparations breathlessly and uncomprehendingly.
Suddenly, an immense shout went up. Several balloons, still retained by cables, had just appeared above the walls of the arsenal. They were few in number at first, but others, suddenly rising up, gradually swelled their numbers. These balloons, operating with the regularity of a military maneuver, soon formed into three groups, three distinct flotillas. To avoid an imminent surrender, the southist army was escaping by air!
Fridolin Rosengarten had foreseen every possibility. In order to escape a possible disaster he had, with the collaboration of other scientists on the committee, long prepared a brilliant means of escape. It was a veritable revolution in the art of aerial navigation that Fridolin had brought about—a revolution whose consequences for the world’s future were incalculable!
Without wishing to attempt a description far beyond our competence, we can say that the Rosengarten balloons had triumphantly solved the problem of the application of ste
am power to aerial navigation. A little engine of moderate power, placed at the summit of the balloon, drew it in the desired direction, as effectively against the wind as in the direction of atmospheric currents.
That was not all. These balloons, constructed for war, were armored. Steel cladding covered each gutta-percha sphere like a gigantic inverted saucepan. Each exceedingly large gondola was also strongly armored, and the muzzles of several cannons projected from its embrasures, ready to give voice in the clouds.
The first group of these balloons, quite different from the others—bulkier and more heavily-armored, if that were possible—was composed of 25 artillery balloons known as destroyers, armed with heavy ordnance and mortars. The balloons of the second group, lighter and more numerous, were still combat balloons, but the third group seemed to be formed of transport balloons, immense airships, each charged with 200 men, without cannons.
When all the balloons had taken their places in the flotilla, Rosengarten—who was racing back and forth through the lines in a fast balloon-launch—sent up the signal to lift off. Two balloon-launches hastily gathered up the last soldiers busy with ground-operations. It was finished!
To put an end to the murmurs of the city-dwellers, however, the worthy Fridolin Rosengarten took one final measure; before rejoining the bulk of the fleet, he made one more use of the electric cable attaching the launch to the arsenal, and blew up the city behind him.
How can one describe the rage of Farandoul and the northists when they saw Phileas Fogg and the remnants of his army escape in that unexpected manner? Farandoul quickly telegraphed his bombardiers to try firing a few asphyxiating shells, but the explosion of the city took that last chance away.
The Adventures of Saturnin Farandoul Page 24