The Petitpaon Era

by Henri Austruy

  “That would evidently be one means,” Petitpaon granted, “but its realization seems to me to be very complicated. My presidential sagacity has found something else: cartridges and shells will be absolutely identical to those in use today, and the cost will be the same; it will merely be necessary to enjoin pyrotechnical artificers to place the projectiles behinds the explosive material instead of in front of it. Thus, one will continue to enjoy the odor of powder and the noise of the detonations will remain essentially similar.”

  “Artillerymen can continue to go deaf?” asked Charles Miraudel.

  “If they so please!” concluded the wily Petitpaon, with a smile. “It’s now a matter of passing on to the military personnel. It’s essential that the most senior general and he humblest private soldier are absolutely equal before the rifles, as they are before death. After each engagement, on the sight of the expenditure on either side of men and munitions, arbiters will establish the outcome of the day and will calculate, in accordance with ready-reckoners approved by all the countries in the world, the number of dead and wounded.”

  “So there will still be some?” queried Pierre Phosphène.

  “More than ever,” Petitpaon replied. “But the physicians will have no need to finish off the wounded, and the dead will continue to live in perfect tranquility.”

  “I no longer understand,” confessed General Croppeton and Admiral Théhyx, simultaneously.

  “It doesn’t matter—you’ll surely understand soon. A capital problem arises here; it’s a matter, in fact, of knowing to whom we should address ourselves in order to individualize the dead and the wounded with all the guarantees of impartiality that such a delicate operation requires.”

  “One could appoint a committee,” ventured Charles Miraudel.

  “I thought of that,” Petitpaon went on, “but all men have their weaknesses, and it would be highly probable that bias, deriving from political issues or personal ones, would intervene in the question of life or death with regard to a greater or lesser number of citizens enjoying the same rights and subject to similar duties. I deem that it is necessary, above all, to avoid having the lists of dead and wounded drawn up by human hands.”

  “If, in his infinite bounty, God would...” Abbé Mortol put in.

  “Oh, you can rest easy—he wouldn’t!” Pierre Phosphène interjected, brutally.

  “What do you know about it?” replied the man of God.

  “Now, now! Don’t start arguing about God in a debate that doesn’t concern him, and in which I, Bernard Petitpaon, have anticipated everything. Is it not to chance, that motor as powerful as it is marvelous, that we ought to address ourselves? Lots will be drawn. Slips will be put into a secret urn bearing the serial numbers of all the officers, superior or subaltern, as well as all the sergeants, corporals and private soldiers of the armies at odds; after the battle, and the verdict of the arbiters, the urn will be brought to the front of the troops; the youngest canteen-waitress in the service of either camp will plunge her innocent hand into the urn...”

  “It’s desirable that the waitress should be a virgin,” observed Abbé Mortol, prudishly.

  “If you wish!” Petitpaon granted. “So, a virgin waitress plunges her hand into the urn; the emerging numbers first designate the dead, then the wounded!”

  “It’s absolutely the same as ancient warfare!” the General and the Admiral proclaimed, in unison.

  “The bullets and cannonballs won’t choose,” Croppeton continued.

  “It’s a matter of chance!” Théhyx concluded. “Once, a shell carried away my helmet and a lock of hair, and without the luck of…a hanged man, I’d have been killed!”

  That indirect allusion to the compensation that fortune had reserved for the Admiral—whose conjugal misfortunes were notorious—made the assembled legislators smile.

  “What will become of the dead and wounded?” asked the steward of the Treasury, Thunasol.

  “For the dead, it’s quite simple,” Petitpaon explained. “They’re erased from the registers of civil status. They’ll no longer exist, and if people talk about them, it will only be in the past tense. For the wounded, it’s more complicated, for they’ll continue to have the right to take part in the social body to a greater or lesser degree, according to the seriousness of their supposed wounds. Thus, a one-armed man...”

  “Will no longer be able to make use of the arm he lacks. That’s obvious!” put in Croppeton.

  “And quite natural,” added Admiral Théhyx.

  “Will prisoners be taken?” asked General Croppeton.

  “Why? There’s absolutely no need. As ardent pioneers of progress, everything that has no intrinsic purpose ought to receive no mercy from us!” said Petitpaon. “But I can’t emphasize too strongly that our new modus belli should be considered purely from a public and official angle. The private lives of the dead and wounded, like those of the living, should not be afflicted in any way by the slightest inquisitorial or vexatious imposition.

  “Long live liberty!” proclaimed Pierre Phosphène.

  “You said it!” sanctioned the President. “We cannot repeat that phrase too frequently, synthetic as it is of all the individual aspirations summoned to melt, for the good of all, into the bosom of common constraint.”

  Unanimous applause saluted that brief and significant proclamation. Bernard Petitpaon returned the salute by applauding himself with the ardor of a Roman of the great epoch.

  “My dear Verbuis, in your capacity as Minister of Foreign Affairs, it will be up to you to open fire for the realization of this project by skillfully explaining the fundamental points—on which we’re all agreed—to the representatives of the Powers...”

  “I request the floor!” interjected Abbé Mortol, lowering his eyes.

  “You have it! You have it, my dear Abbé,” granted Petitpaon, promptly.

  “The reason with which the Lord had deigned to endow his humble creature causes me to feel the immense weight of the change that will be produced in bodies and souls by the application of purely figurative war. It is for me an unavoidable case of conscience to consult, before forming an opinion on the subject, His Eminence Cardinal Pecari, of whom I am temporarily, as Minister of Religion, the temporal superior, but who nevertheless remains, in his capacity as Archbishop of Paris, my spiritual superior...”

  “Act to the advantage of the salvation of your soul!” approved President Petitpaon, rising from his armchair to signify the end of the session.

  II

  Three months after that memorable discussion, the negotiations undertaken by the Minister of Foreign Affairs were completely concluded.

  Throughout the world, not one nation had been found to reject Bernard Petitpaon’s plan. The most warlike countries were those that exhibited the greatest enthusiasm, and the only people to put up opposition were a few celebrated and powerful representatives of religions, who all protested that war, such as it had been practiced since the earliest ages of humanity, was divine in essence and that it would be sacrilegious to make any significant modification to it.

  All peoples were called upon to subscribe to the contract that bound them in honor to one another. The signature of autocrats was sufficient to engage peoples curbed under their yoke, while a vote of their respective Chambers was necessary for Republics and empires or monarchies provided with constitutions.

  In France, President Petitpaon’s idea had been acclaimed by an enormous majority, but it would have been an insult to parliament not to open the question to passionate debate. In the bosom of the Chambre des Députés, among the adversaries of the plan, some were easy to win over; a manufacturer of surgical instruments declared himself satisfied by the addition of lancets, scalpels, saws, forceps and other operative adjuncts to the nomenclature of accessories of war of variable but assured consumption; an intractable merchant of mourning dress was returned to the finer sentiments on a formal promise of a sumptuary regulation obliging the relatives of the pseudo-defunct to dres
s in black for a lapse of time at least equal to that presently customary.

  The question of inheritance raised innumerable difficulties, as can be imagined. On behalf of the Government, Minister of Finance Thunasol made a promise to the families of the victims of “Petitpaon warfare,” as the modus vivendi to be adopted was already being called, to triple their income, not in the ordinary form of cash but the much more democratic and no less sure form of public employment, tobacconist’s shops or collecting agencies, according to the sex and aptitudes of the interested parties. The dead and the wounded, of course, remained the responsibility of the families that the State was deeming it a duty and a glory to indemnify.

  Jurisconsultants presented a few observations on possible filiations. Many children, in fact, would be born of fathers figuring in the registers of civil status in the columns of the deceased. A feminist député argued the blatant injustice there would be in dishonoring widows under the fallacious pretext that they had become mothers of children of husbands presumed dead by the law, but who nevertheless remained capable of successfully delivering themselves to reproduction.

  The Minister of the Interior, Charles Miraudel, explained that a well-organized society, having the family for a substratum, had to do everything possible to ensure the legitimacy of the descendancy of citizens, without class distinction. In the midst of applause he declared that birth certificates would bear, along with the names of the child and the mother, that of the father, followed by the note: “Presently dead for the fatherland.”

  Several other specific and particular points were elucidated to the full satisfaction of those raising them. It was only with Abbé Mortol and Louis Méripal that the debate rose to the level of general considerations and the examination of principles qualified as eternal by the orators, doubtless because of their role in nourishing interminable discussions.

  Abbé Mortol, ceding to the pious injunctions of Cardinal Pecari, had resigned in order to avoid associating himself with the act of relative pacification, estimated as extremely injurious to the interests of the whole of Christendom. His conscience as a Catholic satisfied, but his ambitious heart profoundly ulcerated, Abbé Mortol had resumed his place on the benches as a mere député. All of his hatred was turned against General Croppeton and Bernard Petitpaon, holding them both solidly responsible for the sacrifice that he had been forced to make to his religion.

  With a violence and a shamelessness only excusable by their attachment to a fervently exalted faith, Abbé Mortol launched an attack against the President of the Council of Ministers, of which he suffered so painfully from not being a part, which resounded under the vaults of the Palais Bourbon like a heroic and unusual appeal to some modern crusade. With tears in his voice, he deplored the abandonment of integral war.

  “War is the admirable school, eternal and synthetic, of all the Christian virtues, the inexhaustible source of the dolor and suffering that God, in all his bounty, permits his creatures in order to liberate them from the illusion of this miserable life and give them the hope and the thirst for a future existence made of intrinsic happiness and unalloyed joys.”

  He spoke about the “imprescriptible rights of God” over the blood flowing, thanks to him, in the veins of men, and which it was absolutely necessary to shed, following the example of the savior, the voluntary hero of the crucifixion, less glorious, without any doubt, than the joyful passing on a field of battle transformed into an essential cataclysm by the rain of iron, the lightning-flashes of blades and breastplates, the sometimes-continuous and sometimes-stuttering fire of fusillades, as well as the grave speeches delivered by the cannons “spitting out the thunder of their rifled souls.”

  He threatened General Croppeton—who had taken the responsibility of excluding humanity from violent death, henceforth only assured, as a rare and precious thing, by a few isolated and unforeseen accidents—with the thunderbolts of Heaven.

  “You have betrayed the Épée… and the Épée is merely a servile instrument in the candid hand of Faith! Épée is synonymous with saber, and the Cross, in Heaven, in what the saber is on Earth! The Cross we conserve with the fervor of the azure and the whiteness of souls, and you are refusing the Épée its natural nourishment: human blood! Do you believe that you can deceive God and cause him to bless a saber that, in your perjured and renegade hands, is a wooden sword at best?”

  General Croppeton received the anathema head on, without blinking, like a soldier accustomed to looking worse things than death in the face.

  The orator continued in the midst of a frightful tumult: “Debase war, then, to the point of officially proclaiming it a caricature! Make that tragic shadow of the flag, which has seen the proudest courage falls to its knees before God puerile and derisory! Woe to you who dream of stealing from people the almost celestial joy of the renovative exterminations of the Faith! To expel death from the battlefields is to expel religion from the hearts of men!

  “We have, with the aid of God, tamed the human beast! Our hands have gripped the steel rein flecked with bloody foam! And today, you are liberating from that rein impatient mouths that will howl with hunger, thirst and dolor! Oh, madmen that you are!

  “Promises made in God’s name ordinarily suffice to soothe dolor, receive thirst, appease hunger. And when wretches bare teeth that are to sharp, when their excessively dry throats make disquieting growls heard, we throw them to feed on one another, and they devour one another in epic feasts, in torrents of blood, all of them, as many victors as vanquished, intoxicated to the point of the drunkenness that engenders slumber. That slumber is peace! Oh, beware Monsieur Coffre…!”

  That name, howled at the top of the voice had the effect of a torpedo operating simultaneously on all the benches of the Chambre. Honorable gentlemen young and old stood up in a sudden tumult, launching coarse insults and hyperbolic acclamations toward the first floor gallery. A man was standing there, his arms folded on the red velvet arm-rest, his eyes bleak in a frame of white side-whiskers fusing at the ears with discolored hair emerging capriciously from the bumps of a shiny polished cranium. That cranium belonged to Hermann Coffre,7 the great banker, who, with his long and emaciated hands, the fingers of which only took on the aspect of claws during socialist speeches and writings, played like a cat with a rat with the economic life of the entire world.

  Next to him, the legitimate Madame Coffre, née Pulcelette, assured with her opulent person the stability of a chair in the back of which she was leaning, either because she was trying to hide from the manifestations or because she wanted to approach the nape of her neck to the blond moustache installed behind her under the straight and slender nose of Alexandre Sylphe, a captain corseted in the black tunic with white decorations of the cuirassiers, who was reputed to be her lover.

  As motionless as a statue, Monsieur Coffre did not seem to hear or see anything. The President of the Chambre, Perruquet, clutched his hand-bell in his right hand, which he agitated frenetically, brandishing in his left hand a paper-knife full of menaces for Abbé Mortol, who, in spite of the prohibition on launching an attack on someone unable to respond, continued nevertheless to vociferate against Monsieur Coffre.

  Finally, breathless and exhausted, with white foam in the corners of his lips, his feature contracted with impotent rage, the not-very-ecclestiastical abbé quit the podium, to which another député, hastening from the heights of the Extreme Left immediately climbed, making grand gestures to attract the attention of his colleagues. It was Louis Méripal, whose thirty years represented the revolutionary spirit of a Parisian arrondissement.

  Never had a collectivity been synthesized in a more complete and more exact fashion than the electoral body that had elected Louis Méripal. As nervous and impressionable as a crowd, as passionate as one, to the point of injustice, following his slightest reflexes of sympathy and antipathy with regard to people and things, without even trying to make his reason intervene, he did not belong to any group, and every one of his votes was a white or black
counter with which he marked a fleeting sensation that he made no attempt to analyze.

  Essentially impulsive and spontaneous by nature, Lois Méripal was ignorant of what the accountants of human conscience termed “rights” and “duties.” Free of all prejudice, liberated from any social bond, perhaps hiding, beneath a total absence of self-regard and vanity, an absolute pride in himself, he allowed all his actions to display themselves on the same plane, as items equal in their intrinsic value. Incapable of a calculation or a dissimulation, he professed the paradoxes that skill is the ultimate clumsiness and that instinct, for humanity and for the human individual, is an infallible guide so long as intelligence and reasoning do not disturb it.

  Louis Méripal was, in fact, the least political of the six hundred-and-some legislators of fur and feather habitually combined to form a majority apt to bring to the functioning of the social estate changes qualified as inestimable benefits by some and atrocious calamities by others. He opened his mouth and his thought poured out without reticence, in its entirety, such as he conceived it.

  Méripal’s colleagues experienced in his regard a kind of fear, struck as they all were by a man whose mind had never been crossed by concern for the electors, and who marched through life without a gesture of ostentation or hypocrisy. Sometimes, they listened to him with curiosity, as one listens to a child uninstructed in good and evil, without irritation and without anger. From his lips, conservers of the most distant past and socialist prophets of the most nebulous futures collected the flower of truth—a poor flower, dead as soon as it blossomed, stifled in the feverish hands of base ambition and vile interest. But sometimes, too, that pitiless speech and absolute frankness, unsparingly enouncing the calculations and secret motives that made others act, unleashed furious tempests in the bosom of the Assembly, by which the modern Chrysostom had the naivety to be astonished.