XVIII
In his study, which journalists fond of imagery called the tabernacle of the war, General Croppeton was talking about the progress of events in the company of Monsieur Coffre, who had come to ask for a captain of zouaves whom he had encountered in his wife’s apartment for two consecutive weeks to be sent on campaign.
“Your slightest desire in an order, my dear friend,” said the Minister, signing the officer’s service order.
By virtue of a sentiment of delicacy rare in a soldier more habituated to maneuvering on battlefields than in the labyrinths of psychology, General Croppeton never made the slightest allusion capable of implying that Madame Coffre might also have an interest in the officers of whom the banker was appointing himself the protector.
“Oh, my dear friend, if only everyone took as much interest as you do in army matters,” he confided to Monsieur Coffre. “You allow yourself to be approached by our most brilliant officers. You weigh their merits, you appreciate their value and when you’ve observed the existence of an elite subject, you hasten to make me party to your discovery. Quickly, an encouragement, a stripe, a medal, with a posting of confidence. It’s France who profits from it...”
Several times, Monsieur Coffre wondered whether the chief of the army might be making fun of him, and suffered a moment of anxiety with regard to his head, at which Croppeton might be taking potshots, to assure himself that the symbolic horns had not really grown there. He had ended up convincing himself of the complete absence of irony in the general, who took his candor far enough to talk about Captain Sylphe.
“He’s still in prison, the poor fellow! There’s one for whom Fortune has been a cruel stepmother! A Captain at twenty-eight, almost as in Revolutionary times, much appreciated by his superiors, adored by his inferiors, collecting with the same ease a flower from a lady’s corsage, a palm in contests of horsemanship and a laurel on the battlefield, Alexandre Sylphe considered his future as a starry certainty! Alas, all that is broken, annihilated under the walls of Cirajoum. It was in the condition of provisional death that France saw her predestined son return. Of his act of despair, all those who have a heart in their bosom that beats militarily cannot help but approve! However, Méripal has dared to say that you drove Captain Sylphe to that manifestation, which is quite naturally explicable by the decision of the arbitration tribunal, destroying, along with his life, all his hopes of happiness, his imminent union with Hermine de Foiraubilles. As misfortunes never come singly, Captain Sylphe’s protest was followed by the sad death of the Marquise and the plunge into lethargy of my excellent comrade Foiraubilles...”
“How is he today?” asked Monsieur Coffre, who had followed his loquacious interlocutor with a captive attention.
“He hasn’t made a movement all night. Yesterday, it was permissible to hope that he was finally about to come out of his coma. He opened his mouth. The trainee from the Val-de-Grâce in service at his bedside took advantage of it to make him swallow and almost complete meal: soup, eggs, cold meat, cheese and dessert. My comrade appeared to have eaten with appetite; he thanked those who had served him, kissed his daughter, picked up his bicorn, replaced it on his breast, closed his eyes again, and hasn’t budged since...”
“At least he’s not dead!” concluded Monsieur Coffre.
“Evidently not, since he can eat. The physicians are amazed. Their art does not record any analogous case in its annals. They cannot, therefore, offer a prognosis regarding his condition, whose termination has given rise to the engagement of large agers. Personally, even though I’m Foiraubilles’ friend, I’ve bet a hundred louis against a thousand francs that he won’t last the week...”
An orderly officer came in and waited at arm’s length for his chief to ask him the cause of his irruption.
“What is it?”
“It’s a secret matter, General...”
“Speak. Monsieur Coffre has a right to know everything; we have nothing to hide from him. He’s the vital fiber of the war, since he’s France’s banker. Speak!”
“General, the Admiral in command of the provisioning of the Grand Palais had just informed Monsieur le Ministre de la Marine, who instructed me to inform you, that grave and thus-far inexplicable events interrupted the services in the course of last night. It was around midnight; the first boat, laden with fresh meat, arrived at the mouth of the tunnel; it was immediately moored to the traction cable; the captain gave the signal, as usual to start the electric capstan; nothing happened. He gave the signal again, in vain. The captains of the boats that arrived at regular intervals were no more fortunate in their attempts. At daybreak, the boats were obliged to return to their ports of origin without having been able to unload anything.”
General Croppeton inveighed against the Navy, whom he accused of wanting to play one of their familiar tricks on the land army. He asked why no sailor had gone into the tunnel to see what was happening.
The orderly officer replied that the orders specifically forbade such a maneuver, the personnel of the fleet being prohibited, under any pretext, from communicating with the troops in the Grand Palais. He cited the installation of a small pontoon on which, directly adjacent to the quay, the mariners were to await the return of their empty boats.
General Croppeton ordered the officer to disguise himself as an angler, in order not to attract attention, and to go see what was happening inside the Grand Palais.
In the meantime, Abbé Mortol arrived. The Minister brought him up to date with hat he had just learned. The three men formulated hypotheses as to the possible causes of that interruption in the service provisioning the “supreme army.”
Croppeton put the responsibility on the Navy, the eternal insubordinate, which must have been guilty of some capital negligence, which a formal investigation would surely discover.
Monsieur Coffre wondered whether it might not have been a protest against the poor quality of the subsistence, and insisted that all the necessary sacrifices had to be made to give full and complete satisfaction to the inhabitants of the Grand Palais.
Abbé Mortol leaned toward a revolt fomented by a few godless and undisciplined soldiers. The troublemakers were preventing the arrival of food in order to be able to persuade their dutiful comrades that the Government wanted to let them die of starvation.
The situation had not been clarified by these conjectures when the officer reappeared to report on his mission. His disguise as an angler was so exact that the concierge of the Ministry had not recognized him and had not wanted to let him pass. He was as pale as someone who has just suffered a violent shock.
Without circumlocutions, militarily, he related what he had seen.
The officers and soldiers were lying in their beds and seemed to be profoundly asleep. He had tried to wake up a general and several men. All had remained inert, as if dead.
In their turn, Croppeton, Monsieur Coffre and Abbé Mortol went pale. They looked at one another, and simultaneously asked one another the same question.
“What is this new misfortune?”
After having affirmed that it was necessary not to panic, the Minister declared that he was leaving in order to take account with his own eyes of what was happening at the Grand Palais.
“We’ll go with you!” said Monsieur Coffre and Abbé Mortol, in unison.
The Minister was in civilian clothes, so he only had to take off his medals to ensure himself of an anonymity that was rendered complete by the presence at his side of the angler, who accompanied him.
Monsieur Coffre was wearing a soft hat that changed his very Parisian physiognomy sufficiently into that of some maître d’hôtel. Abbé Mortol could not take off his soutane, so he kept it on, and headed for the indicated point of the bank on his own.
The four individuals slipped into the tunnel successively. They had forgotten to bring a lantern. Monsieur Coffre burned a few matches that guided them as well as could be expected through the dark section of the tunnel to the extremity, at which the fully-armed ma
n on guard was asleep at his post.
They passed by without stopping, took their places in the elevator that took them up into daylight, beneath the immense glazed atrium, in a matter of seconds.
The orderly had not been mistaken; the entire army was sleep. Cuirassiers, spahis, cavalrymen, hussars, dragoons, artillerymen—in sum, all of those whose inseparability from the most noble of human conquests had lodged on the ground floor—were lying in their beds, not far from their mounts, which were also fast asleep.
“But why are they sleeping like this?” groaned Croppeton, shaking officers and soldiers at random, all clad in complete campaign uniforms.
“They’re drunk!” whispered Abbé Mortol in Monsieur Coffre’s ear.
“Since they have all their equipment,” the latter observed, “sleep must have overtaken them in the middle of some maneuver...”
“An equipment review, of course!” muttered Croppeton. “Suppose you help me to wake them up instead of delivering yourselves to contemplation? You probably think that you’re a real angler, don’t you? You have the brain for it!”
The orderly officer put his right hand to the brim of his straw hat, but the resultant military salute produced a deplorable effect.
“You’re ridiculous! Come on, wake that cuirassier!”
The means of extracting a cuirassier from his sleep does not figure in any theory. The angler attempted to proceed by intimidation: “Stand up, Cuirassier!”
He repeated the injunction energetically: “Stand up! Cuirassier!” But the man continued to snore in the chrome steel carapace, which vibrated when the note emerging from the man’s throat corresponded to the pitch of its diapason.
“Leave him! You can see that he’s a brute!” Croppeton intervened. “Help me to shake this artilleryman, who seems less deeply asleep than the others!”
And the Minister, aided by his picturesque acolyte, inflicted frantic gymnastics on the cannoneer, whose limbs fell back inertly on the bed as soon as they were left to themselves.
“That’s a bit much!” muttered Croppeton, striking the sleeper’s face vigorously with his closed fists. The latter showed no hint of emotion.
“Perhaps these soldiers are ill?” hazarded Monsieur Coffre, whose temples were moistened by anguish.
“They’ve been poisoned!” Abbé Mortol concluded.
“Quickly—fetch a physician…physicians. Lots of physicians—all the physicians you can bring!” Croppeton ordered his aide-de-camp. “Go on! At the double! Hurry up!”
The angler ran to the cage of the elevator and disappeared.
The Minister of War, Abbé Mortol and Monsieur Coffre went up to the first floor. The infantrymen were asleep, like their comrades on the ground floor. Multiple attempts to wake them made at various point of the gallery produced no result.
Then the three men went back downstairs, without exchanging a word that might have distracted the intensity of their thoughts, and sat down on empty beds to await the arrival of the physicians.
Only a few minutes went by before General Croppeton leapt abruptly to his feet and howled in a hoarse voice: “I can feel that I’m going to sleep too! My God, protect me! Protect me, my God!”
His two companions ran to him, and after an energetically-administered massage the Minister sighed: “Oh, thank you, my God! It was a false alarm! Oh, I was so frightened!”
The physicians emerged from the cage of the elevator with the precipitation of wild beasts alerted to the fact that it was meal-time. Medical orderlies of various ranks, and some even devoid of rank, disembarked in their turn with boxes of various forms, which seemed to be very heavy, to judge by the difficulty with which they were being transported.
It was the entire Military Council of Health, which the valiant orderly had found in session and had brought, along with its natural auxiliaries, porters of cases of instruments and pharmaceuticals. Alarmed by the spectacle offered to their eyes, the representatives of the curative art—whom it was not surprising to see in the uniform of the corporation whose talents boast of being murderous—saluted before proceeding hierarchically with a summary examination of a few patients.
The meninges encircled in the oak-leaf crowned kepi of a Medical Inspector refused to formulate a diagnosis in advance of a preliminary autopsy, and this opinion, which was complicated by the necessity of analyses whose results demanded a delay of several years, was that of all the echelons of the hierarchy.
The responsibility of making a decision fell upon the Minister of War, who weighed the full gravity of ordering an autopsy on thirty-four thousand bodies that were perhaps only temporarily unconscious. He was already thinking about taking the advice of the sage guardian of the Constitution when a junior orderly started gesticulating and shouting, his right arm extended and the thumb and forefinger united: “Tsetse! Tsetse!”
“A madman now!” groaned General Croppeton, definitively depressed.
The junior orderly continued to utter his lamentable: “Tsetse! Tsetse!”
An Aide-Major headed toward the man and seized his wrist in order to examine what he was holding between his thumb and index finger. “Tsetse! Tsetse!” he howled, fleeing. “Don’t let it go! Don’t let it go!”
The oak-leaved kepi ran forward, only to recoil immediately and imperatively demand a surgical kit, in which he rummaged rapidly. He took out a large veil of white gauze, with which he enveloped his head carefully, knotting it around his neck. He slid his hands into rubber gloves and advanced toward the junior orderly at a deliberate pace, whose wrist he seized in his turn.
He stood in contemplation for a few minutes, and then uttered, in a grave tone: “Certainly! Yes…no possible doubt. Tsetse! Tsetse!”
His thumb and index finger delicately pinch the extremities of the fingers of the humble servant of Science, as if to collect something.
The operation must have been crowned with success, because the Medical Inspector came back to the Minister and, removing his veils with his left hand, he displayed his right hand, saying: “Here’s the guilty party, Monsieur le Ministre. This fly is a variety of tsetse: Glossina palpalis, to give it the scientific name to which it has a right. This fly pullulates in the tropical regions of Africa; the banks of the Niger are particularly infested with them. It’s the fly responsible for carrying the terrible trypanosome that is the cause, little recognized until now,19 of the strange malady that the indigenes designate by terms that all translate to what we call sleep: koulala in Loango and Bangala, auyo in Pahouin, nelawan in Yoloff, sonorhodimi in Bambara...”
“What’s that?” Croppeton interjected.
“Native dialects, Monsieur le Ministre,” replied the doctor.
“I’m not asking you to talk native, but to tell me what disease has struck these men.”
“They have mtoga, otherwise known as sleeping sickness.”
“That’s why they’re asleep?” Croppeton put in.
“Exactly, Monsieur le Ministre. The protozoan penetrates into the cerebrospinal fluid and provoke ravages there that it’s hard to believe can be produced by something so infinitesimally tiny. The infection passes through three distinct phases...”
“You don’t think these men are faking?” General Croppeton interjected.
“Impossible, Monsieur le Ministre! The symptoms are indisputable, and the presence of the Glossina palpalis that I’ve just presented to you completes the basis for the certainty of my diagnosis.”
“So these men who are asleep…?” Croppeton enquired.
“Will be awakened by Death,” completed the scholarly doctor, gravely. “Science hasn’t yet been able to reckon with the redoubtable trypanosome, which it has known for two short a time. The newcomer is profiting from our surprise...”
“What are we going to do?” General Croppeton wailed, lamentably, toward Abbé Mortol and Monsieur Coffre.
“We’d do well to get out of here!” opined Monsieur Coffre.
“Indeed, Messieurs, your presence here is not indispe
nsable, and you’re exposing yourself needlessly to the bite of the redoubtable Glossina palpalis. Withdraw, then; I’ll stay here with my personnel, and I’ll set up the bases of field hospital. These soldiers aren’t dead yet...they might wake up from time to time to eat. It would be unworthy of France to let them die of starvation.”
“Perhaps they’ll recover!” said Abbé Mortol hopefully. “I’ll have Cardinal Pecari order prayers to that effect.”
“Anything’s possible!” said the physician, with a pitying smile with regard to the efficacy of archiepiscopal paternosters.
The Minister, framed by Abbé Mortol and Monsieur Coffre and followed by his orderly officer, had already taken a few steps toward the elevator when the Medical Inspector caught up with him. “I forgot to tell you, Monsieur le Ministre, that the horses and mules are sick too...”
“I can see that,” said Croppeton, brutally.
“They’re afflicted with nagana, which is the soliped sleeping sickness. It’s transported from one organism to another by another variety of tsetse, Glossina morsitans or pallipides...”
The General did not listen to the rest of the lecture, in haste as he was to confer with Petitpaon.
The conversation was one of the most dramatic. The President’s senses almost betrayed him, but he pulled himself together in the name of France, and even had the presence of mind to make a connection between General Foiraubilles’ coma and the one into which the garrison of the Grand Palais had fallen.
He declared that it would be wise, in order to avoid the contamination of Paris, to transport the Marquis de Foiraubilles to join his brothers in arms afflicted by the same disease. The operation was carried out in secret the same day.
The General was installed in the center of the atrium, on a four-poster bed surmounted by a huge tricolor awning with gold trimmings—and a black horse with a red velvet saddle, harnessed in according with the protocol for the mount of a commander-in-chief was stationed at the bottom of the bed.
XIX
The Petitpaon Era Page 18