Timeslip Troopers

by Théo Varlet

  Timeslip Troopers

  by

  Théo Varlet & André Blandin

  translated, annotated and introduced by

  Brian Stableford

  A Black Coat Press Book

  Introduction

  La Belle Valence by Théo Varlet and André Blandin, here translated as Timeslip Troopers (the full significance of the original title, as explained below, cannot be transferred into English), was published in Amiens by Edgar Malfère in 1923. It was, apparently, the third supposedly unpublishable manuscript handed over by Malfère to Varlet for rewriting, following the two volumes of L’Épopée martienne (1921-22),1 whose first drafts had been provided by Octave Joncquel. How extensive Varlet’s rewrite of La Belle Valence was, or why it was thought to be required, I have no idea, but it is not surprising that the novel had had difficulty finding a publisher in Paris, on account of its subject matter alone, thus ending up in the hands of Malfère, who had a reputation for dealing in bizarre and edgy material.

  Whether it was actually written in the trenches or shortly after the author’s return therefrom, La Belle Valence present an image of life and attitudes therein that was somewhat at odds with the notions promoted by wartime propaganda. It suggests, with a laconically cynical black humor, that the soldiers of France did not spend their free time dreaming about a future era of peace and harmony or about distinguishing themselves heroically in defense of the fatherland, but of massacring enemies who were too ill-equipped to fight back and then surrendering themselves to the orgiastic delights of alcohol-fueled pillage and rape. If that were not enough, it blithely takes for granted the fact that a group of French officers accidentally timeslipped into the middle of a 14th century war between Muslims and Catholics would unhesitatingly side with the Muslims, as the contemporary custodians of civilized values, against the adherents of the religion to which they no longer even pay lip service. Both of these notions were liable to upset a portion of the potential audience, and make some of its members apoplectic. Given that Varlet was probably given instructions to tone down the controversial content, we can but wonder what the original was like—although, as a committed pacifist and non-believer, Varlet was presumably fully sympathetic to Blandin’s aims in highlighting the hellish hypocrisies of war and faith.

  As to who “André Blandin” was, no information seems to be available save for what can be inferred from the text—that he was almost certainly a French officer who served on the Western Front during the latter part of the Great War and was extremely disenchanted by the experience. The name is a common one, and internet searches readily turn up a plethora of André Blandins, none of whom seems likely to be the author of the present text. We can be fairly sure that the original author of La Belle Valence was not the roughly-contemporary Belgian painter André Blandin (1878-1945), who corresponded with Guillaume Apollinaire and exhibited in Paris, not so much on grounds of discrepancies in apparent nationality and military experience, but by virtue of the fact that the Belgian Blandin was an accomplished writer who collaborated on a book of parodies of contemporary Belgian writers published in 1914, and would surely not have produced an unpublishable manuscript in need of doctoring by Théo Varlet.2 If the original author of La Belle Valence went on to write other novels, he presumably did so under another name, but the probability is that he disappeared in the same way as Varlet’s other Malfère-supplied collaborator, Octave Joncquel. Indeed, given that more than one André Blandin was killed in action during the war, it is possible that the manuscript was given to Varlet posthumously.

  La Belle Valence is one of several French texts directly inspired by the example of H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895; French tr. 1898), following in the footsteps of Octave Béliard’s Les Aventures d’un voyageur qui explora le temps [The Adventures of a Time-Traveling Explorer] (1909), which also sent its protagonist in the opposite direction to the one taken by Wells’s hero. It has more in common thematically, however, with Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in the Court of King Arthur (1889), whose timeslipped protagonist sets out to import the advantages of 20th century civilization to the legendary King of England, but eventually cannot prevail against Dark Age obduracy. (Blandin would not have known about Enrique Gaspar’s El anacronópete (1887), the first novel featuring a time machine that takes trips into the past.) Unless the other literary references in the text were imported by Varlet, Blandin was obvious well-read, and if the title was Blandin’s, it gives evidence of a certain literary sophistication in itself.

  La Belle Valence translates literally as “Beautiful Valencia” or “Valencia the Beautiful,” and refers in a straightforward sense to the destination of the timeslipped soldiers, but the phrase is used by them even before they know where they are, the first time they find oranges growing on the local trees. “Valence! La Belle Valence!” was once the standard cry of Parisian orange-sellers in the 19th century, and although it had fallen out of use long before the Great War, it had retained a nostalgic familiarity by virtue of numerous literary references; it is one of the Things Past fondly remembered by Marcel Proust in À la recherche du temps perdu [In Search of Lost Time] and is also cited in Joris-Karl Huysmans’ Les Soeurs Vatard [The Vatard Sisters]. More pertinently, it was used as the opening line of a song written by the librettist Maurice Franc-Nohain for Maurice Ravel’s comic operetta L’Heure Espagnole [Spanish Time] (1911), which features a clockmaker named Torquemada and has a farcical plot in which two of the characters spend much of the time hiding inside the cases of grandfather clocks—a combination of images that surely played some part in the inspiration of the plot of La Belle Valence.

  More detailed discussion of the plot of the novel is certainly warranted, but is best postponed to an afterword in order not to spoil the suspense of the reading experience. It is, however, worth noting that the work of translation was made difficult by the fact that the soldiers—especially the enlisted men and the major—speak in an elaborate argot that is sometimes further complicated by a tortuous eye-dialect applied to the speech of characters supposedly hailing from the south of France. How closely this colorful vocabulary resembles the actual argot of the trenches I cannot tell, but it must have posed a stern challenge even to its contemporary readers, let alone 21st century readers.

  There seemed to be no point in offering literal translations of numerous colorful slang expressions, and even those that I have translated straightforwardly because the translation is able to carry a similar implication in English (poule into “chick,” for example) are bound to ring slightly false. I have made no attempt at substituting the eye-dialect, because it would be simply absurd to try to make a Provençal sound as if he were a Cockney or a native of Brooklyn, but I have tried to find English or American slang expressions that reproduce intended meanings similar to the words and phrases in the text’s dialogue, while leaving a few terms in the original, in order to preserve a French flavor while retaining a reasonable measure of reader-friendliness. The result is admittedly artificial and sometimes awkward, but it seemed to be the best solution.

  French is, for various reasons, better supplied with mild doubles entendres than English, so the passages in which the poilus are telling obscene stories presented particularly difficulties. I have attempted to solve them by means of similarly-pitched implication, only descending to frank obscenity when the original text does (rather sparingly, although it does not entirely shirk “the word of Cambronne”), but was occasionally forced to improvise. Although this might have been one of the aspects of the original toned down by Varlet, the text is conspicuously liberal in this regard, for its time—although one of the three appendices attached to it in the 1996 Encrage reprint (from which my translation has been made
) points out that there are other romans scientifiques from the same period that are similarly free in their handling of explicit sexual materials, notably Maurice Renard’s Le Docteur Lerne sous-dieu (1907)3 and Victor Margueritte’s Le Couple (1924).

  Although early time-travel stories tend to suffer somewhat by comparison as a result of the rapid sophistication of such stories in the latter half of the 20th century, which drew considerable narrative energy from elaborating the intricacies of “time paradoxes,” La Belle Valence still holds up remarkably well as an exploratory endeavor, and the quality of its cynical black humor has not diminished at all, perhaps even gaining something by virtue of contemporary trends in humor and weltanschauung. At any rate, it deserves to be recognized as one of the finest romans scientifiques of the period between the end of the Great War and the birth of American science fiction, when the European crop of post-war speculative fiction was thinned out by postbellum prejudices, but nevertheless included some exceptionally juicy fruits.

  Brian Stableford

  Part One

  THE DISPLACEMENT

  I. The Englishman’s Cellar

  “Pernod, you say?”

  “Yes, old chap, Pernod. And Benedictine, kummel, Cointreau, whisky, gin—how do I know? Not to mention champagne and wine, naturally. Hold on—here’s your bolt-hole.”

  And by means of a short communication tunnel dug under the walls of a pretty white house in the style of a villa, the two officers quit the trench to go into a cellar. It was scarcely possible to see in there, by means of the light coming through a narrow air-vent, but Captain Loubet, taking out his lighter, lit a stout oil-lamp suspended from the vault and the subterranean space brightened. One table, three chairs, two iron-framed beds, one Henri II bookcase with a glass front fitted with green curtains, sketched out an accommodation, in a corner where the floor-tiles had been swept clean. Further away, the clutter commenced: a mass of furniture and other objects, piled up at random, obstructed the greater part of the cellar, and only a narrow path cleared around the periphery gave access to the carefully-labeled racks where multiple rows of bottles were superimposed in good order.

  Such was the sumptuous domain in which Lieutenant Marcel Renard was about to succeed Captain Henri Loubet for the next fortnight.

  The captain enjoyed the lieutenant’s bewilderment.

  “Takes you aback, doesn’t it, old chap, to find this at the front line, after 30 months of war? I had no suspicion of the riches myself, to begin with. My predecessor had no idea this cellar existed. The door was walled up, you see, along with the air-vent. As the sector was quiet, I lived on the ground floor for the first few days, but when a few big shells from Metz fell on us—in error, I think, having been aimed at the battery on the flank—I thought it more prudent to take shelter. My orderly, a cunning fellow, ferreted around, sniffed out the camouflage, found the door…and here we are!”

  While talking, the captain opened the bookcase with the masked glass panes, the shelves of which were garnished by a collection of bottles. “This is just to have a small selection close at hand, without searching the racks. I had the books thrown into the river. Pernod for me—what about you?”

  “OK, Pernod,” the lieutenant accepted. “But tell me, Captain, is this the stock of a wine-merchant, then?”

  “Not at all. It appears that it was the villa of a so-called Englishman before the war, who passed himself off as an engineer—but he was really a Boche, and he was sentenced to be shot as a spy in ’14…at any rate, may the old bibber rest in peace. Thanks to him, I’ve not been too bored here, and you’ll owe him the same gratitude, and others after you... To the health of the English engineer!”

  They were putting down their glasses when two poilus came in. One, with the look of a street-porter about him, was bent down under the weight of a trunk; the other was marching beside him discreetly, guiding his companion by means of unctuous little gestures that were almost sacerdotal. He had him deposit the trunk on one of the beds, then sent him away with a amiable smile.

  “Thanks, Saucisson. Go fetch the other one now.” Then he turned the clean-shaven face of a perfect flunkey to Renard, and with his eyes respectfully lowered, said: “Would the lieutenant care to indicate a cupboard where I can arrange his linen and effects?”

  His accent was less distinguished than his outfit, and the latter, which was probably unparalleled throughout the sector—a jacket elegantly pinched at the waist, yellow shoes, an embroidered silk skull-cap—revealed numerous whims that the captain seemed to be studying with a disgusted expression.

  The lieutenant pointed to the Henri II bookcase. “There, Jasmin. You have only to take out the bottom shelves and put the bottles on the ground to one side. And if you’d like to pour yourself a glass of Pernod, go ahead.”

  “The lieutenant knows that I don’t indulge,” the man murmured, as he set to work.

  “That’s my orderly,” Renard explained, in a whisper, seeing that Loubet was about to make unkind comments about his costume and declaration of sobriety. What can you do?—he’s the former valet de chambre of the Duc de Pinchefalise. I sometimes joke about his exaggerated distinction and his family name, which drives him to despair—he’s called Wambrechies; Jasmin Wambrechies—but apart from that, I’ve nothing for which to reproach him; he serves me to perfection. He has no peer for finding chocolate.”

  “You even permit him to hire domestics?” muttered the captain, recalling the arrival of the trunk.

  “Oh, the other one’s my new colleague’s orderly. They share the work—and, my word, it goes very well like that.”

  The said colleague, the sublieutenant of the eighth, made his appearance in the cellar at that moment. He was a tall blond young man with a serious and thoughtful expression, whom Renard introduced to the captain by the name of Henri de Lanselles, although his monocle had earned him the more familiar nickname of Monocard. He came to announce that the relief was complete.

  Loubet gave the new arrival the honors of his cellar one last time, then darted a farewell glance at the precious bottles and, after a brief hesitation, took hold of a bottle of Pernod, which he wrapped up in a newspaper and hid in the vast pocket of his trench-coat.

  “In memory of the Englishman,” he sniggered. Then, shaking the hands of the two officers, he wished them god luck and went out to rejoin the company that was standing down.

  Assembled on the edge of the village, behind a large brick building, the men of the tenth, kitbags on their backs, were only waiting for their captain. The trench stretched away in front of them, and further away—in the forest with bare branches that sheltered the artillery battery, which had been crossed many times in the last fortnight for fetch provisions from Landremont—the road. And today, the road led to the rear, to rest, and, for some, to paradisal leave.

  While Loubet headed in that direction, through the subterranean tunnel that cut diagonally through the entire village, the two lieutenants proceeded with the ritual assembly of the eighth, who were about to occupy Port-sur-Seille.

  Port-sur-Seille, grouped on the left bank of the river, still had numerous houses standing, which permitted the communication trenches to be forsaken and prudent circulation, even in broad daylight, through the streets and terraced gardens. Only on the eastern side, toward the river—beyond which was no-man’s-land, then desolate brushwood, Boches and 20 kilometers further away, the silhouette of Metz and the hummocks of the fortifications—did they burrow underground in the listening-posts and the machine-gun nests lined up along the bank.

  The fire, however, was normally fairly benign: a few shells in the morning; four more at precisely eight o’clock in the evening—no one knew why—falling one after another in the same place; that was, for the time being, pretty much the daily “sprinkling” of Port-sur-Seille. And the continuous rumble of the cannon to the north made the men appreciate the relative mildness of that favored corner. “We’re peppered now and again, but it’s pretty routine,” was the report on
the sector that the men of the tenth, before departing, had just communicated to their successors of the eighth.

  The latter, about a 120 in number, assembled in the dusk in their ranks on the little square completely sheltered by the gross Medieval tower and another more modern building, in front of which the mobile kitchens were already working flat out, listened to the allocation of posts and fatigues: food supplies, sandbags, horse-grooming, barbed wire, cleaning, and so on. Then, in response to the fateful “Break ranks!” they all dispersed into the gathering gloom.

  The fortunate, unoccupied or designated for night duties, went to get their water-bottles and ran for the “reimbursable”—the wine supplement, as thick and as purple as mulberry juice. In the shelters, while waiting for the soup, tins of corned beef were opened. A few, by virtue of an excess of zeal that generated mild hilarity around them, started cleaning their rifles. By the light of a candle-stub, the “artists” unpacked their materials and set about making aluminum jewelry or finding ingenious uses for cartridge-cases. An interested group watched the manipulations of the most skillful, who were occupied in inserting lice into the bezels of rings, beneath magnifying-glasses. Two inseparables, Totor and Dudule, were warmly debating the issue of the leave-roster. “Even if I get blown up, when my leave falls due, you’ll see someone popping up to the head of the column at top speed...”

  After casting an indulgent glance over the familiar spectacle, visiting the as-yet-deserted infirmary, watching the sapper corporal distributing picks and spades from a shed behind the church and the motorcyclist repairing his machine, the lieutenants headed for the company office, installed on the ground floor of the old tower. Beside the door, two telephonists were checking the alignment of the copper antenna that was hanging down from the top of the tower. One of them, a short thickset sergeant with a crafty expression, saluted the lieutenant with respectful familiarity.