by Théo Varlet
He shook himself out of it. They were approaching Port-sur-Seille. This was no time for philosophy—and, without disabusing the monk of his generous illusions, he asked him to negotiate the proposed alliance with the Emir as soon as possible.
As they crossed the bridge of planks that had been established over the Seille in their absence, Etcheverry pointed out to Renard that a trickle of water was running along the river bed again. The lieutenant rejoiced in that, for if it had remained as dry as it had been in the morning, it would have been necessary to dig a well or obtain supplies from some distant source. He had no time to ponder that stroke of luck, however. The sentries had alerted the garrison to their return, and it was in the midst of an effervescent crowd of poilus that the four horsemen dismounted, in front of the kitchens.
De Lanselles, the major and the aviator came to shake Renard’s hand.
“Well,” said the sublieutenant, “things have moved on, so the motorbike courier tells us.”
“Yes, that’s right—we’ve taken the town. And here—anything new?”
“No, everything’s fine.”
“What about your troopers?” Thévenard asked. “They’re not dead?”
“Oh, don’t talk to me about them. They’re dead drunk, the swine! They let themselves be drawn by our allies into an almighty rampage. They’ve gone on the spree, Nevertheless, I’ve succeeded in establishing a small base with the least drunk, and tomorrow morning we’ll go to occupy the town properly. But let me introduce you to the Reverend Father Geronimo, Master of Arts at the University of Valencia—a noble victim of the Inquisition, gentlemen! Can you imagine...”
Among the troops, the boasting of Jasmin and Saucisson concerning the mysterious “torpedo machine” in the cellar, the indiscretions of Dupuy and the doctor’s tall tales regarding the nocturnal “earthquake”—all deformed, embellished and confused by others—had sufficed until two o’clock, along with the fatalistic “We just have to do it, we don’t have to understand it,” to nourish curiosity and explain the unusual phenomena, more or less: especially the camel, the “chicks” and the eunuchs (fairground performers), the arrival of the Moors (Moroccan reinforcements) and that of the Spanish prisoners (Boche spies). No one was unduly astonished by the temporal perturbation and the passage, without transition, from the depths of winter to Mediterranean summer. Even the disappearance of part of the village and a third of the company personnel, and the replacement of the usual surroundings by that exotic landscape, had been put down to profits and losses. “We just have to do it, we don’t have to understand it.” They rejoiced in the good weather and the cessation of the Boche fire, and they stuffed themselves with oranges—la belle Valence!—without bothering too much about their origin.
The comings and goings of the motorcyclist, however—his first trip to fetch sticks of dynamite, then his return with the news that the town had been taken—had excited the imagination. When Vidal had recounted what he had seen and heard; when they knew that “the others” were occupied in freely looting an entire enemy town, taken without resistance or any losses; when they imagined the booze flowing in rivers and girls dressed up to the nines—the murmurs began.
There was naked envy of the comrades selected for the expedition. “It’s always the same ones who get the nice jobs—we know who they are. They make a semblance of calling for volunteers, but that lot were decided in advance!” The vigorous intervention of the NCOs was insufficient to calm the effervescence. As time for soup approached, anxiety grew regarding the lack of new supplies and the broken communications with Landremont. When Duranton served corned beef for the second time that day, indignant protests went up.
They had not calmed down by the time that the return of Renard and his three companions furnished a new pretext for discontent. The lieutenant’s indignant words regarding the conduct of his poilus, and the less virtuous but ultra-seductive amplifications added by Lénac, made the mouths of the men of the eighth water. They imagined their comrades surrounded by houris, plunged into the bliss of a Muslim paradise, and they reflected bitterly on their own lot.
In an exquisitely warm dusk, the crowd around the officers became agitated. The latter were occupied with the monk, the object of bewildered comments—was the fellow a Boche, the new chaplain, or what? Cipriani jostled a few men and tried to shove them away.
“Go on, turn around—you don’t have any business here. Go back to your bolt-holes.”
“But Sergeant, the lieutenant hasn’t said anything.”
The Corsican became angry. “What’s that? Answering back now! Whether the lieutenant’s said so or not, I’m ordered you to go back to your bunks. It’s getting dark.”
And as the troopers went away, murmuring, to reform into groups a few meters away, Cipriani ran to Renard.
“There’s no means of calming them down, Lieutenant. I don’t know what’s up with them. They’re talking about a torpedo machine that has sent them into Boche-land. They think they’re near Berlin. I’ve had the most loudmouthed thrown in the lock-up, but one can’t have them shot.”
De Lanselles, who had been listening to what the men were saying, without appearing to, since two o’clock, whispered in the lieutenant’s ear: “I didn’t want to talk to them without your authorization, but I think it’s time to do so. Better to tell them the truth.”
The lieutenant was reluctant to explain the operation of the Machine, in which he felt that his responsibility was seriously engaged. How should he tackle the matter? He looked at Monocard doubtfully. “Do you think they’re capable of grasping an explanation? Well, if that’s your opinion, so be it. That’s all right, Cipriani, let them be. I’ll talk to them shortly.”
But the major had his own ideas. When the sergeant had turned on his heel, he came over to Renard. “Well, I can see that you’re worried about telling them. Would you like me to do it? I’ll get it in to their thick heads. They know me.” And without waiting for a reply, he headed for the truck with the seven 75 millimeter shells, which as still parked in front of the kitchens, climbed on to it and, standing in the back, he hailed the poilus with his stentorian voice.
“Hey, lads! Listen to me for a minute. I have to talk to you.”
In spite of his affected rudeness toward the wounded men he medicated with paregoric elixir, his good humor and brusque familiarity made him universally popular. The men of the eighth hurriedly gathered around the truck.
The doctor began: “You know me, eh? It’s me, your major, Père Thévenard, and I’ve always looked after you. You trust me, and you’ve never had to regret it. When you have the colic, or a bullet in the bum, it’s me you come to, and I do what I can to make you better—and I make you better, if there’s a means; no one can say otherwise. Well, today, it’s the same thing—I’m going to give you a remedy.
“Oh, you’re not happy! Oh, you’re murmuring, you’ve got complaints? I’m telling you—me, who’s had my finger in your eye up to the elbow. You’re pissed off because you’ve had bully beef twice today? You won’t be pissed off any more when you’ve listened to me, and you’ve drunk a cup of gnôle16 before you go tuck yourselves up in bed. Do you know what the Golden Age was? Well, tomorrow, the Golden Age is opening up for you...”
In the increasing darkness, the troopers listened, seduced by the major’s truculent glibness. The latter interrupted himself, had one of the truck’s lanterns lit, took it and set it down in such a way that he was fully illuminated on the improvised platform, while his shadow on the kitchen walls repeat his gesticulations in a grotesque fashion, to the poilus’ amusement. Conscious of that effect, he continued;
“You’ve heard mention of a Machine, that you’re annoyed about not having seen? Tomorrow, it’ll be shown to you. It’ll be shown to me too, for I haven’t seen it any more than you have—but I’m not complaining, and I’m your major! Tomorrow, we’ll all see it—you’ll be there along with Père Thévenard, and I promise you a good time.
“In the meantime,
I can tell you one thing, and that’s that you won’t have any cause to complain about the Machine. Thanks to that, the war is over for you, and the Golden Age is beginning! As you’ve already been told, it’s a splendid machine. You’ve been told that it’s powerful—very powerful—and that it can send you from Metz to Berlin? You weren’t told the half of it. It’s sent us much further than Berlin. We’ve left the Earth behind and we’re…on a planet!”
He paused, his arms widespread, magnificently.
Timid voices rose up. “What planet?”
“What planet?” he thundered, folding his arms. “Do I know any more than you do? What does it matter? You’ve all read in the papers that there are planets. That chap Flammarion has seen the inhabitants of Mars with his telescope. For the planets are inhabited; the planets are like the Earth, but on this planet, they’re six hundred years behind the times—they haven’t yet discovered gunpowder, or cannons, or matches. You’ve seen that for yourself, with the Darkies. I haven’t invented anything. And since his morning, since we arrived, which of you has been wounded? Which of you has heard a zinzin? Which of you has seen a Boche? I repeat, the war’s over for you, unless you make an easy sort of war here, in which you’ll always be victorious. You’ll have wine, and women and all the rest, as you please, like your mates in Valencia now. Tomorrow, that will be you: everyone will get a turn. Here, you’re at rest, as in the rear—better than in the rear. I can’t tell you any more—it’s a professional secret—but I give you my word that…that you’re going to be heroes, all of you, and …extraordinary heroes, since you’ll have all the advantages without the inconveniences!”
He was out of breath, and bombast. He saw that his listeners had been subjugated by his vehement speech, and concluded, ex abrupto: “Now, no more talking—everybody take your mugs to Duranton’s, and off to bed when you’ve had your cup of gnôle.”
And, leaping down from the truck in the midst of enthusiastic cheers, he called out to the chief cook: “Give these lads some rum, Duranton—a good dose, as for an invalid!”
Opinion had been won over; and like an ancient coryphaeus,17 Dudule summed up the general sentiment: “Talk about a bloke with the gift of the gab! How he can turn you around!”
Only the men in the advance guard-posts were perhaps less than content, but Cipriani took responsibility for wetting their beaks.
Gathered in the company office under the lamp, de Lanselles, the major, the aviator, Dupuy and Lénac were listening to the lieutenant. The monk, quite unable to comprehend what was going on, had been installed in the clerk’s armchair, in front of a light snack.
“Gentlemen,” Renard began, “I’ll get straight to the point. You all know what’s what. You’ve learned individually what combination of circumstances had transported us from the 20th century and the Lorraine front to the 14th and…let’s say the Moorish front. For an indeterminate lapse of time, we’re constrained and forced to live in this new milieu, and to make a choice between two irreconcilable adversaries in whose presence we find ourselves. On the one hand, the Spaniards, otherwise known as the Inquisition; on the other, the Arabs, whose alliance we have virtually secured. In these exceptional circumstances, I can’t make the decision alone. We have to form a kind of General Staff. To begin with, I’d like your opinion as to which side to take.”
A discussion began between the officers. Monocard opted for the Moors—“the true custodians, in this dark era, of civilized traditions.” He was carried away by the prodigious renovation that they would be able to impose on the world, by serving as a lever to accelerate the course of History.
The aviator, who was in the lay ministry of the Anglican Church, cordially detested the “instruments of the Inquisition,” but similarly refused to treat with the Moors—“those negroes.” The English, he proclaimed, in India...
The major simply laughed, and could not be drawn out of his buffoonery. Dupuy and Lénac, in their corner, listened without saying a word. Etcheverry made the modest observation that they had already, in practice, declared war on the Spaniards, and that the side of the Moors had already been implicitly adopted.
“We’re all of the same opinion, then,” Renard concluded. “The first thing to do is to render our occupation of Valencia, presently unstable and precarious, complete and methodical. The second is to procure an effective alliance with the Emir…and the Reverend Father Geronimo here has offered to negotiate it.
“Thanks to our weapons, thanks to the science of our era, we’ve arrived here, rather like Captain Cook on an Oceanian island, among savages. Supported by the Moors, we’ll be invincible. We’ll be the masters of the world, the kings of the Earth...
“In sum, I don’t think that have anything to regret in this scarcely-banal adventure…and after what we’ve been though these last three years, the prospect of having to conquer half of Span shouldn’t give us pause.”
During this debate, the monk, left to himself, had explored the marvels that he found within range. The studious scholar and bold innovator, whose boldness of thought had made the Franciscan colleges and his disciples at the University tremble, the luminous brain that enclosed all the science of his era, was bewildered and distressed by this first, somewhat intimate, contact with a new civilization.
The cold meal that Jasmin served him on a corner of the table began a series of astonishments: he examined, and carefully tasted, corned beef, biscuits and chocolate. The aluminum mug intrigued him with its lightness. He studied the fork curiously, and finally decided that it was a backscratcher, like the one the voluptuous emir possessed. The oil lamp fascinated him. He switched an electric pocket torch on and off fifty times. Then it was the turn of the office equipment: the pencils, the steel-nibbed pens and the typewriter—which he was very eager to try, with Etcheverry’s help.
His keen sense of observation informed him of the use of the tobacco-jar and the old “Jacob” left there by the clerk. He stuffed a pipe for himself, but was astonished not to be able to light it by means of the electric lamp as the others had by means of their lighters. The obliging Lénac struck a match for him, however—another prodigy!—and it was with the pipe in his mouth that he admired, once again, an alarm-clock and the bracelet watch of which he had been made a gift, before plunging into an examination of newspapers and books.
He swore to himself that he would soon be able to decipher the strange “manuscripts” fluently. The saucy images in the Vie Parisienne and the Culotte rouge disturbed him, as did the inevitable photographs of naked women pinned to the office wall. A date in Roman numerals that he encountered at the foot of the title-page of a novel—MCMXIV—bewildered him. What calendar did these singular Gauls use, then?
The black notebook, however, which he found close at hand—that grimoire full of kabbalistic formulae—troubled him even more. His vigorous rationality saw nothing but nonsense and illusions in the occult sciences—astrology, magic, sorcery—and in so-called pacts with Infernal spirits, but he believed in the spagyric art18 and in a possible domination of all the natural forces by the man who discovered the Great Arcana…so did his new friends possess the secret of the Philosopher’s Stone?
In spite of the attraction of these marvels, he did not want to delay his mission to the Empire any longer. A letter in Latin was composed under his direction and typed by Renard, then authorized with the Company stamp. He slipped it into a bag with a few truly royal presents: the alarm clock, a gasoline lighter made from two Boche cartridges welded together, a tin of sardines and one of corned beef, and an aluminum flask full of rum. And at eleven o’clock in the evening, refusing any escort but accepting a pocket torch for the journey through the orange wood, he set out for the Moorish camp, beneath the stars that would serve as his guide.
At the same time, at the other side of the village, the motorcyclist set off for Valencia to obtain news.
IV. Nénesse’s Booze-Up
By force of habit, the troopers had gone to be in their bolt-holes, but they were st
ifling there. At daybreak, all the poilus went outside to breathe the air that was arriving gently from the south-west, laden with the perfume of orange-trees.
The major’s speech had satisfied curiosities, and even the thorny question of furloughs, which had been indefinitely postponed and relegated to secondary status in the presence of the advertised Golden Age and the perpetual booze-up. Anyway, planet or not, the promised leave had come, since they were at the rear! In spite of everything, excitement was running high; the proximity of Valencia had a deleterious effect on discipline.
Cipriani tried to organize the relief of the guard-posts, but no one wanted to go. The priority of tours of guard duty was contested. He was obliged to issue formal orders, in spite of the murmurs and protests.
“Why aren’t they sending us to relieve the men in town?” demanded Corporal Moreau, ordered to a listening-post. “That would be more useful, since there are no more Boche.”
“We’ll get there,” the Corsican condescended to reply. “Patience. We need news. The bike’s gone to fetch some.”
“We could still set out before he comes back.”
“The lieutenant hasn’t said anything. I can’t send you just like that.” And to save himself from having to argue with an inferior, Cipriani shouted angrily at an idler who was in the process of sucking fresh oranges: “Who’s been to the orange grove? I forbade anyone to leave the sector. There’ll be trouble, damn it! It’s like that cannon, which I told you to move...”
The members of the new General Staff formed the previous evening in the office had, for the most part, accepted the situation and were sleeping blissfully after the final grog. The idealist Monocard, however, overexcited by the grandiose prospects he had glimpsed, had spent the night smoking cigarettes and pacing back and forth feverishly outside the kitchens.
After two hours’ sleep, Renard had joined him. His responsibilities were weighing upon him. Soon, he became anxious, not having seen the motorcyclist return, and communicated his fears to the sublieutenant. At two o’clock, Etcheverry having not reminded him in time about the existence of an acetylene searchlight, he had two fires lit on the tower. When daylight came, he gave Cipriani orders to repair the 75mm cannon—it only needed a new wheel fitting—and to make an inventory of the munitions: shells, grenades and cartridges of every sort.