by Théo Varlet
“The conqueror is this man—my brother the Gaul,” said the Emir, nobly. “He holds all our lives in his hands.”
There was a brief deliberation. Abdul Khan thought that they should make an example and cut off the heads of the twelve notables, as he had done in similar cases. The monk advised adding Tortorado and the principal inquisitors, in order to ensure the tranquility of the city. Monocard, by contrast, wanted to win hearts by a general pardon. The major, supported by Etcheverry, was in favor of punitive taxation.
“With the cash, we’ll have all the partisans we want. Come down hard on the treasury, Renard.”
That was, indeed, the most judicious course of action. Life was granted to everyone, but a ransom of five hundred kilos of gold—a weight that the monk was charged with translating into Spanish coinage—was to be delivered an hour after the entry of the allied troops; otherwise, the city would be looted.
The governor, heartbroken, returned to his fellow citizens to have this dolorous condition fulfilled, and his eleven companions were kept as hostages, while a squadron of Moors went forward as scouts, in order to prepare for the allies’ entrance.
That took place via the same street where the poilus had fallen into the trap two days before. Either by virtue of fear of reprisals in spite of the pledge given or authentic horror of the foreign devils, the Arabs of the city, who came to cheer their brothers and liberators, the Jews and the Christian converts who had high hopes of the new order of things, were alone, with the riff-raff, in lining the streets along the route. There was no one to be seen but tavern-waiters, grooms, tent-makers, market-traders with bare arms, children in rags and prostitutes in yellow mantles and red stockings—but behind the peep-holes of doors and the slats of shutters, and on the heights of terraces, an invisible crowd, hate-filled and wonderstruck, was watching the progress of the procession.
Two trumpeters headed the march, filling the narrow Medieval streets with their blasts. Then, on the rattling and jolting truck—the truck chosen by the Emir in preference to his customary elephant as a triumphant vehicle—Abdul Khan was enthroned with the monk by his side, between the two machine-guns and their gunners, shaded by green palms. Renard, the true conqueror, followed modestly on horseback, amid the two confused General Staffs, to which the interpreter Nénesse had been added.
Then came the motorcycle, with Lénac in the side-car; the cyclists, juddering at slow speed over the cobblestones but objects of terrified admiration nevertheless; Adjutant Cipriani, the bearer of the tricolor standard; the poilus, in fours, with their arms shouldered, helmeted, grey with dust, but superb and exceedingly amused; the elephant, the glory of the Emir; the Moorish orchestra, tambourines, cymbals, pipes and horns; the standards and smaller flags; the cavalry, draped in burnooses, lances in hand, grim-faced; and, finally, the army’s retinue, the camels of the harem, the eunuchs, the grooms, the cooks—the vague and variegated host of Moorish foreigners, with whom the city’s Moorish inhabitants immediately mingled.
At the crossroads of the fountain, the palace-fortress raised up its high crenellated walls. They went alongside them on a street to the right, finally emerging into a large sloping square. The palace formed the upper side of it with the cathedral, decorated with gold and mosaics; on the far side stood the somber and massive façade of the Convent of the Incarnation, and then, opposite the palace, the vast buildings of the University, in the Arabic style, in pale stone, as if gilded by the sun; a little further away was the government building.
The troopers and a few hundred cavalrymen formed up in the square. Renard, the Emir, the monk and the two General Staffs gathered on the steps of the palace, and the deputations filed past them, in order.
Don Pedro Casanova and the Corregidor, in a black velvet costume with a gold chain around his neck, successively introduced the magistrature and the University, in black, red, mauve and green togas; the brotherhoods of penitents in blue, white, grey and violet; then came the guilds of jewelers, weavers, coppersmiths, tanners and twenty others, with their banners, who came spontaneously to implore the grace of protection for their markets, storehouses and shops, or an exemption from billeting, and to deposit their particular gifts, in addition to the gross taxation—which was collected in the meantime.
At the feet of the conquerors, in two esparto baskets, gold coins were heaped up: doubloons, quadruples, dinars, piastres, cruzados and escudos. The Jews, alerted to the fact that freedom of religion was about to be proclaimed, came forward, with yellow roundels on their maroon robes, to offer the “blue-helmets” lodging. The students, pupils of the monk, and the Franciscans in their brown robes introduced themselves as friends, congratulating Fray Geronimo on having escaped his torturers and having returned among them. They succeeded in obtaining an exemption from the taxation for their convent.
With a reluctance that was only too visible, and only after repeated summonses, the temporal clergy followed. The bishop, at the head of the canons of the cathedral, had the boldness to present himself with an aspergillum in his hand, and, under the guise of a blessing, performed an exorcism. He was threatened with the confiscation of his cathedral, in addition to the four churches already designated to serve as mosques and synagogues.
Geronimo, however, his voice hoarse from serving as an interpreter, along with Etcheverry, to the delegations that expressed themselves in the vernacular, insisted that the Dominican inquisitors be compelled to appear. A patrol, dispatched into the palace-fortress that they habitually inhabited as soon as the city was entered, had not found any of them. Even the archives of the Holy Office had disappeared; the prisoners were lying in their cells with their throats cut; all that remained were the coffers of gold and the instruments of torture, which had been too heavy to carry. According to Casanova, the Dominicans and the entire personnel of the Inquisition had left Valencia. Geronimo wanted the city to be searched methodically, in order to discover their hiding place, but Renard had other things to think about and the matter was postponed.
The five hundred kilos of gold having been collected and duly weighed, one bag at time, and then stored with the treasures of the Inquisition, the session was ended, to the great joy of the poilus, who had been standing in the sun for two hours. Shouts went up: “To the big booze-up!”
But Cipriani—Adjutant Cipriani—was on the lookout for the squall. “A booze-up?” he shouted. “All in good time! In the meantime, you’re going to come with me, in good order, and get your billets, and duty-rosters. You know what happened to the others. We have to make sure that you’re not nabbed in your turn.”
And the seventy obedient poilus went into the palace, into which the General Staffs had already retired. Squads of Moors, under the direction of Lénac, were busy scraping away the monastic whitewash in order to make the marble and mosaics shine again. The splendor of the place and the comfort of the apartments brought forth cries of admiration.
“It’s not bad, here!”
“It’s nice and cool.”
“And the beds! We can have one each!”
“We’ll be in clover!”
“Look—he’s already taking his photos!”
Nénesse, who was all too familiar with the place, guided a squad to the torture-chamber. His indignation, still fresh, was reanimated. “This is the mates’ tomb. Look—that’s where I was. There’s just enough left of the table to make kindling. That’s where they pulled the poor girls by the hair. And that door, that’s where I made my escape, with that fellow Ali…”
The palace-fortress thus became the barracks and general headquarters of the French. Two machine guns placed on the steps guarded the entrance. Another defended the postern by the stables burned during the first occupation.
The Emir was lodged in another, smaller palace. Some of the Moors were billeted in the Puerta del Sol quarter, others in tents outside the walls. They took charge of guarding the city gates. They also formed the police force. To replace the alguazils, immediately disarmed, four hundred elite cava
lrymen, scimitars by their sides, clubs in hand and each additionally armed with two grenades, went around the town maintaining order and protecting the dwellings of the inhabitants who had paid the ransom and were displaying tricolor insignia.
They could not abandon Port-sur-Seille, which remained an arsenal and place of safety in case of misfortune, nor could they leave it to be guarded by Moors alone. In order to overcome the reluctance of the troopers to leave the conquered city, where they awaited all pleasures, even for half a day, Renard decided that the men on duty over there should have the services of six harem women—to serve as cooks, of course—and Cipriani took responsibility for organizing a duty rota.
On the first day, the motorcycle and the truck made several trips back and forth, bringing to the palace boxes of cartridges—few of which remained, alas, in view of the excessive consumption made during the battle—a few barrels of rum and almost all the bottles from the cellar, removed under Jasmin’s surveillance. Renard personally supervised the placing of the precious Machine under lock and key. It was transferred to the tower a few days later.
After the siesta, toward sunset, the party recommenced in Valencia. To impress the population, the aviator performed some remarkable acrobatics over the rooftops: loops, spiral descents and the “dead leaf.” Lénac, charmed by his previous flight, had offered himself as a passenger; he climbed out of the cockpit green around the gills, and threatened to lodge a complaint against Bennsbury—whose evolutions, he affirmed, had put his cinematic apparatus out of order.
Then, while the Moors and the troopers banqueted in the cool air of the square, with the aid of provisions offered by the inhabitants, and the General Staff dined for the first time in the Lion Hall, a firework display organized with the aid of red, white, blue and green flares brought the terrified admiration of the Valencians to a peak.
During the night, however, on the battlements of the Convent of the Incarnation—which Renard, in spite of the urging of the monk, had neglected to have searched—a shadow leaned over: Tortorado, with his hand on his chin, somberly contemplated the city delivered to the foreign devils, the demons who played sacrilegiously with the stars in the sky!
VII. The Blue Helmets’ Triumph
Naturally, there was some excess in the early days. The Moors and the poilus remembered their murdered comrades, and affirmed their authority as conquerors harshly. Under the slightest pretext, for an insulting glance or on a whim, the new police forces did not hesitate to unsheathe their weapons and break heads, and to loot the houses in the vicinity of the disorder. Several poilus, having seen the regulatory salute refused by haughty individuals, forced them to come to the palace every morning to render them menial services. They boasted of their Neronian exploits in the Unicorn Hall, which served as a refectory.
“The civvies? Me, I treat them to kicks up the bum!”
“Me, I’ve got a genuine archduke for a flunkey—a hidalgo, as they say. I make him polish my boots. And they have to shine!”
“Me, I do better than that. I have my feet washed by some sort of priest. I think he’s a bishop. And when he doesn’t do it to my liking, I make him lick the soles. He crawls like a dog! Here, Azor, I say to him...”
Two whims of this sort had a tragic outcome.
Titi-la-Vache came home one evening triumphant. “Oh, you can talk, lads—the fun I’ve had...I’ve been having a nice time with a chick who’s been doing turns on my knob for a couple of days, and I was in the middle of humping her when her husband turns up. ‘Don’t move,’ I say to him, without stopping, but taking out my revolver, ‘or I’ll blow your head off.’ The bugger doesn’t make a squeak. Me, I finish my little business, and to complete the joke, I make him serve me refreshments afterwards. He was hopping mad, and I think the little wife must have got a good hiding when I’d gone—but the station-master’s wine was excellent.”
It was so excellent that two hours after this wonderful adventure, Titi-la-Vache rendered his soul to God in atrocious agony—poisoned, the major declared.
To set an example, the husband and wife were duly shot—not to mention all the other inhabitants of the house, who were set ablaze along with the building by a more or less official delegation of poilus—and the typed judgment was attached to the doors of the churches, mosques and synagogues.
The second victim of a similar vengeance, Rousselet, nicknamed Haricot, was found one morning in the harbor area, strangled with a rosary and frightfully mutilated. This time, the guilty parties escaped, but a state of reinforced siege was proclaimed and the Moorish police lent themselves to it with a joyful heart, along with their grenades.
The vigor of the repression eliminated any danger of revolt. Valencia no longer put up any resistance, and the conquerors reigned over an enslaved people. In any case, since the day when five hundred of the most notable inhabitants, requisitioned to dig long trenches on the battlefield, had buried the six thousand lime-covered cadavers of the defeated army with their own hands, it seemed that all hope of deliverance had been buried with them, forever. They might perhaps see the last of the Moors one day, but the Devils had the power of Hell behind them; they were invincible by terrestrial arms; only the spiritual arms of the Holy Inquisition, when it decided to act, could prevail against them. It was necessary, in the meantime, to suffer them and bow down to them.
For three days, Renard turned a blind eye to the excesses of his men, but on the fourth, at Monocard’s instigation, he gathered the troopers in the courtyard of the fountain and made a little speech.
“My friends,” he said, in substance, “we’re not here simply to amuse ourselves. You’re aware that I’ve given you much more freedom than in the past, but it’s necessary that discipline is maintained, and that you make yourselves as useful as you can. A civilizing mission is incumbent on all of us: that of giving the benefits of 20th century progress to the backward peoples of whom fortunate circumstances have made us the masters. And the first condition of arriving at that goal is not to make too many enemies among the inhabitants...”
A daily wage of three “quadruples” of gold allotted to each man contributed greatly to taking some of the tension out of their relationships with the populace. Besides, the personal attractions of the French gradually conquered feminine sympathies, and the civilians found a singular charm in the alcohol that was distributed randomly along with blows.
The poilus’ frequentation of the taverns and outlying districts—where lively hostesses taught them the fandango, not to mention the Andalusian dancers who performed in the nude to the accompaniment of castanets—became less tumultuous. By way of reciprocity, in the ex-torture chambers of the Holy Office, which had, in response to Nénesse’s suggestion, been converted into dance-halls, the local young women were initiated into the subtleties of new dances, from the waltz and the boston to the tango and the two-step, to the accompaniment of an accordion.
While waiting for the work of civilization to be organized, and in order to give the men something to do, other diversions were also organized that were more appropriate to the hot climate: bathing in the thermals of the palace or on the beaches; boat-races; gymnastic competitions; bull-fights, and so on.
Among the General Staff, it was the monk who took his work most seriously, and communicated impulsion to the others, thanks to his rapid progress in the French language. The boxes of books found in the cellar had been gifted to him, and he devoted himself to their avid study. He read Rabelais and Montaigne almost fluently; he extracted from Calvin the desire to reform the Church; and at the same time, he was already attacking the moderns, with a marked predilection for the reformist tirades of Voltaire and Rousseau in favor of the humble and the oppressed.
Fearing the total subversion of his reason, Monocard had given him a few vague explanations of the mysteries of future dates, but his genius perceived the greatness of the task in which he was collaboration, and he lived in a perpetual fever, aided by the alcohol of which he made liberal use at the General
Staff’s table. The civilization of the 20th century, which he discovered en bloc, carried away his enthusiasm, and with mad impatience, the seething fervor of a neophyte, he tried to assimilate it in order to apply it to his surroundings, to impose it on his compatriots—to the human race, of which he would be the regenerator.
For the moment, named Grand Master of the University, he had resumed his courses, and transmitted his innumerable discoveries to his students at random. A dozen poilus—including the motorcyclist Vidal, holder of a baccalaureate—seduced by regal rewards, were teaching the students French. Monocard promised lectures on philosophy when the young students were able to understand them. The major, in spite of the burdens imposed on him by his hygienic ministry, accepted the title of Professor of Surgery, Anatomy and Obstetrics, and, as his demonstrations did not necessarily require oral commentaries, he began his course immediately with a few operations and elementary dissections.
The aviator, also solicited by Geronimo—for the latter held him in high esteem during the fortnight that the reformational crisis lasted—refused to initiate pupils in the aeronautical art, but he took it into his head to teach English to some of the children in the cathedral choir, with the baroque design of making clergymen of them. In addition, under the pretext of reconnoitering the locality, he used up a lot of fuel in long excursions, on which he took a collection of small British flags, for mysterious reasons, which he did not bring back.
Renard, the “Director of Operations,” was overwhelmed by work. All the practical care of organizing the conquest devolved on him, for his worthy “brother,” the Emir, in spite of his new title of “Generalissimo of the Allied Troops,” was primarily occupied in completing his harem with the aid of a few pretty Valencian maidens—and in spite of the keenness of his intelligence, the gifts of civilization that pleased him most, for the moment, were Pernod, Chartreuse…and ether.