Timeslip Troopers

by Théo Varlet

  For an entire week, the medical orderly, closely watched by Pedro and Sanchez, who had orders to stab him at the first suspect gesture, trained Tortorado and eight other inquisitor in the employment of Lebels, revolvers and grenades. As for the machine guns, as one of them jammed at the first shot and the other was damaged, they were kept in reserve.

  The sessions had taken place in the inferior crypt, with all openings blocked, in order that the detonations would not be heard outside, by the light of smoky torches—and once or twice, Moors of Bureau B, captured by stealth in taverns, served as targets.

  At the end of the week, Tortorado judged that his men were sufficiently instructed. It was necessary, in any case, to economize with the ammunition. He told Pedro and Sanchez to thank the Inquisitor in Toledo and to take Paincarat back to him. The latter received a sealed letter, which he was told to deliver himself.

  “Go, and sin no more, my son. This is your reward. It is the finest you can receive.”

  The wretch threw himself on the ground and kissed Tortorado’s feet. The latter raised him up gently, gave him the accolade, and confided him to the care of Pedro and Sanchez.

  The secret letter addressed to R. F. Esteban Segura said:

  I have obtained from the bearer information precious to the good of the Holy Church. Pedro and Sanchez will explain how I hope soon to put an end to the demons with their own weapons. Spare him torture, therefore—but the leaven of evil persists in him; he cannot be returned to the demons without danger, and he would risk contaminating our brothers if he lived among them. For the good of his soul, therefore, and for the greater glory of the Church, have him put on to the pyre after he has been given absolution.

  Clutching the precious note to his heart, dreaming of the magnificent reward that awaited him in Toledo, Paincarat meekly followed his guides into the tunnel.

  IV. Attrition

  The rain fell interminably for days on end, from a leaden sky: a December rain, penetrating the entirety of the old Moorish palace—so cheerful and pleasant in summer but direly uncomfortable in winter—with an icy damp. For want of chimneys, they were reduced to braziers, which were toxic and asphyxiating. Furthermore, the gas-plant broke down and they no longer had anything but candles by way of illumination, and they had run out of coal; the bunker was empty and the weekly convoy from Andalusia was already more than a week late, probably because of the waterlogged roads. The poor lighting was not the most painful restriction, however; tobacco and coffee had been totally lacking for a fortnight and their substitutes—dried lettuce leaves and roasted acorns—made no contribution to reviving the good humor of the Frenchmen.

  The rain was falling, therefore, that morning. Having no desire to go to the factories—which were mostly stagnating—the melancholy troopers strolled around under the arcades of the Court of Myrtles, pausing on each circuit at the braziers smoking at the four corners. No more summer uniforms, cork helmets, espadrilles and naval costumes! The ten men of the daily guard in Port-sur-Seille or at the palace machine guns were not alone in dressing in regulation uniforms; they had all readopted blue caps, the heavy boots and steel helmets. Balaclavas and mittens made their reappearance, and sheepskins hid the insignia and decorations stitches on sleeves during the initial intoxication of the conquest. Those triumphant illusions were far away now…the conversations reflected the mournfulness of the sky.

  “Bloody hell, is it going to rain like this all the time?” complained Pilon, between two bouts of coughing. “It’s worse than in the trenches. Hurrah for the war in which one can get killed!”

  “There’s no need for war; we’ll all end up kicking the bucket here. Count up the chaps we’ve lost—not to mention the Moors—since we’ve been in the Golden Age, as the doc calls it. Twelve the time Nénesse came back all alone; Titi-la-Vache, Haricot; and then there’s been Chabert, Delesalle, and I don’t know who else…the five or six who weren’t seen again after boat races and blow-outs with the girls...”

  “That’s true; there’s only sixty-one of us in the company now...”

  “Bah!” said Totor, in another group. “Don’t go on about it. Winter only lasts a couple of weeks here. It’s like in the colonies. My brother was in Tonkin; it was wet like this there, but it won’t last.”

  “I bet it wasn’t freezing there. When we were at Verdun, remember, before coming to Port-sur-Seille, what did we get? It was so cold they were handing out our wine in pieces.”

  “I wonder what’s become of the lads in the trenches—the ones who stayed in Lorraine?”

  “Doesn’t matter—we’re better off here. Do you want to go back there?”

  “I don’t know. There’s real tobacco there, and real juice, not salad leaves and bits of wood…but what’s lacking here most of all is furloughs. Just for twenty-four hours, to take a little trip to Montparno…to see the Rue de la Joie—I’d like that.”

  “You can’t complain—you’ve got full pockets, you’re rolling in gold. We’ve never had so much moolah.”

  “Yes, but with all these fake bills…another four got passed off on me yesterday...”

  That same day, Major Thévenard showed Adjutant Cipriani out of his office. The latter was abashed and crestfallen.

  “There’s no doubt about it, my friend—you’ve got it. You need treatment. Do what I told you, and come back tomorrow.

  Cipriani drew away, but Lénac was waiting on the landing.

  “You’ve come for the photos,” said the major. Can you imagine, that bugger Cipriani has the pox!”

  “Oh! Him too?”

  “You know about others, then?”

  “Yes. At least one other.”

  “The Emir, I’ll wager?”

  “No, I know him better than the Emir. I believe it’s me.”

  “Shit! Where the devil did you catch it?”

  “Must be a gift from the Italian.”

  “Madame Casanova? Him too! Good God! What about Christopher Columbus, then? Who could have…not a Spaniard, or a Moor…no, you must have had it before.”

  “I swear to you that I’ve never had anything.”

  “They all say that. I want to believe you, mind—but it’ll be necessary to do some research. Fortunately, there are mercury mines here! Come on, show me...”

  The reader may consult Candide if he wants to imagine the ulterior propagation of the scourge in Valencia, where relationships between the sexes had the ingenuous facility to which the American importation put an end. As for the discovery of its origin, that took place a few days later, dramatically.

  Like many others, and in spite of Renard’s exhortations to prudence, Jasmin and Saucisson frequently left their beds and spent the night with the cyclist nuns, but their duties recalled them to the palace at dawn—in the brief days of December—and the hirelings of the Inquisition, informed of this particularity, took advantage of it. Lénac, returning from a party himself, found them one morning lying on the flagstones at the crossroads of the fountain. Saucisson was already cold. Jasmin was dying with his throat cut.

  “I’m dying, don’t go,” he stammered to the photographer, who was leaning over him. “Let me confess, like the first Christians. You can pass my words on to our Holy Father...”

  He confessed his sins—but suddenly, Lénac straightened up. “You…you…with the governor’s wife? Oh, you thought you were cured, did you? So it’s you who has contaminated…me and Cipriani, and the governor, and who knows how many more!”

  But poor Jasmin was dying; nobly, Lénac forgave him.”

  The victims of this double murder were given funerals appropriate to their rank. The croix de guerre was conferred on them posthumously. Geronimo officiated, but as a state of reinforced siege had just been pronounced, as the poilus had taken immediate reprisals against the Valencian masses, demonstrations were held at the exit from the mass. A riot broke out, more serious than all the preceding ones. The police charged, and there were dead and wounded on both sides.

  Before Ja
smin and Saucisson, five or six men of the eighth had disappeared inexplicably—in the course of excursions at sea, mostly. Afterwards, as if a wind of desperate fanaticism had over the city, seven other troopers of minor rank had their throats cut in less than a week, in taverns and whorehouses. It was necessary to renounce going out alone or without an escort.

  By virtue of a circumstance that was more than inconvenient, the aura of fear that surrounded the Moorish police had diminished considerably; their grenades, charged with poor quality black powder, only went off half the time, and sometimes in the hands of the grenadiers. That black powder was the sole result obtained by the munitions factory; all other efforts had failed pitifully, or had not even been attempted, and one of Renard’s gravest anxieties was the shortage of ammunition. All that remained in the palace were a few machine-gun strips and three thousand cartridges—and as many more in Port-sur-Seille, where the guard redoubled its vigilance.

  The rumor soon went around that the convoy from Andalusia, awaited in vain for a fortnight, had been attacked by considerable Spanish forces, the merchandise stolen, the truck and motor-cycle burned, and the Moors of the escort massacred, along with three troopers, including the motorcyclist Vidal.

  The news was all too true; a cavalry reconnaissance confirmed it, and also reported that the Spaniards remained camped in large numbers on the sides of the road. To dislodge them would require a serious operation, which the execrable winter weather required to be postponed. Communications therefore remained cut off, and the isolation in which the Frenchmen and Abdul Khan’s Moors found themselves henceforth augmented the discouragement in the palace and redoubled the audacity of the Tortoradists in the city.

  Deprived of raw materials, the half a dozen factories that were still functioning were closed down; only the alcohol factory remained. In the course of recent weeks it had attracted the majority of the directors, disappointed in their hopes of unlimited profits. The financial success of the liquor-manufacturers excited competition, and everyone strove to invent a new product endowed with a prestigious name. Lénac’s poster business boomed, and he could not keep up with demand.

  In the city, riots and skirmishes multiplied. The people rendered unemployed by the factories, who had been conclusively laid off, were organized into gangs subsidized by the Inquisition, and became the most determined adversaries of the Blue-Helmets. High food prices, and the looting in which the Mors and poilus were indulging again, completed the indisposition of the rest of the population. The Liberté-Libertad’s propaganda was increasingly impotent to combat Tortotado’s occult opposition. The false banknotes multiplied with fantastic rapidity. The newly rich, half the students and the distillery workers, numbering four hundred and fifty, were soon virtually the only defenders of the new regime.

  To complete the misfortune, the pro-Stranger party, whose strength had previously frightened even Tortorado, broke up into political sects—humanitarians, socialists and anarchists—at odds with one another. Geronimo, the apostle of Progress, was bitterly disappointed, and his partial responsibility for the disarray completed his demoralization. He was as angry as a hen that has hatched ducks’ eggs to find his pupils becoming enemy brothers, proselytes held up in various phases of the progressivist evolution that he had traversed like a meteor and surpassed successively. Poor great man! The increasingly clear mistrust, the half-confessed hostility that he encountered in the bosom of his Order—the Order that he had raised so high by virtue of the abasement of the Dominicans!—ended up making him doubt everything, even religion. He abandoned socialism for the anarchism of Elisée Reclus and Sébastien Faure. He had just discovered Nietzsche, and regretted only having in his library a single volume of his Selected Works.

  The major’s disappointments were no less. Seduced by the ease of assimilation of his Moorish pupils, he had galloped ahead and led them with drums beating. Amazed by the revelations of anatomy, the young students had taken to carving and stitching with increasing boldness. Several times, the doctor was obliged to intervene and repair the mistakes of the apprentice surgeons. In spite of that, he had the temerity to give them a lecture on animal grafting and the work of Alexis Carrel.

  He had been back in the palace for two hours and was playing cards with Dupuy and Lénac, waiting for the Emir, when his laboratory assistant irrupted into the room in panic. The experiment, although carried out according to his indications, had not succeeded; the hemorrhage had not stopped...

  Thévenard was alarmed by his inference, and ran to the University at the double, in spite of his paunch—which had increased significantly. Horror! He had guessed only too well. The students, jealous of Carrel’s laurels, had embarked upon a super-graft. Enthusiastically, hoping for marvelous results of such a hybridization, which would realize Geronimo’s long-term educational utopias immediately, they had taken two Moors who were being treated in the clinic for minor wounds, and two Spaniards, one of whom had had a recent operation for appendicitis, and, slicing through their necks—secundem artem,27 and with the requisite antiseptic precautions—had attempted to suture the Spanish heads on the Moorish bodies, and vice versa.

  “Oh, the little rascals!” the major repeated, nonplussed, and foreseeing the capital that the Tortoradists would extract from that scientific sabotage.

  Henceforth, he renounced instructing his students, went to the University less and less and spent the greater part of his time with the Emir. The latter caused him a great deal of anxiety, for his narcotic use had brought him to death’s door. The ether, cocaine and laudanum having run out, he had confined himself to chloroform, and there was no means of stopping him. In response to a refusal by the major, he had nearly run him through with his scimitar; then he had begged, offering him the free disposition of his harem.

  And he’s big enough to take care of himself, damn it, Thévenard thought.

  He made use of the harem and ceased remonstrating.

  As for Renard, he was eaten away by cares and anxieties. Two new developments that further aggravated the situation, already severely compromised, ended up depriving him of sleep.

  For some time, the aviator had been giving unequivocal signs of mental derangement. Since Renard had put the brake on his excursions of platonic conquest by means of little Union Jacks, he had remained perpetually angry, and it was difficult to persuade him to undertake authentic reconnaissance flights—a service all the more necessary because of the major troop movements taking place in the vicinity of Toledo. He lost his temper and hurled the contents of his glass of progressinette in the lieutenant’s face when he was held responsible for the loss of the Andalusian convoy, which effectively resulted from his neglecting to fly over the route in advance. He was put in irons for two days.

  One morning, having given the slip to Etcheverry, who had been commissioned to accompany him in the air and to furnish him with the alcohol required by the aircraft, he took off without warning, with two choirboys to whom he was supposed to be teaching English. He was never see again, and the Emir reported that he had offered to take him “to heaven” with his little passengers.

  The Emir’s death, caused by an excessive inhalation of chloroform, had consequences that were just as grave and more immediate. The question of succession gave rise to battles and massacres in the Moorish palace, between the partisans of his multiple offspring, legitimate and natural, and those of the collateral branch. The rupture of communications with Cordova, prevented them from obtaining the advice of the Caliph, who would have cut the dispute short, and Renard could not intervene in a problem of internal politics. The regent finally elected by the army was a young Islamic fanatic. Conflicts were immediately produced between him and the General Staff, and it became impossible to count on the Moors in case of need. Even the police relaxed their control considerably.

  That was tested when an operation was decided against the Convent of the Incarnation, that hotbed of revolt and false money, which Geronimo never ceased to denounce. Three poilus who had vent
ured in had not returned. The Moors refused to venture into the lair. The secret exits having remained undiscoverable, as well as the subterranean floor whose existence was certain, it was decided to blow up the entire building. Two tons of black powder were taken inside, and policemen charged with digging a hole for the mine. Avoiding the surveillance of Cipriani—considerably weakened by his disease and the intensive mercury treatment—the faint-hearted Moors thought they could see a ready-dug mine-hole in the gaping orifice of a conduit that slanted beneath the walls of the convent, and placed the explosive there. The conduit ended in a cistern. It rained. The mine fizzled out.

  Renard sensed that this ridiculous error was heaven’s final warning—something akin to the “prodigies” in which the Ancients recognized the precursory signs of the fall of Empires. An atmosphere of menace and imminent catastrophe enveloped the land. The men of the eighth were murmuring, having observed that thirty-one out of the original eighty had perished since the timeslip. The General Staff themselves, except for Monocard and the monk, no longer believed even in the partial success of their fine humanitarian projects. Far from having been able to extend beyond Valencia a domination that they had thought at first was destined to subjugate Spain and the world, they sensed that their last partisans were tightly grouped around them.

  Several of the newly rich had left the city with their hoards, in solid gold, attempting to reach Andalusia in order to shelter themselves from the reprisals that the Inquisition would not fail to exact, when it returned to power. There were smiles among the hidalgos as they passed on news in whispers; the priests were announcing openly that all the Blue-Helmets would perish within a week. One morning, the governor, having been summoned to the palace, did not come; he had left the city during the night.