Timeslip Troopers

by Théo Varlet

  “But they’re in chains, I tell you. I saw them being carried into the dungeon; they were asleep.”

  “They were pretending. It’s a ruse in order to find out who their friends are. Their vengeance will be terrible. Remember...”

  That anxiety, fuelled by sharp memories, found echoes almost everywhere...

  In the torture chamber, the Grand Inquisitor, assisted by Alvarez, the torturer and some hirelings, proceeded with the interrogation of Melchisedech.

  The Licensed Victualler was stripped of his clothing and attached by his wrists to a pulley in the vault. A clever system of bondage prevented him from bending his legs. A brazier full of burning coals was placed under his feet.

  “You have stolen the Demons’ strong-box?”

  The unfortunate confessed.

  “What does it contain?”

  “I don’t know.”

  A lie, evidently! The rope grated on its pulley and Melchisedech, lowed by a notch, touched the coals with his feet. A frightful odor of grilled flesh, which Tortorado breathed in with a quivering nose, spread through the room.

  “Confess,” the inquisitor resumed. “There are secret documents?”

  “I confess!” Melchisedech replied, very rapidly, howling in pain. “Yes, yes—secret documents!”

  “Would you care to open the coffer?”

  “Yes, yes, I’ll open it—but let me go, for pity’s sake!”

  “That’s good,” said Tortorado. “Suspend the questioning. Take the accused into the vestibule, so that he can open the coffer. Give him a hammer and a chisel. The Demon leaders have been unchained, have they not? Bring them here as soon as the Jew has opened the coffer, for the confrontation.”

  The orders were carried out. Two minutes later, the sound of hammer-blows on metal began to be heard. Melchisedech, the Licensed Victualler, was doing battle with the detonator of the 220mm shell...

  VI. At Top Speed

  In their dungeon, the prisoners of the General Staff were indulging in pessimistic comments. Four guards, armed to the teeth, had just unchained them, and were watching them while waiting for orders.

  “This is to put us to the torture. What are they going to use?” groaned Dupuy, rubbing his aching wrists and ankles.

  Etcheverry addressed the question to the guards, but they contented themselves with sniggering and spitting scornfully.

  “Me, I think I might prefer to be burned right away, like the old man,” Lénac opined.

  “They might at least give us something to drink!” the major exclaimed. “I’ve never had such a thirst. And a stomach-ache to boot. It’s an infection, this! Oh, the swine, the swine! What did they use as a narcotic to knock us out? Henbane? Belladonna? Opium?”

  Lénac began to speculate as to the probable varieties of torture that awaited them; the rack, water, the pincers, splinters under the fingernails, molten lead...

  “I’ve also heard mention of a little bath in boiling oil. Do you think one can survive that, Doctor?”

  “It’s driving me mad. I’ve got a belly-ache, that’s all I know. Too bad—I have to relieve myself!” And he retired to a corner to pull his trousers down.

  “Tell me, Doctor,” said Lénac, following his train of thought, “what about twisting the testicles—is that very dangerous?”

  Renard intervened: “Enough, Lénac—you’re boring us with your stories. Let it go. We’ll soon see...”

  But he did not finish. The thunderclap of a mighty explosion close at hand threw all five of them into the air, opening a flaming crater in the wall. Stones tumbled from the vault; the entire palace seemed to be collapsing...

  In the acrid yellow asphyxia, a gaping breach appeared—and behind it, daylight, and liberty! Still stunned by the blast, but alive and almost intact, the five prisoners pulled themselves together. Of the jailers, only one was lying under a section of masonry, crushed. The other three staggered to their feet—but Etcheverry, Renard and Dupuy launched themselves upon them, hitting them with bricks. Then their arms were distributed: daggers and halberds.

  Outside, heavy smoke was stagnating over the rubble, from which groans and cries for help in Spanish rose.

  Renard hesitated momentarily. “What about Monocard? It’s him who’s come to our rescue! Perhaps he’s still under that, a victim of his devotion!”

  “We can’t hear him, at any rate,” the doctor retorted, pulling his trousers up again as best he could. “This isn’t the moment for pity. There’s the street—it’s a matter of getting through. Let’s go!”

  “At top speed.” Dupuy put in, stumbling over the debris of the corner tower. “To the Machine!”

  “We’ll never get to Port-sur-Seille!” moaned Lénac.

  “God, I’m thirsty!” croaked Etcheverry.

  “Go, go!” Renard repeated, taking the lead.

  In the frightful disarray that followed the explosion of the shell—whether provoked by a Jew’s hammer or not, the explosion of a 220mm makes a lot of noise and packs quite a punch—no one dreamed of trying to stop them. The entire Castilian army was in the cathedral square watching the execution of the newly rich with the people. In the street into which the escapees emerged there were only peasants who had arrived too late to get a good position, and who had been occupied at the moment of the explosion in discussing the chances that the Demons had of getting out of it.

  “There they are! I told you they were all-powerful!” cried the old fisherman in the red bonnet, on seeing the five Frenchmen appear, daggers and halberds in hand. “Their spells have brought down the walls. Every man for himself! They’ll blast us with thunderbolts!”

  The women were already running away, screaming; the rest, gripped by terror, piled into the side-streets. The way was clear, and the Blue-Helmets passed by. At the crossroads of the fountain they stopped for ten seconds to drink, then ran into the street of the Puerta del Sol. It was swept clear by the same panic. At the gate, two sentinels opposed them with their pikes. They were knocked down—but poor Etcheverry fell too, his heart transpierced.

  “Dead!” the major diagnosed, at a glance.

  The fugitives, now only four in number, left the city. The plain lay before them, deserted—and a league away, on the tower of Port-sur-Seille, the tricolor flag was flying.

  “They’re holding firm over there!” said Renard. “Courage! They can see us—they’ll help us.”

  “Oh, my asthma,” wheezed the major, still feeling the effects of the wine. “I’m going to throw up.”

  “Get a move on, doctor—hurry up!”

  Dupuy and Renard each took one of his arms and dragged him at a run. Lénac followed, groaning.

  In the distance—the far distance—was the Machine, their salvation. An enormous tumult went up in the town behind them, but no one was pursuing them—yet.

  They gained ground...

  In the Tribunal Hall, Tortorado, thrown to the ground by the blast, was the first to get to his feet, covered in plaster. He was grinding his teeth, epileptically, foaming at the mouth at that supreme revolt of Hell. In the midst of the smoke, he called out to his colleagues in a thunderous voice.

  “To arms, the sacred battalion! Rally at the Arsenal!”

  Grabbing his own Browning and his bag of grenades, he strode out of the room. Outside, however, there as a void: the staircase had disappeared. The prison tower, adjacent to the vestibule, had collapsed en bloc, and from the mass of rubble emerged groans, croaks and cries of distress—but not one of them in French. Death had been merciful to the thirty-four poilus in the subterranean dungeon, all crushed in their narcotic slumber, perhaps in the middle of blissful dreams!

  Tortorado leaned over the gaping gap, and his vile nose quivered. “Finish them!” he ordered the hirelings who were arriving behind him. “Pour boiling oil into the fissures.” But there were none below but the ordinary Blue-Helmets. The leaders, lodged elsewhere, perhaps having more powerful spells at their disposal…what had become of them?

  The
Inquisitor went back through the Tribunal Hall, found the other stairway intact, and joined the six Dominicans assembled in the Arsenal, rifles shouldered and cartridge-belts buckle over their habits.

  “Where are the other two?”

  “Dead, Reverendissimo.”

  “The idiots! Follow me!”

  He took them to the General Staff’s dungeon. The sight of the breach and the halberdiers’ cadavers drew a frightful blasphemy from him. He grabbed a stupefied hireling who was contemplating the effects of the explosion and shook him ferociously.

  “The Demon leaders—where are they? Speak!”

  “They’ve gone, Reverendissimo.”

  “And you didn’t stop them, wretch? Die, then!”

  Foaming at the mouth, Tortorado aimed his pistol at the man and fired; then, stepping over the cadaver, he launched his militiamen through the breach into the street.

  There, it took several minutes to disentangle the truth from the exclamations and fantastic tales of the peasants. According to some, the five demons had vanished into thin air; according to others, they had projected flames from their eyes and mouths. Two Castilian soldiers, who had arrived from the square, had seen nothing…thus, the fugitives had gone in the direction of the fountain.

  Drunk with fury, Tortorado lost another ten minutes; he went down the street as far as the Puerta del Sol. On discovering the corpses of the two sentinels and that of the adjutant, he finally understood...

  There was a further delay, in order to return to the cathedral square and choose fifty horsemen from among the people and soldiers filling it. Six of them took the armed Reverend Fathers up on to the rumps of their mounts. Tortorado leapt on to a horse, and the pursuit began.

  On the plain, beneath the lukewarm winter sun, there was no one to be seen, but the fugitives could only find refuge in Port-sur-Seille. The Inquisitor, at the head of the troop, galloped straight for the tower.

  “There they are! There they are!”

  Between the bushes of Barbary figs in the distance, they perceived the four men. They only had five hundred meters to cover, and at the entrance to the village, a dozen poilus were running over the bridge, coming to met them...

  “Fire! Fire!” howled Tortorado.

  Awkwardly, the inexperienced Dominican fusiliers, on the rumps of their horses, shouldered arms and fired—but the discharge had no effect. They were too far away—six hundred meters. Furthermore, the horses, frightened by the detonations, scattered, and it was necessary to bring them back.

  The gallop continued...

  Out of breath and exhausted, Renard, the major, Dupuy and Lénac ran toward the footbridge, while announcing the catastrophe, in the scraps of halting sentences, to the men of the guard that Nénesse was bringing to them en masse, by virtue of an uncomprehending solicitude.

  “They have firearms!” Renard gasped. “You’d have done better to pick them off without moving from cover.”

  “I saw that you were all in, Lieutenant. It was to put steel in your legs...”

  “Thanks anyway. You still have ammunition?”

  “Ten cartridges apiece, Lieutenant. We’ve been shooting all night to defend ourselves.”

  The major, who was supporting himself on two halberds in the guise of crutches, staggered and fell, dragging Dupuy down with him. At that sight, the pursuers howled with joy and increased their speed—but a volley from the poilus felled three horses, one of which was carrying a Dominican rifleman. Dupuy and the major got up, but their fall had rendered the dire situation critical. Could they get there?

  Protecting the retreat, the poilus turned around every ten paces, methodically, in order to fire and shoot down the horsemen.

  Tortorado, leading his troop, was only thirty meters away when Renard, Lénac, the major and Dupuy reached the bridge. The Reverend Fathers fired again, killing two poilus. Both sides were firing relentlessly, and the grenades came into play. The last six poilus succeeded in getting back over the Seille, but four fell reaching the left bank. The Inquisitors’ fire, well-nourished, was becoming more accurate; the grenades were raining down...

  The French had to recover the dead men’s cartridges...

  “Quickly, Dupuy, to the Machine,” Renard croaked. “Get it going!”

  “I can’t do any more,” Dupuy moaned. With a supreme effort, however, he reached the tower and crossed the threshold, followed by the three others. He let himself fall into the seat of the Machine, and with his trembling, exhausted hands he pressed the switches, one after another...

  At the bridgehead, only Nénesse remaining standing. All his comrades had fallen, slain by the Inquisitors’ grenades and bullets. The latter, howling, had got down from their mounts and were preparing to descend into the bed of the Seille. The village’s last defender used his bayonet to drive back Tortorado’s first advance on to the bridge, but with a pistol shot, the Inquisitor smashed his right arm. He dropped his rifle, but threw himself upon his adversary furiously, gripping his cape with his left hand.

  A grenade exploded. Nénese fell dead, in the middle of a supreme cry of “Death to the...” But he did not let go. Tortorado, blinded by the discharge, took two steps and fell into the Seille with a despairing roar, amid the frantic cries of the Spaniards...

  At that exact moment, Dupuy tripped the last switch. The machine went into operation, and in a clap of thunder, the tower and its perimeter escaped, to surge forth once again in their original time and place, on the rainy night of January 17, on the Lorraine front.

  VII. The Pact of Silence

  After the fulguration and the formidable jolt of the transfer, the four escapees remained vertiginous, dazed and bewildered for several minutes, Dupuy in the bucket-seat of the Machine, Renard, the major and Lénac where they had thrown themselves down, panting hard, after their long flight from the Inquisition’s dungeon. The rectangle of the doorway, through which the soft Mediterranean winter sunlight had been flooding a short while before, was open on darkness now. The glacial cold of the night invaded the tower, A cannonade was rumbling to the north.

  Suddenly, there was a sound of footsteps approaching across the square. The four men started, and the frightened Lénac threw himself toward the door in order to close and bolt it. Renard pulled him back brutally.

  “Stay calm, idiot!”

  “Hey, Dupuy!” someone shouted from outside. “Are you up there?”

  “No,” Dupuy replied. “I’m down here, at the bottom. Is that you, Chabert?”

  “Yes, of course! With Vuillemin. We’ve brought the accumulators.”

  The accumulators! It was the two assistant radio-operators, with the accumulators, still stranded in undisplaced Port-sur-Seille. With a huge sigh of relief, Dupuy whispered the news to his three accomplices. Aloud, he added: “Come in!”

  “And above all,” Renard whispered, “complete silence about our absence.”

  The two radio-operators came in, groping in the dark. “But there isn’t any light here, Dupuy! What are you doing, then?”

  “It was the earthquake that put out the lamp,” pronounced the hoarse but familiar voice of Thévenard.

  “Oh, beg pardon, Major, sir…we didn’t see you. We thought that a mine had gone off…two, in fact, a few minutes apart. Here’s your accumulators, Dupuy. Shall we take them up?”

  “Yes, yes, go up, lads—go on up, and I’ll join you.”

  Fortunately more preoccupied with their burden than with trying to make out the watchful faces around them, the two radio operators, without noticing their sergeant’s anxiety, climbed up the rigid ladder, lighting their way with a pocket torch, and disappeared.

  “Light something, then,” whispered Renard, when the noise of a closing trapdoor resounded from above. “We need a serious talk.”

  Dupuy unhooked an oil lamp and generated some light. All four of them looked at one another.

  “Oof!” gasped the major. “We’re back at Port-sur-Seille, at any rate, for sure. They didn’t get us, the swine!
”

  “Saved! Saved!” exclaimed Lénac ecstatically, with a wide grin—and, hiding his face in his hands, he burst into tears.

  Dupuy and the lieutenant breathed in the icy night air voluptuously.

  “It’s not over yet,” Renard said, suddenly. “We don’t have any time to lose. I don’t need to tell you that if we utter a single word about what we’ve done during these last six months—or the last six minutes, which comes to the same thing—we’ll all be court-martialed.”

  “There’s more chance that we’ll be locked up as lunatics,” the major sniggered.

  “One’s as bad as the other. So, silence all down the line. You hear, Lénac? And now, we have to restore a little order here. But first, what’s that shining on your sleeve, Thévenard?”

  “My insignia, of course! My insignia as Minister of Hygiene…and yours as Director of Operations.”

  Feverishly, using pen-knives all four of them returned their uniforms to the regulation appearance.

  “What about the others?” Dupuy exclaimed. “The lads who are lying on the ground outside, decked out from the shoulders down?”

  “No one must find them like that. Take care of it, with Lénac. Your two radio operators aren’t going to come back down, are they?”

  “Them? Come back down? No, they were on duty, the night of the departure. It was…it still is…me. They’ll take a nap up there.

  “Go, then—take care of the cadavers. Search their pockets too. Get rid of everything recalling Valencia. There are twelve, aren’t there?”

  “No,” said Lénac, “two fell on the other bank, in Spain. I saw them when I turned round. There can’t be more than ten here…and Nénesse; that makes eleven.” He went out with Dupuy, armed with a lantern, to accomplish the macabre task.

  Renard and the major set about restoring the plausible appearance of an office to the ground floor of the tower. Before the Machine was moved there, it had first served as a guard-room for the Moors, then as an arsenal. Finally, after the death of the Emir, Lénac had stored all his photographic and cinematographic apparatus there, of which he was no longer making use. In preparation for the departure, however, all the original furniture and the typewriter had been brought back. As best they could, the two officers finished restoring order; they made a bundle of everything left over from the occupation.