That was what it was necessary to determine, before anything else. And to find out, it was necessary to make contact with one of the three people over whose heads one of the most formidable dramas the world had ever known was being played out: Fulbert, his daughter Nicole or Serge Kaniewsky.
To make contact with them, it was necessary to discover whether all three were being held in or outside the factory, and precisely where they were, how far apart they were from one another and how far from Rouletabille.
To operate outside the factory, Rouletabille had engaged Vladimir; to operate inside, he had recruited La Candeur. Would he find those two aides at their posts? That was a second question to settle as soon as possible, for Rouletabille obviously could not work in the same way if he had a week before him rather than two months, or if he had to operate on his own rather than as a group of three.
He gave himself three days to discover the answers to those questions.
After making that resolution, fatigue seemed to overwhelm him momentarily. He fell into a semi-sleep and let his extinct pipe fall on to the floor. The noise that it made as it fell immediately woke him up. He was ashamed of himself, threw himself to the foot of his bed, reached down to pick up his pipe and suddenly stopped at the sight of an extraordinary object, which almost drew an exclamation of joy from him.
Under the bed beside his own there was a shoe—a enormous shoe! There were, in fact, two of them, the second being hidden behind the one he could see. And that shoe was sufficient for Rouletabille’s happiness. Oh, that beautiful footwear! He recognized it. That lovely leather! So well cared-for, shiny and polished, magnificent! And there it was! The owner of that shoe certainly had to be something like a 47, or more!
His heart beating rapidly, Rouletabille reached out with a tremulous hand toward bed number 8 and picked up one shoe, then the other. For some time he considered that enormous pair of shoes without being able to retain a few small sighs of satisfaction.
It’s him! he said to himself. There can’t be anyone but him walking around here in such superb boots!
The reporter could no longer doubt that favorable destiny had made him La Candeur’s room-mate. To be sure, Rouletabille had aided fortune somewhat with his plans, and it was perfectly normal for the Boche to aggregate in the same group the prisoners of war who were to work in the same factory; the most perfect schemes, however, are not always rewarded by such a mathematical realization. The young man’s heart was warmed again. He had confidence in the imminent future.
It was about half past noon when there was a great stir in the corridor; it was the prisoners returning from work. On Sundays, the authorities granted them the entire afternoon to relax, walk in their courtyard or write. They could even play dominoes or draughts in the common room.
When the crew from his dormitory irrupted into the room, Rouletabille was lying on his bed, his eyes wide open.
Eight prisoners filed past him, wishing him an amicable bonjour while taking off their work-clothes. Some went to the bathroom; the others asked him a few questions. He replied vaguely, affecting extreme fatigue…and closed his eyes.
He had not seen La Candeur, and did not want to ask anyone any questions.
Suddenly, the floor of the corridor began to creak under powerful footfalls; Rouletabille’s heart beat more precipitately, and the reporter opened his eyes again. Le Candeur came in.
La Candeur did not see Rouletabille immediately. He threw his jacket on his bed, crying: “Oof! That’s the work’s final sprint finished!” Then he let himself fall on to his bed, which creaked—after which, Le Candeur took his shoes off, repeatedly uttering “Ow!” in a lamentable fashion.
“What’s wrong now, Pichenette?” asked one of the prisoners.
“Dan it, I forbid you to call me that! Do you hear, Enflé?”
“You call me Enflé, when I haven’t two got sous’ worth of lard beneath my skin, so I can call you Pichenette, who have a fist that could stun an ox!”
“Possibly—but I have a real name, which it’s necessary not to forget. It’s...René Duval. Quite simply! Oof—I can no longer remember it myself!” Le Candeur groaned, aside, standing up after depositing his clothes carefully at the foot of his bed. As he straightened up, he suddenly perceived Rouletabille.
At first, he quivered. His huge body oscillated like a pendulum; then his mouth opened enormously…and closed again on the exclamation, of which nothing could be heard but a distant groan.
With his fixed stare, Rouletabille left “René Duval” thunderstruck.
“Well, Pichenette,” Enflé added. “What’s the matter now?”
“I’m groaning at the thought of the wretched dinner we’re going to have!” La Candeur replied, turning his gaze away from Rouletabille’s with an effort. “They surely aren’t going to serve us tripe in the Caen style.”
“Would you also like a bowl of Normandy cider?”
“Alas!”
“Hang on—there’s the bell!”
Two strident whistle-blasts summoned the men to table. The little dormitory emptied. La Candeur and Rouletabille were left alone there. The latter had closed his eyes again. When he reopened them he saw La Candeur contemplating him, as motionless as a statue, not daring to say a word.
“Would you like to go eat with the others, Monsieur René Duval? I don’t know you, myself.”
La Candeur turned and left the room, bumping into the furniture in is joy. Rouletabille had finally arrived! La Candeur had been waiting for him for a fortnight—or, rather, was no longer hoping to see him arrive. Had not Rouletabille said to him: “I’ll be in Essen before you.
The giant did not eat, and was the first to return to the dormitory.
Rouletabille turned his back on him and pretended to be fast sleep.
La Candeur uttered a sigh that would have melted the heart of a tiger. It only succeeded in getting him a sly kick in the belly from Rouletabille, who seemed to be continuing to sleep peacefully.
It was not until five o’clock, when Rouletabille was certain that no one could hear, that he permitted La Candeur to take advantage of the solitude in which the two of them had been left to relieve the pressure of his loving, devoted but unheroic heart.
In any case, the Époque reporter soon put a stop to the sentimental chatter and subjected La Candeur to a tightly-focused interrogation that permitted him to learn as many useful things as possible in the shortest space of time.
Thus, he learned that the prisoners of war working in the factory, and who had formerly slept in a camp outside the city, had been conclusively installed inside the factories, whose gates they would no longer go through, since the escape of two prisoner workers that had occurred a few months earlier. That way, there was no longer any indiscretion to be feared regarding the Krupp factories, for as long as the war might last.
That had resulted, moreover, in better treatment for the prisoners. They had benefited from the firmer barracks of the unmarried factory-workers, a few hundred of whom were now at the front.
These facilities, simultaneously dedicated to prisoners of war and foreign workers from neutral nations, were called Arbeiterheime. Prisoners and foreign workers were treated almost identically, with the same surveillance. Everywhere there were foreign workers in a factory there were sentinels with bayonets fitted to their rifles; the workers were searched as often as the prisoners, and watched as closely. A particularly high wage helped them get over these slight inconveniences.
In the arbeiterheim where Rouletabille and La Candeur were sleeping, there were six hundred foreign workers and a hundred French prisoners. The latter all worked in the manufacture of commercial steel or sewing-machines, the only work they could accept.
“And how many soldiers watch over an arbeiterheim like ours?”
“Twenty territorials, who come back with us to man our particular barracks when we’re summoned to meals or to sleep, and who follow us into the different workshops where we toil, never ceasing to keep watch
on us.”
“Twenty! That’s not many!” Rouletabille observed.
“Bah! It’s too many for what they have to fear,” La Candeur replied. “What do you expect anyone to do against them? Remember that they have machine-guns, and we’d be shot down in five seconds, just like that, old chap! We’d have four hundred thousand Boche workers on our backs before the general who has the responsibility of giving the order had time to telephone all the guard-rooms and rally his legion. Oh, they’re sure of us! So sure that we sometime enjoy a relative freedom.”
“Really? But I thought your guards never relaxed?”
“In all the workshops, while we’re working—but they leave us almost in peace here. We can go down to the canteen at certain times, and by slipping out of the room one can prolong one’s stay in the canteen by night, if one knows how to arrange things with Père Bachstein.”
“Who’s Père Bachstein?”
“That what they call him here! Father Brick—it appears that Bachstein, in German, means ‘brick.’ You probably knew that already.”
“Oh! The feldwebel who oversees the floor!”
“Exactly.”
“But he seems terrible!”
“He only seems it. He makes money off us, you know—he’s a war profiteer! The amorous ruin themselves for him.”
“The amorous?”
“Yes indeed! There are always people who need to tell stories to ladies. Our canteen-manager has two daughters as fresh as ripe wheat, who have a few friends who aren’t too faded...”
“Paying court to Boche demoiselles! Do you think that’s appropriate, in time of war, La Candeur?”
“It’s not a matter of knowing what I think, it’s a matter of knowing that for five marks, there’s a feldweg who’ll close his eyes if you’re not in your bed at the exact time when the orders are to snore! That might perhaps interest you, Rouletabille, even if the canteen-manager’s demoiselles don’t. Because, listen carefully, it’s necessary not to forget that you haven’t yet explained anything to me...and I don’t suppose that we’re here simply to...”
He stopped, hesitating before a certain furrowing of Rouletabille’s brows. Then he resumed, timidly: “You make me shiver! What’s going to happen here, old chap? Now you’re here! At least you aren’t planning to declare war, as at the Black Castle? We can’t do that here, you know. It’s not just the machine-guns. There are cannons everywhere. Do you know that they’re shipping cannons out of here for the navy? Cannons twelve meters long, old chap, no less! Fitting shells a meter fifty long! You can’t fight cannons like that, eh?”
Impatiently, Rouletabille leaned toward La Candeur.
“You’ll know everything. I’ve come—or, rather, we’ve come—to fight a cannon three hundred meters long!”
La Candeur started. “You still haven’t lost the habit of making fun of folk!” he moaned.
“Quiet! Someone’s coming.”
And Rouletabille resumed snoring, while La Candeur polished his shoes.
Chapter XII
The Monster is There...
The night passed without incident. Rouletabille slept like a log. La Candeur, however, never closed his eyes. With Rouletabille, it was necessary to wait for everything, and La Candeur had been paid back several times over for knowing that the most extravagant—and, alas, the most dangerous—were generally those that the greatest reporter in the world attempted.
The next morning, when they left the arbeiterheim to go to the workshops, Rouletabille unobtrusively came to place himself beside La Candeur in the rank, and as they were allowed to talk, and the guards accompanying them were not paying any attention to them, they talked.
La Candeur told Rouletabille that the “kommando” of civilian and foreign industry was under the direction of a neutral who had been working at the Krupp factory for many years. That neutral was an engineer of Germanic Swiss origin, all of whose Boche relatives were working at the factory, and who had graduated from the École Polytechnique de Zurich. His name was Richter; he must have been about forty, and was about to marry the daughter of engineer Hans, the director of the Energy Laboratory. That daughter, Helena, was the niece, via her late mother, of General von Berg, who was at the head of the general kommando, the central directive organization of the entire factory, from the technical viewpoint.
“Everyone thinks,” La Candeur explained, “that it’s a case of favoring his relatives and friends and consider them as rogues for exploiting the ‘war mine’—which won’t have ruined everyone in the world, I can assure you.”
“I see that you still like gossip, Monsieur René Duval.”
“Yes, I’ve always had something of the concierge in me,” admitted La Candeur. “It doesn’t do anyone any harm, and I thought that it might be useful to you.”
“And how did you learn all this?”
“Between two bouts of packing, my dear Monsieur Talmar, we chat, and Enflé, who’s a packer with me, has learned a great many things, because he knows German.”
“You’re a packer, then? What do you pack?”
“Sewing-machines, of course! I’m the one who supervises the packing on Sundays, when there’s nothing else left to do but put the machines in the boxes. During the week I work in the distribution of the primary components. Basically, they’ve made me a porter, and I quite like that—it permits me to get around. At first they put me to manufacturing control-levers and shuttles, but the work was too delicate; I was too clumsy and broke too many. There was a reason for that! I was afraid that they’d perceive my inexperience and I told them right away that I did heavy work at the factory that employed me. It’s worked out, as you can see.”
“Yes, not too badly. So, you told me that the packers can chat a little between themselves? What else do they say?”
“Aha—you’re getting a taste for conversation. Well, know that there are a few sozialdemocrates here with whom one can chat if one knows the language. Enflé’s’s talked to a few of them. That’s how I learned that Krupp’s has, it seems, an occult administration of control and reciprocal surveillance between all the chiefs, like the one that’s said to exist in the Jesuit Order. Each of them is suspicious of the others and thinks he sees spies everywhere. They make alliances, conspire, hatch plots and betray one another. People are always talking about their organization. It’s possible, but some chiefs, it seems, are most expert in organizing pilfering. You can well imagine that there must be a lot of pilfering in a business like this. When I see all the things that are manufactured here, you know, I can’t help smiling at the idea that anyone thought that they’d run out of munitions after six months of war!”
In fact, during that journey through the factory, necessarily slow because of the obstacles encountered at every moment, it was possible to take account of the formidable supply of raw materials, their rapid transformation into projectiles of all kinds and weapons of every caliber.
Trains were gliding incessantly in every direction, bringing in iron and steel, taking out cannon and mortars, in an atmosphere that was thick and hot and asphyxiating, behind locomotives vomiting black smoke, amid the tramp of thousands upon thousands of workers, who had barely had time to sleep before retaking their places before the furnaces, from which the night shifts were fleeing with ghostly faces.
A nudge of La Candeur’s elbow made Rouletabille turn round.
“Look!—here, this building…it’s the munitions depot for the 420s. Look—there are more shells arriving. Isn’t it frightful? They never stop making them, you know. You were joking yesterday with your 300-meter cannon...”
A sharp kick from Rouletabille on La Candeur’s enormous boot made the giant grimace, amazed to see his companion’s distressed face.
“I forbid you, you hear, ever to mention that cannon again!” Rouletabille hissed between his teeth. “I forbid it—on pain of death!” And as La Candeur, pale and frightened, no longer knew where he was, he added: “But go on then, idiot! You were saying that they had depots.
..”
“Yes, an ammunition depot for every caliber,” poor La Candeur stammered, increasingly bewildered. “There’s one for 77s, 120s, 105s, 150s, 210s, 420s, 280s, 350s, and you’ve just seen the one for 420s.”
“It was said that they were running short of 420s...”
“I don’t care—even if they have none for the moment, they’re making seven at a time in the foundry. So…hang on, look over there!”
“Ah! God, that’s worth the trouble of getting out of bed,” said Rouletabille, considering two prodigious containers that had just appeared to their left, between the countless iron pillars that surrounded them. They were two enormous Krupp gas reservoirs, the largest in the world.
“And they’re always full to bursting, you know! Just think! With one bomb from an airplane overhead…what a bang!”
“Shut up, I tell you—shut up!”
It was La Candeur’s turn to observe Rouletabille’s pallor. The latter was no longer looking at the reservoirs, but beyond their formidable rotundity, at something even more formidable.
In the smoky atmosphere, torn by a sudden gust of wind, a nightmarish monument, which seemed to be built on hellish clouds, raised up its colossal silhouette. It was really there: the hideous and terrible carapace of the war-machine, which Nourry had evoked before dying. Rouletabille recognized its fantastic dimensions and the inclination, inexplicable at first glance, of its gigantic roof, which was much higher at the southern end than the northern end—and, finally, Rouletabille recognized the orientation of the monster: north-east/south-west; the direction of Paris.
“Oh, you’re looking at the hangar of their new Zeppelin,” whispered La Candeur. “It appears that it’s a new model, more marvelous than all the rest. Yes, a new invention of a Polish engineer who’s found a means of transporting a veritable fortress through the air. Can you believe how stubborn they are, with their Zeppelins. They lose them all the time; it’s necessary to reconstruct them all the time—and bigger and bigger ones. That one will be in the three hundred met...”
Rouletabille at Krupp's Page 8