The most interesting element of Baudry de Saunier’s story, however, is not what it has in common with Robida’s but the dramatic contrast in its narrative method, which, far from looking at “Prussianism” from a horrified distance, adopts the strategy of looking at, no less disapprovingly, it from the inside. Like Robida, Baudry de Saunier sets out to produce a striking image of the symbolic “ingénieur von Satanas,” but attempts to make it even more striking by allowing him to tell his own story, in a long diabolical gloat. In terms of his nationality, of course, that figure is now hopelessly out of date, but in terms of his profession, he is still very much alive as a bugbear, and as scary as ever, Nowadays, he is a “genetic engineer” attached to the Offensive Medical Corps rather than the aviator that Baudry de Saunier elects to make him, but the fundamental principle remains the same, and twentieth-century versions of Robida’s Dr. Christiansen do not have to modify the good doctor’s fundamental argument regarding “that slut Science” at all.
Unlike Robida’s narrator, of course, modern readers are unlikely to be so easily converted to Dr. Christiansen’s point of view; the century that has elapsed since the Great War has made us, in spite of our anxieties, somewhat more complacent than Robida or Baudry de Saunier felt entitled to be in its immediate aftermath. We are far more likely to side with the valiant dead-but-immortal heroes of Adrien Bertrand’s story, determined in their hope that life can and will go on, and that Candide’s symbolic garden can be replanted, if only we can all pitch in, like Mr. Pickwick, Faust and Achilles. There is, after all, no alternative. Wherever we might stand intellectually, however, there is no doubt of the continuing relevance, in the twenty-first century, of the five texts in this volume. Their juxtaposition increases that relevance synergistically. In term of their anxieties, they were ahead of their time, but in terms of provoking thought, they have only become more urgent.
This translation of L’Ingénieur von Satanas was made from a photocopy of the Renaissance du Livre edition made by Jean-Marc Lofficier from a copy of the book supplied by Marc Madouraud. I am very grateful to both of them for enabling me to translate an exceedingly rare text of particular interest.
The translation of the 1883 version of “La Guerre au vingtième siècle” was made from the copy of the 27 October 1883 issue of La Caricature reproduced on the Bibliothèque Nationale’s gallica website.
The translation of the 1887 version was made from a copy of the 1991 Tallandier reprint of the book. The translation of “De la pluie qui surprit Candide en son jardin et d’un entretien qu’il eut avec divers personnages” was made from the copy of the Calmann-Levy edition of L’Orage sur le jardin de Candide, romans philosophiques made available by the University of Toronto to the Internet Archive Digital Library at archive.org.
The translation of Comment Paris a été détruit en six heures le 20 avril 1924 (le jour de Pâques) was made from the copy of the Flammarion edition reproduced on gallica.
Brian Stableford
Albert Robida: War in the Twentieth Century (1883)
The Australo-Mozambiquan Conflict
The Events and Chemical Operations of the War
The new era has arrived. The old established order of things has collapsed, at the same time as the antique dominatrix of the world. Europe, ravaged by the martial monomania of her populations, has allowed the scepter of the world to slip from her senile hands, and the vigorous and healthy peoples of young continents are preparing to pick it up.
The struggle today is between young Africa, overflowing with sap, exuberant with youth, and adolescent Australia.
America, the daughter of Europe, as Europe was of the great ancestor Asia, is growing old, and from now on has been thrown out of the lists; the future belongs to the nations constituted by the vast territories of Australia, or the almost virgin lands of great Africa, the mixture of a hundred diverse races, newly melted, so to speak, in the crucible of nature.
Africa and Australia have come, arms in hand, to dispute the scepter of the world, in a first collision, which has stirred the African continent from the Cape of Good Hope to Lakes Nyanza and Tanganyika, bloodying the banks of the Mozambique, the waves of the Indian Sea and the clouds racing above the Mozambiquan and Australian plains.
It is an accurate summary of the terrible events of the great Australo-Mozambiquan War that we are going to condense in a few pages, accompanying our story with a certain number of sketches collected on the terrestrial, aerial and submarine battlefields, as many by trustworthy eye-witnesses as by myself, who has had the honor of participating in the entire campaign in the capacity of volunteer aide-de-camp of the Colonel-General of the Mozambique Torpedo Corps, and who, as a result of my conduct, has been mentioned in dispatches six times in three weeks.
The Causes of the War
Everything has changed since the last century closed the era of ignorance and barbarity. Once, among the ancient peoples of the little corner of the Earth still called Europe on maps, war was only waged between adjacent or not-very-distant neighbors. There were no points of contact, no motives for war, and, above all, no means of waging it more distantly, even if anyone had wanted to.
Science, shrinking distances, removing obstacles, cutting isthmuses and perforating mountains, has created points of contact between the most distant peoples, and permitted all communications amicable or otherwise. Immense progress!
No more barriers! No more separations! Instead, commercial and financial relations between peoples, giving birth to entirely new motives for war. Peoples no longer fight nowadays for frivolous and sometimes chivalrous motives, such as the protection of a weak ally or the defense of principles of liberty, but for serious, solid reasons, most often resounding, such as advantageous commercial treaties, the opening of markets, favorable custom duties, speculations on the Stock Exchange and the regulation of financial accounts.
The Australo-Mozambiquan War had no other origin than an immense coup on the Stock Exchange. Taking advantage of the temporary embarrassment of the great African nation, caused by the great expense of the completion of its railway network, making a further eight hundred thousand kilometers available to traffic, not to mention the enormous impetus given to other public works, a group of Australian bankers was able, by means of skillful maneuvers, to cause a panic on the Mozambicoville Stock Exchange, and bought a colossal quantity of 2½% bonds at 35.75. When the operation was complete, the Australian government, interested in the scheme and acting in the name of the syndicate, demanded via diplomatic channels the reimbursement of the bonds at full value, which would have produced a net profit of eighteen and a half billions.
The Australian demand provoked a legitimate surge of indignation throughout Africa. On 15 April 1975 the President of the Republic responded with a formal refusal and immediately convened the Parliament at Livingstonia, the political capital of the great South African Republic, situated in a strong position at the extremity of Lake Tanganyika.
17 April 1975. From this day forward events will progress rapidly. Second Australian note.
Australia repeats its demand for the eighteen billions and raises another question. The Mozambiquan Parliament having raised its import duties on merchandise from Australia several years before, in order to prevent the crushing of African markets, is summoned to abolish those duties completely.
Australia gives Mozambique three days to respond, and warns that a refusal will constitute a casus belli.
18 April. Call to the flag of all men capable of bearing arms. The Mozambiquan taxpayers are invited to pay three years taxes in advance.
“What is the Fatherland?”
“It is the place where one pays one’s taxes.”
The best Fatherland must be the one where one pays the least, in money or in military service. Unfortunately, the more one progresses, the more one pays, in both fashions. We fear that the men of the twenty-first century will be tormented by the fatherland’s collectors or recruiters from weaning to the age of seventy, th
e age at which one will be put into the reserves.
Those are the slight inconveniences of civilization. In the barbaric centuries, the times of armies of twenty thousand men, one was acquitted much more cheaply. Everything increases, the consumption of human flesh as well as other contributions.
The Mozambiquans do not murmur. Six months before, in order to claim a little liberty hindered by a Ministry, they had had a Revolution. This time, at the first appeal, they rally as one man to the offices of revenue, customs and excise, in nature or recruitment.
19 April. Review, at Livingstonia, of the troops of the active army. Call up and mobilization of all the chemists in the territory.
Review at Mozambicoville of the four divisions of the torpedo corps.
20 April. Response of the South African Republic to the Australian Republic. The Australian demands are flatly rejected and the revision of customs tariffs refused.
The Australian ambassador leaves in a war balloon of the Australian squadron. It is war; it only remains to wait for the official declaration.
Mozambique prepares energetically to sustain the struggle. She has complete confidence in her forces. A well-planned system of torpedoes defends her coasts and the Zambezi, her great river, against the attack of the Australian submarine naval forces. It is absolutely impossible for the enemy ships to carry out a disembarkation without running into three narrowly-spaced lines of torpedoes.
Everything is prepared to repel a submarine attack and submerge the assailants. Unfortunately, an aerial attack has more chance of success; all militaries are aware of the extent to which the unexpected enters into the schemes of aerial warfare. How can one anticipate in advance the precise location of a descent, and how, even if the location were to be divined, can sufficient troops be transported there to the descent efficaciously, without removing them from another location, on which the adversary might precipitate his flying squadron?
And in fact, the Australian air fleets have, in recent times, been raised to a high degree of power, and are commanded by engineers of the greatest merit.
The Great Council of War
Engineer Marshal Blick, the commander-in-chief of the Mozambiquan forces, an old warrior curbed by sixty-five years of studies in his laboratory, meets with all the chiefs of the army aboard the admiral balloon Ravageur: the Engineer General of Military Railways, the energetic Balister; Dr. Clakson, commander-in-chief of the aerial squadrons; General Turpin, commander-in-chief of the land army, an old moustache whitened in a hundred combats; Colonel Engineer Barbarigo, commandant of the perforators; Engineer General Coloquintos, commander-in-chief of the torpedo-carriers of the line, flying, subterranean and submarine; and finally, Engineer Eugene, the commander of the mobilized chemists.
After three hours of secret discussion, the defense plan prepared long ago by the great Engineer Marshal Blick, has been adopted, save for slight modifications of detail, and the engineers have departed at top speed to take up their posts at the head of the troops.
21 April. The Light Aerial Squadron, reinforced by all the available aerial scouts and dispatch-vessels, has departed for an observation mission. Overseas, a squadron composed of the lightest balloon scouts has to reach the coast of Australia in order to track the enemy preparations.
The greatest activity reigns in the arsenals. The mobilization of railway troops is carried out with an extraordinary precision; in 13 hours 45 minutes, all the contingents have arrived at their posts with the officers, engineers and electricians of the reserve, fully assembled. The locomotives of war receive their garrisons and charge their electric accumulators. The locomotives of the active army are speeding along the iron roads inland and along the coast; the huge blockhouse-locomotives and fortresses have reached the important strategic points.
22 April. The submarine army is still at anchor off Mozambique aboard submarine frigates, on the surface. It has set up its advance posts six leagues out at sea. Off the foremost protrusion of the coast, at a depth of twelve meters, strong patrols are scouting the passes and submarine dispatch-boats are extending reconnaissance at a distance; at the first signal, the submarine forces will be able to set off for the threatened point.
23 April, 7 a.m. A telegram brings the Australian declaration of war.
7:50. A series of frightful detonations bursts forth at sea off Mozambicoville; jets of water are launched to enormous heights, clearly designating three lines of conflagration. They are the torpedoes blowing up. Engineer Marshal Blick, returning from a nocturnal aerial reconnaissance in his admiral-balloon, is nearly hit at a altitude of three hundred meters by a column of water and rocky debris.
The Australian attack has followed closely on the heels of the declaration of war.
The Mozambiquan engineers were tranquil, the dispatches of the aerial observation fleet over the Australian coast had simply announced a concentration of troops in Melbourne and a few ports.
The Australian government, having decided on the war, had very secretly sent out a strong submarine division even before sending the first note. At the very moment when the declaration of war reached Mozambicoville, the commandant of the Australian submarine corps received his instructions via a special wire connected to the first international telegraphic islet in the Mozambique Channel.
Six volunteers commanded by Engineer Electrician Pipermann slipped between the enemy posts in the torpedo-launch Fuse, destroying a Mozambiquan patrol by means of an electrical discharge, and came to attach an electric conductive wire linking the three coastal torpedo systems.
Immediately informed, the Australian admiral, sacrificing the brave men of the Fuse in order not to lose the fortunate opportunity, had activated his electrical battery. All the torpedoes disseminated over a distance of twenty leagues had blown up simultaneously. Two frigates and eight dispatch-boats, surprised by the immense conflagration, perished along with forty or fifty merchant ships, belonging for the most part to neutral nations.
23 April. Complications in the South. The Australian Atlantic Squadron, which was believed to be in America, comes in violation of human rights and treaties to land a corps of troops in the neutral territory of Kaffiria.
Port Natal has been taken by a nocturnal surprise attack. The Kaffir troops only put up feeble resistance, and King Nelusko III has contented himself with registering a protest by means of a note addressed to the diplomatic corps. The Australians, arguing links of origin between the founders of the former English colony of Port Natal and Australia, have proclaimed the annexation of Kaffiria to Australia, while announcing the intention of respecting the rights of Nelusko III if he will resign himself frankly to recognizing the suzerainty of powerful Australia.
That sudden conquest of Kaffiria gives the Australians an excellent base of operations and provides them with the key to the South-East African and Timbuktu-Congo-Cape railroads, and thus the entire Mozambiquan network.
The Statesmen of Mozambique now see the danger present for their neighbors, small neutral countries, too weak, if necessary, to compel respect for their neutrality by overly powerful and, above all, inadequately scrupulous nations.
24 April. The Australians have already received reinforcements at Port Natal by the submarine route. The Kaffir war locomotives, filled with Australian troops, have crossed the Mozambiquan frontier and have taken possession of the mountain passes after a fierce combat.
Six hundred thousand Australians left Melbourne last night by maritime, submarine and aerial routes.
Engineer Marshal Blick has rallied all his army corps in order to confront the enemy. The initial reverses, far from diminishing the courage of the Mozambiquans—on the contrary—stimulate the martial ardor of the engineers and soldiers.
25 April. Bad news from the South. The Australian locomotives are making the most of their advantages, crushing under their number the few mobile fortresses spaced out along the frontier, from which forces had been withdrawn. They have reached the great plains and hastened their progress over t
he roads and tracks toward the passes of Monomotapa. Their objective is Zumbo on the Zambezi, where the Timbuktu-Congo-Cape intersects with the major Mozambiquan lines of the Lakes.
Engineer Marshal Blick has gone to met them with eight hundred mobile blockhouses, a hundred and fifty thousand men of the railway infantry, and a strong aerial division.
For his part, Engineer General Coloquintos, with a superb submarine corps, is heading up the Zambezi in a submarine flotilla in order to collaborate with the defense of the Zambezi lines.
The Battle of Zumbo3
26 April. The Australians, stopped during the night by the aerial squadron’s rocket-torpedoes, mounted a vigorous offensive at four a.m. The great mass of mobile blockhouses was launched against the Mozambiquan mobile fortresses, in spite of the frightful fire vomited by the six hundred railway artillery pieces and the aerial squadron’s two or three hundred pump machine-guns.
In less than twenty minutes, the Australian right wing was repelled and almost pulverized, but a division of reserve blockhouses commanded by Adjutant Engineer Flaghurst, the savant professor of the Military University of Melbourne, replaced the destroyed locomotives and launched a vigorous assault on the breathless and badly damaged Mozambiquans. The Mozambiquans, who had thought that they were already victorious, were forced to retreat.
At five a.m., at the moment when the great Engineer Marshal Blick advanced in his admiral-balloon to clear the damaged mobile fortresses and bring forward in the midst of the debris the intact blockhouses and armored wagons, the Australian railway artillery, recognizing the Engineer Marshal’s flag in the smoke, directed all their fire at the balloon.
The Engineer Von Satanas Page 2