The Engineer Von Satanas

by Albert Robida

  The Engineer Marshal, excessively scornful of the danger, leaned a little too far over his armored poop, and was hit full in the body by one of the superdynamite shells that the Australians’ new cannons sent forth with a simple two-gram cartridge. The illustrious Engineer Marshal was killed outright; all that was found of his remains were a few buttons from his uniform.

  Disorder spread through the Mozambiquan lines. One after another, fourteen engineer generals were killed. The aerial squadron sacrificed itself and resolutely engaged the enemy in order to give the railway artillery time to reorganize. In the meantime, the fortresses retreated and formed up again in front of the great tunnels of Zumbo. Two companies of Mozambiquan perforators, arrived that same morning, penetrated the immense embankment of Zumbo, with a dozen electric borers traveling at two kilometers an hour.

  The Mozambiquan perforators soon reached the Australians and blew up several blockhouses, but they were rapidly disemboweled and annihilated by depth-torpedoes. At that moment, as the Australians were accelerating their movement, a column of their veteran blockhouses, by way of reputedly impracticable and unguarded paths, reached the summit of the hills overlooking the tunnels and the course of the Zambezi, and covered the Mozambiquan flanks with a hurricane of iron.

  The Mozambiquan engineer, fearing that he might be cut off, beat a precipitate retreat without being able to bring the torpedoes placed in front of the tunnel into play. 45,000 dead and 490 mobile fortresses destroyed or captured was the bill for that first encounter.

  Noon. The passes of Monomotapa and the city of Zumbo are in the power of the enemy. The submarine division of the Zambezi has also suffered a defeat. An Australian corps, having traveled upriver at top sped in thirty-five submarine case-boats with powerful electrical engines, took the Mozambiquan submarines by surprise as they were taking on air. The casualty figures are unknown. The Australian corps, reinforced by twenty case-boats brought by aerostats, have departed for the grand canal of Loanga to rejoin the upper Zambezi and reach the Lakes.

  27 April. The second Australian army has disembarked. The great port of Mozambicoville is entirely blockaded by land and sea. The Australians want to take possession of it and occupy it strongly before marching on the interior.

  The Mozambiquan army, having lost the Zambezi line, is concentrating at Mazayamba in order to protect Lake Nyanza against the first Australian army. A second corps is forming up at Lucenda, at the southern end of Lake Tanganyika.

  30 April. The siege of Mozambicoville is proceeding with vigor. Two suburbs have been destroyed by enemy torpedoes, but our rocket-torpedoes have blown up a position on the besiegers’ right wing along with an armored battery. The enemy perforators, having begun drilling twelve kilometers from the walls, have already reached our ramparts. The garrison of the Southern fort, surprised last night, has perished in its entirety. Honor to those brave men, crushed beneath their bunkers!

  The other forts built on the rock have nothing to fear from perforators, but they are suffering greatly from the enemy’s asphyxiant shells.

  31 April. The perforators have succeeded in skirting a rocky massif and penetrating, through a weak stratum of friable terrain, into the elegant quarter of Mozambicoville. The district in burning over their heads, but the main body of the enemy forces is preparing for the assault.

  The chemist Eugene, the governor of Mozambicoville, has recommended that the inhabitants to lock themselves in their homes tonight and to seal all the openings carefully. Something new is expected.

  A powerful magnetic current directed at the southern front having totally paralyzed the defenders of the forts and bastions, the Australians captured that portion of the wall without firing a shot, at ten p.m., taking 18,000 prisoners. They were about to launch themselves into the city when the governor found a mean of blowing up their electricity reservoir. Our troops, who immediately launched an attack on the hill were the reservoir was situated, found the entire division occupying it prey to the most violent attack of epilepsy.

  Forty-five mobile fortresses fell into our power; the cannons were turned on the enemy, but, as asphyxiating shells converged on the expeditionary troops as well as the epileptic Australians, we were obliged to beat a retreat, bringing our prizes with us and reoccupying the southern bastions.

  1 May. The entire army has been obliged to don helmets fitted with chin-bands, and tampons soaked in chemical solution over the mouth, in order not to suffer the deleterious emanations of as asphyxiating fog that the governor and his general staff of chemists have succeeded in producing. The Australian cannonade has become very weak, our fog-rockets crushing the enemy positions.

  2 May. 35,000 inhabitants not having obeyed the governor’s instructions relative to the absolute sealing of houses are very ill and nearly all doomed. The Australians have been severely tested; their losses due to the fog are estimated at 40,000 men. Unfortunately, new reinforcements have disembarked, and Commandant Clifton has supplied all his troops with protective chemical tampons.

  4 May. Great aerial and submarine battle to the south of Lake Nyanza.

  The Mozambiquan aerial squadron took the offensive. Burning to avenge the Fatherland’s reverses, it fell upon the Australian army in the process of extracting war taxes from the rich cities of Nyanza.

  The Australian air fleet covering the railway fortress and infantry engaged combat resolutely. The Australians had numbers in their favor, but the gutta-percha armor of the Mozambiquan balloons offered considerable resistance to shells. The victory remained indecisive; after three hours of terrible cannonades and broadsides, the two fleets, their munitions exhausted, withdrew.

  During the combat four hundred meters below the balloons, the submarine fleets met beneath the surface. The Mozambiquan submarine monitors Shark and Silurus sank twelve enemy vessels in succession; unfortunately, the Silurus having had her electric propeller broken by a torpedo, was surrounded by four enemy monitors. When the submarine refused to surrender, the Australians sent the Silurus to the bottom and drowned her heroic crew.

  5 May. Destruction by the Australians of all the factories of the great manufacturing districts of Nyanza. The great manufacturing cities of Australia are delighted; they had requested the destructions in order to obliterate dangerous competition.

  6 May. In modern warfare neutrals sometimes have the opportunity to witness superb aerial combats, when they least expect it. Thus, when six Mozambiquan balloons, giving chase to Australian corsair aerostats, caught up with them during the night over Seville, in Spain, the battle was fierce.

  Finally, thanks to the terrible Mozambiquan rocket-torpedoes, the corsair balloons perished with all hands. Two churches, twenty-five houses and approximately three hundred inhabitants of Seville suffered grievous damage in the battle; compensation will naturally be paid at the end of the war.

  7 May. Mozambicoville taken by the Australians. The Mozambiquan general staff was blown up with a part of the fortifications, two hundred mobile blockhouses and thirty thousand troops, owing to the incompetence of a chemist officer in the middle of a chemical operation while storing a murderous gas in cylinders, on which the governor was counting heavily. The Australians have taken possession of the ruins.

  8 May. Attack on the entrenched camp of Mazayamba.

  The greatest battle of the war: 800,000 Australians against 625,000 Mozambiquans; the terrestrial and railway infantry maneuvered in profound and exceedingly mobile masses against the Mozambiquan troops supported by solid retrenchments, opened at intervals in order to give passage to the railway fortresses. The reservoir-rifles of the Mozambiquan infantry covered the terrain with a storm of iron and lead; the Australians swept by that machine-gun fire fell in thousands. Unfortunately, their masses seemed more inexhaustible than the reservoir-rifles of the valiant African soldiers.

  The Australian engineers worked wonders. They succeeded in bringing their veteran locomotives and mobile blockhouses, armed with enormous cannons loaded with superdynamite, thro
ugh the machine-gun fire and over a thousand obstacles. Behind the mobile blockhouses the infantry frayed a passage all the way to the Mozambiquan lines.

  The bullet-pumping rifles and machine-guns of the Australian railway infantry then demonstrated their superiority, at short range, over any engines whatsoever.

  At two p.m., the Mozambiquan army, reduced to 180,000 men, beat a retreat to the fortified locations of Lake Tanganyika; the aerial squadron and the mobile fortresses, retreating slowly, covered the retreat gloriously.

  9 May. Foreign powers having offered their mediation, the ambassador of the Congo, Monsieur le Duc de Brazza, has brought the response of the Australians to Livingstonia.

  Australia is making exorbitant demands: an indemnity of twenty-five billions, plus an obligation for the Mozambiquan nation to furnish exclusively to Australia raw materials, manufactured goods and objects of consumption that she cannot produce herself, the suppression of all duties on Mozambiquan merchandise exported to Australia, etc.

  The Mozambiquan National Assembly has rejected the enemy’s demands.

  10 May. Counter-offensive by the Mozambiquans. The Australians, confident of their victory, having not expected contact with the enemy, have been taken by surprise in the midst of an asphyxiating fog and driven out of the positions occupied two days earlier. Victory has shifted, essentially. The ex-victors have lost 900 mobile fortresses and 290,000 men in four hours. The Blackrifles, the Mozambiquan negro regiments, have fought heroically alongside white and mulatto regiments.

  11 May. The Australians are beating a retreat. The submarine corps that had traveled up the Zambezi, surrounded in one of the reservoirs of the river dried up by means of the sluice-gates, has been obliged to surrender after a fierce combat.

  12 May. Mozambiquan torpedo corps brought by the aerial squadron have succeeded in getting ahead of the retreating enemy columns. At Topambas, flying torpedoes and electric rockets destroyed more than three hundred locomotives of war, along with their crews.

  19 May. The Australians are counting on retrenching in Mozambicoville and holding it, until a peace is signed or reinforcements arrive. A corps of two hundred thousand Mozambiquans has embarked for Australia on the large transport vessels of the submarine fleet and cargo aerostats.

  30 May. Bombardment and asphyxia of Melbourne. The Australians sue for peace. Signature of an armistice.

  2 June. A peace congress is about to meet to negotiate the conditions of the peace.

  Albert Robida: War in the Twentieth Century (1887)

  I. Mobilization

  The first half of the year 1945 had been particularly tranquil, however. Apart from the usual routine—which is to say, a little three-month civil war in the Danubian Empire, an American attack on our coast repelled by our submarine fleet, and a Chinese expedition pulverized on the rocks of Corsica, Europe had lived in the most complete calm.

  On the 25 June 1945, my friend Fabius Molinas, of Toulouse, a charming fellow with an estimable private income, was lounging blissfully, with a cigarette in his lips, the windows overlooking the garden wide open in order to let in the perfume of the flowers and the Pyrenean breezes. Fabius was fatigued; for two days he had been packing his trunks for the bathing season, which he intended to spend on the beaches of the Norwegian coast.

  Entirely preoccupied with his preparations, Molinas had scarcely had time to listen to the telephonic news, so he was surprised to learn on the twenty-fifth, by the midday Telephone, that a casus belli had arisen two days before and that the adequately rosy political horizon had suddenly become intensely black.

  What seemed particularly grave was that the conflict was of a purely financial order, a question of customs duties that touched all interests to the quick. Business is business; nowadays, among civilized people, commercial treaties are imposed with cannon fire.

  Well, thought Molinas, as long as it doesn’t disturb my season at the seaside!

  As he finished his cigarette, the telephonograph spoke:

  “Order of mobilization. Monsieur Molinas, Fabius, is drafted as Cannoneer second class in the eighteenth Territorial Aeronauts, sixth squadron. At five p.m. today he will report to the airship Épervier, three thousand two hundred meters above Pontoise.”

  “Damnation!” cried Molinas, leaping to his feet. “That’ll take an hour—I only just have time. I won’t be going bathing this year!”

  Accustomed to sudden departures, Molinas rapidly telephoned a few adieux and collected various papers; then, opening his drawers he found all his equipment in order.

  Forty-five minutes later, Molinas, jammed into his leggings and buttoned up in his reefer jacket, with his greatcoat over his shoulder, his continuous-fire revolver and saber at his sides, and his reserve oxygen-tank slung around his neck, arrived at the Paris tube with numerous companions.

  A special train hurled them toward Paris. At 4:10 he disembarked, slightly dazed, at the Central Tube Station. Airships were waiting for the troops, and, at five o’clock exactly, the squadron of Aeronauts destined for the Épervier set foot on the platform of the balloon.

  The Commandant of the Épervier gathered his men and announced to them in a few words vibrant with patriotism that war was to be declared at midnight precisely. The crew members installed themselves in haste. From time to time, the Commandant took out his watch. Suddenly, at a signal from below, the lieutenant pressed a button, the electric propeller went into action, and the Épervier launched forward, carrying my friend Molinas toward glory.

  At daybreak, a nauseating odor woke Molinas in his hammock; he went up on to the deck of the Épervier, which was flying through a dense fog.

  The squadron was moving past a division of flying vaporizers in the process of covering the frontier with a dense fog designed to dissimulate the operations.

  II. The Mobile Blockhouses

  Fabius, leaning out of the guard-room of the Épervier, was dreaming; still dazed by the rapidity of events, he thought he was on his way to the seaside resort.

  Have I brought my bathing costumes? Damnation! It’s only swimsuits made to measure that have the grace...

  A canon shot close to his ear brought him brutally back to a sense of reality. Fabius opened his eyes; six hundred meters away, a corps of blockhouses appeared, stopped in their march by the fog. The engineer’s whistle summoned at the Épervier’s men to their posts. The squadron spread out rapidly, the forms of balloons passed by, going to take the enemy corps from the flank and behind, as, regardless of the risk, it gave its electric engines full power to force a passage. The Épervier and five other airships were engaging in close-range combat at the head.

  Fabius, the second feeder on the port side, passed the cartridges to the loader without seeing anything of the battle. Suddenly, a machine-gun burst penetrating the embrasure put the commander of the gun out of action, along with all his assistants except Fabius. Without hesitation, he leap to the loaded gun, took aim with the greatest composure, and fired.

  A formidable explosion followed his cannon-shot, and the blockhouse at which he had aimed blew up.

  The fog gradually dissipated, and the battle appeared in all its horror. A dozen blockhouses had already been destroyed, others were defending themselves more feebly—but the smoking debris of two airships lay on the ground.

  Having sustained serious damage, the airship Épervier dropped steeply upon a group of blockhouses whose decimated crews were obliged to lay down their weapons.

  It’s all over: Only a few blockhouses have managed to escape and take refuge in a forest, where the airships are forced to leave them. The crews of the Épervier and a few crippled airships are divided among the captured blockhouses, which are launched forward.

  Fabius, having been promoted to sub-engineer in recognition of his good conduct, is given command of the lead blockhouse.

  Full speed ahead!

  At nine a.m. the blockhouse, traveling as if pursued, penetrates without difficulty into the earthworks of strong position gua
rded by a female brigade of enemy territorials, summoned to relieve the army of the first and second lines, comprising all men between seventeen and fifty years of age. A terrible surprise for those inexperienced warriors! In the blink of an eye they are disarmed, and the town captured.

  Alas, the occupation of the town would not be of long duration. They had been unable to cut the telephonic wire in time; the alerted enemy made preparations to destroy the audacious little corps that had ventured so far.

  In the middle of the night an enemy battalion, led by blockhouses to within a few kilometers of the town, penetrated one of its outlying districts without being seen. One by one, men clad in chemists’ uniforms, with aprons over their tunics and leather helmets enclosing their heads and necks, slipped through the streets. Silently, they began to set up strange and mysterious instruments on the terrace of a garden, screwing pieces together and attaching tubes. Within ten minutes, a chemical campaign battery was mounted; the men lowered the padded chin-guards of their helmets, took up their battle positions, and waited for their commander to give the order.

  “Fire!”

  One by one, four asphyxiant bombs described brief parabolas through the air.

  III. The Surprised Town

  Fabius’ companions were camped around bivouac fires. A sentry, having perceived suspect shadows, was about to raise the alarm when the first bomb rose up in a green-tined cloud. A loud cry, a puff of smoke...

  Three more bombs followed; then a great silence fell.

  The bivouac fires were extinct; everyone was dead, including the unfortunate inhabitants still in the town, suddenly asphyxiated in their homes. That was one of the accidents of war, to which, since the most recent conquests of science, all minds have become accustomed.