The Engineer Von Satanas

by Albert Robida

  By a providential hazard, at the moment of the explosion, Fabius, who was hungry and thirsty, having gone down into the cellars to make a requisition, had just gone into a cellar that was carefully sealed and devoid of any communication with the exterior air. The only one of his company to escape asphyxiation, he remained unconscious for thirty-six hours, without drinking or eating anything.

  In the meantime, the general commanding his army corps learned of the recapture of the town by the enemy, and launched a few aerial torpedoes, of the 1944 long-range model.

  The torpedists lying in ambush in the cirrus and nimbus clouds at an altitude of three thousand meters allowed the first shades of evening to descend over the town and then, activating their propellers, precipitated from the heights of the sky and, having reached a convenient range, launched their terrible torpedoes.

  Suddenly, the town, wrenched from its foundations, swelled up, cracked and leapt into the air.

  Fortunately, Molinas, still unconscious, traversed space, along with a certain number of small objects, rapidly enough to escape the jet of flame, and emerged abruptly from his faint, slightly browned, and carried, so to speak, by a column of smoke.

  He hung on feverishly to an object that his hand encountered; it was a weathervane that had been hurled into the air with him.

  The upward momentum had ceased, and Molinas sensed that he was beginning to fall. That was an anxious moment.

  Thirty seconds later, he was gripped by an abrupt sensation of cold.

  IV. The Offensive Medical Corps

  After remaining underwater for a few seconds, unconscious again, Molinas ended up coming round, still dazed and bewildered, in the process of swimming on the surface of a river. He headed straight for the bank, where he would be able to hide in a clump of reeds.

  In the evening, some enemy chemists decided to give themselves the pleasure of taking a bath. Molinas came out of the river, took possession of the uniform of one of them, and joined a patrol that was going back into a domed fort. A sub-officer put him on sentry duty in a large hall in which members of the Offensive Medical Corps, composed of chemical engineers, physicians and apothecaries, were discussing the latest measures to take in order to make a dozen mines loaded with concentrated miasmas and microbes of malign fever, glanders, dysentery, measles, stabbing toothache and other maladies to explode under the feet of the French army.

  The mines were prepared; caissons were about to transport the zinc shells loaded with the necessary miasmas and canisters of microbes…

  But Fabius, thanks to his comprehension of the language, has understood everything. A sublime resolution ablaze in his heart, he devotes himself to the salvation of the army. Rapidly, he raises his repeating rifle and fires his entire provision of bullets into the large reservoir of miasmas and chemical products...

  Terrible, frightful, the explosion that follows the rifle shots of the heroic Molinas!

  Everything blows up: the reservoir, the caissons, the shells! The deflagration of all those concentrated and compressed miasmas occurs with enormous violence; thick columns of swirling, rolling vapors flood out through all the exits, spreading over the plain and dissolving in the atmosphere, carrying with them unspeakable odors and innumerable ferments of disease.

  Everything has collapsed in the conference room. Generals, officers, chemical engineers, physicians and soldiers have all fallen down suddenly, and are writhing on the ground, prey to all the maladies unleashed by Molinas’ action. Epidemics fall upon the enemy army and transport their ravages over a radius of three leagues in three minutes.

  Thanks to the tampon in his chemist’s helmet. Fabius, who had decided to sacrifice his life, got away with a nasty toothache.

  Fortunately, the French army escaped the contagion. A microbial engineer in the French Offensive Medical Corps, on sentry duty at the extreme advance posts, understood the distant rumblings of the explosion the accident that had overtaken the enemy, and telephoned the general, who sent forward all the available chemical batteries to cover the army’s front with an insulating fog.

  Thus rid of the enemy that was threatening his left, the general, shielded by the fog, abandoned the contaminated region with an abrupt about-turn, and fell back upon the enemy corps maneuvering to his right.

  Molinas, still prey to his raging toothache, then rejoined the army and made his report to the general.

  Heaped with felicitations by the general, embraced by the entire general staff, decorated and mentioned in dispatches, Molinas finally sensed his dolors calming down.

  He retained nevertheless an unfortunate tendency to odontalgia, and was obliged not long afterwards to get an entire set of false teeth.

  Let us say immediately that the enemy hospitals had to treat 179,549 civilian and military casualties, and that, from the mixture of all the miasmas, a remarkable and absolutely new malady was born. Cultivated by the physicians of Europe entire, it is now known by the name of Molinous fever, after its inventor, and the place where it first came into existence has remained exceedingly unhealthy.

  V. Siege Operations, Pumpers and Mediums

  In recompense for his admirable conduct, Fabius Molinas was appointed a sub-lieutenant of pumping machine-gunners. That corps, of recent formation, is a kind of extremely mobile artillery which can be transported very rapidly to any location and instantly cover positions inaccessible to ordinary artillery with a violent fire.

  To begin with, Molinas had four pumps under his orders, each maneuvered by five men. In the first battle, fiercely disputed, Molinas, huddled with his pumpers in the ruins of a house, withstood four successive attacks, his men being replaced three times; he alone emerged unscathed from the field of carnage. That same evening he was promoted to lieutenant.

  The region in which the army was operating was sown with lines of torpedoes linked by wires, mines, and cleverly dissimulated domed forts. They only marched with precaution, electricians and mediums to the fore in order to defuse the mines and blow up the enemy torpedoes. The Aeronautical Division being occupied elsewhere, there was no possibility of dynamiting the domed forts from above. It was necessary to proceed by means of regular sieges.

  The heavy artillery, by means of a series of fortunate shots, having succeeded in smashing or jamming the mechanism that moved the cupolas, the assault columns were launched forward and descended through the breaches in the dome.

  Having taken the domes of the first line, the army was preparing to lay siege to a large fortified town. After having simulated a fake attack at another point, the general sent forward a reserve squadron of mediums under the cover of a dark night. Put at his disposal by the Ministry of Science, the mediums in question—the most powerful magnetizers and suggestionists in Paris, according to the scientists—marched slowly toward the enemy lines, emitting torrents of fluid by means of energetic passes.

  A moment of terrible anxiety! Are the enemy guards going to fire, or will they, subjugated by the fluid, allow the mediums to pass?

  A profound silence continues to reign; the mediums are still going forward; they have passed thought the lines. A column of troops follows them. Firstly, the column finds a few sentries and little guard-posts in catalepsy, and then the entire garrison of a redoubt lying on the ground, stiffened by the magnetic trance.

  The general, informed by telephone, moves his troops, racing to occupy the redoubt conquered without a shot being fired.

  The mediums have collapsed, exhausted; a full two hours of rest is absolutely necessary to them.

  Grave danger! The enemy might flood the redoubt with asphyxiating gas before it can be put in a defensive state—but the enemy has no suspicions, and the cannons remain mute.

  Finally, at the first light of dawn, the mediums, having recovered their energy, resume their passes. After terrible efforts of will, and after having lost the hypnotizers to disturbances of the brain, the chief medium succeeds by means of suggestion to bring the commander of the southern fortifications the town to
capitulate.

  VI. The Battery of the Fearless Chemists

  All was not yet finished. The mediums, after a well-earned rest, turned their efforts toward the corps in position. Thy commenced their operations that same evening; unfortunately, in their haste to advance, they neglected to defuse the torpedoes with which the terrain turned out to be sown, and the entire squadron was pulverized by the explosion of a mine that the magnetic passes caused to explode beneath their feet.

  It was necessary to revert to regular operations. During the night, under a rain of projectiles of all kinds, the general set up a large chemical siege battery.

  A spectacle of sublime horror: the air ablaze with red, green, violet, yellow and blue flamboyance, traversed by sudden fulgurations and great jets of flame, criss-crossed by thousands of shells, canisters and chemical carboys bursting with projections of gas and smokes of every hue!

  The enemy chemists are also at work; there is an epic duel between the two corps. That same day they reveal two batteries that pepper ours with paralyzing gas bombs. Our men, paralyzed or afflicted with a mortal catalepsy, fall on their guns. The response is given to them by miasma shells producing frightful attacks of epilepsy. But the asphyxiating shells rain down like hail on our lines, as well as canisters containing the microbes of chemical mange, a superb find by an illustrious enemy scientist.

  Our chemists were suffering horribly when one of our engineers finally invented carboys of a corrosive dew (awarded the Medal of the Académie des Sciences for the production of atmospheric vitriol) which destroyed the enemy batteries in a single night.

  In the meantime, it was discovered that the enemy submarine fleet was preparing to quit its home port for an unknown destination, either with the intention of ravaging our ports or to operate a disembarkation at some point on our shores. A scout who had ventured into enemy waters had been able to count the magnificent submarine monitors of the fleet, the armored high-speed destroyers and the torpedo-boats moving through the waves with a remarkable velocity.

  The French fleet, also numerous and no less beautiful, was at sea, carrying the submarine infantry along with a disembarkation corps The Engineer Admiral’s plan was to fall upon the enemy fleet as it passed, destroy it, and then attack the enemy ports.

  Fabius Molinas received order to join the French fleet; by reason of his brilliant services, he had been detached to the navy in the capacity of an Engineer Torpedist, and strongly recommended to the Admiral, who entrusted him with the command of the Cyanure de Potassium, a submarine torpedo-boat of an entirely new model.

  Fabius went immediately to his port of embarkation and took up his command. The Cyanure de Potassium, of very restricted dimensions, only carrying six men, was one of those small and slender pisciform torpedo-boats designed for rapid strikes, and also for difficult explorations: one of the terrible myrmidons of the sea that glide just under the surface and come up from below in order to plant their torpedoes in the hulls of huge monitors.

  VII. The Submarine Torpedo-Boat Cyanure de

  Potassium

  “You’re a landlubber,” the Admiral had said to Molinas, when he confided the torpedo-boat to him. “Show me that you conserve all your qualities in the water.”

  “Damnation! You’ll see that, and so will the enemy!” Molinas had replied, modestly.

  Almost shaving the sea-bed, hiding among the rocks covered with weed, the Cyanure de Potassium pressed ahead at full speed. In two days, she reached enemy waters and almost ran her nose into the lines of torpedoes defending the coast.

  In seventy-two hours, during which his men did not have a moment’s rest, Molinas succeeded in unfastening the torpedoes of three chaplets, each more than twenty leagues long. Taking care not to cut any wires, in order to allow the enemy to think that the defenses remained intact, he emptied all the torpedoes without any accident.

  One last chaplet remained of torpedoes anchored at the extremity of the haven when the enemy fleet charged its electrical accumulators. The Cyanure de Potassium succeeded in approaching unperceived. This time, Molinas did not remove the torpedoes; he had another plan. He cut the enemy wires and reattached the chaplet of torpedoes to his electric battery. Then, hidden in a hole in the rocks, breathing through an air tube, the Cyanure waited for the moment when the enemy fleet presented itself at the pass in order to go out to sea.

  “Go!” said Molinas to his electrician.

  The torpedoes exploded; seven monitors were dispersed in fragments in the air, with a gigantic jet of foam; five or six others were thrown on to the coast, badly damaged.

  A few monitors of the advance guard had passed through; the brave Cyanure de Potassium, quitting her shelter, launched forward and deposited her torpedo in the flank of a huge bombard.

  That was her final exploit; the fore section of the bombard, falling on the Cyanure, broke her torpedo tube and badly damaged her propellers. At the precise moment that the Cyanure was thus disarmed, Molinas perceived all the enemy scouts and torpedo-boats racing toward him furiously.

  Let’s use cunning! Molinas said to himself—and instead of fleeing toward the open sea, he headed for the coast in order to lodge there, hiding among the rocks.

  The Cyanure slid into the rocks, bounding into the wider gaps—but behind him, getting closer all the time, the enemy torpedo-boats were also bounding. At nightfall, the Cyanure ran aground close to the mouth of a river.

  Two enemy scouts, traveling too fast, also ran aground and sustained damage. Taking advantage of the confusion, Molinas had his men put on their diving suits, in order to try one last move. He was just in time—the enemy divers were already attacking the Cyanure’s hull with axe-blows.

  There was a flight across the sea-bed into the unknown. The enemy divers, after a moment’s hesitation, followed Molinas and his men, who slid between the viscous rocks, stopping from time to time in order to send the pursuers a bullet from their compressed-air carbines. By turning into a creek, Molinas succeeded in gaining a little advance in the water of the river.

  For nine days they marched thus, sometimes on the bank and sometimes in the river when they passed through towns, pursued by cavalry launched on their trail, lost and picked up again, when one day Molinas hear the muffled sound of cannon fire—water is a good conductor of sound. There had to be a battle twenty-five leagues away, so they were going to meet up with the French army again”

  “Forward, damn it!”

  Another three days of forced march. They redoubled their prudence and passed through several enemy army corps without any difficulty. Finally, Molinas recognized the uniforms, and during the fusillade at a good moment during an engagement on the banks of the river, he and his divers appeared to the astonished soldiers.

  “Who are these men” asked the general occupied in telephoning orders.

  When Molinas had explained his presence, the general said “Bravo! But before you go to the field hospital, I need you again.”

  “I’m ready!” Molinas replied.

  “You’ll have to go back into the water!”

  “I’ll go!” said Molinas.

  “You’re going to go downriver with your men. A league from here you’ll find the first enemy lines. Go through them! Further on, the enemy has his big blockhouse locomotives in a battery. You’ll pass under their fire…and further on still, you’ll find the telephone wires maintaining communication between the enemy’s left wing, which I’ll pin down by means of a forceful diversion, and the right wing, which I intend to crush. Cut those wires, and then come back, under the fire of the locomotives, and come to give me a report of the expedition. Go!”

  Molinas has already gone.

  VIII. Airborne Commando no. 39

  Having carried out his mission successfully, Molinas reappeared with two more wounds. He immediately went to the field hospital, and shortly afterwards was evacuated to a French hospital. Three weeks later, as he was finishing his convalescence, he received an order to join the aerial squadron in order
to take command of Airborne Commando no. 39.

  Following the instructions he received from the Chief Engineer, he went, by way of a long detour, to the enemy’s northern provinces, making abrupt descents here and there to disorganize services, cut wires, impose war taxes on towns, and dynamite enemy fortresses whenever he could.

  Airborne Commando no. 39, under Molina’s orders, caused an unusual trouble in enemy territory with its rapid incursions its sudden descents and its unexpected attacks. Enemy airships wasted their time in futile flights to one place while he was inflicting ravages fifty leagues further on.

  Finally, the enemy, spitting feathers, sent an entire fleet in his pursuit, with hosts of little independent torpedo-craft. Identified by a scout, the Airborne Commando was overtaken and surrounded by innumerable torpedo-craft of various sizes, manned by between two and six men.

  Molinas understood that only audacity could save him. He attacked himself, risking everything to a charge directly at the torpedo-craft, and continued straight on, ahead of the squadron.

  “Damnation!” he said to himself. “If there’s nothing more to be done here, I’ll go surprise their colonies!”

  And, favored by a gale, he headed due south, only followed by a few stubborn torpedo-craft, whose pilots had guessed his plan and were striving to increase speed. Molinas did not allow them to overtake him or take him by surprise; matching wits with them, he succeeded in disabling the torpedo-craft one by one.

  In a desperate scrap with the last of them, however Commando no. 39 was hit in the propeller and its rudder was broken. The enemy colonies were saved.

  That damage forced Molinas to descend and land in a wooded area on the bank of a river, which, on taking a bearing, he found to be the White Nile, a few hundred leagues from Belgian Africa, the Empire of the Lakes, the French kingdom of the Congo and the American colonies.