Damn! Damn! Damn! War has passed this way. These ruins seem more recent than the first. We’ve been unlucky!
I scan the horizon in vain; I can’t see anything, except bumps in the ground here and there, which might be more ruins.
No noise: a deathly silence around us; no appearance of movement anywhere.
What does all this signify? This frightfully deserted landscape, this devastation, this silence…what? War? Revolution?
We keep on going, cautiously.
Suddenly, as we’re climbing over heaps of bricks in a fold dip in the terrain, people hurl themselves upon us, uttering clamors in an unknown language. They knock us down, in spite of our resistance, violently applying cloths to our faces soaked in I don’t know what.
We struggle, and we howl, but we’re gagged, jostled and thrown into a dark hole, pell-mell with the brutal men, who hasten to shut a kind of door made of thick planks, after having ignited a heap of straw and branches, already prepared inside.
II. Brigands or rescuers?
The asphyxiating cloud.
What is this band of brigands, and what do they want with us? What are they trying to do to us? Bad luck is pursuing me! I’m bruised all over my body, and my gag is making it very difficult for me to breathe.
While I struggle, I notice that our aggressors are gagged too—or, rather, their faces are covered by a sort of hood or mask with goggles, which gives them a repulsive physiognomy. They have two enormous round or square eyes, with a kind of snout, and a bestially menacing expression.
I must look like them, with this mask that they’ve buckled over my face. There’s some chemical ingredient inside the snout that is suffocating me. I cough and cough!
My young companion is doing the same. In spite of his coughing fits, he’s distributing kicks at the people who are holding him.
As I try, in spite of everything, to remove my gag, I finally distinguish a few words in the inarticulate cries that the bandits are uttering.
“The gas! The gas!” they’re shouting. “Beware, or you’re dead!”
More threats! I shout to my companion to give up, in order to avoid our being killed.
Meanwhile, one of the individuals grabs me from behind and howls in my ear: “Leave it on! Are you mad? We told you there’s Boche gas. Didn’t you see the yellow cloud coming toward us? Boche gas!”
“What’s that?”
“Where have you come from, fool? You look like an intelligent man, though. Boche gas! Asphyxiating gas!”
Ah! I begin to understand, and stop resisting. It appears that they don’t want my life—on the contrary, they’ve saved me from an unknown peril. But what? What gas?
“Explain it to me,” I say.
I can hear masked me all around me, taking in muffled voices. I catch a few words, in Flemish or Dutch, English too, and French, and even Italian. My interlocutor speaks French with a strong foreign accent. What a cavern of Babel! Where are we, then?
Now that I can see better, their eyes, behind the big spectacles, no longer seem as evil. These people are all dressed nearly the same, in bizarre garments, more or less ragged and muddy, and it seems to me that there are a few women among them.
The man who spoke to me first makes me sit down on a charred wooden beam, and sits down next to me. The others form a circle around us. I can see, now, that their expressions are benevolent.
“Don’t worry,” the man says to me. Here, you’re almost safe. With our masks, and staying well wrapped up in our shelter, nothing will happen to us here—at the most, we’ll feel a little stifled, a certain difficulty in breathing. That will pass. But for you, it was just in time. Another five minutes outside, the sheet would have arrived, and you’d be dead. Thank God that we had spare masks with us, as a wise precaution!”
My fear is gradually dissipating, but it gives way to a profound amazement. I renounce trying to comprehend, and let my arms fall. I’m bewildered, nonplussed. It’s too much, too much. I gurgle ohs and ahs, endlessly.
My interlocutor gets impatient.
“Come on, at your age you must be a rational man. How were you imprudent enough…but first, who are you? You’re French, it seems to me.”
“Yes, yes, I’m French...a peaceful man of science, Monsieur,” I reply, sighing. “A man of study and science, cast up on this coast after terrible adventures, by one last shipwreck, after…”
My interlocutor leaps to his feet, suddenly furious.
“Man of science!” he cries. “A scientist! Shh! Don’t mention science—you’re risking a poor welcome here. Look, the others are growling already! You’re a man of science? Me too, unfortunately. I’m not paying you any compliment—oh no! We’re colleagues, then; me, I’m a poor devil of a Danish scientist. Doctor of medicine and many other things…very repentant and disillusioned, I assure you. Oh, that slut Science! The harlot! The whore!”
It seems to me that the others, around me, are looking at me with hostile eyes behind their spectacled masks, uttering muffled exclamations, and their fists are clenching.
“The harlot Science! The horrid slut!” the Dane repeats.
“But please,” I say, astounded. “Please…why the blasphemy?”
“Eh! You can doubt it, then? Without her, would we be buried in these ruins, in peril of death by asphyxiating gas, with other dangers lying in wait for us in every direction: being reduced to pulp by mines, torpedoes, explosions…devastations coming from the skies, by aircraft…diffusions of epidemic disease by means of miasmas, or grenades of high-virulence microbes…etc, etc…what do I know? Not to mention, my dear Monsieur, the danger of dying of hunger, if we escape violent and rapid death—and that danger isn’t the least, as I fear that it’s imminent!”
“What are you saying? What jokes are you babbling? Aren’t we in a civilized country?”
“Yes, if you can see clearly, since it’s full of shells. But you, Monsieur, be more careful what you say...to accuse us of joking! Have you disembarked from the Moon?”
I was seized by a frisson; he seemed sincere in his indignation.
“Where are we, exactly?” I asked.
“In Holland, near Harlem—which is to say, close to the place where the good city of tulips, the lush city of Franz Hals, lived happily and tranquilly before the upheaval...”
I strove to understand.
“Where Harlem was, you say? But...Holland is at war, then? At war against whom, Seigneur?”
“Once again, have you fallen from the Moon?”
“Very nearly!” I cried. “Very nearly! Listen to me, my dear colleague, let me tell you…I’ve arrived from the North Pole! Yes, the Pole! The Hutchinstone Expedition—you must have heard of it. The Hutchinstone Expedition, departed in May 1914, never came back! Prisoner in the ice for fifteen years! Fifteen years! We were finally returning, the survivors, when, two days ago, an explosion, cause unknown, destroyed our vessel. I’m the last…the only one spared! All the others…swallowed up!”
“The Hutchinstone Expedition to the North Pole! I remember—there was a lot of talk about it once, before the Deluge! I remember...I understand…you don’t know, then…you don’t know anything! In that case, I have terrible, lugubrious, fabulous things to tell you, my poor Monsieur! But I can’t tell you all at once…no, your brain would explode! The sole survivor, you say? And your companion?”
“I don’t know him. Encountered at sea on a fragment of mast to which I clung on...”
“Returned from Polynesia,” said the young man, who was following our conversation anxiously. “Marcel Blondeau, twenty years old, approximately. Sad adventures, me too; I’ll tell you about them briefly. A long time ago, about 1914, when I was about four years old, my parents were coming back to France with me. We too were sunk by a floating mine…yes, already! Only a few survivors were able to reach land, an almost deserted rock. I was saved, but I was an orphan and was raised by kindly savages, scarcely rough-hewn, who had been cannibals forty or fifty years earlier...”
<
br /> “Good and naïve cannibals,” said the doctor, bitterly, “who would never, I’m sure, have invented all these…but do go on!”
“And I was coming back with a few old castaways, driven by nostalgia for old Europe, good old Europe, so beautiful and so sweet! Oh, Monsieur! Their stories, their memories had cradled my childhood on the Polynesian island. We were coming back, and we were blown up again, five days ago. A stray mine again! For the rest, I know a little more than the Monsieur who’s come back from the North Pole, but not much. The war…the nations fighting for such a long time, all that is vague and very muddled in my head. I was coming back; I was bringing my arms, to serve the old country, if I could...”
“Pour young man from Polynesia!” said the Dane. “And poor Monsieur from the North Pole! I’ll tell you everything, as gently as possible, in a little while, when the Boche gas has gone.”
A fit of coughing interrupted him. I started coughing too, and the whole company did likewise; the atmosphere was becoming unbreathable; an odor of sulfur, or bromine—something horrible, I don’t know what—filled our cellar. We looked at one another anxiously, without saying anything. Next to me, an individual of the female sex, muddy, like us, was suffocating and clutching her mask with her hands. It was evidently a woman; that was divinable even though she was enveloped in a kind of old infantry coat, threadbare and ripped.
We struggled against the suffocation for three quarters of an hour; then our suffering eased; the fits of coughing became more widely spaced and less violent.
“You said Boche gas—what does Boche mean? Is it a new scientific term?”
“No! Boche—the horrible Boche, the anthropomorphous Boche of the Prussified German tribes, the Boches of scientific barbarism, in sum! The new Huns, I’d say, if I weren’t certain that, in doing so, I’d be slandering Attila, who didn’t have their hypocritical and scholarly ferocity. Well, those asphyxiating gases are Boche, it’s the Boches of the Palace of Peace in The Hague, not far from here, who send them to us...”
“Why?” I asked, stupidly.
The Dane shrugged his shoulders. “Not to be agreeable to us! Yes, yes, you’ve come back from the Pole, that’s obvious! Know that the Boche trenches are five kilometers from here. The Palace of Peace, you recall, the great Carnegie foundation for the pacific conferences?”
“I know, I know...”
“No, you don’t know. The ex-Palace of Peace, transformed, is both the central redoubt of the Boche positions in that direction, and their great factory of projectiles of all sorts, asphyxiating torpedoes, toxic gases...”
“But how? How? Explain it all to me!”
“Let me get my breath...”
The poor Dane needed a breather. Our semi-asphyxiation, the atmosphere of our cellar, the masks...all of that was hardly calculated to facilitate elocution.
We looked at one another for a while without speaking.
“Oh, great God!” I said finally, when I felt my throat slightly less acrid. “When shall I be in Paris? When shall I recover my pleasant and tranquil apartment in the Boulevard Montparnasse? That, my dear Monsieur, has been my great preoccupation during my fifteen-year sojourn in the Polar regions. On departure, anticipating that the expedition might be forced by circumstances to spend a few winters out there, I entrusted the care of my apartment and my natural history collections—one of which, above all, was particularly dear to me heart, an admirable collection of butterflies, unrivaled...unrivaled, Monsieur!—to my only nephew, a charming young man, tranquil and hard-working, like me, in those days. I made him swear to keep everything in order and await my return, no matter when, however long the delay…and that was fifteen years ago! You understand how much haste I’m in to get to Paris! An unfortunate hitch, this war!”
“Paris!” cried the Dane.
“Paris!” repeated the others, with a kind of snigger.
“Paris! But it’s five years now…yes, a little more than five years, since we’ve had any news of it…five years in which we’ve known nothing. Before then, we succeeded from time to time in picking up a wireless message, and caught a few fragments of news…but along came another scoundrel of a Boche scientist, to discover a means of disrupting wireless reception absolutely and forever, all over the world, and it was all over. No more communication, no more anything!”
“Yes, we live in absolute blackness,” said another, somberly. “Blackness in the head and in the heart, blackness everywhere.”
“News!” sniggered a third. “Oh, yes—that’s what we miss, as much as bread!”
“Newspapers! A newspaper, what a dream!”
“Families? Did we ever have families? Me, I don’t know any more!”
“A house, a nice little apartment! Central heating! Eiderdowns…!”
III. A fine meeting of human wrecks
and the debris of the Old World.
“Five years!” I exclaimed, when I had recovered slightly from the shock. “Five years! This war has being going on for five years?”
“Five years, my dear Monsieur from the North Pole? No, not for five years, for many more. How long, alas, how many years has it lasted, the frightful carnage that has devastated the world and is eating away poor humankind? No one, or almost no one, knows anymore!” He interrupted himself with a fit of suffocation that made him clench his fists.
“Shush! Don’t get angry—that does no good,” said one of his companions. “You’re right, this second war, alas, has lasted too long. Let’s see, it’s now 1929, isn’t it? About the eighth or tenth of July, if I’m not mistaken?”
“The tenth. At the Pole I marked every day in my notebook, for want of a calendar.”
“Here, in our burrows, we make a notch on a piece of wood every morning, for want of a calendar or a notebook. But one might make a mistake, you know...”
“So,” the Dane went on, breathing more easily, “if it’s the tenth of July 1929, the second war has been going on since....”
“Second!” I exclaimed.
“Yes, the second.”
“The first, which concluded in our victory, began in August 1914,” said the young man from Polynesia, advancing his mask before us. “I knew that, myself, out there in that savage island where I was brought up. I learned to read from an old collection of dispatches: French, English, American, Italian, Serb, Rumanian, etc. I would have told you that, Monsieur, on our piece of wreckage, if we’d been able to pay attention to anything but our salvation...”
“Then,” I said, “the second war...”
“Has been going on for nearly ten years.”
“Oh!”
That was like a sledgehammer blow on the back of my neck. I nearly fell backwards, and, in my distress, I snatched my mask away violently. Immediately, I was punished by veritable spasms of suffocation.”
The Dane precipitated himself forward and, in spite of my unconscious efforts, buckled the apparatus over my face again.
“Keep it on! Keep it on for at least another hour or I won’t answer for you! You’d be sick—very sick—and we don’t have anything with which to care for you. My dear Monsieur from the North Pole, you have a great deal to learn. Hold still, and don’t talk anymore! Keep calm—imitate your young friend from Polynesia. He’s holding still...”
“He already knew something, while I’m learning everything at once! And my poor apartment on the Boulevard Montparnasse—can you tell me…?”
“We can’t tell you anything about that, can we, Messieurs?”
All the masks in the circle around me made signs of negation.
“Excuse those personal preoccupations, Messieurs—I’m blushing about them now. I was thinking about my collection of butterflies, which I haven’t seen for such a long time! Tell me, I’ll be strong…let’s see…that first war ended with our victory, though?”
“Yes, by in a botched peace, with ill-conceived conditions, and poorly-taken measures... Lassitude, enervation, the enormity of the questions, the difficulty of finding good sol
utions, the neglect of indispensable precautions…and above all---above all!—the work of Boche agents, the incredible folly of international socialist parties propagated by mental contagion, under the triumphant sniggers of the Social-demokratic kaiserienne…in brief, instead of radically excising the monster’s claws and carefully breaking its teeth, we were content to erode them slightly, with gentleness and delicacy. False capital! Catastrophic forbearance, of which the entire world is now suffering the frightful consequences! Germany replenished her war materiel with feverish haste, multiplying its perfection tenfold...
“Her claws quickly grew back, her teeth were sharpened more furiously. Her aviation, her submarine fleet, her rolling bombards, her hordes of machine-gunners, flamethrowers and poisoners—the entire organism of massacre—was soon ready to function again, and the second world war burst forth.7 General explosion, universal conflagration, total disruption of the planet. Total, my dear Monsieur—total!”
He stopped, his voiced strangled in his throat.
“Look,” he resumed, after a momentary pause, “You won’t believe me, if I don’t show you right away a picture of the situation: a few human wrecks, the debris of the old world, scattered by the monstrous cataclysm. I’ll introduce you to all these Messieurs, the comrades united here by the solidarity of suffering and the desperate struggle for existence. We have the time, unfortunately, before being able to risk ourselves outside...”
The circle had drawn closer.
“Here, one of your compatriots first: Monsieur Miraud, French aviator.”
One of the men, perhaps the muddiest and most ragged of them all, bowed and raised his mask for a few seconds—just enough for me to see a bearded face that was trying to smile.
“Oh, an aviator dismounted for a long time,” he said, “in this war of moles or burrowing termites, I’ve forgotten the intoxications of rising into the open sky and hunting the enemy aircraft from cloud to cloud, machine-gun duels at three thousand meters…all that’s a long way away.”
The Engineer Von Satanas Page 7