“Fallen, his wings broken, on to this coast some years ago, Monsieur Miraud is now with us,” the Dane went on. “He crawls instead of flying. He’s missing his left arm, as you can see—that’s rather inconvenient.”
“Bah! A matter of getting used to it,” said the former aviator.
“Here, now, is Señor Estebano Gomarès, Spanish businessman...”
“At the disposicion de Usted,” said a stout man, lifting his mask slightly. “I came from Barcelona to Amsterdam on business, after the first war. Imprudence, Señor, fatal imprudence! Forced to stay! Then Spain entered the struggle in her turn...imprisoned by the Boche; then retaken by the French, then tossed around with the Americans, the English…but always impossible to find a way to get back to Barcelona, by land, by sea, any way at all! Fatal imprudence—six years since I heard and mention of Barcelona!”
“Monsieur Demetrius Manoli, businessman, owner of oil wells in Rumania, numerous and once abundant. Enriched and ruined two or three times since the first war, ruined for good by this one.”
One of the refugees nodded his head sadly, but all I could see of him was the underside of a rabbit-skin helmet, evidently of his own manufacture.
“Don’t be downhearted, Monsieur Manoli—you’re no more ruined than the comrades...”
“Monsieur Arbydian, also a businessman, from Andrinople…”
“A Turk?” I said.
“An Armenian, Monsieur!” cried a tall fellow, sharply, whose velvet eyes and black plush beard I was able to perceive momentarily. “Let us distinguish, I beg you...
“There is no more Turkey,” the Dane put in, “but there are still Turks, since there are two or three old Turkish regiments with the Boches at the Palace of Peace—Turks Prussified for a long time, who can only pray to Allah in German!”
“But how do you come to be here?”
“I don’t know…affair of banking; I was in finance when there were still finances. Anyway, today, still, I’m the sole capitalist among all these gentlemen, for I still have a pierced English coin, which I conserve as a fetish.” From the pocket of a waistcoat made of packing felt, which certainly had not emerged from the hands of a tailor, he plucked a string, at the end of which hung a halfpenny bearing the effigy of King George.
“A true curiosity now, and a capital, in order to recommence business if the worldwide torment comes to an end one day, one way or another. Personally, Monsieur, I was surprised in Vienna by the tempest and driven all the way here, I don’t know how...soldier enrolled by force by the enemy, prisoner, driver of automobile trucks, explosives worker, ditch-digger, maltreated, starving, tracked a little everywhere, but always escaping, by great good luck, the supreme catastrophe.”
“Mr. Howard Gibson, American billionaire, and Mr. Bob Hatfield, American infantry major.”
The major, dressed in furry pelts, had both legs wrapped up in old rags, but I could see that he was missing an eye. He laughed at me without saying anything, revealing a big gap in his jaw and an enormous gash across his face.
The American billionaire bowed. I glimpsed the long face of an Uncle Sam who had allowed his beard to grow in complete liberty. The billionaire did not look very cheerful, and beneath an old frayed overcoat, I perceived a wooden leg.
“Billionaire?” said Mr. Gibson, trying to force a smile. “That doesn’t prevent me from digging in all my pockets, which are full of holes, in search of a fetish like Mr. Arbydian’s.”
“A billionaire in America, all the same, and that’s something...”
“If I could go there! Any then, what state would I find it in, our America? You don’t know, and me neither.”
“But what are you doing here?” I asked.
“Ah,” said the Dane, “that’s a long story. Mr. Gibson made his billions furnishing cannons, shells, tanks, and so on, in the course of the first war. And wanting to make noble use of that fortune made by war, he disembarked in Europe as soon as hostilities ended, with the intention of adding a considerable wing to the Palace of Peace constructed in 1908 by the American Carnegie, and a Museum of the Horrors of War. All his plans were ready, and his collections already assembled...”
“That was a very noble idea!”
“Yes, and Mr. Gibson was passing on to its execution when the second war broke out. He was in The Hague to hurry the work along and to follow, at the same time, the sessions of a great International Pacifist Congress organized by German intellectuals and Social Democrats. You know the…but no, I’m forgetting that you don’t know how the second war started...
“This is how it went: the Boches, who hadn’t been flattened completely enough, whose war factories hadn’t been fundamentally demolished, nor their machines, materiel and chiefs removed, suddenly threw themselves one vile morning on Holland. Aggression by sea, by land and by air! At the same time there were other attacks by the Swiss and elsewhere...but let’s not bother with that, and stay in The Hague with Mr. Gibson. He was at the Peace Congress. Interesting session; a sensational speech had been announced by a famous German philosopher, but that day, our German intellectuals weren’t in attendance. Suddenly, a coup de théâtre even more sensational than the advertised discourse: bombs falling from the sky, Zeppelins, Gothas and Fokkers, a rain of incendiary, asphyxiant and lachrymogenic shells...
“The Congress is badly hit; the session hall collapses. At the same time, we learn about the capture of Flessingue by Boche submarines, the forcing of the Helder, the bombardment of Harlem, the capture of Rotterdam, etc., etc. Personally, Mr. Gibson lost a leg. He found himself stuck in The Hague, a hostage of the Germans, who were able to amputate it, and a substantial part of his fortune at the same time. And Mr. Gibson only escaped from The Hague last year, after a great many tribulations.”
Mr. Gibson sighed. The poor billionaire’s misfortune had troubled me, but without giving me time to draw breath, the Dane resumed his introductions.
“Maître Saladin. Captain of infantry, previously a notary in a town in Flanders, alas, even more ravaged than him!”
A fit of coughing responded from a mask that inclined. I perceived a man so thin that his garment, a kind of long stiff sack, almost forming a dressing gown, seemed empty—and beneath it, another wooden leg.
A strange captain, and an even stranger notary.
“Monsieur Bustamente, lieutenant in the Peruvian infantry...”
“Peruvian!” I exclaimed. “There are Peruvian infantry in this war!”
“But yes, Monsieur, after we helped Brazil to recover the province of Sao Paolo, proclaimed a German Grand Duchy in 1924, and fought two campaigns on the Panamanian border against Boche guerillas from Mexico...”
“What?”
“Yes, and Monsieur Bustamente is one of the rare officers of a brave Peruvian regiment crushed by mines at the siege of Hamburg in 1926... Well, if you’re surprised to see a Peruvian with us, what will you say when I’ve introduced you to Mr. Archibald Felton, volunteer in the New Zealand Grenadiers, wounded in a mountain skirmish…in Switzerland, during the defense of a pass in the vicinity of Porrentruy! Mr. Felton fell into the hands of the Boches, was able to escape from prison in Germany after three years of the most miserable existence...”
Mute with astonishment, I could only stare at the Peruvian and the New Zealander, while uttering hoarse exclamations in the depths of my mask.
“Don’t splutter,” the doctor continued. “This is Mohammed Bamakou, born on the banks of the Niger, a sergeant in the Senegalese Rifles; Monsieur Konang. the son of a mandarin from Hué, if you please, an officer in the Annamite Rifles; and finally, to return to Europe, Monsieur Jollimay, a professor at the University of Geneva, a soldier in the Helvetic Mountain Artillery; and Monsieur Vandermolen, from Harlem, a ship-owner whose last vessel sank a long time ago, but who weeps above all for the destruction of his home town of Harlem and the loss of his tulip collection.”
Successively, the men thus introduced had raised their masks slightly, and I had been able to
distinguish their features. I glimpsed the New Zealander momentarily: a fellow about thirty years old, not at all the tattooed Kanak that I had been expecting. The Senegalese rifleman was a tall fellow of the purest black. The son of the Annamite mandarin I had mistaken for a woman because of his stature, his beardless faced and his small Asiatic eyes. The Swiss artilleryman was a bony fellow of at least forty-five, with long arms and legs, thin features and a benevolent and frank expression.
“This gathering of the most diverse races troubles you a little; that ought to allow you to begin to comprehend the extent to which the worldwide catastrophe has shaken up, mixed up and pulverized its peoples! But I haven’t finished the introductions. There are still two ladies, whom I kept till last; they’re compatriots of yours.”
Indeed, we still had another two companions in our hole. I say two companions because I could see hardly any difference between those ladies and the other refugees. I have mentioned that the garments of both sexes no longer had either form or color. With the masks, all were alike. Only the stature and a certain suppleness in their attitudes could allow their sex to be vaguely divined.
And their footwear! That truly lacked elegance; those ladies, like their companions, were shod in scraps of leather and canvas stitched together with thread or strips of cloth, as one might have seen on the most wretched tziganes in the most miserable land of the Orient.
“Madame Vitalis and Mademoiselle Vitalis,” the Dane continued. “Two Parisiennes, one of whom, I believe, has never seen Paris…or very little! Their adventure is worth being narrated to you in detail, but I’m a little out of breath. Know only that in nineteen-something-or-other, Madame Vitalis, whose husband was a young lieutenant in the infantry, went with her daughter, born at the beginning of the first war, to see her husband on the Belgian front, and at the same time to transport woolen socks and sandals to her twelve godsons in the trenches....”
“Pardon?”
“The ladies will explain it to you later8... Know, then, that Madame Vitalis arrived, unfortunately, just as a gigantic offensive was commencing along the entire front. Caught in the gears, she had to follow all the troop movement with a field hospital: advances, retreats, breakthroughs, charges, attacks and counter-attacks. Completely cut off from Paris, Madame Vitalis finally wound up, still with her daughter, in a village on the Belgian coast, packed off with the wounded.
“She stayed there for some time, while the distant battle carried off her husband, who had become a captain, a commandant and a colonel. She found him again one day, however, in a field hospital, wounded and almost dying. She cared for him, healed him, and lost him again shortly thereafter, forever this time, for one can be sure that he perished in the great attack on the retrenched Krupp camp, near Essen.
“Madame Vitalis and her daughter, after many other tribulations, ended up finding shelter, like us, in the caverns of Harlem, to which we shall go in a few minutes, when the danger has truly passed.”
I was astounded, and I lowered my mask in order to press my forehead, for fear that it might burst. Someone told me that the gas mask ought to be maintained, like an extremely precious possession. But how could I stop the tumultuous gallop of my thoughts in my poor head? How could I master my nerves again, and rediscover the strength to question and reason, in order to try to understand? How many fabulous upheavals I had been enabled to glimpse by that strange gathering in a burrow beneath the dunes of Holland, of people of such diverse origins, specimens of races so scantly related, swept there by the frightful torment!
IV. The Doctor lands a few explanatory hammer-blows on my head.
It took me nearly three-quarters on an hour to recover somewhat from so many successive shocks; I felt, in consequence, a veritable mental collapse.
I must have appeared pitiful, wedged between the Dane and the young man from Polynesia. I bowed my head, but my mask could not stifle my sighs completely. I had been dreaming recklessly, and for such a long time, of the intoxication of the return to European soil, to a civilized country!
Huddled in my hole, my eyes closed, all those dreams passed before my mind’s eyes again, involuntarily. And I no longer knew...
Come on! Let’s see, am I going mad? Or am I dead already?
I was recalled to reality, first of all, by distant detonations, and then by the pangs of my stomach. I was hungry, therefore I was alive.
“What time does one eat lunch here?” I asked my neighbor, the Dane, abruptly, without really knowing what I was saying.
The Dane seemed stupefied. “Lunch?” he said. “You’re hungry?”
“Well, we haven’t eaten anything since yesterday evening, and it must be two or three o’clock in the afternoon, it seems to me. We’ve passed through terrible emotions, which have hollowed out…”
“That’s a pity, but we don’t have anything to offer you. No food at all! We were on a hunting expedition, trying to find some...”
“No one eats lunch any more, and no one eats dinner,” said the professor-artilleryman from Geneva. “One eats when one can, when one has the luck to get one’s hands on something that can almost serve as nourishment...”
“It’s just a habit to acquire,” said the Peruvian.
They were jolly, the joys of return! I certainly pulled a terrible face behind my mask, and I uttered a sigh of desolation that ended in a furious growl.
In order to try to forget my hunger, I started to interrogate the Dane again.
“My dear doctor,” I said, “you’ve made the introductions; now I that know these gentlemen and these ladies, I’d be glad also to know to whom I owe my life—for it was definitely you who hurled yourself upon me first, in order to tip me into this burrow sheltered from the gas...”
“I told you, I’m a wretched man of science, a physician, doctor of natural sciences, something of a chemist; my name is Eric Christiansen, of Copenhagen. Among all the enormous fatalities through which we struggle blindly, destiny has rolled me as harshly as my unfortunate associates. My story is no less somber than theirs. In 1920 I was on campaign as a major attached to a regiment of Danish cavalry, first in Jutland—a rude campaign; then, transported to Italy, I took part in the retaking of Dalmatia from the Bolsheviko-Boches, the march on Vienna and the Bohemian campaign. I passed through Rumania, and then defended Constantinople against the Turco-Bulgaro-Austro…I don’t know, exactly. I found myself in Poland thereafter, with a Portuguese corps, and then…I don’t know any longer...
“Time passed; sometimes we stopped, white and frozen trench against white and frozen trench, during interminable winters. Finally, one day…it was in Silesia…half-frozen and half-burned in an explosion in one of our subterranean forts, three-quarters stunned by the collapse, I found myself a German prisoner. Then there was the prison camp, the forced labor, like all the prisoners, military or civilian, picked up in the lands occupied by the enemy or merely passed through by them. As I was a doctor, they naturally assigned me to making munitions...”
“What? Munitions?”
“Yes—chemical and medical munitions.”
“Eh? What?”
“Chemical munitions—you’ve just sampled a little: a feeble specimen; poison gases. That’s already an old game, but medical munitions…I hope you don’t make their acquaintance, although it’ll be very difficult to avoid it. Anyway, you’ll probably see when the occasion arises…let’s hope, if it comes to pass, that it will be benign!”
“Thank you,” I said, rather anxiously.
“So, I was put to making medical munitions at Chimische-Essen, the pendant to the Essen of Steel, in an immense factory comprising a good five hundred armored laboratories, protected by electrified barricades...oh, well protected! At the slightest attempt to get out of the enclosure, inevitable electrocution! Don’t worry, the installation had been very carefully organized. Twelve hours work per day, with just enough nourishment not to die completely, and the harshest treatment at any protest, or the slightest appearance of ill will. Horribl
y dangerous work…I’ve seen unfortunate wretches, forced to handle all the viruses, collapse over their bottles, poisoned.
“What work it was! The preparation of infectious cultures, studies of ferments and viruses; breeding and pulverizing of all the microbes and bacilli susceptible of transmitting the worst diseases and causing epidemics to break out; dosage of the products of our culture broths, arrived at maturity, in order to load them into miasmatic torpedoes, bombs, canisters, bottles, tubes, pastilles, etc…
“Those medical munitions, those projectiles if every form and nature, some destined to be employed by the artillery, others, apparently more innocent, seeming to emerge from an honest pharmaceutical laboratory, destined to be sown by aviation or carried by rivers and streams, to spread typhus, tuberculosis, glanders, smallpox, anthrax, cholera, yellow fever, or unknown and mysterious epidemics... The entire medical dictionary, in sum, put in bottles in accordance with formulae studied and established by Boche science!”
“Horror of horrors!”
“Gesta diaboli per Germanos!” said Jollimay, the artilleryman-professor of history at the University of Geneva.9 “There’s no other explanation. Oh, the Germany that we admired naively and stupidly, allowing ourselves to be taken in by its false façade, camouflaged so artfully! What a humiliation it is for us, alas, to remember before the enormous monster the no less enormous candor with which we fell into the trap—along with the entire world, however... Intellectual Germany! Gretchen with the blonde hair picking the petals off the daisy of Science! For us, apart from the Hohenzollerns in the depths of Prussia, apart from a clan of hawks and militaristic Bismarckians, there was nothing but intellectual Germany, the mild, friendly and scientific Germany! And we did not perceive it, loading its cannons behind a protective curtain of suave poets and worthy bespectacled scholars, preparing its satanic arsenal, accumulating its means of aggression, murder and pillage. Blind! Blind!
“Science, like war, was its industry, that Hohenzollern Germany: militaristic and militarizing science, organized with a view to the intensive production of anything that might serve to kill, to destroy, to massacre directly or indirectly... Come to us, chemistry, physics, electricity, radioactivity, bacteriology, etc., etc…and forward march for the King of Prussia!”
The Engineer Von Satanas Page 8