The Engineer Von Satanas

by Albert Robida

  “I’m a doctor, alas,” the Danish doctor added. “Well, now, I can give people diseases, but I can’t cure them. I can’t, not any longer! And, then, you remember, Jollimay, when the stock of medical munitions seemed sufficient, we were transferred to chemical munitions... Other abominations, manipulations no less dangerous, for the carboys of sulfur, the gas shells, the phosphorus shells…and the various explosives! The trinitrotoluene and the panclastite, the cresylite, the bromine, nitrogen peroxide....and the various employments of benzenes and kerosenes, and the poisoned mists, and the incendiary fogs, and all the diabolism of previously-unknown compounds, and the entire infernal dictionary of science, all the satanism of Cornu retorts,10 put in requisition and poured over the world by Germany. Gesta diaboli per Germanos!”

  “May God crush them, all the instruments of that accursed science!” murmured Jollimay.

  “He’s in the process of doing so,” said the doctor, grimly, “and all the rest of us with them: torturers and victims alike, we’re all going the same way. I’ve had plenty of time to reflect on the subject, in all the holes where we vegetate lugubriously. Well, I believe that God has had enough of this planet, which does him no honor, and the creature emerged from his hands, who has decidedly gone to the bad. He’s resolved to finish it and liquidate a failed operation. Once, the Bible assures us, he cleared away his work with a universal Deluge, but as God doesn’t do things twice, he’s renounced the method of water. This time, it’s by fire that he’s proceeded, by a deluge of iron and fire, and he’s confided the work to humans themselves—the humans who find an atrocious satisfaction in deploying all their ferocity, conscientious and perfected, against themselves, in a racial and planetary suicide! The tree of Science, we know only too well now, had been planted by Satan, and Adam got his hands upon it on the very first day!”

  “Calm down Doctor,” said Jollimay. “You’re no longer in the Boche factory...”

  “No, no, fortunately, I’m no longer there, and nor are you, Jollimay, since we got out at the same time, escaped—God knows how—on the day when three-quarters of the factory blew up after a deflagration of trinitrotoluene, which then spread layers of poisoned fog, mortal waves of corrosive air, over a radius I daren’t estimate! We were locked in our cell underground, but even with the threat, or rather certainty, of an imminent fusillade...”

  “Suspicion of sabotage of several tons of a new explosive,” said the artilleryman Jollimay.

  “Justified suspicion,” said the doctor, laughing behind his mask, “for we had sabotaged them quite nicely, their gas shells…and others! Infectious bombs whose ferments we had destroyed in advance, bottles of bacilli carefully spoiled, charming little beasties rendered inoffensive...”

  I saw his mask stir and shudder for some time under the shocks of silent laughter.

  “Our subterranean cell had saved us,” he went on. “We only had to push the door, dislocated by the explosion, and risk ourselves outside, prudently, when it seemed to us that the racket had calmed down. What ravages in the factory of death! But what joy for us! It was sufficient for us to pick up coats and helmets to give us the appearance of Boches, and slip away through the fogs with our masks on—no one could recognize us!

  “Six months of traveling across unknown country, ravaged lands...and without a map or a compass, relying on luck to get us all the way to the allied lines...and we ended up, after getting turned around, trying all sorts of directions, always running into obstacles, lying flat in certain places, pursued and tracked, finally to end up here, all together, our group having grown somewhat on the way, swelled by the friends you see assembled, fugitives like us, encountered in equally sorry states, escaped like us from various places and tracked like us. We’ve associated our miseries...”

  “In order to try to get out some day, I don’t know when, or how,” Jollimay declared. “There has to be an end to all this diabolism—there has to be!”

  The doctor shook his head sadly. “There are two more of us now,” he said, extending his hand to me and the young man from Polynesia.

  V. Four wooden legs and a few other snags.

  “There’s no more danger—we can take off our masks,” said the Peruvian lieutenant, who had ventured outside the burrow.

  “At last!” I exclaimed, “Help me to undo it—I’m stifling underneath it, with that horrible odor of I don’t know what.”

  “A mixture of hyposulfite, ammonia and various other products—it smells bad but it’s indispensable. You’ll get used to it, the mask—sometimes it’s necessary to keep them on for entire days.”

  Everyone had unmasked, with a visible satisfaction, and we were finally able really to make the acquaintance of the people who had saved our lives—the young man from Polynesia and me. For three or four hours, in our hole, we had been confronted by creatures of nightmare, phantoms with the faces of fantastic beasts. Once we were rid of our hideous hoods, I found them all benevolent faces, very sad but genuinely sympathetic, and I shook hands all round.

  Monsieur Bustamente, the Peruvian lieutenant, was a sun-tanned fellow of thirty-five or forty with hair already going white; Monsieur Gomares, the Spanish businessman, whom I had thought very stout, was, on the contrary, thin, with a wrinkled face and neck. He was a formerly obese individual thinned down by the disagreeable life that he had to lead in the burrows to Holland. Only the various sacks of coarse cloth that served him as clothing gave him a false bulk.

  Also formerly obese, Maître Saladin the notary-captain, doubly invalid, having lost one arm and one leg, seemed to have kept in spite of everything a certain joviality, for, seeing my gaze stay with alarm from his leg to his arm, he whispered softly into my ear: “It’s not from birth! 310 mortar, a few broken bones at a bargain price and buried under the debris—but don’t worry; pulled out three hours after the fact, just when I was beginning to get bored...”

  “The Armenian Arbydian and the Rumanian businessman Manoli, both bronzed, one as curly-haired as a negro, the other with his forehead shaded by thick tresses that seemed carved from ebony, allowed the same expression of distress to ooze through their eyelashes, of Orientals disorientated under the cold sky of Holland, whereas the Senegalese rifleman appeared quite calm and relaxed. That Mohammed was a true negro; thick ruddy lips parted to reveal a formidable set of bright white teeth, his broad smile contrasting with the funereal aspect of most of the others. His eyes gazed at the Danish doctor with an expression of tranquil obedience, ready to do anything at the slightest signal.

  The Annamite was ageless; I hesitated between forty-five and fifty years. Certain wrinkles at the corners of his moth made me incline toward the latter figure. I thought he looked intelligent and distinguished, with a certain arrogance. Remaking the introduction, the doctor told me that he was the son of a mandarin, and had graduated from the École Centrale de Paris in the class of 1915.

  The artilleryman-professor Jollimay, the New Zealander Felton and the aviator Miraud were very thin, and so was the Dutch ship-owner Vandermolen, in contrast to the common run of burgers of his race. Everyone in the burrow had hollow and fatigued features, but those most of all.

  The physique of the two Vitalis ladies was no more copious. In the young woman it might have passed for the slimness of youth, but for her mother it was a circumstantial thinness, like that of the Spanish merchant—which is to say, contrary to her nature, due to the deplorable kind of existence that events had forced them all to lead.

  But where had my eyes been? In my disturbance, under the sledgehammer blows of the successive revelations, I had not noticed that Madame Vitalis, like the American billionaire, had a wooden leg. As she saluted with her head and upper body during the introduction, with the fine manners of long ago, I heard a dry click, and saw a wooden pillar scraping the ground lightly.

  That made three wooden legs in the little troop. That was already a lot, but in his turn, Monsieur Jollimay, the artilleryman-professor from Geneva extended a leg of bizarre appearance.
A fourth pillar! On looking harder, I perceived that the Senegalese rifleman was wearing an iron hook at the end of his right sleeve. Then again, the aviator Miraud was missing an arm...

  What else? I examined my companions around me. The Spanish businessman had lost an eye. What that really all?

  Madame Vitalis, perceiving my gaze obstinately returning, involuntarily, to the wooden stump projecting from her skirt—frayed and ornamented, if one might put it like that, with numerous pieces of cloth in overly various shades—pulled the pillar back inside, blushing.

  Poor lady! Coquetry still, in this cellar under the ruins!

  Dr. Christiansen noticed the movement. “My dear Madame Vitalis,” he said, “don’t hide that piece of wood. Doesn’t each of us bear the marks of the savage beast’s fury? Yours was a shell-burst received in a field hospital bombarded and set ablaze. A war wound—a glorious wound!”

  Oh yes, all those unfortunates retained the traces of the teeth and claws of the diabolical beast!

  Decidedly, I had returned from the Pole at a bad time, and landed in a sorry place.

  Let us hope that we’ll find something better further along, and that, notwithstanding the amiability of these good people and their benevolent dispositions in our regard, that we shall remain in this dangerous country for as little time as possible.

  The most ravaged of all, in terms of physiology as well as aspect, was the poor Dane, Dr. Christiansen, my savior. I had not expected that funereal, devastated face with hollow cheeks, and haggard eyes profoundly sunk in their orbits: a lamentable face, completed by a drooping moustache and a white beard, a wrinkled forehead and a cranium like yellowed ivory, completely devoid of hair.

  “Yes, we can risk ourselves outside,” he said. “The layer of gas has been blown away, and will be lost at sea. We’re all hungry, and we need to find some food before nightfall. We had come out to search for food supplies for Monsieur’s house when we spotted you. Our provisions there are exhausted, and we need to take something back...”

  “What?” I asked, slightly anxiously.

  “Don’t worry. Hunting, fishing and horticulture will, I hope, furnish us with something to give you for dinner tonight. Oh, very frugally—I beg you in advance to excuse us; our resources are exceedingly thin...”

  We emerged from the refuge, and I rediscovered the landscape of devastation and ruins that had caused me such surprise after my first steps on European soil: crushed houses, scattered in heaps of stones and bricks, mingled with charred beams and twisted metal; disrupted terrains, enormous fissures whose origin I could not explain.

  “Let’s see—where are we, exactly?”

  “I’ve told you—in the suburbs of Harlem.”

  “Harlem is over there, look, to the right” the Dutch ship-owner told me, in bad French, which he mingled with phrases incomprehensible to me, “and over here, you see, Monsieur...” He tapped the ground with is wooden leg. “This was my garden, where my fields of tulips were, my bloementiunen…if you had seen them, those rows of flowers, orange, violet, yellow, red…splendid, Monsieur, splendid! I’d paid as much as thousands of florins for certain rare bulbs. And you see, it was here...

  “I’ve been able to save a few precious bulbs, which I cultivate in well-sheltered spots. Look, I keep four bulbs on me, in order to be sure of not losing them; once, I wouldn’t have sold them for ten thousand florins, and now, what sadness, one of these days we’ll be obliged to make soup with them, in order not to lose everything! Look, here are the ruins of the little windmill that pumped up the water for irrigation. The hole where we were just now was the cellar of my gardener’s house; it’s still solid, I was right not to skimp on its construction. It’s a good refuge, as you’ve been able to judge...”

  “I can’t see Harlem,” I said.

  “Because you’re looking for monuments…they’re leveled, the Groot Kerke, the Stadthuis, the Museum…all of them! It’s over there, in the direction of those cut trees; yes, that’s it—there are lines of trenches made with the debris of the houses of the outlying districts. Behind those is the town…somewhat damaged...”

  “We’ll be going there shortly,” said the doctor. “We live in one of the best houses, and we’ll offer you hospitality. Presently, it’s our dinner that it’s necessary to find...”

  “I’m anxious about our salad vegetables,” said the son of the mandarin from Hué.

  I looked at the vegetation on a bank, bizarrely withered and discolored. It had not been like that before. And the wild plants that had invaded the former squares of the tulip garden and covered the rubble everywhere with their vigorous shoots had lost their color.

  “It’s the gases that have passed over them,” said Monsieur Vandermolen desolately. “Everything’s withered.”

  While our companions dispersed in every direction, the doctor led the ladies, the young man from Polynesia and me toward the entrance to the opening of a trench, which was certainly several years old. We suddenly arrived before immense crevasses carpeted in places by vegetation. Some were very deep and pathways extended over their slopes, all the way to depths filled with yellow pools.

  “Mine craters,” the doctor relied to my mute interrogation. “There was a siege six years ago, when Harlem was retaken by the Boches. It made well-sheltered gardens; this is ours. We try to grow a few vegetables there. Alas, today’s gas has spoiled everything—our poor salad vegetables are lost! Here, look at them...”

  Indeed, on one of the slopes there were tufts of verdure that ought to have been lettuces, but seemed reddened and burnt.

  The young woman had run into a fissure in the crater. The remains of a tunnel opened there—a black shaft into which I would not have ventured willingly. She soon came out with a large wicker basket, which her mother filled with the least sickly salad vegetables.

  “Our potatoes look promising. The gas hasn’t done them too much harm. In six weeks, if nothing bad happens, we can start digging them up. The artichokes look beautiful—it’s precious, the artichoke; it grows anywhere!”

  We went back up with our harvest. Madame Vitalis’ wooden leg clicked on the pebbles of the crater. We walked for some time, climbing over heaps of rubble, stumbling into depths and following the guts of trenches.

  The young woman made us take a detour; she had discovered two or three partly-broken plum trees sheltered in a hole, and wanted to see if there were any ripe plums. We picked a dozen, which went into the basket to join the vegetables.

  VI. Encounters in the dunes.

  We found ourselves back in the dunes, which formed true hills near Harlem, over which grand old trees had once waved their foliage in the sea breeze. Poor devastated woods! The majestic trees were now reduced to the state of jagged stumps, or sad slashed and shattered debris, imploring the heavens with their long denuded arms.

  As we arrived at the ruins of a windmill that was still standing, on a substructure of stones, half-collapsed beams, with two sails hanging down limply, Mohammed’s black head appeared at a small window.

  “Good hunting!” he shouted. “I’ve got three rats today—but all three big and fat!”

  So saying, he stuck out his arm, and made the rats, held by the tail, dance.

  “Roasted, they’re not bad,” said Mademoiselle Vitalis.

  “You eat rat, Mademoiselle?” sad Marcel Blondeau, his expression alarmed.

  “Of course,” she said, quite naturally.

  While the doctor and the young woman made a tour of the windmill, searching for snails in the cracks, Madame Vitalis took me into her confidence. She talked to me about her husband, the colonel, about her youth in the brilliant Paris of old. She had lived in the same quarter as me, in the vicinity of Notre-Dame-des-Champs. I told her about my apartment; she had had friends in the house, perhaps she had met my nephew! She sighed as she remembered daytime visit’s to lady on the second floor, the cups of tea, and the pleasant chats! Melancholy reminiscences, but full of sweetness. She sighed more in thinking about
her daughter, a child of the war, brought up in the trenches, and who, poor thing knew nothing about society, and what a ladies’ afternoon tea was, in the happy days of old! At eighteen, she had never seen a piano—yes, Monsieur!—except, one day, for a few pieces of rosewood, with which, alas, they had done the cooking.

  “Good!” said Mademoiselle Vitalis, returning with the doctor with the harvest of snails. “There’s Maman, bewailing my fate! Of course I don’t know anything about scales and pianos, it’s a little gap—but I know how to distinguish the whistle of a big shell from that of a trench-mortar, an asphyxiant canister, shrapnel or an aerial torpedo, and that’s much more indispensable. In any case, Monsieur, Maman, out of modesty, won’t have told you, but she’s given me, I assure you, as careful an education as possible. I can read, I can write, I can sew, knit, tailor clothes from no matter what, make shoes and repair them, make faggots and wicker baskets—in sum, I possess all the little pleasing talents of a well-brought-up young woman of our epoch!”

  I told Mademoiselle Vitalis that I congratulated her of having successfully cultivated all those leisurely arts, which were now of such great utility, and I was about to ask her whether she added cooking to the list when the mother told me that she had reserved the cooking to herself since they had been living in a group in the house of the Harlem ship-owner.

  “A delicate task! Not that these gentlemen are difficult—the times aren’t right for gastronomy—but because it’s necessary to add to indispensable experience a great deal of ingenuity, in order to succeed in not living entirely on privations, with things that it isn’t easy to cook...”

  She was dutifully describing a few of her more ingenious dishes when we were hailed by a head that seemed to emerge from the ground some distance away, level with the grass of the dunes.