The Engineer Von Satanas

by Albert Robida

  The doctor has no fear for himself; he had typhus in Silesia, and is now immune to it. We see very little of him. In order not to risk bring the scourge to us, he sleeps at the end of the garden, in the remains of a old stable. Our other companions aren’t afraid; they’ve seen many other scourges and maladies; they declare that they too have been fundamentally vaccinated.

  One morning however, there was an alarm among us. Marcel Blondeau, very valiant, very active, and, by virtue of the demands of a twenty-year-old’s appetite, always disposed to run off into the dunes in search of some nourishment—rabbits, rats, vegetables or fish—felt very ill.

  The doctor came to see him, and seemed dissatisfied.

  “Fresh organism,” he said to me, taking me to one side. “The boy arrived here from a healthy country, free of all our scourges, falling on to ground saturated with horrors, swarming with bacilli, carrying into his veins all the poisons that a frightfully soiled and polluted atmosphere can contain. He can’t present the same resistance as the poor Europeans who are still surviving, for the moment, so many opportunities to die, natural and scientific. We’re mithridated, so to speak, by habituation to the scourges, accustomed to breathing and vegetating in the midst of all the abominations distilled so abundantly on all sides by the satanism of accursed Science. I have a fear fears for him…and for you too, who arrived with the same freshness from a fortunate and tranquil land, perfectly healthy, for at the Pole, you had nothing at all to fear from everything that we suffer. Oh, why the devil did you quit those pleasant Polar lands?”

  He caused a cold chill to pass down my back by looking at me an examining me very closely.

  “No headache? Let’s see, no pink patches on your skin? No…at least, not yet...”

  “You’re not very reassuring, you know, doctor!”

  “That’s because I’ve seen pink patches on our young friend’s epidermis which have taken away the last doubts. He has typhus, damn it! Beware of contagion!”

  The patient was isolated, very near to the doctor, in the corner of an old automobile garage, almost as comfortable as a coal-hole; and Madame Vitalis took her chair into it in order to keep vigil with the doctor. We had grave fears for several days. The doctor didn’t prognosticate, but when we interrogated him we could tell from his reticence that the boy was gravely afflicted.

  Madame Vitalis cared for him with a great deal of devotion—or, rather, nursed him, for deprived of any pharmacy, there was nothing much we could do against the disease. Her daughter was perpetually running to the fields and the dunes, hunting for herbs requested by the doctor for miscellaneous anodyne tisanes, since he didn’t have anything better to wage war against the malady.

  The young woman, who hadn’t previously shown any fear of the epidemic, was utterly distressed and demoralized; her eyes were perpetually imploring the doctor, and when he came back from seeing Marcel she bombarded him with anxious questions—but without ever naming the young man.

  “And how is our invalid, Doctor? Has he slept? What of your anxieties yesterday evening? You don’t fear for our invalid any longer, do you, Doctor?”

  I believed, however, that the two young people had quarreled, since Marcel, ravaged by jealousy, had previously shown poor Jeanne an almost hostile coldness, to which she had responded with an affectation of perfect indifference.

  And now, what desolation and anxiety! In the end, the resistant strength of youth and the young man’s mental vigor reckoned with the attack. Madame Vitalis came back to us, in the common room, with her face almost joyful.

  “Well,” I demanded, “Is there hope?”

  “He’s saved! The doctor is rubbing his hands and he’s gone into town to visit other patients. By the way, it’s said that there’s cholera now...”

  “Cholera! And you announce that calmly!”

  “Yes, cholera—like last year, the malady has begun very quietly, in the Melkbrug district, where there are little canals obstructed by ruins, and stagnant water...”

  “Bah!” said the aviator Miraud, who was coming back from the dunes with two rabbits in a sack. “We’ve seen many others. By taking a few little precautions, we’ll get through your cholera.”

  The American billionaire was in the midst of discussions with Mademoiselle Vitalis regarding the repair of his single shoe—he only had one leg—which resembled a Mohican moccasin in a poor state, more like what we would have called a sock prior to 1914. He shrugged his shoulders with a perfectly indifferent expression. Jeanne Vitalis smiled. She had suddenly recovered her gaiety.

  “One epidemic more or less,” she said, “is of no importance.”

  The worthy Senegalese rifleman rolled his eyes and showed all his teeth in a broad silent laugh. “Boche cholera’s worn out now,” he said. “I don’t care about that.”

  So be it—let’s treat these plagues with scorn and think about something else—for example, of getting away from here as soon as possible. “I want to go home, damn it!” I repeat every day it the doctor, who replies with his usual pessimism.

  “Home my dear Monsieur? Do you even know whether anything is left of your ‘home?’ Perhaps your apartment, your house, and your entire quarter are in an even worse state than this superb family home, the patrimonial manor of our friend Vandermolen—which is to say, the heap of broken ruins in which we’ve organized our precarious existence.”

  A scarcely agreeable perspective! However, the terrible doctor is a little less somber and bitter at the moment, because he’s very busy. He runs to his patients, he agitates, he lavishes petty cares or soothing words on them for want of medicines, or brutalizes them, in accordance with circumstances, in order to rebuilt their morale. While doing that, he spends less time devoting himself to despair, and forgets to roar his wrath and maledictions.

  He laughed sarcastically while making me glimpse such awful possibilities for the peaceful apartment that I loved to describe to him in our conversations when, bleak and weary, we went back to our cavern.

  Monsieur Jollimay and Maître Saladin laughed too, looking at one another.

  “Your peaceful apartment!” said Maître Saladin. “Yes, yes, perhaps—continue to hope, that’s not forbidden to you…as it is to me for my study! Where is it, my poor study? In what state? More damaged than I am, my second clerk told me, when I met him in Bavaria in a village we’d just taken. He was able to inform me about my study. He was in the air force, my second clerk; one day, three or four years ago, patrolling on the western front near here he was able to make a detour to fly over the area. He circled and circled, at a low altitude looking for our poor study…impossible to discover it, to recognize the street, or even the neighborhood. The entire region in little pieces, in smithereens! And I had a major affair in progress—the liquidation of an important inheritance: a magnificent Renaissance château in the area, superb estate, woods, farms, etc. But I think the château, converted to a strong position, was bombarded for eighteen months. Oh, my minutes, my poor minutes!”

  “Perhaps your second clerk didn’t see very clearly, or didn’t search very hard,” I said to him, in a low voice. “Listen—what if we were to go to see for ourselves, try to get out of here…?”

  Maître Saladin shook his head.

  II. Excursions and Reconnaissance

  I go out every day with a few of my companions in the refuge. I’ve explored the surroundings with them, usually circulating in the trenches that are dug more or less everywhere, and which replace roads on the surface, long since disappeared under rubble or invading vegetation.

  In order to formulate a plan of campaign I study the routes, trying to obtain dome notion of the facilities or difficulties and the eventual perils—in brief, everything that I might find before me in such and such a direction.

  The ruins of villages, almost all dating back several years have a less lamentable appearance than that of the own; nature has rehabilitated them more fully, dressed and ornamented them. Sometimes, we pass the cadaver of a farm or a hamlet,
collapsed in the course of some frightful drama and one might think that they were cheerful and verdant hillocks where children go to play among the flowers, picking poppies or strawberries. Sometimes we discover a path where one might expect to see young girls emerging from beneath the foliage, singing, and that path leads to some tumulus planted with hundreds of wooden crosses, keeling over, bearing effaced inscriptions, covered in brushwood, under which one also glimpses shells, old rusty helmets, the debris of weapons...

  Where are they, those village girls that I imagine pink and pretty underneath their Dutch plaits, in their old brightly colored picturesque costumes? Where are the insouciant children? Yes, where are they all, alas?

  I sometimes perceive inhabitants; I see them coming out of holes underneath the ruins, or burrows similar to the one where we were collected after our disembarkation: people with wan faces, clad in raged costumes, advancing prudently, with anxious expressions, their hands clutching old weapons adapted as clubs. They go forth like us, in search of more or less bizarre game; they head toward some square of ground spared in the genera devastation, where they grow vegetables, the precious potatoes, onion, turnips and carrots, awaited by their families or their companions left behind in the refuges, hidden in the woods or under the ruins.

  In such encounters we look at one another suspiciously, one calls out from a distance before approaching. I also interrogate, asking questions, in quest of news; I’d so much like to know what is happening elsewhere, beyond our narrow horizon. Of news, there is none. No one knows anything; everyone stays confined in his hole, hiding like a hunted animal, only trying to live and to endure.

  And in the city—in what we persist in calling the city—it’s the same. People live in families or in groups in old solid cellars, which have so far resisted them bombardments, and have often been consolidated by beams and heaps of rubble or sacks of earth. Some quarters, more maltreated than others, are entirely deserted, while the population has concentrated in better protected places, leaving the excessively ruined ruins to packs of dogs and wild cats, thin, bristling and hungry, always hunting and always tracked themselves by hunters with empty bellies.

  The human faculty of adaptation is extraordinary, of people living in these deplorable conditions, always under the threat of worse catastrophes, at peril from shells and bombs, collapses, poisoning by gas, maladies and plagues that the world no longer knew, with the dread of famine as well—ever-imminent famine, always possible with brief delay if everyone, in the quotidian struggle for nourishment, doesn’t do his utmost in the perpetual effort to keep going as best they can. And I observe that they seem to consider that wretched day-to-day existence as entirely natural, and don’t appear to be astonished or indignant at all. They only think about the danger at the moment it materializes; the rest of the time, I believe, they don’t think about anything except the pursuit of their daily bread.

  What am I saying, bread? There has been no more bread for a long time, since there are no more wheat-fields and no more agriculture. Bread has been replaced by potatoes, which everyone tries to produce in the gardens that are shared between all the available arms, in all the accessible terrains, vague fields and old public promenades.

  It’s the triumph of ingenious people, of practical people, and above all of those who possessed, before the great torment, a little knowledge of gardening.

  The families of the bourgeois class, in general, the former rich, the people with strong-boxes filed with the title-deeds of income from Estates, of shares that were said to be absolutely safe, have fallen, along with those derisory pieces of paper to the utmost degree of poverty, and are vegetating awkwardly and lamentably in their devastated homes, while the poor devils once devoid of cash are making their way in the new world with more facility. The rich men of today are those who possess a goat or two, or well-protected chickens, precious resources in case of bad days, but over which it is necessary to maintain very careful surveillance, for fear of the envious and hungry marauders.

  And those worthy people don’t moan about the misfortunes of the times, and don’t make a fuss about an emission of asphyxiating gas or one epidemic more or less; they try to keep apart, to protect themselves from and against everything, and to live—to live in spite of the accumulation of impossibilities. I scarcely see anyone except the doctor, who doesn’t accept these new conditions of existence, without perpetual protest.

  “Well, yes, my dear Monsieur, you’re up to date now. You know as much as I do. You find it jolly, our super-civilized existence, eh? Come on, though, stick out that tongue so that I can see it…not bad. And no headache? That’s good, you’ll avoid the typhus. Anyway, the epidemic is decreasing, petering out! Yes, yes, you see here all Europe in miniature. The same thing everywhere, Monsieur, and the same pleasures!”

  “What stupefies me,” I say, “is to see these populations, the peasants, the ravaged villages, the mariners of the coast, as well as the inhabitants of that wretched ruined city, showing such a perfect resignation—or, rather, a tranquil acceptance of their dire lot!”

  “Can they do otherwise? It’s necessary. Flee? Seek to go elsewhere? Where, if you please? In the beginning, yes, there was many an exodus of population, bewildered flights from the unleashed Teutonic hordes, fearful of ravages and barrages, under the hail of explosives and he sheets of gas, extinguishing life everywhere in front of the invading troops. But now, where would they go? Flee through all the dangers? Why? To find oneself somewhere else, further away, no matter where, in exactly the same situation? As futile as it is impossible! Better to stay in one’s shelter, and try to endure, with difficulty, scratching the earth to maintain one’s life...”

  “If that existence is really worth the trouble...”

  “Well, well, you’re in a black mood—are you becoming a somber pessimist too? I told you so! My good Monsieur, examine the state of Europe, only to think about her—look at the picture! Europe! Do you remember the photographs of the Moon, which showed us a world in demolition, a soil covered in holes, in brittle and crumbling craters? Well, if there are astronomers on the Moon, that’s exactly what they must see here now! Undoubtedly, the Moon has passed through the same horrors as us; there will have been some race of prey there, lunatic Boches to devastate everything and turn everything upside-down, to the extent of complete and definitive extinction.

  “In our devastated Europe there’s no longer anything but trenches. Those trenches, zigzagging across all countries, furrowing, cutting, slicing and crosshatching plains and mountains, have been, for a long time already, the sole fashion of laboring that the poor earth has known European! The fronts—I don’t say armies; there are no more armies, but entire peoples under arms—the fronts penetrate one another and become entangled, friends and enemies all mixed up, pell-mell. Gradually, they’ve formed islets of a sort, more or less vast; regions of resistance and combat, around a center of war factories, in a state to function more or less actively. The old war materiel, with which the carnage commenced, having been used up long ago, they fabricated improvised materiel as best they can; then it was necessary to have recourse to untried methods, to engines of war entirely new, especially chemical and miasmatic. The modern Bellona was Science, that slut Science! Oh, the frightful visage of the scientific Bellona!”

  He went on. He had already repeated all that to me; I knew the picture: the devastated and depopulated countries, the surviving populations crammed together or heaped up in regions forming vast entrenched camps of a sort; war everywhere, danger everywhere, from one end of Europe to the other! Cities destroyed, vast chaotic and desert extents, abandoned fields returned to the wild state, or rather, rendered uncultivable...

  Frightful explosives, a hundred thousand infernal volcanoes, have ravaged everything at certain particularly disputed and assailed points, where nothing subsists, neither an intact tree nor a standing section of wall—not even the appearance of houses or edifices. The very soil is burned, corroded and cracked.


  Aerial squadrons traverse the skies in rapid flights, bombarding with chemical grenades anything that allows itself to be glimpsed. Death comes, precipitated, rising or falling everywhere.

  So it’s finished; humankind finds itself forced to live underground henceforth, in order to escape the diabolical engines, themselves well-hidden and buried, which sweep the ground everywhere with storms of metal, electric or paralyzing currents, corrosive clouds and asphyxiating sheets, visible or invisible, burning and mercilessly ravaging the lungs that breathe them in.

  The populations that escaped, in the first years of the general war, being smashed by explosives, intoxicated by sheets of gas, canisters of mortal vapors, infernal projections of flames, acids or miasmas, have buried themselves in the soil. People live underground, hollowing out the fields as profoundly as they can, the good old once-nourishing earth; one digs through clay, through stone or through rock.

  The European of today is a troglodyte almost everywhere; he has gone back all the way to the age of caves, has bored shelters under rock and carved out catacombs. I’ve seen all that in Harlem. There are strange architectures, “dug-outs” and “rat-runs” the aviator Miraud calls them. I don’t know those new terms of the art of building. People huddle together in long dark burrows, with entrances as well-concealed as possible—“camouflaged,” as the aviator puts it, once again—and inside, they nourish themselves on privations, vegetate in the pangs of hunger. By night they slip out of the burrows, cautiously, to cultivate some corner of land and plant vegetables on the slops of craters or shell-holes.

  This long-distance, blind, scientific warfare, can no longer make any distinction between civilians and belligerents; everyone lives fully exposed to the same dangers, always and everywhere, in the same common infernal furnace, and I distinguish in everyone the submission to the inevitable, the resigned fatalism, that is the new and dismal form of courage.

  Thus, all the treasure of civilization, all the capital of beauty heaped up by the golden centuries of the earth, is lost, smashed, crushed, along with the Arts, wealth, with thought itself.