“The monstrous appetites of a few ferocious brutes, a caste of feudal lords hungry for wealth and advantages, theoreticians of productive massacre, overlords of great industry and finance avid for billions and power…to table for the feast! To table! Growls and howls of joy, gods and demons of Germanic Hells, Odin, Thor, Wotan and all the rest, and Mephistopheles, and the witches, vampires and ghouls of the Sabbats of the Brocken! You see that: he collective soul of an entire people sold to the Devil at a stroke, fifty million Fausts joyfully signing the pact with Satan that will deliver them all the wealth of the world, universal empire and total power over the Prussified planet!”
“What revelations of humankind!” cries the doctor, hoarsely. “What extraordinary observations, what stupefying data on the real depths of the human soul! The true limits of human nature were unknown, the extreme frontiers of humanity, the limits of human strength and faculties, for evil as well as for good… we didn’t know how far human ferocity could extend...or descend…but we know now. The diabolicoarabic horrors of Germanism have marked the point, never before attained! Do we know the supreme limits of heroism?”
“That’s true,” says Jollimay. “Let’s ask at Verdun, the banks of the Yser, the Marne or the Somme, the plains of Picardy or Champagne... And the high-water level of love and hatred, the limits of endurance, of patience and devotion, of rascality and ignominy, of all the sentiments and all the passions, of all the exacerbated faculties... And the extreme point of madness? Look at Russia...”
“Oh!” clamors the doctor, taking his head in his hands as if he wants to tear it away. “Oh…! Madness! madness! madness! Quickly, the straitjacket for Humankind! What years we have lived! There were times, in the immense terror of that seething fulguration of explosives and gas, grinding the living and the dead into the ground in all directions, sweeping the atmosphere with great gusts of fire and making the planet shudder to its utmost depths, there were times when I felt my brain jumping and colliding with the walls of my skull, and I held my head, ready to fly away; the general, universal madness gripped me…I searched, in the lightning and the fire setting the sky and all the heights ablaze, I searched for the Exterminating Angel of the End of the World... And I saw him, the Exterminating Angel of the End of the World... Yes, I saw him…the Exterminating Angel of the End of the World, sent by God, finally revolted by the delirium of his creature. I saw him greeted in the clouds by an immense barrage of gunfire!”
But the clouds have passed over, the downpour has stopped. One after another, we quit our cavern to climb back up into the daylight. The doctor and Jollimay don’t notice it; they continue their discussion. From outside, I can still hear the two voices, alternating in the depths of our burrow.
“…Science, accomplice for the work of iron and fire…science preparing the bloodbath of the Hohenzollerns...
“And do you know, Monsieur, how many, in the course of the last century—that century of enlightenment and mildness, of refined civilization and increasing rapid progress—how many Europeans in the flower of their age, in the full bloom of their youth, have been devoured in wars, the struggles of various imperialisms? Thirty-five millions, Monsieur, thirty-five, if not forty! European scholarship can be proud of its crushing superiority, for in the same lapse of a single century, warrior massacres hardly caused one or two million people to perish in Africa, a land of savage tribes, a land of ignorant barbarity…scarcely one or two millions...”
“And then, for them, for those worthy cannibals, it was to eat them!” cries Miraud, looking back toward the disputants.
Scaling the slippery banks, the aviator starts declaiming dully into his beard, “Request: Death in the Heavens…a novelty unknown to our ancestors, limited and earthbound...
Humankind, ferocious insect, scales the skies,
Surpasses in the azure the eagle of the snowy peaks,
And goes forth bearing death as he sublimely flies,
To splatter blood on clouds and God’s pink cheeks!
V. The supreme conference at the Palace of Peace.
It was all very well to have a horse, entire and alive, in the larder, but while waiting to sacrifice it to the appetite of the community, it was necessary to feed it, to stuff it with oats and hay to fatten it up.
The difficulties materialized when the question of the indispensable ration of oats came up. How were we to procure that daily ration, that provender, in sufficient quantity? A council was held, and an expedition to lay in supplies was decided. It was necessary to go quite a long way into the grassy meadows of the interior, to have any hope of discovering, for want of oats, enough forage and fresh verdure, not withered, burned or poisoned by emissions of toxic gases.
Early one morning we set off in a troop, well equipped with a very varied collection of weapons and furnished with our masks, which Madame and Mademoiselle Vitalis had checked carefully, or sown up the seams. The ladies remained at the house to carry out domestic tasks, for they had to carry out a thorough cleaning of our burrow and repair a pile of worn-out clothes.
The billionaire Gibson and Maître Saladin, by reason of their wooden legs, stayed to form a garrison with Marcel Blondeau, always active in helping the ladies in case of need, and to see to the gardens in the dunes, as well as the rabbit-snares. The valiant Jollimay, in spite of his wooden leg, had insisted on taking part in the expedition.
The weather was fine; the sun rose behind the hills of sand where the opulent villas of Dutch Nabobs returned from Java, Sumatra and Borneo had once displayed their sumptuous and picturesque white and red facades, beneath the verdure of their parks, refreshed by the benevolent sea breezes.
Where are they, the opulent excessively decorated villas? Blown away by the breath of heavy cannons, pulverized by the squalls of huge shells or aerial torpedoes. Where are the Nabobs? Perhaps crouched in the depths of some cellar, miraculously uncollapsed, in some hole contrived among the ruins of their shattered manors, striving to eke out as best they can a dangerous, precarious and malnourished existence, just like us in Monsieur Vandermolen’s house, for want of being able to go forth under kinder skies.
Monsieur Vandermolen guided us. He often sighed, the poor man, at the memory of the splendors of old; he groaned in passing through certain ruined parks, in front of certain façades shredded by projectiles or certain portals that no longer led to anything but dismal heaps of stonework and tiles.
“Here, Monsieur, I dined at least once a fortnight in the home of my friend Zuremberg... Very rich, my friend Zuremberg, huge fortune brought back from Batavia, plantations of tea, coffee, etc... What dinners, Monsieur! What menus! Can you imagine…?”
“No details please! No menus! Don’t say anything!”
“You’re wrong—they still make my mouth water. And to think that we’ve only been able to bring for our expedition a few boiled potatoes and beets, with no salt! Let me at least console myself be remembering truffled capons, salmis of woodcock...and look, here’s Monsieur Floris’ house—a former planter in Sumatra. Huge fortune, heaps of millions. We had delightful gatherings! Charming woman, Madame Floris! Magnificent dresses from the great Parisian couturiers, Monsieur! Miraculous liqueurs, the curacaos of the Rajahs! Exquisite teas. Cigars such as the gods of Olympus certainly didn’t smoke!”
“Let’s not talk about that, I beg you,” said the Spaniard Gomares and Lieutenant Bustamente, in unison with artilleryman-professor Jollimay, whom I had already caught resignedly smoking elder-pith or some other pseudo-tobacco of a similar ilk.
Monsieur Vandermolen sighed again, but he consented to stop talking about the dinners of yore.
We marched for three or four hours, sometimes in the tunnels of old trenches, sometimes in bare country, through ancient polders, flooded again, where we waded in Indian file over grassy undulations. To begin with we had veered northwards to avoid the marshes, and then turned eastwards, and I perceived thereafter that we were setting a course frankly southwards, in the direction of Leyden and The Ha
gue, to which the Germans—or, rather, the Germano-Turco-Bulgaro-etc.—had been driven back when Dordecht and Rotterdam had been recaptured, Rotterdam, Amsterdam and Harlem blockading the Hague, and blockaded themselves by the enemy forces entrenched toward Nimegen all along the Waal, the southern branch of the Rhine, perhaps linked with those of Antwerp, or those blockading Antwerp…no one knew, exactly…not to mention the little islets, friends or enemies, lost in the unknown in the middle of devastated territories: a complicated geography, very difficult to sort out for lack of reliable information.
We arrived on hills raised about forty meters above sea level, veritable Alps by the standards of flat Holland. We were not sorry to take a breather, well sheltered by bushes, and rest our legs while having our miserable lunch.
A pretty part of the country! I couldn’t help thinking sadly about hunting in the olden days, in the distant times before the deluge...
Monsieur Vandermolen had brought a telescope recovered from the ruins of his house; I borrowed it from him in order to examine the vast spaces we were overlooking, enemy territory or contested deserts, cut by dark lines and speckled with white and yellow patches.
“Way over there is The Hague,” Monsieur Vandermolen said. “Can you make it out?”
“Yes quite clearly.”
“And can you see, in that direction, those big ruins? Are you there?”
“Yes, I can see. One might think it was an enormous redoubt with several lines of trenches in front...”
“The Palace of Peace,” said the doctor. “The Boches have their heavy artillery in there, their biggest guns, the giant cannon and all the improved satanic engines... What hurricanes of fire, what fulgurant cyclones, they unleashed in the early days! The Palace of Peace was flamboyant, like a volcano in continuous eruption, among whirlwinds of multicolored smoke. Hell opening up! It’s calm now; the enormous guns are silent, doubtless for want of projectiles; the monstrous engines are mute, the red mouths no longer spitting out their tons of poisoned explosives!”
As if to give the lie to the doctor, who was waving a furious fist at the Palace of Peace, transformed into a frightful den of war and death, there was a sudden flash in the distance, and in spite of the distance, a frightful detonation made the ground shake around us. The Palace of Peace, or what was left of it, was covered by a cloud of yellow smoke, which overflowed, swirling in a heavy cumulus, and then rose up into the sky in green, red or violet spirals.
I had ducked down involuntarily, and was almost lying down behind our brushwood. There were further flashes and further shocks, which made the foliage shiver—and me too, I confess. I counted five explosions, and then silence fell again, but the thick clouds of smoke, rolling into one another, floated for a long time over the International Palace of Peace, where the speeches of the pacifist Congresses of old had sung so eloquently to us of the joys of peace between men who had become tender lambs again, and announced so exactly the return of the Golden Age to Earth.
What remained of those promises, those bucolics, those garlands of roses swayed by the brutal breath of heavy artillery, those delights announced by the meek prophets and utopians in god faith, among whom had slid a good number of reptilian hypnotists and “social-demokrat” secret agents of Panprussianism and the insatiable vulture of the Hohenzollerns?
What remained of the Palace itself, the imposing architecture of which I remembered vaguely, beneath its colossal ruins, armored shields for the steel monsters of Krupp, the great engineer and stage-setter of the bloody feasts of the old German god Odin, resuscitated by the Hohenzollerns?
“Five!” said the doctor, after the last shock. “But those shells aren’t for us. Listen—follow the rumble in the distance. That must be over Amsterdam or Rotterdam.”
Scarcely had the roar of the fifth shell died away in a swirl that the wind bore away, than a detonation resounded in the distance, jostling the low clouds on the horizon, traversed by the projectile... A dull sound, a ululation, a growing thunderous din, like an approaching railway train…explosion!
And then a cloud of thick red smoke, with jets of bright flame, in the green and yellow turbulence of the Palace of Peace.
“The Peace Conference!” said the doctor.
“Amsterdam’s response,” said Monsieur Vandermolen. “Take a look with the telescope...”
There were three responses; three jets of flames rose high into the sky—and that was all. Rings of variously colored smoke remained suspended for some time, paling, and ended up disappearing. The terrified silence of the countryside was no longer troubled.
“Bromine, trinitrotoluene, peroxide, aminol, etc.,” said the doctor. “I know that; I’ve ground it, alas, when I was a captive in the laboratory, cast into the slavery of the Boche factories. Fortunately, I spoiled their monstrous chemistry as much as possible. Oh, if you had heard the concert in those days, to make brains explode, to make the vaults of heaven collapse! But nowadays the lack of raw materials has forced economies, a dearth of explosives everywhere…they’re trying to make up for it with miasmas, gases, infectious bombs and bacterial shells, but for how long? What we heard just now, Monsieur, is the death-rattle of the expiring scientific Bellona, the supreme convulsions, the coughs of the final agony of the monsters of steel spitting out their last tons of explosives before kicking the bucket…Satan uttering his last howl...”
“And that, Doctor,” I exclaimed, “will be the end of it?”
“The end, no—but it’s the imminent exhaustion of stocks, complete penury everywhere, the absolute lack of munitions.”
“Well, what then?”
“Well, there will still be the other weapons, the old weapons, those of pre-scientific humankind. Everything that can smash, slice and perforate, the blade and the club, the bow and the sword: the sword of the truly valiant! When it’s well established that no one has any more cannons, machine-guns, explosives, mines or torpedoes, when everyone in both camps is certain that they no longer have anything to fear from asphyxiating gases, stupefying vapors, deleterious chemicals or perfidious electrocutions, there will be the savage and hectic charge of all those who have survived the scientific hecatombs, the supreme assault, to finish it off!”
I was about to protest, to show, on the contrary, peace gradually renascent, in the general exhaustion, on the ruins of worn out and demolished engines of war, among the horrified and breathless survivors, when furious clamors cut off my speech, and a horde ragged and hirsute individuals surged out of a trench cutting through the brushwood, brandishing strange weapons.
VI. A horde of prehistoric warriors.
What an emotion when I think about it! But for the doctor and Monsieur Vandermolen, who had abruptly thrown themselves forward, their arms raised, we would at least have been knocked down and pinned to the ground by those fanatics!
And what a sudden apparition of the most distant past, after the fulgurant recent visions of the most advanced civilization, turned to ferocious kultur and finishing in the monstrous terrors of scientific barbarity, that abrupt return to primitive ages was!
But the doctor and Monsieur Vandermolen shouted things I did not understand in Dutch, protesting and arguing with the most furious members of the menacing horde, and fortunately, the weapons were lowered, the faces relaxed.
Deeply disturbed, in the shock of surprise, we had fallen back and assumed defensive postures. As everything seemed to be settling down, I uttered a sigh of relief.
“Friends, they’re friends!” cried the doctor. “Don’t worry—worthy people like us, who live in the ruins over there…departed in quest of nourishment, vegetables or game of some sort, and who, having mistaken us at a distance for Boche marauders, crept up on us, crawling from hole to hole, in the sweet hope of reducing us to little pieces. Fortunately, we recognized one another in time. It’s settled—we won’t be killing one another; these gentlemen are good friends!”
I considered with wide eyes those “gentlemen” of such unreassuring appearance and
such strange clothing.
With what extraordinary weapons they had wanted to exterminate us a little while ago! Out there, in the expiring citadel of the Palace of Peace, the latest perfections and refinements of technology and science, here, the instruments of war of resuscitated prehistoric peoples. He was right, the doctor—as ever...
There really was a return to primitive might, for the last phases of the struggle, for the final act of the formidable tragedy. I recalled a painting by Cormon at one of the Salons of old, depicting the return from a bear-hunt in prehistoric times:15 the rude tribesmen, hirsute and muscular, brandishing stone axes and clubs, returning to the family caves with the felled game.
I rediscovered all of that, minus the bear. The newcomers numbered about twenty, young and old men, mostly thin but robust, with solid arms, suntanned, with beards as bushy as those in Cormon’s painting, covered rather than dressed in rags more reminiscent of those of prehistory than the civilized costumes once worn in this region of neat and tidy Dutch villages of white, pink or pale green houses, pulverized today.
For the most part, they were wearing cassocks of a sort, of coarse cloth; some of them had torsos covered in goat-skins, worn over what might have been the remains of overcoats, secured by rope belts, from which cutlasses dangled.
Leather or canvas socks, extremely worn, and sandals, or rather moccasins, on their feet, and bonnets of furry hide, completed the costumes of the horde.
They all grouped around us in order to gaze at us curiously with their anxious and wild eyes. They were leaning on large clubs garnished with iron spikes, spears or crude axes with long handles. Two or three of them were even clutching large bows in their muscular fists, shiny and polished, and wearing quivers on their backs furnished with long arrows.
In what times were we living, really? The age of caves? Yes, doubtless, on seeing those fellows, but alas, the age of concrete and armored caves, the lairs not of large wild beasts armed simply and honestly with teeth and claws, but of fabulous monsters of steel spitting hellish flames and toxic gases.
The Engineer Von Satanas Page 16