The Engineer Von Satanas

by Albert Robida

  Reminiscences flooded by troubled brain. I thought about another painting, by Puvis de Chavannes this time: Doux pays.16 A pastoral eclogue, a noble dream of poetry, truly dolorous to remember in this era of frightful horrors. O mildness of time times gone by, expired, abolished forever, times that will never return, which never can return! O sweetness of the past! Extinct splendors!

  And the memory also passed through my head of a motto inscribed on the bell-tower of a Belgian town, Alost, between Termonde and Antwerp: Neither hope nor dread.17

  In what condition is it now, the bell-tower of Alost? Neither hope nor dread, a desperate motto engraved in the stone in the sixteenth century, an era of calamities: wars, sacks and plagues, doubtless terrible, but which passed, leaving the tons still standing and their populations in a state to resume their lives.

  Wars and plagues, sacking and burnings of old, of the times when men only had their arms for evil endeavors as for others, what are you by comparison with our cyclones of fire, of universal cataclysmic destruction?

  It is us, the unfortunate people of today, who bear in our hearts that motto of somber depression! Neither hope: where and how could we find the slightest ray of hope? Hope, the divine cradler of souls, gone forever... Nor dread: the excess of our misfortunes and suffering has given us resignation to the worst, and absolute consent to the inevitable.

  But I perceive that I am becoming as funereal as the doctor. It’s the sudden appearance of the prehistoric horde that has caused me to take that plunge into the black. No, no, unfortunate Belgians of Alost and elsewhere, hope regardless! And this impression of the recommencement of the world ought, on the contrary, to comfort us, to warm our hearts. Are we not about to see the end of the Scientific Era and the dawn of a better epoch?

  “All’s well, then,” said Dr. Christiansen, at the end of his palaver. “These rude warriors bristling with pikes and cutlasses are friends, the worthy men of Noordwik...”

  “That little village you can see over there,” added Monsieur Vandermolen. “They’re inoffensive fishermen and agriculturalists...”

  “I can’t see anything at all over there.”

  “Yes! Can you make out that reddish line in the green of the dune? That’s the scattered bricks of which the village was constituted. The more visible square to the right was the church, or the tower, at least. The people live under that undulation, in those holes hollowed out in the earth and consolidated with bits of wood.”

  “Good, good…they won’t scalp us, as I feared at first sight; I’m very glad of that...”

  Monsieur Vandermolen, who served as our interpreter, set about explaining the objective of our expedition to our new friends.

  The one who seemed to be their leader was a man at least six feet tall, with broad bony shoulders, and long muscular arms terminating in formidable fists—a kind of thin Hercules, doubtless undernourished—with a long yellow beard, clad in animal skins and armed with a long club with iron spikes. He was smiling at us now, and I liked him better like that than when he was running toward us with his teeth clenched, raising his grim weapon against us.

  “It appears that he’s the burgemeester of Noordwik,” the doctor told me. “He commands about forty men like this.”

  “He’s replaced the old burgemeester, whom I knew,” added Monsieur Vandermolen. “He was a worthy and peaceful farmer…”

  “And now, as of old among the people of the caves, the chief is the strong man,” the doctor continued. “He’s the robust warrior who imposes his direction on the others. And there you are! Our miserable humanity will soon have completed the cycle and returned to the point of departure. So much the better! May the evolution conclude as rapidly as possible!”

  “It appears that we won’t find forage in these parts; all the vegetation has been reddened and poisoned by the recent emissions of gas. The chief thinks that it will be necessary for us to go past his village, and circle behind Leyden in the direction of Utrecht; and there, in meadows that haven’t been inundated, we’ll certainly be able to cut a good provision of grass and hay. Let’s go—en route with these gentlemen! We’ll pay a visit to their caves in passing. To see people, new faces, will be an event for the families vegetating in those shelters...”

  VII. The cove of the old mines. A new recruit.

  Our new friends took the lead in order to show us the way. One by one, in Indian file, they went down the hill through the holes and the brushwood. No danger was perceptible on the horizon; the Palace of Peace would not want to waste a precious shell on a few human ants glimpsed through binoculars twenty-five kilometers away. Nevertheless, our prehistoric—or, rather, post-historic—warriors marched bent over, hiding behind the undulations of the ground or clumps of meager vegetation. It was evident that for a long time, with permanent danger, the unexpected and menace on every side, the habit had taken hold.

  Soon we were zigzagging along the slopes in the remains of half-collapsed trenches, and were forced to march more slowly. Obstacles cutting off our route and obliging us to make detours, we had to move cautiously along the rim of some of the enormous holes that I knew so well now, the craters of bombs or mines, filled with salty water, having become dangerous pools or wells, into which it was necessary not to fall. Sometimes that muddy water filled the bottom of the trenches and we had to wade knee-deep in it.

  With those obstacles and detours, the road to Noordwik as much longer than I had thought. We could hear the sound of waves breaking gently on the sand nearby, and the trench suddenly ended in a cove, invisible until then.

  Through breaches in the abandoned dykes, the sea had crossed the line of the dunes at many points. The furious assault of the waves at high tide, in the bad seasons, enabled it to take a further leap forward every time into the polders, and the reconquest of the Zuider Zee.

  Here the sea filled a rather large cleft in the shore; in the calm weather, it was gently caressing it with little tranquil and regular waves, which seemed to be amusing themselves sketching out a few fringes of foam in the manner of Japanese artists.

  I admired it, and then I immediately thought that crabs, if I could find any, would be well-received in the kitchen by the Vitalis ladies.

  So, very happy to be able to read on fine sand, gentle on the feet, I descended rapidly to the border of the foam and stated hunting, while my companions picked up shellfish as they walked.

  I couldn’t help thinking, bitterly, that we had the appearance, on that strand, of bourgeois holidaymakers at the seaside, as in the good old days. Oh yes, the seaside! How far away those times of distraction there! The pleasant beaches with the bourgeois families chatting in front of the beach-huts or the striped tents, the ladies in white bathrobes, the children in swimsuits fishing for shrimp in rock-pools or paddling in the sunshine, the casinos with their concerts and balls...

  Beaches fashionable before the deluge—Scheveningen and Zandwort—were not far away. Alas, what strange bathers were on those beaches today? For years, what infernal concerts, what satanic music on all sides! What frightful balls were held there, where death held the great Maestro’s baton, with which to conduct the orchestra!

  Come on—I’ve forgotten the crabs! It’s necessary to live, though, and to bring back some nourishment from our excursion. I resume the hunt. Then I perceive huge rusty masses in the water, all covered with algae and encrusted with shellfish, run aground in the sand. What are they? Buoys, presumably. I move closer, and start collecting shellfish, with which I fill my pockets.

  But some of our comrades come running, uttering loud cries. They try to attract me attention with broad gestures.

  Eh? What’s the matter?”

  “Stop! Don’t touch anything!” the doctor shouts at me, while our prehistoric men continue gesticulating.

  “What’s the matter? These shellfish are very good—I know them…”

  “Fool!” shouts the doctor, out of breath. “Leave it! Don’t touch!”

  “What is it, then?”

/>   “Mines! Mines! Unexploded mines—understand?”

  “Dangerous!” proffers Monsieur Vandermolen, trotting away in order to distance himself. “Dangerous! Explosives!”

  The shock nearly caused me to fall on one of the detestable engines, but the chief of the tribe arrived just in time to catch me.

  “How the devil did these infernal machines get here?” I exclaimed. “There must be fifteen of them....”

  “It’s the currents that bring them,” said Monsieur Vandermolen, still keeping his distance prudently. “The Boches have sowed so many of them at sea—floating mines, or positional mines that the sea has ended up carrying away—that they’re spread all over the Oceans...”

  “That’s true,” I said. “We know something about that...”

  “Three-quarters of the mines end up exploding on some rock, but there are plenty more, as you can see! These have been in this cove for a long time, the burgemeester tells me, and he’d really like to be rid of them...”

  “All the more so,” added the doctor, “Because, if the Boches in the Palace of Peace, short of explosives, knew of the existence of this little provision, they’d try to get their hands on them...”

  “Let’s go, let’s go,” said Monsieur Vandermolen, eager to get out of that troubling neighborhood. “We mustn’t be too late back...”

  The domicile of the prehistoric men wasn’t far away. After having gone around the cove with the inconvenient mines, we took a small trench, which, after a few turnings, brought us out in front of a series of holes plunging into the dune, well hidden in the vegetation.

  Children leapt outside the holes on hearing the whistles with which the newcomers signaled their approach. Women and men appeared.

  All of them were costumed like the warriors of the tribe. In the troglodytes of Harlem one still found a little of the city-dweller of old, but here, far from the town, among these worthy seamen or peasants, they had been using rope for belts for a long time, and had had to be ingenious in making garments, first weaving wool from a few sheep, then tailoring the sails of their boats, and then using the skins of beasts they had eaten: sheep, goats, rabbits... And now, all of them, men, women and children alike, constituted a tribe almost similar to those of the primitive caves.

  These people could be perfectly happy in their shelters, in spite of all the dangers of wild nature, against which they knew how to arm themselves and struggle. Over time, moreover, their situation would improve. The future opened, immense and marvelous, before these people of the youth of the world.

  But we, alas, who know—how can we support out misery our broken hearts, our crushed spirit, tortured by the memory of better times that will never return, and all the fears that weigh upon us?

  The former village once grouped its houses at the base of the dune, around one of those old squat churches built as a pendant of a big windmill amid the greenery, as in the old paintings of the Dutch school, which give such an impression of pleasant and peaceful life, in the atmosphere of a beautiful summer evening...

  In front of the village was a beach of yellow sand on which the fishermen had once moored their boats within a framework of dykes made of stakes and cross-pieces. None of that existed any longer. The church, the houses, the surrounding farms and the dykes had all been destroyed, crush and ravaged. The sea and the squalls had completed the ruination of the ruins, and carried away most of the debris. I could scarcely distinguish the location of the unfortunate village when the primitive burgemeester tried to indicate it to me.

  I went into a few of the burrows, similar in all respects to those I had already visited in the course of our excursions. The earthworks were maintained by wooden beams, the debris of boats, tree trunks, branches and wickerwork. There were items of furniture saved from the demolished village, and in the depths of the refuges, even a few items of faience, Delft plates, shining softly in the obscurity, sad and dear relics more treasured than ever, wreckage of the tranquil happiness of old, of which these poor folk were trying to conserve the memory. The burrow only seemed sadder in consequence.

  In one, under clusters of onions drying on walls of planks, and packets of arrows exactly similar to those once seen in ethnographic museums, with the quivers of tattooed savages, I saw a dainty little blue Delft pot containing a bouquet of dune flowers. A young woman in an exceedingly ragged skirt made of sail-canvas and a worn sheepskin bodice, was mending the sleeve of a leather jacket, doubtless that of one of the robust men of the tribe, a father or perhaps a fiancé—and I immediately imagined an idyll of the cave age.

  I noticed that her hair, although a trifle ruffled, was not without a certain coquetry. Eternal femininity still persisted; that caused a vague suggestion of hope to pass through me.

  Suddenly, as I had doubtless thought aloud, someone spoke to me in French. Two men were coming back to the troglodyte village; they had been hunting along the shore and were bringing back two wild geese killed with arrows.

  One was a Picard from the vicinity of Noyon, a former bowman in his native land, the other a Belgian from Ypres, once a skilled archer, often winning competitions, run aground among these Dutch fishermen after many vicissitudes and bloody adventures.

  They utilized their archery skills here now, for want of cartridges or powder, their rifles no longer being able to serve as anything but handles for bayonets.

  I questioned the two men about the events that had cast them up here and trapped them in this little corner of the Dutch dunes. Still the same story: deluge of fire, iron and gas; violent drives northwards or southwards, crushed under machines or explosives, slavery in the Boche mines or factories, and to finish, miraculous escapes under fire, through the networks of electrified wire...

  Everything they told me about the circumstances only served to confirm the fantastic stories of the doctor and the others; even so, I kept asking questions, hoping for some information about the state of things in France, in the country that held me by the heart, beyond our restricted horizon. It was so close, and yet so far away!

  But who is that man who has just joined our group? Prominent cheekbones and hooded eyes, an entirely Asiatic face. He’s very small of stature beside the tall Dutchmen. He has an arm in a sling—or, rather, attacked to his breast by bits of cord, and he’s limping. He’s clad in shiny leather, badly scorched. His only weapon is a long cutlass in his belt.

  As I draw him to the attention of the doctor, he advances and says to us in French: “Permit me to introduce myself…Yamato...”

  “You’re not Dutch,” I say, naively.

  “Yamato Yradonou, of Yeddo, aviator-bombardier of the ninth Japanese army, operating in northern Germany, siege of the lines of Berlin and Danzig...”

  A surge of surprise and a flash of joy for me…news, at last!

  All that I could say was: “Oh! oh! oh!” as I shook the hand of the man from Japan.

  “Not so hard,” he said. “I’m still slightly injured.”

  “Excuse me,” I said, “but I’m so glad! Finally, we’re going to have news!”

  VIII. Imprecise information and not-very-fresh news.

  “It’s just that we haven’t much time to get back home,” said the placid Monsieur Vandermolen. “It’s getting late.”

  “Bah! A few minutes more! Let’s chat first with Monsieur Yamoto. If the news is good we’ll walk all the better afterwards.”

  We formed a tightly-knit group in front of the entrances to the burrows. The entire tribe was outside, the men to one side, slightly to the rear, the women, slightly more curious, clustering around us, the late-comers climbing up the bank or the woodwork, some carrying babies in their arms or on their backs, wrapped up to the neck in sheepskins.

  “Finally, news!” I exclaimed, still shaking the Japanese aviator’s hand, albeit with a little more care.

  “You’re wounded?” asked Dr. Christiansen.

  “Yes, yes,” I said, with egotistical haste. “Monsieur Yamato is wounded, that’s obvious. But let him sp
eak first. Fresh news from the rest of the world—you can guess how keen we are to hear it—how keen we all are.”

  “Oh, fresh, fresh!” said the Japanese, smiling. “That’s saying a lot, Monsieur, given that I arrived here, falling from the sky...how long ago?...sixteen, seventeen or eighteen…? How long, exactly, burgemeester?”

  Monsieur Vandermolen having repeated the question, the prehistoric burgemeester went to a large beam supporting the entrance to one of the raves.

  “The Mairie…the the Hôtel de Ville,” the French aviator told me, having taken hold of the hand of his Japanese colleague in his turn.

  The stake was engraved from top to bottom with notches of various sizes, figures and letters, carved with a knife.

  “Calendar and register of Civil Estates,” the Japanese told me, still smiling.

  The burgemeester examine the variously-sized notches, counted and recounted, and then came back to us.

  “Not eighteen, nineteen and a half,” Monsieur Vandermolen translated for me.

  “It’s not important, to the day,” I said.

  “Nineteen and a half, but not days, months! It’s nineteen and a half months since Monsieur Yamato arrived here…

  I had suddenly gone considerably colder. The news was going to lack freshness.

  “Yes, time passes, all the same,” said Yamato Yradonou. “It’s nineteen months and a half, then, since I had my accident... Well, it’s quite simple; we were manning apparatus 38 of fighter squadron no. 27 of the ninth Japanese army, a biplane armored in four places. Operations before the entrenched camp at Brandenburg had been going on for two and a half days, all going well, good results, the enemy driven back, crushed, defenses demolished, towns in pieces, disappeared, evaporated. We’d taken their big explosives depot, and we were using its provisions ourselves, which we were serving to them in nicely cooked little dishes. Would you care for some trinitrotoluene, superclastite, gases and deleterious vapors? There you see, Messieurs les Boches! Stuff yourselves, eat your fill, since you like it so much!