“To us, squadron 27, only two almost usable aircraft remained, nos. 26 and 38, mine, against a dozen Boches, who scarcely dared show themselves any longer. Shortage of fuel, presumably...”
“Good, good,” I said. “But outside the entrenched camp of Berlin…let’s talk a little about France. How is Paris doing?”
“Paris? Hang on, let’s see…1922, 1923…yes, before Brandenburg, we were operating near Dresden, then retreated to Leipzig, and then the big counter-offensive by the Bulgaro-Turks, to which we gave a warm reception with an Anglo-French corps, and drove back to the lines at Berlin. For the latest news of Paris that makes something like six years...”
“Tell us anyway...”
“All was well…that’s all I know.”
I let myself fall on to a heap of sticks, discouraged.
“To get back to my accident,” Yamato went on, “it’s quite simple. We were carrying our reconnaissance in the direction of Aix-la-Chapelle. Caught by storm, error in direction, engine breakdown, steep descent, disastrous crash behind the Boche lines! Three killed outright, one only three-quarters killed—that was me. So I find myself on the ground, badly demolished, and I set off straight ahead. Not funny! I have no idea where I am and among whom. Hungry and no food. Less and less funny. Not even the possibility, with my broken paws, of trapping a rabbit or picking a lettuce, or even of opening my belly, in the fashion of my ancestors of the good old days, if no other resource remains. Forward march! Two days like that! Not much ground covered. I’m about to turn up my toes, as they say. Forward march! And I suddenly happen upon these Messieurs, who receive me with the points of their improvised halberds. Salvation, or the contrary? It’s salvation! I’m collected, cared for, lodged, and I live with these worthy folk for nineteen months and a half. They’re totally kind, and I like them a lot!”
Monsieur Yamato’s speech plunges me back into the black.
How I envied the beautiful insouciance and resilience of that Far Eastern aviator!
Monsieur Vandermolen, who was getting impatient, reminded us that we had a long way to go to find the forage and get back to Harlem. He was in a hurry to get back to his slippers and the dining room.
“Let’s go! Let’s go!” he said, while my comrades distributed handshakes to the good troglodytes of Noordwik. The clapped the robust shoulders of the burgemeester, weighed the warriors’ clubs in their hands, and arranged a rendezvous for the day of the big push, when the Boches of the Palace of Peace have definitely expended their last explosives.
It was necessary, however, to leave, when Dr. Christiansen had made a tour of the caves to see a few poor old men in the process of ending their existence in such strange circumstances. The burgemeester gave us a few men to serve as guides for a short distance, in order to put us on the right path.
Yamato Yradonou suddenly decided to go with us.
“I’ll go with you,” he said. “I’m sorry to quit these worthy folk and their rude burgemeester, who makes such a fine warrior in the mode of the most distant antiquity, but I can’t stay here forever, sheltered in these burrows in the dune. I’ll go with you—that will be new, other adventures, perhaps a step toward the ninth Japanese army...”
I shook his hand, delighted with that new companion.
We strode forth.
Dunes, polders, marshes, more marshes, more polders, more dunes—and green intervals filled with disorderly brushwood and clumps of wild flowers, from which flocks of little birds rose up, which mocked the follies of men; and desolate spaces strewn with scattered stones or bricks, with dubious pools covered with weeds...
A glance in passing at the ruins of villages, traversed with prudence, or the cadavers of big windmills, finishing their collapse, tragic skeletons that still raise long beams toward the sky, like desperate arms that the wind stirs with plaintive groans. Encounters with a few hunters, always with the same aspect as the prehistoric warriors.
The afternoon advances, the sun declines toward the horizon. Finally, here are the desired grasslands. To work! Rapidly, we cut as much as possible, making large bundles, as much as we can carry. It’s excellent forage; our horse will feast on it; he’ll get fat, and when winter comes he’ll...but no, I expect to be far away, not eating him.
Off we go, in Indian file behind Monsieur Vandermolen, who tries to find his way through the maze of the marshes.
Our caravan makes a picturesque line of hunchbacked silhouettes, outlined against the setting sun, which is setting too rapidly, alas, much too rapidly for us to be able to be certain of still being on the right route.
We climb banks only to tumble down into the sand, climb back up, go round almost-invisible holes, or fall into them. Look out! Let’s not break anything—let’s take precautions!
Those precautions cost us time; the sun finishes putting itself to bed and disappears, and now we’re almost in pitch darkness. Monsieur Vandermolen, already anxious, becomes as somber as the night. He makes the cruel admission that we’re completely lost.
None of us can see anything except the vague outline of the person in front of him. It’s almost necessary to hold hands in order not to get separated. It’s definitely impossible to go any further. A hole—we need a hole, in which there isn’t any water, in order to camp: a shelter, no matter what, in which we can lie down to sleep…without any supper, because our provisions, like our reserves of strength, are exhausted.
But we can’t find one. However, here’s some firm ground without too many cracks; let’s advance slowly, and search...
IX. The aviator Miraud. I take a prisoner.
It’s Miraud the aviator who is marching in front of me. I only know that because while moving forward, he sings in order that I don’t lose track of the file.
Songs in that funereal décor of ruins, which the night will populate with phantoms—how out of place!
We have been close for some time, poor Miraud and I. Deep down, he held a grudge against me at first for having brought into the association that overly sympathetic coxcomb, that rival who has stolen the heart of Jeanne Vitalis from him, but as he needs to talk in order to distract himself from his troubles, he has taken me for a confidant, for covert admissions, without naming anyone.
And between complaints about the candid cruelty of the sweetest young women, or the unusual luck of certain young coxcombs who have only to appear to conquer, he recounts to me his memories of old, of the brilliant and joyful Paris before the torment, of his cruises in the clouds, his machine-gun combats at fifteen hundred or two thousand meters, and the final bad encounter at the corner of a cumulus cloud...
“…Which won me the pleasure of making your acquaintance, my dear Monsieur...”
Poor Miraud, on an aerial patrol, had run cross a squadron of large armored German airplanes, which had sent his apparatus, his pilot and himself, pierced like a colander by machine-gun bullets, straight down to crash into the ground, fortunately behind the allied lines.
And there, as he put it, he had nearly had to swallow his last rhyme. But that had been sorted out, save for the arm; they had taped up the colander, and the one-armed poet was now lining up black rhymes instead of rosy rhymes, the singer translating into grim verses the wrathful outbursts of Dr. Christiansen.
Extraordinary transformations of everything in this upside-down world! Where are our Montmartrean cabarets, singers and students, poets and painters? And you, old Chat Noir of the distant times of my youth, how, through this nightmare, will I be able to think about you?
Miraud has woken up; the perspective of the imminent great assault, the collision, perhaps supreme, with thrusts of pikes, axes or clubs, has reanimated him and made him vibrate. He’s nervous; his gaze has been keener and more decisive for a few days; I’ve noticed that. He has allowed himself to be overly influenced by the funereal ideas of Dr. Christiansen; he’s detaching himself now that he’s glimpsed a glimmer of hope.
As we stride over the dune he murmurs:
Let’s unstuff, let�
��s unstuff, let’s unstuff all the skulls!
I interrogate him about that refrain, which seems singular to me. It isn’t slang, no—merely a metaphor that’s slightly bold but perfectly clear. Let’s unstuff all the heads of everything heaped up therein of false ideas, hollow nonsense and harmful chimeras, utopias or illusions that are doubtless generous but so replete with dangers. Let’s get rid of the stuffing completely, and we’ll see thereafter!18
Let’s unstuff them completely, to hell with big words,
Empty of all sense, misleaders of herds,
To the puffed up masters we prefer fools;
Let’s unstuff, let’s unstuff, let’s unstuff all the skulls!
He had couplets about philosophical unstuffing, political unstuffing and scientific unstuffing. I didn’t want to follow him as far as that; I supposed that he, like the doctor, wanted to unstuff the skulls of the remaining humans of everything that the doctor called the “deleterious rubbish of knowledge,” in the hope, by rejecting the whole lot, the good with the bad, of putting an end to infamous science.
We were advancing with difficulty, utterly exhausted. I was holding on to the end of Miraud’s bundle of foliage, and was almost being towed, I’m ashamed to say. Truly, I wouldn’t have been sorry finally to encounter a shelter where we might try to sleep, in order to forget hunger and fatigue.
“Pass it along to the guide,” Miraud said to the bundle of forage preceding him. “No need to search for a tourist hotel—we don’t need comfort or electricity; the bottom of a ditch, grass or sand—that’s all!
If ever Dame Fortune
Smiles on my desire,
I’d buy myself the moon
And stars by the quire.
“Mark me well, we’re going to get lost in the dark, and the column will break up...
Quickly by airplane
I’d reach my port
I’d take my refrain
And my kindly thought
And my family too
High into the sky
In the infinite blue
As I wave goodbye!
He stopped abruptly, and his bundle of forage hit me in the face. The entire column did likewise. Was it finally the shelter so much desired?
The Japanese Yamato went to the head of the column, his nose in the air, striving to pierce the obscurity with his feline eyes.
We put our bundles of forage on the ground and sat down on them.
Monsieur Vandermolen was anxious. Yamato took a few steps forward and came back.
“Look out,” he whispered in Vandermolen’s ear. “I can see something—a big black menacing machine—in front of us. Ruins? Château? Village? Old abandoned battery? I don’t know. Perhaps there are people there; we need to go carefully. I’ll go see—follow slowly...
After taking a few more steps, I too could make out the bizarre silhouette toward which we were marching. It was strange enough as an outline against the blue-black of the sky. Doubtless a ruin, but the ruin of what?
I joined the Japanese, in order to advance on reconnaissance, lying face down on the rough, stony ground, with a mixture of brambles and nettles, semi-brushwood full of thorns, where I left bits of the skin of my hands behind, not to mention a few shreds of my trousers.
Soon, the two of us, Yamoto and I, were getting very close to the ruin, redoubling our prudence before that troubling somber mass, when a ray of moonlight slid between two clouds and made it even more gigantic and stranger still.
Yamoto nudged me with his elbow.
“Machine!” he whispered.
Machine? In fact, I could make out something like the debris of colossal wheels, and above it, what I had thought at first was a wall, I now realized was a kind of iron carapace, holed and dislocated in places.
But what kind of machine was it?
“Tank!” said the Japanese. “Rolling bombard, demolished.”
As no noise was coming from the dune, and it did not seem to be hiding any danger in its flanks, our companions had advanced.
“All seems tranquil to me,” said the doctor. “There’s the desired shelter for the night. Let’s see...”
Yamato had already introduced himself into the place, and was searching the shadow.
“You can come,” he said. “We’ll sleep very well in here.”
Close up, the machine seemed even more forbidding than it had in the vagueness of the night. It was visible now, with the ray of moonlight gliding over the rusty iron. We had to scale a mass of twisted metal, dislocated armor plating, the enormous remains of fabulous wheels, which made me think about steam-rollers for flattening macadam, all heaped up, forming a substructure around a deformed and monstrous breached carapace, pierced by cracks and riddled with holes.
Hoisting myself up, in spite of my fatigue, as far as a black hole, I bumped heads with Yamato, who had just finished exploring the interior.
“We’ll be fine,” he said. “The bundles of forage will make soft beds. Tomorrow we’ll be fresh and rested.”
The bundles of forage were passed up to the Japanese, who laid them out inside the machine, and we formed a short human ladder in order to go and join him. Oof! I sank delightedly into the hay, with a sigh, for, once the legs were tranquilized, the stomach began nagging in its turn, and unfortunately, we had nothing for it.
I tried to think about other things than the untimely demands of appetite.
“But after all, what is it, this war machine?” I asked one of my comrades in misfortune, lying beside me, similarly racked by hunger.
“I told you,” Yamoto replied. “It’s a big allied tank, the cadaver of an armored automobile bombard, demolished in the course of some attack by large-caliber shells.”
“And it was already a ruin a long time ago,” added Monsieur Vandermolen. “Everything is rusty, and vigorous vegetation has slid in everywhere, invading everything. These tanks are formidable machines, much improved after the first war. This ruin of an ambulant fortress must have been here since an attack on the retrenched camp of The Hague five or six years ago. I recall the frightful debauch of explosives of every sort that completed the devastation of the entire region. The Boche in The Hague still had plenty of munitions in those days!”
I was about to ask more questions when I sensed something moving in the heap of scrap iron, under my bed of fodder. But what was it, exactly? I sat up, somewhat anxious. Something gripped my leg, and I uttered a cry, to which a growl responded. My comrades were also sitting up on their couches of hay.
What is it? Paw or hand? Slightly emboldened, I grope in my turn, and I grip an arm. I pull; the growling accentuates and a large bearded head appears through the grass, jabbering rapidly in an imploring tone. I don’t understand very well—there’s Dutch, German, French, and words in an unknown language.
“What is this intrusion?”
My companions got up and pulled the individual from the hiding-place where he had secreted himself when we arrived, between broken iron traverses and a long tube that appears to me to be a torpedo-launcher. In a hurry to lie down, I had thrown my bundle of forage on top of it without looking very hard, and I shivered retrospectively at the thought that I might just as easily have been lying on top of a torpedo or some dangerous chemical bomb.
“Bulgar! Don’t hurt me! Prisoner!” said the intruder.
“Good—a Bulgar!” said Jollimay and Bustamente, shoving the man roughly into a corner. “What are you doing here?”
The doctor having succeeded, with some difficulty in lighting a taper, we were able to see the face of our prisoner. He was an individual of about forty or forty-five, with a thin, even emaciated, face with an unkempt beard and a shock of hair.
Monsieur Vandermolen interrogated him in German. The man replied humbly, and showed that he had no weapon, Our comrades searched the entire bombard to make sure that it did not contain any other occupants. No one. Very frightened, the man swore that he was alone.
But what a mass of twisted iron, the debris o
f unknown machinery, the feeble light of the taper caused to appear, among fragments of projectiles, bolts, tubes, fragments of mechanisms and plates of armor.
“The latest marvel of science—admire!” said the doctor, bitterly, kicking away some kind of machine-gun corroded by rust.
The interrogation of the man continued. The doctor translated his replies for me. He was a Bulgar escaped from the Palace of Peace, who had been living hidden in this bombard for ten days. According to him, everyone in the Boche camp in The Hague was dying of starvation—and the unfortunate inhabitants even more so. Better still, they were entirely out of explosives, shells and chemical products to make gases. No more munitions! Nothing to eat for the men, and even less for the cannons and all the bulimic engines of war, worn out for the most part, corroded by the infernal storms of gas, red hot or corrosive liquids that they breathed, vomited or poured out over their perimeter of devastation.
The situation out there was frightful. The monstrous factory of massacre was in its death throes. People were killing one another by night in order to snatch a few shreds of nourishment. It was the end. The Bulgar had been able to flee in the company of a few other starvelings, lost on the way.
As he talked a great deal about famine, that reminded us of our appetite. The man understood. He asked permission to get up, and pulled out a heavy sack hooked on to an iron road behind a sheet of armor.
Provisions! Two rabbits and a first-rate rat, almost as fast as the rabbits. A magnificent windfall! At a stroke, our fatigue was forgotten. We got up very quickly; brushwood was piled up under a corner of the bombard, with bits of dry wood, and a flame shone.
Our cooking didn’t take long. The rifleman skinned the two rabbits and the rat and spitted them on iron rods. We all found branches and blew on the fire in order to make the roast go more quickly.
The Engineer Von Satanas Page 18