We showed the Bulgar a little more respect.
“Go on, sit down—you’ll have your share.”
The rabbits, browned rather than cooked, were soon dispatched. That was a pleasure. I also had a small slice of rat; it’s a delicate dish that we all appreciate now.
After that almost lavish meal, we would be able to lie down and sleep!
The Bulgar lay down in the hay beside me, finding that better than underneath in his hidey-hole.
X. An agitated night in the ruins of a tank.
A profound silence is established in our ruined bombard in the depths of that pitch darkness, only disturbed by a few vague sounds of respiration, the rustle of brushwood, and a snore that rises, and abruptly ceases.
I contemplate the slightly brighter sky through the breaches and holes with which the armor is riddled. Thought leaks away from my weary brain; I don’t know exactly where I am. Is that the heavens I perceive up there, through the holes in the carapace above my head? They heavens, with theirs stars, seen through the vaults of Hell? Yes, more like Hell, that’s where we are...
And I stir, I turn over, I struggle...
Then, a shock...
I have an abrupt sensation of a fall on to sharply-pointed rocks. I must have fallen off my bundle of fodder on to the iron debris, which is wounding me. I roll over slightly; I try to get up…impossible. I remain on my side, and sink into an exhausted sleep.
Now I’m dreaming...
Mountains glaciers, precipices, the bristling crowns of gigantic fir trees, twisting and writhing monstrous, menacing arms…that must be the idea of my fall on to jagged rocks just now...
The mountains rise up. It’s the Himalaya. Thunder rumbles…thunder or explosions? And the mountains talk, the Himalaya frowning its eyebrows of white rock, cries furiously: “Come on, you out there, you, the Alps! You, the Caucasus and Carpathians! You have no more volcanoes, then, to finish off these enraged pygmies, these frenetic myrmidons? Shrug your shoulders—a good earthquake to crush the race, summon the fire of heaven to the rescue...”
“Silence, Brother,” replies the terrified Mont Blanc. “It’s those pygmies who have blown the volcanoes up! The fire of heaven? It’s theirs, they have it, they’re making use of it to demolish my peaks and blow up my summits. Shut up, I beg you—I’m scared!”
I don’t know what the Himalaya might have said—someone pushes me again, and the metal on which I’m lying is scratching my sides. The Himalaya disappears; I open my eyes; I can only see blackness, but I can hear bizarre sounds outside in the dark. What is it? Howling in the countryside...
I remember now; we’re a long way from the Himalaya, lying in the ruins of a wheeled bombard. Let’s sleep, then...
Someone pushes me again. It’s the intolerable Bulgar who grabs me by the arm.
“Let me sleep, satanic Balkan Boche! I need my eight hours of sleep.”
“Wolf! Wolf! Wolves!” he shouts in my ear.
“What? Wolves?”
“What?” The comrades have heard the word, vaguely, and are trying to wake up.
“Wolves,” I say to them. “This damned Bulgar doesn’t want to let us sleep.”
“Wolves!” cries the doctor, bounding from his straw at the expense of my tibias. “It’s serious, then! Packs of wolves—I’ve heard talk of them. A bad encounter! Get up! Barricade ourselves in, quickly!”
The howling was getting closer. Mohammed, the Senegalese, got down outside our fortress to reconnoiter, and leapt back up again.
“They’re coming,” he said. “They’re all around us.”
Already we were foraging at hazard under our bedding, pulling out iron rods and fragment of armor plate, the debris of a door, various lumps of iron and piling them up in the breach through which we had got into the tank.
The Bulgar was more familiar than we were with the resources of the rolling blockhouse, his domicile for a week, and he passed us the materials for our barricade. Fortunately, there was no other practicable breach for the four-footed assailants. The other holes not being accessible, we only had to face up to a frontal assault.
We were just in time; as we finished blocking the breach, the wolves leapt to the assault, howling. That woke me up completely. Until then it had seemed that my extravagant dream was continuing, but I saw the embers of their eyes gleaming, I heard their raucous breath and the grinding of their ferocious teeth. They too were hungry!
If they seemed furious, we were even more so, because of our troubled night—and out prehistoric weapons were about to make them see it! Above our barricade, through the scrap iron, we were already thrusting judiciously at the menacing snouts, or into the pack, or at the spines of those that were trying to get through the holes.
That first attack lasted a good quarter of an hour; then the assailants retreated. We heard them circling our refuge, scratching and growling, wearing away their claws on the armor plate.
“The enemy is on the run,” I said to the doctor as the growling and the panting gradually eased. “I think that with a watchman at the barricade, we can resume our interrupted sleep.”
“All right,” he said. “Try. Me, I’ll stand guard—someone can replace me when I’ve had enough.”
It took us a good quarter of an hour to go back to sleep; the battle had started our blood flowing vigorously. But finally, little by little, we all departed again for the land of dreams—a happy land, the sweet land of the past, on which we tried every evening to focus our thoughts, with the hope of going there to find a few hours of repose, forgetful of somber realities.
Personally, I strove to think about my apartment on the Boulevard Montparnasse, my study, my soft bed, my breakfast in the morning, with cream, chocolate, gilded crusty croissants—and I had been savoring the delights of all that for hours, it seemed, when the Bulgar gave me a hard punch.
“Wolf! Wolves!” he cried.
I heard the howling without understanding. I had forgotten the enemy. Fortunately, my comrades, behind the barricade, resumed thrusting at the assailants, more furious and panting harder than the first time. While still half asleep, I did the same as the others, jabbing through the holes at the enemy.
That lasted ten minutes. Again the wolves renounced the assault and resumed circling the tank, howling, or trying to climb up to the higher breaches.
Then they disappeared, and I lay down again.
“Who’ll take guard?” asked the doctor.
Mohammed offered. I didn’t dispute the post, and stretched myself out beside the Bulgar.
…Howling again, pressure again our barricade. Someone comes toward me. I get up, groping, and I go, almost in a dream, to make spear-thrusts, almost at random. The attack weakens; the wolves resume circling. They’re crunching something, jostling one another and growling. I hear the sound of their jaws and I shiver. One of ours, perhaps?
“They’re eating their wounded, for want of anything else,” the doctor tells me. “Will you take the watch?”
I make no response to the invitation. Tranquillized, I’m already asleep again.
Thus, seven or eight times before morning, it’s necessary to wake up, to get up, numbly, cold, yawning and groaning, and endure the assault of the wolves, striking and thrusting at random through the augmented and consolidated barricade—which holds firm.
“Oh, if I only had two or three grenades!” roared the artilleryman Jollimay, finally driven into a rage by all the sudden awakenings.
With daylight, we all wake up, this time for good, harassed, stiff and bent, but definitively rid of our enemies, disappeared at dawn.
When we emerge from the tank to stretch our limbs, we find three carcasses torn apart, scattered bones and bits of bloody skin—all that remains of our victims.
No booty of war. Mohammed and Jollimay grumble. They had hoped to find a few cadavers of wolves to take back for the larder.
In the damp morning mist, our ruined fortress stands out in an impressive and dramatic fashion, dominating a v
ast and sinister landscape of devastation, where everything is ravage and ruin: the ground cracked and broken, full of asperities, holes and scars, with white or red traces of evaporated farms or villages, disappeared forever; the water of streams with changed courses spread out in stagnant pools in the craters; the trees decapitated, crippled amputated and dislocated, but obstinate in living regardless, putting out new branches and garnishing their miserable broken stumps with foliage.
The tank is grounded on a kind of mound, its rusty mass looming up ponderously on the debris of its enormous wheels, brandishing twisted metal, seemingly still threatening the entire horizon through the black holes of its breaches and battlements.
But I’m not allowed to linger in the contemplation of our fortress; I’m summoned to take up my burden of forage. It’s necessary to get back without wasting time. Monsieur Vandermolen takes the head of the caravan; he has got his bearings and knows approximately where we are.
En route, then, to try to arrive early.
XI. The return to the cavern.
The misfortunes of a henhouse.
We had been advancing for about half an hour when the doctor, who was walking alongside me, pointed out shadows to our right, moving through the brushwood some distance away, bounding behind the undulations of the dune.
“The wolves,” he told me. “They’re following us. Bah! In daylight, they don’t scare us.”
Old memories came back to me as we marched. My grandmother once told me that in her childhood, after the great Napoleonic wars, wolves had been seen to reappear in her province: the ancient forgotten terror of villages in forests...
Here they are again, brought back by the frightful upheaval, emerging in famished packs from what distant forest, what wild Balkans, what steppes?
Under our bundles of hay, wary eyes watching the wolves, the doctor and I philosophize as we stride along.
“I knew one worthy fellow,” the doctor said, “who contended that the Earth was, in reality, the Purgatory of which our religion speaks: Purgatory, the place of deportation, into which we’re precipitated at birth in order to expiate sins committed on another planet, and where we’re condemned to live a more or less long existence, in accordance with the blackness of our faults, venerable centenarians being, in consequences, those most heavily charged with grave sins. And in sustaining that, he thought himself frightfully bitter and pessimistic, the poor fellow!
“How wrong he was! Our Earth is much better than that, I’m sure, better than a simple and gentle little Purgatory! It’s quite simply Hell, the realm of Satan. Everyone, whoever we are—you, me, the others—if we’ve had the misfortune to be born on this sorry ball, it’s because we’ve merited it thoroughly, by crimes of all sorts, committed elsewhere, in perfectly deplorable anterior existences, which have obliged the great judge to exercise severity on our souls and our bodies...”
“That seems quite probable to me, alas! Yes, we must have been frightful rogues elsewhere...”
“That’ll teach us! Let’s expiate, since we must, expiate and redeem! I swear, from now on, to conduct myself in the most edifying fashion, throughout the time I still have to live. That’s what you say, isn’t it, for a moderately pleasant existence? I swear to show myself, as much as possible, kind, good, helpful, even devoted when I can, in order to merit a reduction in punishment…and if my soul has to come back, as is probable, to animate a substitute body somewhere, please, Lord, let it not be on this accursed Earth! Let it be elsewhere; there’s no lack of room in your universe…send me to some little planet, far, far away from here—as far as you like! O Lord, to obtain that mercy, what would I not do? Penitence, fasting, disgrace and unpleasantness, I can accept it all, even solicit it... Here, my dear Monsieur, put your load of forage on mine—I can easy carry two!”
A little more, in his desire for mortification to augment his merit and his chances, and the doctor would have invited me to climb on to his back. I didn’t want to abuse his good will, and I even kept my bundle of forage.
We kept going. Toward the middle of the day, when noon was sounding in our stomachs, we recognized familiar landscapes. Harlem and home couldn’t be far away. A little more courage, one more stage, and we’d be home.
We went through the remains of a village that we’d visited before. There the doctor found an opportunity to devote himself a little to the relief of the miseries of the world. A few invalids in a few huts were signaled to him. He ran to them. He bled one old woman, set a fisherman’s broken arm, massaged rheumatisms, distributed a dozen gumballs to children with colds, and searched for simples to make tisanes. That was all he could do.
In the meantime, we rested. Monsieur Jollimay, with is wooden leg, needed to catch his breath, and we dined on snails we’d picked up along the way.
The doctor rejoined us exultantly. He had been given four beets for his honoraria—in spite of all his protestations and refusals, I ought to say, but, after all, the beets were very welcome; we ate two of them, reserving the others for the evening salad.
The wolves had abandoned us; we didn’t see them again. We warned the people of the village to look out for their children.
We’re almost home; here is familiar territory, our own dunes, with the holes and craters cultivated by our hands, or those of the people in neighboring caverns.
I’m not sorry to reach port, or our legs can do no more, and if the doctor keeps going on, I think I’ll end up climbing on to his back—but we’ve been spotted; people are coming to meet us, Here comes someone waving their arms at us.
Howard Gibson, the American billionaire and Madame Vitalis tumble down the slope, followed by Mademoiselle Vitalis and Maître Saladin, the captain-notary. The three wooden legs of the captain, the American and Madame Vitalis are going tick-tock on the pebbles.
“How anxious we were yesterday!” cries Madame Vitalis. “We were waiting for you all night...”
“We were too far away and too tired,” I said. “We had to camp in a tranquil spot…relatively tranquil…but here we are, with a good provision of forage, as you see. We’re going to fatten up our horse.…”
“And is all well at the villa?” Monsieur Vandermolen asked
“Yes, yes,” said the two women, in an evasive tone.
“Imprudents!” cried the doctor. “You don’t have your masks with you! What if there was...?”
“Oh, yes…er, no…the thing is, we thought there was no more danger...”
“You don’t know,” said the American. “During your expedition, prisoners have been taken—or, rather, deserters fleeing the Boche lines at the Palace of Peace have turned up. It’s true, it’s right! Out there, they’ve run out of the munitions of their infernal chemistry! We have the details…there are a couple of chemists among the deserters. Nothing’s happening any longer out there; the ammunition dumps are completely empty: no more explosives, and nothing with which to manufacture them, nor anything for the toxic gases.”
“Is that absolutely certain?”
“There’s been penury there for a long time, since an accident, it appears,” said Mademoiselle Vitalis.
“Oh,” said Maître Saladin, “say a catastrophe, a delightful catastrophe! I got the details of the order and the progress…explosions of carboys of asphyxiants in a laboratory, fire spreading from depot to depot, a series of increasingly powerful explosions, the big factory blown up, with all the storage bunkers. The best of all is that the entire general staff of chemists perished along with the laboratory! Nothing to be done, impossible to approach! Eruptions of deleterious gas at every moment, clouds of asphyxiating vapors, geysers of corrosive liquid hurling death in all directions...”
“No more chemists!” the American added.
“Good riddance!” said the doctor.
“No more acids, no more explosives, nor raw materials for mines, no more sulfur, niter, bromine, manganese, benzol, no more iron, no more tin, copper, nickel, no more coal, no more...no more anything...in sum, no more materie
l. Engines, machines, cannons—all worn out, finished, and replacement as impossible as the renewal of stocks of munitions. Finished, this war of machines in which humans were only a derisory accessory, destined to be flattened more or less rapidly—the factory war has ended up destroying the factory itself!”
“They’re eking out the scrapings from the bottom of the barrel. What do they have left? A few old torpedoes, a few charges from fished-up mines, a few canisters of viruses and bacilli. They’re the monster’s last spasms!”
We arrived home. What a joy to drop the bundles of forage and sit down properly, while awaiting the dinner we’d certainly earned.
However, it appeared that Madame Vitalis was a trifle melancholy, and she seemed rather embarrassed. Jeanne Vitalis and Marcel Blondeau were plucking the salad without breathing a word, with worry lines on their forehead, which was entirely foreign to their habit, the young people usually exhibiting an insouciance that bordered on cheerfulness.
“What’s wrong?” asked Monsieur Vandermolen, anxiously. “Is the goat all right? And the horse?”
“Very well, very well, but...”
“But?”
“Well...it’s the chickens.”
“What’s wrong with the chickens?”
“They’re…there aren’t any, any more. They’ve been eaten.”
“What? You’ve eaten the chickens!”
“In our absence!” said Miraud, dolorously. “That’s not polite...”
“No, not us—the rats! Last night…an invasion of enormous rats!”
“The henhouse wasn’t properly closed, then?”
“Yes, but there were holes. We heard noises, without suspecting the disaster at first! The rats were killing the hens and the cock. In the end, as the din went on, we arrived...too late, alas! None were left, except for the white hen besieged at the top of the ladder. Monsieur Blondeau fell on the rats, hitting them with a stick. He was heroic—he killed seven or eight!”
“Nine,” said young Marcel.
“He’s closed the door in order to massacre the miserable rats, but he had to open it so that we could help him, or the rats would have devoured him too. Enormous rats—look, look at the plate over there.”
The Engineer Von Satanas Page 19