The Engineer Von Satanas

by Albert Robida

  Mohammed got up to run to the henhouse.

  “Damn! Damn! Quickly, traps, we need to make traps. I have to kill them all, the rats. It’s your fault—you didn’t want to eat them…very good, though!”

  “Fortunately, all is not lost. They didn’t have time to eat the slaughtered hens—that will give us provisions for a few meals.”

  The catastrophe of the henhouse saddened our dinner somewhat, although we were all glad to be back after our fatiguing expedition and our nocturnal battle against the wolves. Two of the murdered chickens fortified the dinner and made it more sumptuous than we had hoped; our appetite did honor to the victims. They had very tender flesh—but, alas, there was no hope of any more eggs.

  Madame and Mademoiselle Vitalis shivered when we recounted our adventures. Marcel Blondeau regretted not having been with us in our rusty fortress for the battle against the wolves. I’m quite certain that he was insincere, and preferred having stayed behind to help Madame and Mademoiselle Vitalis look after the house and the garden.

  Youth, youth! In the ruins of the world you persist! Is it really worth the trouble, though?

  Good—now I’m falling back into the black again; Dr. Christiansen has infected me with his pessimism.

  There are two more of us now: the Japanese aviator Yamato Yradonou, our new friend, and the Bulgar from the tank. Yamato will share the aviator Miraud’s room; they can tell one another about their experiences of combat in the sky. It’s necessary to find a corner for the Bulgar, our prisoner. What are we going to do with that intruder?

  XII. The revenge of the pike, the bow and the club.

  Mange! We all have the mange! Catastrophe! It’s the wretched Bulgar who’s brought the mites from the German lines.

  For days now we’ve all been scratching and looking at one another anxiously. The doctor was scratching too, preoccupied and thinking about other things, but one evening, I extracted him from his somber reflections to ask him for a consultation.

  “You see, Doctor, horrible itching, unbearable pruritus. I’m scratching, we’re all scratching, everyone here is scratching. What is it?”

  The doctor’s only response was to scratch himself—then he slapped his forehead.

  “Where’s my head?” he cried. “Of course, it’s the mange! It was well worth the trouble of escaping the wolves in the ruins of our bombard to bring that back! Malediction!”

  “It’s nothing serious, Doctor, since it’s only mange, as I thought. Cure us!”

  “Cure you? Cure us? That would have been easy once, but today…with what, if you please? I don’t have anything for that...let me think... In the meantime, don’t breathe a word to anyone; leave them ignorant of that displeasure for another day or two...”

  Mange! That’s not going to extract me from the depression into which my attack of pessimism has thrown me. Why did I have to come back from the Pole, where we’d organized a supportable, even tranquil, little life, devoid of emotions and torments, with various kinds of hunting for distraction? One is never content! Life there was possible, after all, in a nice cozy cavern, well equipped; the bears furnished us with food and clothing, we had an abundance of aquatic game, birds and fish, with good companions to keep the fire going. I was able to sort out my observations, and even to occupy my mind; I was planning to write a great natural history in fifteen or twenty volumes...

  How far away all that is now, since I’ve rediscovered Europe, with its present pleasures, the flood of horror brought by what they called Science and Progress, Civilization and other follies collapsed forever, illusions drowned in rivers of blood.

  It’s the doctor who was in the right when I tried to combat his ideas about that and refused to accept his conclusions. Where has that hateful Science led us, which put so many resources and discoveries in the service of a race of prey? That Science, which furnished them with the frightful arsenal from which they gleefully drew their infernal weapons: gas, flames, vapors, acids, viruses and bacilli, all their maleficent chemistry! And iron to fabricate the plowshare with which the labor peoples! Yes, the engine is everything, and the value of the human being, its slave, is nothing, or almost nothing.

  Into what bloody gulf has it precipitated us, that famous Progress of which we were so proud, when we puffed ourselves up with admiration for ourselves, the Progress that suddenly permitted the rapid and complete demolition, the sudden collapse, of an illusory civilization, which, in reality, was nothing but degeneracy, and a mortal malady...

  I spent a bad night scratching myself, turning back and forth in my fury.

  Will we ever get out of the abyss in which we’re struggling? Shall I ever see Paris again? What would I find there? What would I do, what would become of me? Shall we ever see less somber days again, less hideous times? Do we even have a future? I don’t want to stay here forever, though, exchanging somber ideas with the doctor! It’s necessary to go, to go—but how? I’m still looking, always, for the how, rolling more or less absurd projects round my head, which maintain my insomnia...

  When morning comes I rush to the doctor, scratching frantically. I’m not the only one; the others arrive, all just as anxious. They know, and are scratching themselves in the knowledge of the cause. We can talk.

  “Well, Doctor, have you found it?”

  “For the little inconvenience?” says the doctor. “It’s quite simple very easy. I’ll tell you: a little special ointment or black soap, or lotions of essence of turpentine or fuel-oil. In two days, it’s gone. Except that, to reckon with this accursed mange we have no ointment, no black soap, no turpentine, no fuel-oil, and I can’t see where I’m going to find any...”

  Such desolation is painted on our faces, and Marcel Blondeau groans so dolorously as he looks at Jeanne Vitalis, as red as a poppy, that the good doctor is moved.

  “Wait, though, before lamenting,” he said. “I don’t have anything at the moment, but I’ll search. There’s a means. Let’s go into the town, four or five of us, with spades and pick-axes, to the ruined shops. Let’s dig in the ruins of the pharmacy…or the paint-merchant…yes, that would be better, the paint merchant’s hasn’t been excavated so thoroughly, because there’s nothing worth eating there. There’s more chance of finding something for us...”

  “Right away!” I cried. “Let’s go! Quickly!”

  Marcel already had a pick in his hand, and Jeanne Vitalis ran to fetch a spade.

  “Yes, that’s right—run!” said Madame Vitalis. “Find something!”

  The hope of soon being rid of the wretched acarid, the minuscule enemy that has just added its unbearable assaults to all our troubles, makes me forget my other preoccupations.

  Everyone wants to go on the expedition; five minutes later we leave, all full of ardor.

  People we encounter in the town, in much greater numbers than in previous weeks, grouped in discussion, stop us as we go by, to confirm what everyone already knows about the total exhaustion of resources, and above all of munitions, in the Boche lines. Wretches escaped from The Hague or neighboring ruins are still arriving, their accounts can’t leave the slightest shadow of doubt.

  Finally! We’re going to see something new!

  But I confess that I was thinking first and foremost about our new enemy, the acarid!

  We worked for two days on our excavations, feverishly and furiously, turning over and scattering all the heaps of rubble, without discovering the slightest thing that might serve to massacre that brigand of a mite. Finally, as we were despairing, the doctor laid his hands on I don’t know what horrible hardened mixtures, which resembled paint, in the debris of crushed tins and drums. He brought everything back, carefully, and took possession of Madame Vitalis’ stove, to the detriment of our cooking, in order to devote himself to a nauseating chemistry that was almost as bad, in mephitic terms, as the Boche gases.

  I heard the young people moaning in low ones in the corners.

  “Marcel, I beg you, don’t look at me with horror,” stammered Mademo
iselle Vitalis, still crimson and trying to hide in the shadows of our cave.

  “Jeanne, Jeanne, will you love me in spite of these…oh, I’d much rather have a good wound!”

  “No, no, Marcel, don’t say that!”

  But there’s no need to go into the ridiculous details of our cure. Three days later, the infinitesimal and tenacious enemy was vanquished; we were all cured! We uttered sighs of relief. Mademoiselle Vitalis no longer blushed when she looked at Marcel Blondeau, who gave the impression of having to retain himself in order not to dance and sing. He embarrassed our savior with excessively warm expressions of his immense gratitude, shook the hands of Jeanne and Madame Vitalis, expanded in effusions and came back to congratulate the ladies, to congratulate everyone...

  The acarid having been annihilated, crushed in its lairs, my thoughts returned to the other enemy, the frightful monster at bay in its trenches and fortresses, having reached the end of its means of destruction.

  Information arrives with increasing certainty. The people buried for such a long time in their holes and their cellars, are emerging and going from ruin to ruin, spreading the good news. They no longer hide during the daylight hours, only risking themselves outside with a thousand precautions, or only after nightfall.

  I’m surprised to see so many people emerging from all the holes in a country that I had thought deserted. Children are running over the dunes in the sunlight, without masks: poor children born in misery, famine and suffering in the depths of cellars, where they had lived as little troglodytes, far more unfortunate than their ancestors of the age of caves, who had only had to fear natural forces and ferocious beasts, and not all the horrors and perfected ferocities of the scientific age.

  All the men of the surrounding burrows, the Batavian tribes of the ruined villages, are coming into the ruins of Harlem to hold councils and seek allies for the great battle that they’re preparing.

  I admire the beautiful clubs and the rude pieces of pointed iron, forged, reshaped and naively equipped with handles by people who are reinventing the lance, the pike, the guisarme, the vouge, the halberd, the mace, the battle-ax—all the old hand-weapons of distant ages—and who will be happy to make use of them in the great final charge at the enemy of the human race.

  The bow will also be at the feast, manipulated by men who haven’t forgotten the Fleming and Picard traditions of shooting at birds. There are archers desirous of sending their arrows at the abhorred Boches, at the scholarly barbarians who have crushed them with huge shells, bombs, torpedoes loaded with superdynamite, panclastite, trinitrotoluene, phosphorus, poisoned them with their emissions of asphyxiating, suffocating or corrosive gases, and buried or electrocuted them under the eruptions of electric volcanoes…

  Finally!

  And their thirst for vengeance grips me. It really is going to be the end of Gesta diaboli per Germanos!

  Emissaries are being sent toward the allied lines, toward Amsterdam, to try to find out how things stand there, and to reach an understanding in order to coordinate the movements.

  The country is silent, except when Amsterdam launches a few shells—for it still has a small provision—at the Palace of Peace, which no longer responds.

  I’m no longer thinking of leaving before the big push, the imminent mass attack that our prehistoric warriors are preparing. I shall be there. We shall all be there!

  We’re furbishing weapons in the cellar, as people are doing everywhere. My comrades are rubbing their hands together, joyfully. Yes, one can see people smiling now, and brandishing their primitive weapons at the thought of the use they’re going to make of them, and that perhaps the end of the frightful nightmare is nigh—and the hour of vengeance too.

  Mohammed shows his teeth; his smile is a rictus. He has sharpened the tip and blade of a magnificent saber-bayonet, passed through his belt like a dagger, and all day long he polishes spears or hooked vogues with multiple points for our friends or for the amateurs of the neighboring caverns.

  The military men of our little association, the wreckage of various armies who have ended up here, brought together by the hazard of catastrophes—the Peruvian lieutenant, the Japanese aviator, Monsieur Jollimay, the Swiss rifleman, Maître Saladin, the captain-notary, and the New Zealander—are organizing those neighbors, with the valid men of the town, into a single company, which has very rapidly become a sizeable battalion, and training them for the supreme hand-to-hand battle with prehistoric clubs. They practice running, combat and skirmishing, in preparation for the great charge, devoid of pity and mercy, that is to liberate the world—“or what still remains of it and is worthy of being conserved,” says the doctor, ever pessimistic.

  Marcel Blondeau is showing a frenetic ardor. He goes out, running around incessantly, carrying out distant reconnaissance in the direction of the Boche positions. He recruits warriors with solid fists from the surrounding area, awaiting the great day with impatience.

  Jeanne Vitalis is as excited as he is, and when we depart for the battle, she will be there. She is already able to put one arrow in two into the black at fifty paces. It’s an appreciable talent, added to all those she possesses already. She is going to avenge her mother’s wooden leg—poor Madame Vitalis, who is shivering in advance, and would like to prepare, with the doctor, the provisions of lint that we’re certainly going to need before long, when we come to blows. But to make lint one needs cotton, and we don’t have any, or so very little!

  XIII. A wretch who wants to reinvent gunpowder.

  And I too shall go to the great battle—me, a man who is so peaceful, even pacifist! I would once have treated as a madman anyone who had told me that I would one day march to combat full of ardor and fury, ax in hand, like a warrior of prehistoric times—but that is what I am going to do.

  I feel myself, I look at my arms, I even pick myself to make sure that I’m not dreaming again. No, I’m awake; it’s really me who is brandishing this heavy ax and wearing an enormous cutlass, which Mohammed has carefully sharpened for me, passed through a rope belt.

  Through the main square of Harlem—what remains, at least, of the old Groot Markt, so prettily formed by beautiful brick houses and monuments: the Saint Bavo cathedral, the Town Hall with the Franz Hals Museum, and the old meat market with the gigantic Renaissance gable—file a strangely equipped troop of thin but robust men, warriors dressed in badly-worn cassocks of coarse fabric and animal skins, showing glimpses of suntanned chests and muscular arms, all marching with and energetic and decisive stride, carrying various weapons over their shoulders: enormous pikes, clubs, long-handled axes, sparkling scythe-blades attacked to the ends of solid handles.

  They all have cutlasses in their belts, or sabers of all forms. Alongside one infantry saber that must have seen service in the army of 1810 or 1830, I perceive a huge rapier from the time of William the Silent, and a bizarrely-sheathed steel blade, the work of some contemporary blacksmith.

  Oh, old Franz Hals, painter of the bourgeois guards of the heyday of Harlem, the feasts of pikemen and arquebusiers of the good old days, what would you say if you saw the descendants of your models of yore, the primitive horde that is traversing the main square today and going to line up before the masses of red and white stone, the scattered rubble of the monuments that were the adornment of the destroyed city?

  You would not find among their descendants the expansive rubicund faces of the brave bourgeois soldiers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, any more than the well-tailored doublets and the magnificent collars. But you might admire the energetic heads refined by misfortune and long suffering, the attitude of resolution of all these men and all those who are coming to join them, arriving one by one or in small groups from all the streets, or ruins of streets opening on to the great market square, and the paths circling or cutting through the mountain of crumbled stones.

  And there are warriors arriving in little troops, armed with pikes or scythes, sometimes in groups of archers carrying quivers on their back garnish
ed with a provision of long arrows.

  Some on them have come from a long way away, contingents furnished by the villages of the interior, peasants from farms lost in the polders or coastal fishermen. I recognize our friends from Noordwik, led by the formidable burgemeester, carrying the huge ax of a tribal chieftain of the age of caves. Yamato the Japanese aviator goes to clap him on the shoulder joyfully, happy to see the Batavian Hercules again, who laughs into his coarse beard and must be expressing to him, if I understand correctly, his loud desire to come to blows as soon as possible, his haste to rush to the assault on the Boche fortress of the Palace of Peace.

  People come together, fold discussions, bring news from more distant regions, where people are also emerging from caverns and burrows under the ruins. Men go to examine the bands and groups that are arriving.

  Every band has its war-chief, who makes them carry out various drill movements, bearing no resemblance to the military maneuvers of old, the days, so near and yet do far away, before the cataclysm.

  What we have before our eyes really are the tribes of distant centuries, united by common danger, exercising with primitive weapons, the honest weapons used by the men of old to repel some invasion.

  They seem ready, all of them, and disposed to march to battle with the will to win, the resolution to finish off and smash the common enemy, the scourge of humanity, the execrable scientific barbarian who was run out of his diabolical inventions and munitions.

  The great day is nigh. Is the dawn of a new and better era about to shine over the ruins of the old world?

  Dr. Christiansen and I are looking at one another, very emotional, our hearts beating hopefully, when Monsieur Vandermolen comes over, bringing the doctor a man from Harlem who has a big bulging sack under his arm.

  “What’s that?” asks the doctor, when the man opens his sack.