The Engineer Von Satanas

by Albert Robida

  “That is why I said to you, my friend, that the terror of the agents of the police is the commencement of sagacity and the love of the nation. The case of my professor is that of thousands of citizens of his age, just as able to bear arms, who have not undertaken to do so. It is that of many young men, excused by a fortunate hazard, doubtless not very solid, but nevertheless as solid as the majority of our soldiers, and who expend their activity, not in enrolling and fighting, but in work singularly more exhausting: making money, taking the place of those who are fighting, playing comedy, giving speeches and matinee performances in honor of writers wounded or killed by the enemy.”

  “You’re severe toward that rabble, Monsieur l’Abbé,” said Vaissette, “but I admit that we very often said the same in the course of our reveries in the trenches; and I would have experienced a sentiment of revolt, if the war hadn’t taught us to accept everything with resignation, and not to believe any more than you do in the justice of things of this world. There are men who offer themselves as victims and are killed; there are others who remain in the depots or who escape at all their medical examinations; it’s fatal, just as it’s inevitable that there are poor and rich, sick and healthy individuals, geniuses and imbeciles—which are equally unjust.”

  The master of Jacques Tournebroche, benevolent and subtle, freed from the errors of his century and many of the centuries that preceded and will follow his own, continued in these terms:

  “I have no doubt that men, following their natural instincts take great pleasure in being soldiers. They are borne by their inclinations toward marauding, murder and false glory, and to the brutalization that is the prerogative of barracks; I once defined a man as an animal with a musket. But if he likes to be a soldier, it’s in order to parade in peacetime. The métier doesn’t agree with him in wartime; it’s decidedly too dangerous! Personally, I can’t criticize those who are untouched by a fervent patriotism and don’t join up. My horror of arms is such that I would do the same.”

  “Criticize them, Monsieur l’Abbé!” cried Vaissette. “Criticize them! If everyone had reasoned like you, it would have been all over for France—which would have been an irreparable disaster for humanity. I want to be finished with your paradoxes. Some young people have, indeed, escaped the popular conscription, but what does their opprobrium count by comparison with the generation that has sacrificed itself entirely? Some men, robust in spite of approaching fifty, have stayed at home, but what is that weakness in the presence of the devotion of the old men who have gone of their own will and have given everything, including their lives? Alongside the former and the latter, younger than their age, there are those who bear their years; would we have required that decrepit army of valetudinarians? Their place was not really in the firing line, and that is why they had the wisdom not to go there.

  “You have stigmatized a few individual cases, Monsieur l’Abbé, which are indeed shameful, but you cannot generalize them without injustice. The law, in imposing the sacrifice of blood on thirty classes, was only observing the will of those classes and the whole nation. We forged that servitude ourselves, in our determination to defend our soil. The gendarme has only ensured the play of our free decision. When the aggressor came, we stood up.”

  Having paused thoughtfully for a few moments, Vaissette continued:

  “Doubtless I know better than anyone what our misery was, and the sadness of those lambs that were led to the slaughter. I’m making use, you see, of an evangelical figure of speech. The uniform I wear, once horizon blue, now yellow, reminds me of the ennui of the trenches, the dismal days that passed, the rain, the anguish and the sweat of the eve of an attack…I remember all that. But I also remember the irresistible surge of the waves running toward death. It was so beautiful that I wept at commanding such men. It’s necessary not to have been a real soldier not to retain the memory of the assault. Shame on anyone who denies it. I don’t know what miracle or movement transformed us; we carried in our souls a Christ running toward Golgotha. Oh, I don’t know whether what was driving us was patriotism or fear of the gendarme, but I know that, deaf and blind in the unleashed tempest, while the heavens were exploding over our heads and the earth was being torn apart under our feet, we experienced the horror of a sacred frisson!”

  IX. “War is divine,” proclaims Achilles

  “I’ve finally heard the words I was waiting for,” said Achilles. “I was lost in your discourses, as subtle as those of Odysseus. War is divine in essence, like justice and religion!”

  “A Greek is certainly qualified to sustain that thesis,” declare the Abbé. “There’s always been a little of the boastful soldier so well described by Plautus in him. If he daren’t bite, at least he’s able to bark.”

  “My name has remained the personification of bravery in all languages,” the hero of the ancient poet went on. “When I was a child, you know, a centaur nourished me on the marrow of lions. Would you dare to compare me with Ulysses, all of whose courage resided in his advice and speech, or Ajax, son of Telamon, who calmed his furies by slaughtering sheep that he had mistaken for warriors?”

  “That’s the kind of thing that can happen!” observed Don Quixote, without insisting.

  “Would you dare to compare me with that unfortunate Agamemnon, or that other Ajax, son of Oileus, the proudest of the Greeks, who, rebellious against destiny, threatened the heavens in vain? I alone, the cherished hero of Homer, remain immortal. I am the symbol of valor in battles and the very soul of combats. Joseph de Maistre glorified war, declaring it an expiation and a kind of purification of humankind. He was wrong; one ought to glorify it by proclaiming it the grandeur and the beauty of the world. It is a virtue, not a punishment. War has taught humans everything; it has rendered their coarse minds subtle; it is the mother of the family, the city, of government and the arts; it is the daughter of religion and justice!”

  “The poor fellow is more demented than you ever were,” Mr. Pickwick whispered to Don Quixote.

  Achilles continued: “To begin with, people fought to defend their hearth and the altar of their household gods, and the first epic was born of battle; can you deny, after that, that the origin of war is divine and that even poetry has its source therein? War is the crucible in which nations are purified, the bloody Fountain of Youth in which they are rejuvenated, the touchstone that puts nations to the proof. By means of war, sick and weak peoples are destroyed. By means of war, the most worthy and most powerful States dominate. Whatever your paradoxes and sophisms might mean, of which I don’t understand a word, recognize that the right of force is the most ancient, the most solid and the most durable.

  “One could believe that we were listening to Hegel, Fichte or General von Bernhardi!” exclaimed Faust, alarmed.32

  But Achilles, unleashed, could no longer be stopped. He went on: “War was present at the genesis of the world, since the murder of Abel by Cain. And even before then, was there not the struggle of the Titans and the Gods? The Ancients thought a goddess sufficient to incarnate wisdom, Minerva, and another to incarnate love, Venus, but they required two divinities, whether they were Greek or Latin, to incarnate war: Ares and Pallas, Bellona and Mars.”

  Candide interrupted. “Such is the way that you see war,” he said, “when I see it as nothing but pillage, theft, murder and brigandage—and, in sum, crime and madness? Whence comes that difference?”

  “Does it not come,” Abbé Coignard replied to him, “from the fact that you have made war, as Vaissette has, whereas Achilles, in spite of his renown, never has? There is no greater strategist and more valorous warrior than one who rests tranquilly in his armchair, in his dressing-gown, shod in carpet-slippers ‘where spring and flowers bloom’”

  “I haven’t made war?” repeated the son of Thetis and Peleus, bewildered.

  “Or very little, you must agree, Achilles of the light feet,” said the abbé. “If I can believe Homer in his Iliad, and my dear Statius, in his Achilleid, your role, at the beginning of the T
rojan war, was primarily, while disguised as a woman under the name of Pyrrha, to amuse yourself at the court of Lycomedes with the king’s daughters; you were secreted on the Isle of Skyros! The ingenious Ulysses could only discover you among that chorus of nymphs by disguising himself as a merchant of jewels and weapons; they admired the jewels while you, your boiling blood having spoken, seized the spear and sword.”

  “It was then,” said Achilles, ashamed, “that the enemy knew my wrath. “Ask the dead Trojans, the ravaged fields, the smoking towns...”

  “You success was very brief,” the abbé continued, implacably. “Because, the tyrant Agamemnon having stolen a captive, you retired to your tent, and for ten years you consented to remain tranquil while the siege unfurled its ups and downs. Admit that that’s a strange method of going on campaign!”

  Achilles, crestfallen, said nothing.

  “What distinguished you, Achilles,” said Candide, naively, “from Caesar, Napoléon and other great captains, is that they are celebrated for their exploits, while you are only known from Homer’s poem.”

  “You’re making very light of my legendary intrepidity,” replied the vanquisher of Hector.

  Candide went on, imperturbably: “Caesar, whose legions followed the sturdy horse, conquered Gaul and subjugated the Empire. The world was his domain. He perished on the eve of accomplishing a grandiose dream, which could only be conceived by a poet and rhetor like him: to set forth against the Parthians in order to conquer the East, then, heading northwards, to vanquish the Dacians, the Suevi and the Germans, astonished to see him arriving from the direction of the dawn, thus to return to his province of Gaul, to conclude his career where he had begun it. As for Napoléon, from Arcole to the Pyramids and Austerlitz to Moscow, Europe and Africa saw his legendary frock-coat pass in a cloud of glory.

  “Is it necessary to talk about other warriors whose victories have been reported to us by history? And to crown these bloody battles, you see Sergeant Vaissette, unknown to literature, a humble hero in the midst of millions of others whose names will not remain, who was one of the obscure soldiers of the Marne, the Yser and Verdun and died on the Somme in 1916, in the course of the most implacable of all the wars that have ravaged the world.

  “Caesar, Napoléon, Vaissette, seekers of glory, conquerors or defenders of the sacred ground that was your fatherland, your deeds are traced in furrows on the fields of history! You have done nothing, Achilles, and scholarly annals do not know you. Your exploits are of the order of Don Quixote’s follies. You do not exist in yourself, but only through the Iliad.”

  The seething Achilles did not explode in fury, because he was not entirely sure whether Candide was flattering him or mocking him; in that, he proved that he really was of the race of those braggarts and professionals of battle, striking in appearance but limited in their words and prudent in their actions.

  Martin’s pupil went on: “Nothing, moreover, is as boring as Homer. I remember on that subject the theory once sustained in Venice by Seigneur Pococurante: for him, as for any sincere person, the poem had no interest. ‘The continual repetition of combats that all resemble one another,’ the Venetian senator declared, coldly, ‘ the gods that always act but never do anything decisive; Helen, who is the subject of the war but is scarcely an actress in the drama; Troy, which is besieged but cannot be taken—all that causes me the most mortal boredom.’ At first I was scandalized by such impertinence; then, having become wiser, while I was hoeing my aubergines, I said to myself that Pococurante was right. That is why, Achilles, the tale of your imaginary exploits is only conserved, among our books, by tradition. Who else, then, possesses the courage of his opinion, as I do?”

  Abbé Coignard laughed like a Homeric hero, all of his ample midriff dancing. “I’ll grant you,” he said, “even though the genius of that old author is eternal, that his works are unskillful and soporific, and are only placed alongside Sophocles or Horace, perfumed by the rarest odor of antiquity, out of habit. Just as, with regard to the moderns, Descartes and Bossuet are placed alongside Fénelon and Racine—but who reads them?”

  “No one,” said Vaissette, unless they are on the syllabus for an examination or a degree.” I understand that those authors, whose influence was considerable, are studied if one teaches theology, like Abbé Coignard, or philosophy, like me, but what are they doing in the city of Letters? My dear master, Monsieur Lanson,33 in spite of his independence and clear mind, only left them there because Monsieur La Harpe had found them there. It’s time to expel therefrom those who have no other concern that to cultivate the arts as Candide cultivates his garden—that was the last concern of Calvin or Pascal! But we’re getting away from the war, proclaimed divine by Achilles.”

  “I no longer insist,” said the Greek, courageously, “since I see that I’m alone in my opinion.”

  “That’s all right, then,” concluded the abbé, taking a pinch of fine tobacco perfumed with rose-water from a snuffbox, which he then held out to Candide. “I’ll tell you something I remember, which once struck me vividly. It’s a matter of the strange admission made to me by a captain who fought in the War of Succession and had served the king for eighteen years under Monsieur le Maréchal de Villars. I confess that it was late at night and that many empty bottles justified his eloquence while excusing his frankness, along with the thick pipe-smoke and the presence of his mistress, who, being too warm, was only wearing her chemise—which was, to tell the truth, short and transparent.

  “‘Monsieur l’Abbé,’ that captain confided to me, ‘war consists uniquely of stealing chickens and pigs from serfs. Soldiers on campaign have no other occupation than that.’34

  “That confidence,” Monsieur Coignard continued, “did not fail to furnish me with matter for reflection. But give me more of that Oriental tobacco, Candide, my son; our greatest bishops never had the like. It’s worthy of the nose of a philosopher, or even a theologian.”

  “That’s because its leaves, the object of my diligent care, grew at the far end of my farm,” replied Candide, “near a stream enveloped by tall plants of a propitious humidity. What will becomes of them, alas, Monsieur l’Abbé? Oh, now, for the first time in five hundred years, I’m regretting my establishment in this region. Our arguments and the misdeeds of the storm are making me reflect. I recall the land of Dorado, where there was no Palais de Justice and no parliament, and where the only soldiers were twenty beautiful young women! It does not much resemble Westphalia, I assure you, nor France, nor even this fortunate corner of the Orient, a land of contemplation, dreams and prayer, where I’ve been able to find peace and dispose my kitchen garden, which the tempest is in the process of destroying.”

  X. In which there is Competition in Erudition

  “The armies,” replied Jérôme Coignard, “for which I experience such a great hatred, are obviously not as amiable as the battalion of maidens that you mention. The unfortunate thing is that if you conserve armies because of the wars you dread, it’s precisely the existence of those armies that render new conflicts possible!”

  He continued: “I detest war and its apparatus not only for its ferocity and cortege of mourning, but also for the ignorance of men-at-arms, their stupidity, their hatred of independence and their routine.”

  Achilles, the seething Achilles, wanted to make one last protest, but he sensed that no one would support him—not even Don Quixote—so he kept silent.

  “It’s true that they don’t know anything much,” conceded Vaissette. “At the beginning of this war they were ignorant of the employment of heavy cannon and trenches. And as for the German reiters, the destroyers of Louvain and Reims, let’s not insist on their rancor and scorn for arts and letters.”

  Dr. Faust intervened. “A hundred and fifty years ago,” he said, “I solemnly pronounced in Auerbach’s Keller: ‘The German is an animal of prey, who sleeps when he is not hunting or eating like a beast’”35

  That condemnation having been pronounced, the friend of Goethe fell s
ilent.

  “The fact is,” declared Candide, “that I haven’t retained an excellent memory of my sojourn among the Prussian armies. To begin with, I received four thousand lashes one day, a punishment the reason for which I’m unaware, but the memory of which I still retain from the nape of my neck to my buttocks, and I no longer believe the stupidities of Doctor Pangloss, who would have been bound to affirm that the reason was sufficient and that everything was for the best. As for the battle that was fought between our army and that of the King of France, I can scarcely remember it, having hidden throughout its duration.”

  “My dear Horace has confessed to acting no differently at the battle of Philippi, where he commanded a legion,” said the abbé. “Military courage is not a prerogative of Epicurean philosophers.”

  “All that I know,” Candide went on, “is that villages were burned and everyone was massacred, while each of the princes had a Te Deum sung in his camp. And yet, none of the soldiers had known the reason for the battle. Scarcely one of them remained who was not wounded at least slightly. And Mademoiselle Cunégonde, who later became my wife, was violated by a great Bulgar, whom I shall never forgive for such a trampling, if I might put it like that, of my rights. And as she struggled, not knowing that such is the custom of war, he stabbed her in the abdomen and left her for dead; and the Baron Thunder-ten-Tronckh, the greatest of the Barons of Germany, was killed, and his wife the Baroness cut into pieces; and the schloss of my youth, the witness of my first amours, which consisted of picking up the handkerchief of Mademoiselle Cunégonde behind a screen, the schloss, which was the most beautiful and agreeable of the schlosses of Westphalia and the world, was so completely demolished that not a stone remained of it, nor a tree in the park, nor a duck in the poultry-yard. Judge from that what I think of war and soldiers!”