The Engineer Von Satanas

by Albert Robida

  I had the prudence only to reveal to them the general lines of my plan, so that no indiscretion could harm it. For greater safety, I naturally mingled a few false details with the exposition of my project, appropriate to throw an overly ardent curiosity off the track. And I waited.

  THE BLIND CANNOT SEE LIGHTNING

  A few days later, the eminent individuals making up our Imperial Council had me appointed Minister of Aerial Transport, with unlimited powers. My mission was henceforth to seek the eternal glory of the Fatherland in the air. When I went into my office for the first time, I swore to myself to shoot myself with a pistol in five years time at the latest if, by that time, I had not sent Parisians the aerial transports they deserved.

  At the beginning of 1921, Majesty, if someone had explained to the French that Germany, anemic and extenuated, would be able, three years later, to reveal herself as the Mistress of the World, and that she would owe her universal empire to the little mechanical birds that furrow the sky, they would immediately have declared that no buffoonery more amusing had ever been served to them in a boulevard theater, and that the ideas of the air were simply “fiction.”

  God has permitted that our enemies never believe in reasoning that it is disagreeable for them to hear. If the French had pulled themselves together in time, if they had organized large air fleets, they would have remained the most envied, the richest and the most respected people on Earth, and we would have remained for another century in the dolorous servitude into which the Treaty of Versailles had thrown us. There is no shame, when one has emerged stronger and greater from a terrifying abyss, in recognizing that one nearly lost one’s life there!

  But let us repeat, God has permitted that France would not have the revelation of the supreme power that aeronautical power could give to a people. Her stupidity and our clear sight has permitted us to scratch out her name from the list of nations.

  These general considerations are the ways that are now leading us a little closer to the fact itself: the destruction of Paris.

  Far from priding myself on that incomparable event, I intend to draw a lesson from it for our people, to demonstrate how the stupid Welches,47 their eyes glued to the ground and the stream of the Rhine, were stubborn in preparing for their own death; how right the Cassandras had been, crying to them in 1918 that Paris could be destroyed in a day by German aircraft; how easy such an operation would become, on condition that someone to in our homeland cared to meditate it, and to organize it methodically. After so many centuries of hopes, struggles and sanctifying sufferings, Providence sent to virtuous and laborious Germany the doves of universal domination!

  Aeronautics? It soars above all human beings! Our steely gaze had pierced the clouds in 1897. In that year, on the fourth of October, one a day of rain and squalls, on the other side of the old frontier, in France, a machine heavier than air, which he called an “avion,” a Frenchman had left the ground: Clément Ader! The French had shrugged their shoulders, but the Germans had frowned.48

  Ten years later, almost to the day, on the twenty-seventh of October 1904, again on French soil, Henri Farman carried out a flight of 770 meters in a biplane. The advertisement became precise! The Sign of the Times was designed in the firmament!

  In 1908, when the American Wilbur Wright, perfecting Clément Ader’s idea, accomplished at Le Mans, again in France, the series of flights that attracted all of Parisian High Society to the Camp d’Auvours, the die was cast for us. Germany, no matter what the cost, had to assure herself of supremacy in the air, because the people who were only masters of the land of all the continents only had a fifth of the world’s surface in their possession as yet; because the people who were only masters of the water of all the oceans, only had an illusory domain in their hands as yet; awaiting the time when the people who would be masters of the air would obtain sovereignty over all the continents, all the oceans and all the skies. That people alone would be the masters of all humankind, because the air is everywhere that humans can live!

  Stupid France! All the progress of nascent aviation—all of it—took place on your soil! On the fifteenth of September 1908 Wilbur Wright carried out at Le Mans the first flight with two passengers. Your children did not understand that the passengers could immediately cede their place to two 75-kilogram bombs! Heil to our God! The Santos-Dumonts, the Voisins, the Blériots, the Delagranges, the Farmans, the Esnault-Pelteries, the Bréguet-Saulniers, the Nieuports, the Renaults and the Moranes clarified the question for the Deutschland!

  On the sixth of March 1908 the Michelin brothers created the Prix du Puy-de-Dôme, which consisted of transporting a passenger in an airplane from Paris to the summit of a 1,445-meter mountain; the proof constituted a feat that the most competent experts judged it unrealizable within twenty years. Three years later, almost to the day once again, on the seventh of March 1911, the prize was won, in five hours!

  On the twenty-second of August 1911, the same Michelins created the Prix de l’Aéro-Cible: to place projectiles from a height of two hundred meters within a circle with a radius of ten meters. If a layman thought about the enormous speed of the airplane from which the projectiles are dropped, and the extremely small area of the target drawn on the ground, he would think, rightly, that success could only be achieved by a particularly adroit marksman, equipped with very complicated, much improved apparatus, with many years experience in that extraordinary kind of shooting. Now, less than a year later, on the twentieth of August 1912, Messieurs Gaubert and Scott put into that target, which, from a height of two hundred meters, looks as big as a pancake, twelve projectiles out of fifteen! In 1913, Lieutenant Varcin placed thirteen out of fifteen and, furthermore, declared that few exercises in the world are as easy as carrying out extremely accurate fire from an airplane! I shall shortly have the great honor, Majesty, of demonstrating that to the court.

  Progress in the science of the air, therefore, defied all human anticipation in its unexpectedness and rapidity—that is the truth! If God, for the accomplishment of his impenetrable designs, had not decided that France would one day perish by way of the air, the French would have grasped the scope—which has no limits in time, in space or in power—of the aerial marvels that all unfurled before their eyes and in their homeland between 1897 and 1914!

  Their parliamentarians squabbled, their senior civil servants shrugged their shoulders, and the French laughed, as crickets sing and dancers dance.

  Then, on the eve of the events of 1914, while England was still trying to take off and could not oppose to us any substantial aerial force, Germany, by means of her Zeppelins, her Taubs and her Gothas got a head start in the sky over all the nations of the world. On the second of August 1914, France had the ridicule of aligning against us a hundred and twenty aircraft, produced by fourteen different manufacturers, divided into twenty-one squadrons, some of which were composed of five or even six types, aircraft that all flew at different heights, at dissimilar speeds, possessing neither sighting-devices, nor bomb-launchers, nor bombs, nor machine-guns!

  At that moment, however, Divine Bounty seemed to want to give the French one final warning, in order that faith in the victorious airplane might be embedded in their memory forever, very profoundly! When our immortal armies marched on Paris—defended by nine aircraft!—on the third of September 1914, one of those aircraft reported in haste to General Gallieni the enormous news that General von Kluck had veered toward the south-east! Only an aircraft could have discovered that the German army had thus left its flank open to attack!

  That attack was launched from Paris, and that was the Battle of the Marne!

  But the French did not understand yet, and God kept their head in the fog thereafter. After an enlightenment in 1918, during Foch’s battles, the clouds closed again, and France, today, has died of incomprehension. Our God be praised!

  (At this moment the Emperor rises to his feet and the orator falls silent. His Majesty turns to the court and pronounces these words slowly, which will roll
over all the territory of the Empire like echoing thunder: “Yes, our God be praised! The French have killed immortal France!” A sovereign clamor rises from the throats assembled around the Emperor, who quietly resumes his place on the throne.)

  LET US GIVE THANKS TO THE ALLIES

  God, in sum, had tested us severely in 1918 in order that we might sense his predilection. His punishment was a blessing. God showed us that he had blinded our enemies and that we would find our victory in the sky. Victoriam in coelo!

  But he demanded that we should merit that victory. In order to win it, we would have to bind our loins with the cilice49 of obstinate hard labor, and cover our head with the hood of dissimulation.

  Without hard labor and dissimulation, it was impossible that the trophy of the air would ever belong to us, since, in order to test us, the Eternal had installed Allied monitors inside our very workshops.

  But also, in order to lead us more surely to triumph, he had installed at all times in our solid German heads the cunning of a thousand smiles!

  Incomparable virtue, O Cunning, supernatural power which succeeds in thwarting the best-establish rights, you have soared over our entire history like a mysterious Genius! In the report that I am presenting today to the Master of the World, your hand appears in every event! You alone rendered infallible the plan whose details are about to unfold.

  In 1918, at the time of the armistice, the German air force was rich and powerful. But in 1920, progress in that field being frightfully rapid, having aged, it no longer consisted of any but obsolete apparatus.

  The Allied Commissions rendered us the unappreciable service of constraining us to destroy those antiquities or surrender them. If we had been the only judges of our decisions, we might perhaps have hesitated to reform all that equipment of backward warfare; the Entente was kind enough to demand that we renew our aerial armaments as early as 1921, in order that it would be entirely in conformity with the most recent progress.

  Inestimable intervention, O Cunning!

  COMMERCIAL AERONAUTICS CONSTITUTES

  MILITARY AERONAUTICS

  Yes, joyfully we signed up to the end of our military aeronautics, because, in all verity, “military” aeronautics does not exist, and never will! No State can or ever will be able to maintain aerial armies in times of peace, because progress in such an industry transforms the apparatus within a year, with an absolutism that no public budget would be able to support.

  In addition, no aerial army, in peace time, is capable of providing its pilots with continuous exercise, the daily training that is the sole determinant of their value.

  Undoubtedly, every government possesses ultra-rapid hunter aircraft, which form the police forces of the air and are crewed by career combatants. But the bulk of aerial armies, of the armies that determine victory, is constituted, and will remain so, by commercial and passenger apparatus.

  From whatever angle one envisages such a solution, one cannot help admiring its marvels: the aeronautics of commerce and transportation enrich the country and, while enriching herself, she easily subsidizes the costly demands of progress. The Ministry of War thus has in its hand a weapon of immense power, which costs no more than the price of munitions, and which it can mobilize in a matter of hours—for a decisive surprise attack, for example.

  We were the very first to understand that, and that is why the years from 1918 to 1924 appeared to us less cruel than Europe supposed. We did not moan, because we had the certainty of our dazzling future!

  The mastery of the air in commerce thus procures, for a people sufficiently clear-sighted and sufficiently hard-working to obtain it, the mastery of the air in war; one can no more separate those two terms than one can separate an effect and a cause, or conceive an upstream without a downstream, a recto page without a verso, the right-hand side of a blade without the left-hand side. Transport aircraft and bomber aircraft are two faces, scarcely dissimilar, of the same coin.

  TO WORK!

  As soon as I arrived in power, I therefore spread through the public, by all means possible, an obsession with commercial aeronautics. The government lent me the most enthusiastic collaboration in that crusade, creating numerous lines of aerial transport, subsidizing all the companies that showed audacity in the length of journeys or the magnitude of the weights transported. It ordered the banks to support every establishment that was contributing, proximally or at a distance, to the progress of aeronautics.

  New postal services by air were installed with every passing week, making practical tariffs inferior to those that remained imposed on the old modes of transporting correspondence. I divided cities into sectors that were visited every morning by beaters charged with recruiting an ever-increasing clientele for our aerial services among manufacturers and traders. They demonstrated to them the advantages of rapidity and punctuality offered by the new methods; a large number of businessmen came to consider automobiles and express trains as obsolete, for themselves and for their merchandise.

  All the newspapers in the Empire were constrained to keep their readers breathless for news in regard to these questions. My ministry sent them all, every week, popular articles that they had to insert. Many, in any case, were ingenious in lending their collaboration with regard to some aeronautical issue. The obsession with aviation was maintained by my care on trams and in railway carriages, in feminine fashion and in the products of confectioners, pastry-makers cakes and Christmas toys!

  Great aeronautical schools were opened, and it was soon accepted that a German had not completely acquitted his debt to the Fatherland until he had received his aerial baptism! Men, women and children besieged departing aircraft.

  I did not neglect to set up immense factories for the construction of aircraft entirely made of metal, which, after 1920, completely supplanted the old machines of wood and canvas, and for the fitting out of modern Zeppelins that could transport 500 passengers. The success of our manufacture soon dominated worldwide construction to the point that Italy, Spain, Japan and even the United States became our assiduous clients.

  Gradually, the umbrageous Entente thus had incontestable proof of the assiduity of German labor, of her desire to pay the billions in compensation, to abandon any idea of revenge, and finally to sit down in a comradely fashion at the table of Nations!

  The profession of pilot soon became one of the most sought-after to which a young German could aspire. To the best of our civil aviators I had ranks attributed that put them at the same level, in the eyes of the public, as officers in the land army, and thus obliged women to make way for them on sidewalks. I imposed upon all of them a rigorous discipline that constrained them to regular exercise and made them servile in my hands. All of them were content with that constraint and that subjugation.

  Your Majesty will doubtless permit me not to repeat here the minor details of a hierarchical organization that He was good enough to approve, two years ago, by Imperial Decree.

  The emprise that my Air Ministry exercised over all its pilots had the official aim of making them flexible to the practical methods of the standardization of their art. The perfect knowledge of naval signaling systems and intercommunication between ships, for example, justified the frequent meeting of pilots under the authority of carefully selected leaders. Our aerial commerce gained by that discipline a bearing and a progress that demonstrated to the world, a little more every day, the greatness of Germany, and hastened our prodigious recovery by the development of our commerce.

  But the ultimate goal of that emprise was, in reality, to constitute a severely selected elite of intelligent and ardent combatants hardened to all audacity. We were preparing them for a war of rapid action and surprises, overtly, under the confident eyes of the Allies.

  Here, I shall give the praise that is due to one of the noblest individuals in the Empire, the Director General of Camouflage, Heinrich Mannheim, who was necessarily my confidant and collaborator. There is no brain more fertile, no merit more modest. His mere gaze transforms obj
ects and men; at the very moments when I thought it prudent to dissimulate from him the detail of one of my projects, his psychic influence constrained me to reveal it to him in its entirety. He forced me to show him the truth laid bare, to be sincere; and thus he disguised me from myself.

  If one brings the slightest common sense to the analysis of an aerial engine of bombardment, one understands immediately that the only thing differentiating it from an aerial engine of commerce is the nature of its cargo.

  In consequence, the problem is limited to the solution of two problems: firstly, the rapid transformation of a peaceful cargo into a martial cargo; and secondly, a perfect knowledge of the methods of delivery of that cargo to a domicile—which is to say, the methods of bombardment.

  The first element of the problem would have appeared difficult to solve if the fox with the delicate nose that Heinrich Mannheim is had not imagined his system of express delivery, which I shall describe shortly. You will see that, thanks to that, all the mechanical apparatus of aiming and release that are indispensable to a vehicle of bombardment became indispensable to a commercial vehicle. The difficulty was reduced to child’s play: transformed in two hours, the meekest of aircraft could take to the air with the attitude of the most redoubtable warrior.

  I am not telling the August Assembly that is listening to me anything new in reminding them that the bombs dropped by airplanes in the 1914-18 war bore no more resemblance to present engines of destruction than an explosive bullet destined for an orangutan resembles the torpedo that was reserved for the Lusitania! In January 1918 a miserable hundred-kilogram cooking-pot, dropped by one of our Gothas, completely destroyed a house in the Rue Geoffroy-Marie in Paris. We had thousand-kilogram bombs in 1920; we are the proud possessors of three-thousand-kilogram bombs in 1924! The explosion of La Courneuve,50 whose ravages extended from Saint-Denis to Coulommiers, certainly did not have the power of a single one of our Frankreichsliebs—lovers of France! If one explodes within two hundred meters of an ironclad, it sinks her completely! If it hits the ground in a city, an entire quarter is demolished, smashed and devastated; chimneys falls into cellars, electrical short-circuits ignite the gas that is flooding out of the broken mains. The Frankreichslieb treats the inhabitants of a city as a good gardener kills a wasps’ nest: it turns it over with a thrust of the spade and sets fire to it.