(The minister does, indeed, seem harassed. His Majesty replies with a Ja! That summarizes, in its energy, all the inflexible German will. And the minister straightens up again. Supporting himself with one hand on the slide-projector table, he continues.)
HOSANNA!
It is an indescribable dolor that Your Majesty is reawakening in my memory! To have killed Paris! But it was necessary for the immortal glory of the Fatherland! If I had to do it again, I would pray to the Lord to render me the heart that he maintained as hard as bronze for me all through the night of Easter Sunday 1924.
That evening, at the hour when joyful Paris was leaving the table—at about ten o’clock—when, in all the fashionable restaurants, the blonde women were lighting their cigarettes, when the youngest daughter of the family was playing her piano piece for grandmama, enormous flocks of birds rose up from our plains, much higher than swans or herons. They flew at high sped above Champagne, heading westwards. In their feathers they were carrying death to Paris.
The first flock arrived over the capital of France at ten thirty, unloaded over the railway stations, the ministries and the Élysée, and then resumed their flight toward Germany.
1,526 bombs had been dropped in thirteen minutes.
When the second appeared, at ten forty-five, a yellow fog under which swirls of gold were visible began, according to the reports that I received later, to cover the low-lying parts of the City; the lighting gas had been ignited by electrical sparks, stimulating the fires that our special bombs had sown.
I believe that during the passage of our seventh aerial army, three-quarters of the City of Light had been crushed or burnt. Its colonel affirmed to me that by a quarter past midnight, so much smoke was rising from the city that it was inconvenient at the regulation height of two thousand meters. Intense glows were being given off by the conflagration of the general stores, wood-yards and department stores, illuminating in red and yellow the sea whose waves were rolling in a swell higher than the towers of Note Dame. The reverberation of the heat attained such a height in the atmosphere by three-twenty, according to the report of the eighteenth army, that Commandant William Mantzel, who was manning a helicopter and remained immobile for a few seconds above the furnace, was obliged to protect his face with is map in order not to hurt his eyes.
At four o’clock in the morning our twentieth, twenty-first and twenty-sixth aerial corps, comprising 550 aircraft of large tonnage, poured into the burning fog veritable rivers of heavy asphyxiating gases. I had insisted that that work of charity be carried out in order to kill in the utmost depths of the ground those Parisians who, having taken refuge in cellars, were buried there forever; those who were still struggling under the ruins, howling, their limbs broken; and those whom the hazards of chaos had imprisoned intact, still alive, in the tangles of iron and stone. We needed to finish off all those poor people.
Our newspapers have given, a few days ago, the numbers of the results we obtained on that forever celebrated night. I can rectify them today by means of a more certain documentation. Officially, 1,473 houses remained almost intact and 187,000 inhabitants were able to escape. The elevated quarters neighboring Sacré-Coeur, the Arc de Triomphe and the Panthéon, which did not include any point that we had an interest in destroying, have been spared. 88,430 dwellings, churches and public monuments, along with approximately 1,726,000 inhabitants, no longer have a name, a face or a form.
The only problem posed today for us, with regard to the capital of the French, consists of protecting the two surrounding départements of the Seine and the Seine-de-Oise therefrom; plague might emerge from the frightful cadaver of Paris.
TWITCHES
The head crushed, France struggled for a further three weeks, as you will recall.
The police documents that I have received since the month of April establish that, on the eve of Easter, almost at the same moment that our first aerial army began to fly toward Paris, the French Ministry of War was warned, thanks to wireless telegraph, probably by a watcher in Coblentz, that we had been able to recover.
Only a cabinet secretary was on duty at the Ministry.
The news that suddenly reached him on that festival evening appeared to him at first, he later declared during an interrogation, to come from “a practical joker with no sense of humor.” An army of night birds in flight toward Paris—what an implausible communication! To relieve his responsibility, however, he telephoned the three principle centers of aviation near Paris; then, leaping into an automobile, he hastened to warn the Minister, who was dining in a Montmartre restaurant and was very amused by the message. It was in the debris of the house that they were found two days later, the secretary wounded and the Minister dead.
In brief, our first army had arrived over Châlons when it was attacked by fifteen small French airplanes, extremely agile and fast, which threw themselves into an attack, as crazily and with as little success as a flock of linnets trying to overturn a locomotive.
All night long, say the reports, our aircraft, arriving over the capital in well-regulated waves, were harassed by the Chevaliers Saint-Georges of despair. The majority were hurled into the depths of the furnace by the counter-hunters mounting guard on the flanks of our squadrons.
That night, and the following days, because fury cannot defeat cold preparation, noble Germany scarcely had to shake her robe to make that vermin fall. Those stings could not alter the fact that 163 of our Zeppelins, on the afternoon of Easter, had departed to fly over French territory at an altitude so high that they were imperceptible, and all the centers of organization—Lyon, Bordeaux, Bourges, Marseilles, Saint-Etienne, Nantes, Le Creusot, Dijon—had been paralyzed during the same night as the death of Paris; that the provisions and munitions of the adversary, everywhere, were on fire five days later; that her railways were broken at vital points; that the most important wireless telegraph stations had been reduced to silence. For eight days and eight nights, without a single hour’s pause, storms of shells rained down on the gatherings of men, horses or cannons that our enemies, running around like demented ants, attempted to oppose to our methodical conquest.
Thus, our aviation tied up the limbs of France, one by one, as it had crushed her head. Everywhere, all the way to the mountains, it carried our terror and our law. With a beat of its wing it opened the route to our automobiles loaded with infantrymen and machine-guns. By Easter Tuesday the rapid roadsters of our officers had already passed Tours and Nevers.
The Welches’ troops had no more to do than hold out their necks, as they chose, for the knife or the yoke. The example of the headstrong of Mézilhac enlightened the French provinces: the 1,800 soldiers and peasants whom our troops had surrounded, but who refused to surrender, were lit up by our aviators, to the last man, like ricks of dry hay, in ten minutes.
Three weeks after Easter, the last twitches of our age-old enemy died away in our glory. The peoples of Europe, exhausted by the war of 1914, eaten away by social decomposition, had been unable to do anything better than drag themselves on to their balconies to watch...
We were absolute masters. We did not even grant the vanquished a treaty!
(At these words the Emperor stands up abruptly and, in a surge of sacred anger, exclaims in a measured fashion these henceforth historic words: “Does one make a treaty with the horse over which one passes a bridle, with the ox that one harnesses to a plow? One says to them: march and pull! The crop that you prepare will be for me!”
The eminent lecturer concludes as follows:)
Majesty,
I have finished. I have explained the patient and secret preparation of the immortal night of the twentieth of April 1924; I have stated the facts, most characteristic of the genius of our Chosen Race. I have shown the abominable and delicious horror of those festival hours; I have noted the incalculable consequences that place Easter 1924 amid the stars as the date of the most marvelous even the Universe has ever known.
The Putrid Race has disappeared. The entire German people brin
gs back all that glory to Your august head. You are the symbol of the superiority that Providence has given the German race over all human races.
Beloved Emperor, permit the delirium of my joy to conclude with a song of praise to Holy Aeronautics.
Little mechanical birds that furrow the air, as rapid as machine-gun bullets, giant eagles whose shadow covers an entire city with blackness, frightful powers that France has created in order that we might crush her, little birds, little birds, you have given Germany the supreme wealth that Destiny has owed her for six hundred years: the Empire of the World!
Then His Excellency General Hans von Stick, his eyes filled with crystal tears, the most beautiful that any man has ever shed, ran to His Majesty, knelt down before Him, and kissed his hand for a long time.
We are incapable of even attempting to describe the scenes of enthusiasm that accompanied the Emperor’s exit. The cries of “Hoch! Hoch!” shook the windows of the Hall of Mirrors, as a series of exploding bombs would have done. A delirium of love and patriotism set the entire audience ablaze. Our hearts melted in delight.
Yes, little mechanical birds that furrow the air, giant eagles, you have finally given Germany the Empire of the World!
Otto Walter.
Notes
1 tr. as The Adventures of Saturnin Farandoul, Black Coat Press, ISBN 978-1-9355453-61-0.
2 tr. as Electric Life, Black Coat Press, ISBN 978-1-61227-182-8.
3 The subheadings that I have treated as chapter titles disappear from the text hereafter, presumably as a space-saving measure.
4 A monument to the probably-fictitious Berthold Schwarz, or Schwartz, was erected in Freiburg in 1853, thus laying claim to the legendary inventor on behalf of the town.
5 The Steel magnate Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919) financed the building of the “Palace of Peace” (which now houses the International Court of Justice) in The Hague. There was no conference there in 1909—it was not officially inaugurated until 1913—so the one described in the story is purely symbolic. The second Hague Peace Conference of 1907 had produced a number of conventions relating to the arbitration of national disputes and rules of war relating to bombardment, the laying of mines, etc., many of which were violated during the war of 1914-18. Chemical and biological warfare were not fully incorporated into the network of conventions until the Geneva Protocol of 1925.
6 Robida was not the only armchair traveler of his era to be unaware of the fact that there are no penguins in the Arctic.
7 This reference to a “deuxième guerre mondiale” [second world war] is early, but not the first, the phrase having been used even before the 1914-18 war ended.
8 They don’t, but the novel’s original readers would have been well aware that it was conventional during the Great War for Frenchwomen to “adopt” individual soldiers in the trenches, to whom they sent gifts of food and clothing, and who were conventionally referred to as their filleuls [godsons].
9 Jollimay’s wordplay echoes a classic riposte; a famous 12th century narrative of the first crusade by Guibert de Nogent described it as “Gesta Dei per Francos” [The Deeds of God via the Franks], a phrase occasionally borrowed by subsequent French historians to refer to the history of their nation—inevitably calling forth the response that the history in question was more akin to “Gesta diaboli per homines” [The deeds of the Devil via humans].
10 The French physicist Alfred Cornu (1841-1902) had several scientific instruments named after him; they did not include a kind of retort, but the attractiveness of the wordplay inherent in “cornues de Cornu” [Cornu retorts] encourages the pretence.
11 William I, Prince of Orange (1533-1584), leader of the Dutch revolt against the Spanish Hapsburgs, which turned into the Eighty Years War.
12 The Banquet of the Officers of the St. George Civic Guard (1616) was one of Franz Hals’ most famous paintings, which led to a series of commissions to paint similar scenes.
13 The literal meaning of cafard is “cockroach,” but it had long been used metaphorically is France to refer to fits of depression, and an acute sense of the pointlessness of existence, before the Great War added a further twist of dark emphasis to the term, when applied to the mental troubles experienced by soldiers in the trenches.
14 The three winter months of the new secularized calendar introduced after the 1789 Revolution.
15 Retour d’une chasse à l’ours. ge de la polie Pierre by “Fernand Cormon” (Fernand Piestre, 1845-1924), exhibited at the Salon of 1885, now in the Musée d’Orsay, part of a series of prehistoric paintings commissioned by the Parisian natural history museum.
16 Le Doux pays [The Ideal Country] by Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (1824-1898) depicts a group of women and children in a placid setting by the shore of an intensely blue sea. It was exhibited at the Salon of 1882 and is now in the Musée Bonnat at Bayonne.
17 The actual inscription in question reads Nec spe nec metu, but the original, the motto of Philippe II, is in French, and it is almost always quoted in that language by French writers referring to the tower of Alost, as Robida does here.
18 I have translated débourrons [let’s unstuff] in a brutally literal fashion, because it suits the narrator’s decoding, which appears to be correct, but it could also be construed as “let’s scalp,” or even, “let’s bash the brains out.” Another listener might well have interpreted it in that fashion and construed subsequent embellishments in the same light.
19 Charles Thorel de Campigneulles (1737-1809) published Candide, ou l’Optimisme in 1761. He had previously written several other contes philosophiques in the Voltairean mode.
20 Abel Hermant’s short story “Le Nouveau Candide” appeared in La Vie Parisienne in 1915
21 The author inserts two references, the first to “Remerciement de Candide à M. de Voltaire, Halle & Amsterdam 1760, octavo 35pp, attributed to Louis Olivier de Marconnay, counselor of legation and principal registrar of the Department of Foreign Affairs in Prussia” and the second to “Candide, grand opera-bouffe en cinq actes et sept tableaux by Desiré Pilette, Paris, Dentu 1861, octavo, 123pp.”
22 The author inserts a reference here to his own quasi-autobiographical novel “L’Appel du sol, roman, by Adrien Bertrand. Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1916, octavo, 302pp,” in which Vaissette is the central character, his alter ego.
23 The author inserts two more references, to “Candide au Danemarc, ou l’Optimisme des honnêtes gens, Geneva, 1769, octavo of 8 plus 200pp” and “Candide Anglais ou aventures tragic-comiques d’Amb. Gwinett avant et dans ses voyages aux deux Indes, Frankfurt & Leipzig, 1771, 2 vols. octavo, 184 & 132pp.”
24 Anatole France—who was still alive in 1915—is included in the apology because the author borrows the character of Jérôme Coignard from the satirical historical novel La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque (1893; tr. as At the Sign of the Reine Pédauque) and its companion-volume Les Opinions de M. Jérôme Coignard (1893; tr. as The Opinions of Jerome Coignard). Coignard becomes the mentor of the initially-hapless protagonist of the earlier novel, whom he renames Jacques Tournebroche [i.e., Jack Turnspit] and both of them assist the alchemist M. d’Astarac in his scholarly but futile alchemical researches.
25 Anatole France had followed up his volumes featuring Jérôme Coignard with a more earnest account of Le Jardin d’Épicure (1895; tr. as The Garden of Epicurus).
26 The Greek name for the Sea of Marmora.
27 Bertrand Capmartin de Chaupy (1720-1798). The three volumes in question were published in 1767-69.
28 Docteur Tant-Pis [i.e., Dr. Too Bad] features in Jean La Fontaine’s fable “Les Médecins”; Diafoirus is featured in Molière’s Le Malade imaginaire.
29 Credo quia absurdum means “I believe it because it is absurd.” It was actually credited, apocryphally, to Tertullian.
30 Author’s reference: “Faust, study scene.” The reference is to the third of the three scenes set in Faust’s study in Part I of Goethe’s Faust; it is, of course, specifically Goethe’s Faust who is
taking shelter in Candide’s house.
31 Pandore became a contemptuous argot term for a policeman after the use of the name in a popular song written by Gustave Nadaud in 1852.
32 The Prussian general Friedrich von Bernhardi (1849-1930), a best-selling author in the years before the Great War, regarded war as divine, recommended a policy of ruthless aggression and the total disregard of all treaties and conventions. He made the earlier militant nationalism of G. W. F. Hegel and Johann Gottlieb Fichte seem rather tame.
33 The historian and literary critic Gustave Lanson (1857-1934) was teaching at the Sorbonne when the author (and hence Vaissette) knew him.
34 Author’s reference: “La Rotisserie de la Reine Pédauque, p. 297.”
35 Author’s reference: “Faust, Auerbach’s tavern scene.” The famous tavern in question is the first place to which Mephistopheles takes Faust in their travels in Part I of Goethe’s epic. It is now a restaurant, with a Mephisto Bar.
36 “Love your enemy”—from the Vulgate Bible’s version of Luke 6:27.
37 Author’s reference: “Opinions of Monsieur Jérôme Coignard, chs, X and XI, ‘The Army.’”
38 Author’s reference: “Candide, ch. XX, ‘What Happened at Sea to Candide and Martin.’”
39 The Italian humanist Lelio Sozzini (1525-1562); his nephew Fausto is generally given more credit for the formulation of Socinianism.
40 Arms give way to togas (i.e., military means give way to political ones).
41 Author’s reference: “Don Quixote, part one, ch. XXXVII.”
42 Ecclesiastes 9:18: “Wisdom is better than weapons of war”—but the verse concludes “”But one sinner destroys much good.”
43 i.e. De Imitatione Christi [The Imitation of Christ] (c1425) by Thomas à Kempis
44 This reference is enigmatic. If the name is a misprint it cannot refer to the American general Smedley Butler, of whose belated involvement in the Great War the author could not have been aware.
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