Electric Life

by Albert Robida

  During the triumph of Science and the large-scale industrial exploitation of continents, certain nations were unable to support the expenses of establishment and were too heavily burdened with debt. At first, the debtor nations politely mocked their ruined creditors, but the debts still existed, and by means of the purchase of titles, they fell into good hands, into the powerful claws of nations that were able to enforce payment by military might, or, even worse, by the seizure of all the assets of the bankrupt State, to convert the debtor realms into productive farms.

  So goes the world henceforth, in old Europe, whose territorial divisions change continually, as well as in America, subdivided into a number of cuttings rather than nations, where changes are even more frequent, and in Asia, more compact, invaded by the harsh and prolific Chinese race.

  Thus, in our ultra-scientific civilization, always surrounded by latent perils, a nation must, in accordance with to the old adage, truer now than ever, always remain on a war footing in order to have peace, and to protect itself severely, on land, at sea and in the atmosphere.

  How much precaution, how much care and how much organization is required to maintain the military machine in a state ready of readiness, able to furnish all its energy, at any hour, at any minute, at the first signal, at the mere push of a button in the office of the Minister of War!

  But it gets done.

  Everything is anticipated, planned, arranged. Today’s military organization is a masterpiece of technology, which seems to be due to the combined genius of Vaucanson, Napoléon and Edison.

  The inhabitants of Châteaulin had scarcely woken up on the twelfth of August when, as five o’clock sounded on the official electric clocks, a hundred reserve officers of every rank, disembarked from Tubes or arrived by airship, presented themselves at the Chemical Base, where the colonel of the 8th Chemists was waiting for them.

  Georges was there, clad in the elegant and severe uniform of his corps: a dark maroon Brandenburg jacket, black trousers and boots, a helmet with movable visor and chin-strap, lowered when chemical apparatus commenced. An oxygen reservoir with a movable tube, a compressed-air revolver and a saber completed the equipment.

  The saber is traditional, a last vestige of the ancient armament of the Middle Ages; the cumbersome instrument, so complicated to manipulate and so scant in its effect, is hardly ever used on modern battlefields. By Bellona! We have better things today than blades, which are only good for cutting up mutton-chops in barracks.

  We have much better, to be sure, with our fine catalogue of various explosives—which are, admittedly, beginning to go out of fashion somewhat. Do we not possess the series of asphyxiating or paralyzing gases, easy to fire at short range by means of tubes, or in light shells, simple bottles easily hurled thirty or forty kilometers by our electric cannon? And the miasmatic artillery of the Offensive Medical Corps! The latter is still in the process of being organized, but its redoubtable canisters of miasmas and various microbial shells are beginning to be appreciated.

  Oh yes! We have better things than the antique cabbage-choppers, better than all the perforating or contending instruments that, for many centuries, were the principal implements of battle! A few minds resentfully contemptuous of progress dare to regret them and claim that the marvels of science, applied to war, have killed valor and suppressed the beautiful pressure of the heart that threw men forward against the enemy in ardent and honest battle. According to them, the fire of military courage, henceforth useless and impotent, has been replaced by a fatalistic resignation, but the passivity of targets...

  But to hell with these vain regrets, and long live Progress!

  At five fifteen, the 8th Chemists were completed by reservists brought by a special train from the Main Tube of Bretagne, bifurcating at Morlaix; they received their uniforms and their equipment, plus seven days’ supply of concentrated food-pills, and at five forty-eight, in response to a whistle-blast, the twenty batteries of the 8th Chemists lined up on the drill field in front of the base, sparkling in the light of the rising sun.

  At five fifty-one, the pump-operators of the Offensive Medical Corps arrived in their turn, in four sections, and almost at the same time two hundred meters away in the sky, the aerial torpedists appeared, emerging from their base.

  The commandant general appeared at precisely six o’clock, at the head of a brilliant general staff, and passed rapidly in front of the troops. He gathered the superior officers in order to communicate the program of the maneuvers and give them their orders.

  An enemy, represented by an elite army corps, sent forth the previous evening, was supposed to have taken Brest, by infiltrating the harbor with a multivarious host of Goubets—those terrible, hard to grasp, submarine torpedo-boats invented at the end of the last century,5 which make every naval war into a succession of surprises—and blowing up all the defenses that might have opposed the landing of its forces. In the march on Rennes, it was threatening Châteaulin with its right flank, and seeking to overwhelm it with its aerial squadron.

  It was necessary, therefore, to carry out all the necessary operations to defend Châteaulin, and then try to cut off the aerial squadrons and mobile torpedists launched forward by the enemy, to cover certain areas with poison gases, to retake the occupied towns, villages and hamlets, no matter what the cost, and finally to drive the enemy back to the coast or into zones supposedly rendered uninhabitable by the Offensive Medical Corps. Such was the plan for the defensive operations, explained in full detail to his officers by the commandant general, one of our most brilliant military engineers.

  At six forty-five, the operations commenced.

  Mobilization had, therefore, required an hour and fifteen minutes, which was a good result, the previous trial having taken an hour and eighteen minutes.

  The officers of the aerial squadron, veering away in their helicopters, rapidly regained their posts; a cloud of torpedist scouts was seen to launch forward at an accelerated pace, describing a kind of fan in the sky, and soon disappeared, lost in the distant mists. In the rear, huge airships, in a single immense line whose intervals gradually increased in such a way as to embrace the widest possible horizon, progressed more slowly, all ready to pivot in a particular direction at the first signal as soon as the enemy squadron as sighted.

  The terrestrial forces, in the meantime, had also moved off; a special tube train was transporting a few battalions of machine-gunners as far as the thirtieth kilometer, where the tube had been cut by enemy scouts.

  The first contact was made; the aerial torpedist and terrestrial bicyclist scouts having met resistance, the enemy was perceived to be in the process of concentrating its forces sixteen kilometers away. Immediately, the mobile electric cannon, arriving overland at ten forty-five, commenced the attack, driving back the enemy cannon.

  The entire day was employed in maneuvers, as expert on one side as on the other. The enemy had time to provide cover by sowing blank torpedoes, which would have caused enormous losses in a war. It was thus necessary to advance prudently, avoiding them as much as possible and going around obstacles. The machine-gunners, divided into small sections, infiltrated the enemy lines, profiting from all the alterations of terrain, carrying their little portable reservoirs, the officers and NCOs in the lead, scouring the horizon with their binoculars and calculating distances. As soon as a section arrived within range—which is to say, within four kilometers of a visible enemy—each man fixed is tube-rifle to the movable mouth of the reservoir and opened fire.

  The Chemical Artillery, ten kilometers behind the line of attack, fired at the points that the helicopter scouts had just signaled to them. The artillery fired with precision, of course, using the map-reference to locate the target, always placed at least twelve to fifteen kilometers away, and hence invisible to them. In a real war, it would have covered the points indicated by the scouts with its terrible explosive poison gas shells.

  The aerial squadron remained out of sight all day. Toward evening, the defen
se corps had obtained a few marked advantages, but it was perceived that the enemy had adroitly hidden a turning movement on the right and that one the whole, the day had been favorable to them.

  The commandant general had, however, left a reserve of five batteries of the 8th Chemists with the entire Medical Offensive Battalion at Châteaulin to cover the town, and we shall see that the wise precaution in question was no bad thing.

  Georges Lorris’ battery was part of that reserve. The young man was able to greet his fiancée and his friends and install them in a good hotel in a fine location on the hill overlooking the whole river valley. He offered Estelle lunch in the Chemists’ cam—a genuine military lunch, at which the guests only had crates of torpedoes and various explosives to sit on.

  In the afternoon, seeing that he had a little time to spare before an equipment review, he got an airship and took his friends to see the battle, but as they could not approach too close for fear of falling into enemy hands, they did not see very much—nothing a few minuscule groups of individuals filing along the hedges of the immense open terrain and a few puffs of smoke here and there, immediately dissipated in the air.

  As there was no suspicion of danger, Georges went to dine at the hotel where he had lodged his friends; he spent a pleasant evening with them, and then went to rejoin his men in their barracks. The night was to be troubled, however; between three and four a.m., sleeping Châteaulin was woken up with a start by violent detonations. It was the enemy, who, having succeeded in their flanking movement, were attempting a surprise attack on the town. Fortunately, the advance guards had intercepted them eight kilometers away; there was time to prepare the defense.

  And, before the eyes of the hotel guests, woken up by the cannonade—before Estelle’s eyes, smiling at her fiancé who went by at the head of his battery, and before poor Grettly, who thought that it was “for real”—the Chemists, visors lowered, with the connecting tubes linked up to their portable oxygen generators, set up batteries on the hill, sheltered by a curtain of trees.

  Within twenty minutes, every apparatus is set up, the tubes and nozzles aimed. Mounted on his helicopter, Georges has gone to reconnoiter the enemy, and, thanks to his indications, marked on the map and carefully checked, the devices are aimed in various directions.

  While the reserve airships move forward, the sections of torpedists have sown the threatened points with torpedoes and the Chemists begin firing. The situation remains good; the enemy, running into all the obstacles that have been strewn in their path, make little progress to begin with, but by seven o’clock, taking advantage of a dip in the ground, they succeed in advancing a few kilometers and surrounding certain advance posts.

  To gain time and allow the opportunity for help to arrive, Georges, who is in command by virtue of being the longest-serving officer of his rank, has the perimeter of the defenses covered with smoke-bombs. These bombs, bursting a hundred meters in the air, emit floods of black nauseating smoke, which the Chemists would render fatally asphyxiating in time of war. Châteaulin, where the air remains pure, is surrounded by a ring of opaque fog, which renders it invisible to the disconcerted enemy.

  The defensive Chemical batteries continue firing; then, under cover of the smoke, the torpedists sneak forward toward the enemy, and the Medical battalion, with its own battery, finally goes on to the offensive in its turn. It moves forward and sends to the reference point a few inoffensive bombs, merely nauseating today, provoking nasty coughs, but which, in wartime, would transport the most dangerous miasmas to the enemy concentrations.

  Châteaulin is saved; while the enemy gropes in the fog, runs into torpedoes or goes around areas supposedly rendered uncrossable by the miasmas, help arrives.

  We have no intention of following these interesting maneuvers step by step; Georges Lorris, who had had the idea of the smoke-screen, was warmly congratulated the next day by the general; then, as his battery had sustained almost all the effort of combat for a day and a night, and a certain number of men, having not had the time to renew their oxygen supply, were indisposed as a result of handling the products, it was placed in reserve for the remainder of the operation—which permitted Georges to devote a little more time to his fiancée.

  The aerial squadron, after having attacked and dispersed the enemy airships over Rennes, came back with captured airships, bringing its collaboration to the ground forces. The defense corps, thanks to the general’s expert planning, quickly recovered the lost ground, and by the third day of the maneuvers the enemy situation became critical. Every day was taken up with combats or speeches by the general himself or offices of the general staff. Sometimes, in the middle of a battle, when a circumstances arose that might be useful for the instruction of the officers, a signal called the two armies to an abrupt halt, confining them to their respective positions, and on each side the gathered officers listened to the general’s speech, offered opinions or proposed plans. Then, at another signal, the action resumed at the point at which it had stopped.

  Soon, the enemy army, in spite of its efforts, was driven back into a mountainous canton and to the sea. A part of their aerial squadron had been taken prisoner; the rest attempted in vain to relieve a part of the menaced corps, in order to move it to a better position by night, but airships were on the alert; their electric searchlight beams were able to discover the attempt.

  The supreme moment had arrived. After an entire night’s work to place the batteries, at dawn on the sixth day, the Chemists and the Offensive Medical Corps covered the region occupied by the enemy with smoke bombs and miasma shells. The enemy retaliated as vigorously as possible, but their bombs had no great effect on the very extensive perimeter of the attack; it was soon evident that in a veritable action, the enemy, drowned in the Chemists’ asphyxiating gases and the fast-acting noxious vapors of the Offensive Medical Corps, would have been quickly and conclusively rendered hors de combat. The two army corps, attack and defense, reunited on the evening of the seventh day at Châteaulin, were reviewed by the generals under electric floodlights and congratulated on their fine operations—and the reservists, immediately given leave, went back to their homes.

  Only the officers remained, having to pass examinations for promotion to a higher rank or to sustain theses for doctorates in military science.

  The general congratulated Georges Lorris very warmly. “Captain,” he said to him, “I’m happy to propose you for the rank of Commander, but you need a doctorate first; so, if your job at your father’s laboratory leaves you the time, work hard, and in the spring examinations, you can present yourself with every chance...”

  “Thank you, General, but I’m in the process of preparing something else.”

  “What’s that?”

  “My marriage, General—and I must postpone ambitious dreams until later. Permit me to introduce you to my future...”

  After a day’s rest, the fiancés decided to return home, on the insistence of Sulfatin—who, disdainful of the beauties of battle, had spent his days at the hotel Tele in Châteaulin, communicating with the Molière-Palace, confiding his patient to the care of Grettly.

  PART TWO

  I

  “Have you fallen out?” asked Philox Lorris, when his son presented himself to him on his return from the Engagement Voyage.

  “Not in the least. On the contrary, I...”

  “Ta ta ta. You haven’t been seriously tested; you both—you especially—still have mouths in your hearts, sighing sweet nothings. That’s not the way to test the person of whom one wants to make a companion for life It’s not honest—I find you completely lacking in good faith...”

  “What! I’m lacking in good faith?”

  “Certainly. And your fiancée too, for her part. You’re not made any differently from all other men, of course, and your fiancée is no different from the rest of the feminine genre. You ought to show yourself as you will be for the rest of your life—as all busy men are: rude, distracted, often peevish, headstrong, even violent. We
’re all like that in life. It’s so short, life; once married, is there any time to waste on manners?”

  “I have no intention of behaving as disagreeably as that...”

  “Of course not! Good intentions don’t take up time; one can have as many of them as one wishes...but daily reports—life, in sum—that’s what I expect of you! In the same way, in order for an Engagement Voyage to constitute a truly honest trial of conjugal life, a fiancée ought to show herself to be futile, frivolous, quarrelsome, often sulky, inclined to be domineering, etc., etc.—in sum, everything that she will be later, in the household. Then, one can judge frankly, and decide in perfect knowledge of the case, whether communal life is possible. ‘Pay attention! When I am the wife of that gentleman, I’ll always have him before me!’ ‘Damn it! When I’m the husband of that lady, remember that it will be in perpetuity.’ Those are the sage reflections that reasonable people ought to make.”

  Georges burst out laughing. “Are you going to paint the eminent Doctress Bardoz and Senatress Coupard, of the Sarthe, for me in the same colors?” he asked his father.

  “Not at all! If I’ve singled them out, it’s because they’re true exceptions. Then again, they’ll be so busy themselves. Anyway, let’s conclude. You’re really persisting?”

  “I persist in seeing the happiness of my life in union with...”

  “All right, all right! No pretty speeches. It’s your artist ancestor, the poet working in you. Let him sleep! We’ll see—but before giving my definitive consent, I want to study your fiancée. You know my principles: no unoccupied woman. I propose that Mademoiselle Lacombe comes into my main laboratory, in the research section; she can work alongside you, under my eyes. Fear not—no overwork; a little gentle work. In the meantime, you can show off your house and we can talk about accommodation when the nest is complete.”