So I was in an aerobagne!
When my guide arrived at the commandant’s door, he knocked, spacing out the raps, and then opened it.
I went in.
I immediately found myself confronted by a man who was standing in front of two other officers—a lieutenant and a second lieutenant—and a military physician.
“Approach,” said the man I assumed to be in charge—and who was, in fact.
The door closed behind me. I took the two steps necessary to place myself at an appropriate distance from the individual and waited. Fortunately, I was bare-headed, which dispensed me from saluting.
“You are the Frenchman Paul Ménestin?”
“I am Paul Ménestin.”
“Good. Know, Monsieur, if you do not know it already, that there is a judicious choice to be made between the actions of life. On earth, you have not judged wisely, and you will suffer the consequences for as long as it is deemed necessary. I have received orders to consider you as a unit lost among the other units that I command, and you will henceforth bear the number seven.”
He paused momentarily, as if to await what I had to say; then, before my silence, he added: “I will add that, with an objective that I do not know, I am to put at your disposal, at your request, a chemistry laboratory installed especially for you; you will be taken there every day, and you will meditate your imprudence there if you do not want to do anything else—but remember, Monsieur Frenchman, that at the slightest infraction of discipline you will be treated like the other convicts and subject to the same penalties. Go.”
I did not “go” as the brute ordered; I remained standing before him, and I replied: “Whatever fate you and yours reserve for me, Monsieur, a day will come when you are called to account for it.”
The commandant made a gesture; the feldwebel, who had remained behind me, as rigid as a pikestaff, took my by the arms and dragged me out.
We had only taken a few steps when the youngest of the officers joined us. “Weber,” he said to the feldwebel. “Leave the prisoner on the deck for an hour. He can see everything—but don’t let him out of your sight.”
Then he turned to me. “You’re going to be able to convince yourself that you cannot count on any human aid, and that any escape is completely impossible. It’s necessary that you have those two certainties in order not to waste your time nursing stupid hopes.”
He turned on his heel and drew away.
Of those I had just seen, that one was the least disagreeable. He was still very young, very blond, with large blue eyes, and a warm resonant voice. He left me the hope that he was not as sly and cruel as his companions, and that one day, perhaps, he would not be devoid of pity.
The feldwebel drew away at a leaden pace to take up a position in a corner, where he waited.
Then, followed at a distance by my companion, I set out to visit the immense vessel. This is what I discovered.
The airship is approximately a hundred or a hundred and ten meters long; its supportive surfaces, of which there are two, are about seventy. At the far rear is the steering apparatus. To either side, port and starboard, near-horizontal ladders lead to posts where two small aircraft, their wings folded, are suspended from the sides of the monster, like launches aboard a transatlantic liner. To judge by their dimensions, they are both reserved for the officers, and only accessible, given the point of departure of the ladders, to the officers. They are aerial lifeboats.
Other similar ladders lead to the propellers, and almost half way along each of the wings. In the bow and around the cockpit, two wireless telegraph installations are installed, along with a crane and lifting-tackle.
The aircraft is powered by electricity, without the aid of internal combustion engines. It employs, I subsequently learned, the recently-discovered ABK accumulators; the electrical energy stored aboard is considerable, and exceptionally long-lasting. Those accumulators only require recharging once every two or three months, they retain so much force.
Six tractional and propulsive helices and two further ascensional helices, all differential, ensure stability and progress, under normal circumstances, at a rate of twenty kilometers an hour.
As I have said, the aircraft is circled by an elevated round-path with machine-gun posts. I conclude in consequence that the number of warders must be relatively small.
The aerial vessel is subdivided into five compartments or sections. The first, in the bow, encloses the propulsive apparatus, the lodging of the mechanics and the men on watch. Immediately afterwards, but separated from the first section by a gap in the hull and linked to it by a bridge, is the command post, the dining room, the office and the bedrooms; then the deck or platform on to which my cabin, a firmer solitary confinement chamber opens; and finally, the largest of the sections, the gehenna, the bagne.
How many people are suffering therein? I’ve never been able to obtain a precise number. They sleep in hammocks, are dressed in gray, and live like animals.
Add, in order to have a complete vision of the giant aircraft, that the hull and superstructure appear in a tangle of guy-ropes, nets and lifting-gear, like a city enveloped by an immense spider-web.
That is where I was to live henceforth. That is where I have lived for eighteen months.
The hour that had been granted to me must have elapsed, for my guard took me back to my cell. I saw that someone had taken advantage of my absence in order to stick a piece of paper on one wall, I which I read the following in beautiful Gothic script:
ORDERS
1. The most absolute silence is imposed on everyone.
2. Obedience must be passive.
3. All offenses will lead to punishment that no one can escape.
Punishments
1. Solitary confinement; privation of nourishment.
2. Flogging.
3. Suspension in the void by the hands, for a duration in proportion to the offense committed.
4. Suspension and maintenance in front of a moving propeller, for a duration in proportion to the offense committed.
5. Perpetual sequestration in the strait box.
I learned subsequently that the “strait box” in question was situated under the hull In the midst of the landing gear. A hammock with a hole above it through which nourishment could be thrown, and a mobile plank to dispose of the body when death ensued: that was what they had dared to imagine for a human being. The man thus punished as permanently enclosed in that box, which was more reminiscent of a coffin than a habitable structure, even for a convict.
I had just sat down, in a state of discouragement and dolor that is easily imaginable, when my attention as attracted by a soft, rhythmic sound, like that produced by a continuous friction on the metallic floor. The feldwebel came to open my cell, as ordered.
The convicts! All clad in iron-gray trousers and jacket, barefoot, placed one behind another three abreast, were slowly circling the deck. It was the exercise period.
They were all similar. The same stigmata of misery and despair had fashioned their features, hollowed out their eyes, blanched their faces. They all had the same gaze of fearful beasts, eternally tracked: a bleak, lifeless gaze; they all seemed to have lost the faculty of thinking and acting other than by instinct, innate or developed under the blows of an iron discipline.
Nameless creatures, whose crimes almost disappeared under the rigor of punishment: one could not see them without being struck by terror.
A brutal blast of a whistle stopped them. They made an about-turn and stood still. A second blast of the whistle made them sit down on the floor; then, each of them took an aluminum bowl out of his jacket and waited. Four more convicts appeared then, carrying a large receptacle containing a thick brown substance, a kind of soup made from purely chemical elements. Each convict received two ladlefuls of the mixture and a biscuit. After they had absorbed that pittance, two other convicts, bearers of a large leather bottle, distributed water.
That was all.
A third blast of the wh
istle brought the members of the frightful taciturn crowd to their feet, and they resumed their slow movement. For half an hour they circled, heads down, arms dangling, without exchanging a glance; then a signal caused the door through which they had come to open, through which they disappeared.
Dante had not imagined anything more terrible.
How long did I remain without being able to write, and what ruse was it necessary to employ for me to succeed in doing so?
For months I remained confined to my cell, my sole distraction being the exercise that I was obliged to take; then, one morning, the feldwebel came to find me and took me to see the commandant.
The latter was waiting for me standing up; he was accompanied by the junior officer.
“Monsieur,” he said to me, “Although the relations that have been able to exist between us have necessarily been devoid of cordiality, I am going to ask something of you that I cannot impose on you.”
“Why not call me Seven,” I asked him, “since that is my number?”
He uttered a snigger in which the anger was palpable. That was what I was seeking.
“You can impose an order on me—it remains to be seen whether I shall obey it—but do you think you have the right to ask me for a service? Don’t you find that humiliating for yourself?”
I saw him go white with rage; he raised his closed fist over the frail table that supported bottles and glasses, but the fist did not come down.
The second lieutenant, who never left the commandant’s side, made a brief salute and intervened.
“Monsieur,” he said to me. “Our engineer—or, rather, our chief mechanic—has just been struck by a congestion. The medical officer is with him. When he was struck down, he was examining the apparatus of starboard propeller number two, immobilized for three hours, which obliges us to proceed with an uneven number of propellers. The vessel cannot maintain that progress easily and is suffering considerable fatigue. If you have no concern for the lives of the warders and officers, we have human debris here that perhaps interest you more. Those lives, Monsieur, might be threatened at any moment, because if the wind rises, it will be necessary to lighten the vessel…to dispose of ballast, you understand? We’re too far from any relay to hope to be able to reach one without resorting to that measure. You’re an engineer...”
“You ought to be one too,” I told him.
“I’m not; it’s a lacuna in our professional education.”
“The cabin has no mechanic?” I said.
“Yes, but he’s being punished; he’s to be flogged this evening. It’s his negligence that caused the damage.”
“All right,” I said. “I consent…for the sake of the human debris, of which I am one at present. Lead the way—I’ll try to help you.”
“Follow me,” he said.
The commandant had slumped on to a divan and was fuming, with a malevolent smile.
IX. A Hellish Existence
The second lieutenant led me to starboard cabin number two, and, for the first time, I set foot on the near-horizontal ladder that led to the engine-rooms and the wings.
It was frightful!
As soon as one had surpassed the hull one found oneself with the clutching void below: a gulf of three of four thousand meters in which the clouds were floating. A terrible vertigo made me dizzy and caused my limbs of vacillate. However, I had the courage to overcome any weakness, and I followed the officer as deliberately as if we had both been on the ground.
When we were in propeller chamber number two, the two guards stood aside and, leaning over the machine, I examined it. The damage was serious; the entire apparatus had jammed. I had to take it apart completely. I studied the pieces one by one; the second lieutenant looked at them with me.
As I have said, he was not absolutely antipathetic to me, by reason of his youth.
When my examination had concluded I showed him the cause of the damage and indicated what it was necessary to do. While I spoke he took rapid notes. When I had finished he said: “Thank you, Monsieur.”
I went out of the propeller chamber first and, without bothering to see whether I was being followed, went back to the hull. The second lieutenant stopped me with a gesture and then, going on ahead, he took me to the commandant’s bridge and paused.
“Are you still intent on opposing the same refusal to the proposition made to you?” he said.
“Still.”
“But you’re placed in a situation of force majeure, which could silence many of your scruples, and don’t forget that those here and those down below are incapable of pity.”
“I’m not asking for any from anyone.”
“You’re wrong, Monsieur Ménestin. No one can say that he’s scornful of pity; you’ll realize that when you know this hell better.”
“What forces you to live in it, Monsieur? The profession of jailer is a wretched one for a man of your age.”
He stared at me, his eyelids lowered, and then he replied: “You’re not the only one to have a secret, and perhaps mine is as respectable as yours.”
I made an evasive gesture. He was about to draw away.
“Pardon me,” I said. “It appears that a laboratory has been put at my disposal. May I see it...and work in it?”
“On what is asked of you?”
“On anything except that.”
He reflected momentarily.
“We’ll see, Monsieur,” he said. “I’ll mention it; we’ll need to take orders from below. But it seems to me that it’s not impossible. We’ll add your request to the radiogram that we send to the ground tonight; you’ll have your response tomorrow.”
He saluted me with a brief movement of the head and indicated another ladder, which led to the deck.
I went back to my cell—but at five o’clock the feldwebel brought me out to witness a barbaric spectacle that the second lieutenant had announced to me.
The convicts were kneeling in three rows. Their eyes, this time, were lit up by a gleam of ferocious curiosity; a kind of joy was legible in those gazes of mastered beasts. The wretches found in the scene that was about to unfold before them a means of emerging, for an all-too-brief moment, from the dismal state of mental immobility in which they were maintained by the silence and the uniformity of their existence as the damned. It was an event that tickled their evil instincts.
On the round-paths and in the blockhouses I have mentioned, the guards stood with their electric rifles, and the machine-gunners were at their posts, with their weapons aimed at the silent crowd. The officers were standing on the bridge. Only the noise of the propellers, a soft purr, was perceptible.
The guilty man appeared, his torso bare and his mouth gagged. He was thrown to his knees. One of the guards approached and placed himself half a pace behind him to the left. The man was armed with a whip with three leather thongs.
Impassively, the commandant raised his white-gloved hand.
The whip whirled through the air and fell, whistling. The first blow scarcely made the man quiver. All the convicts, craning their necks, watched avidly. Thirty times the whip struck the back of the wretched human rag. The flesh turned blue, swelled up, then burst. At the tenth blow it split, and the blood began to flow; the man was agitated by a great shudder. At the twentieth blow he fell unconscious and received the last ten strokes of the flogging thus.
The motionless officers watched the torture; only the second lieutenant had turned his head away, and his gaze was lost in the sky; I counted it to his credit that he avoided an ignoble spectacle that I only glimpsed intermittently myself.
The man was carried away; then the convicts returned to their abode, having resumed their bleak expressions.
Yesterday’s execution has had consequences that were to bring other punishments in its train. It appears that incoherent words traced in blood have been found on one of the metallic walls of the prison:
To die! To see the earth again ! Trees! The odor of soil! Death! Death! Death!
The investigation
has demonstrated that a convict has dipped his finger in the blood that the tortured man shed and traced that inscription in the dark, which summarizes all his dolors and all his hopes.
“If the investigation doesn’t discover the guilty party,” the feldwebel told me, when he reported the incident to me, “the entire camp will be punished.”
I had believed that, at least during the night, braving the written prohibitions, the convicts could talk to one another in low voices, exchanging a few words, hearing their voices, or at least that of their neighbor. In fact, that is impossible; each convict is isolated in a closed bed, a kind of crate that resembles a coffin, and is sealed; the latticework floor supports a leather mattress inflated with air.
Two guards patrol the central corridor, and as soon as they perceive raps or scratchings that might constitute a kind of secret language, they intervene, in such a fashion that the communication ceases immediately.
The convict is alone, without ever being able to exchange a thought, a hope or a word with one of his companions in ignominy. Can one imagine such a torture?
I’ve learned today that it is the second of April; I must have been here about two months.
The laboratory installed in the doctor’s consultation cell has finally been opened to me, and I’ve been given the feldwebel as a watchman. Although small, the laboratory is fairly complete, and at least I can write there without awakening the suspicions of the junior officer. All the materials have been brought at night by airplane, as I was myself.
The Mirror of Present Events Page 29