Satisfied with his raid, he headed straight for France—but, deeming that he had not finished his day’s work, he landed two hours later in a clearing in a wild forest beyond the battle-front. No sooner had he descended from his apparatus than he lit a cigarette, sighing: “I’ve certainly earned that!”
He made a cursory meal with the provisions that he had brought with him, drank a little champagne to toast his first success and, deeming himself sufficiently rested, took off again in his aircraft.
Before the Sun vanished over the horizon, he plowed through the clouds in all directions, sowing terror and death wherever he went. He took good care not to hit towns without defenses or peaceful populations, but he had the satisfaction of reducing military railway stations to ashes, blowing up battleships and ammunition dumps and annihilating moving trains. Thus, the enemy would not be able to bring fresh troops to help those that the Kaiser, the innumerable assassin, was throwing at the French lines like an insatiable Moloch.
Undoubtedly, the tenacious Germans would have repaired the damage by the following day—but the following day, the iron aircraft would begin again, and they would see whether the fantastic bird or the German horde crawling down below like ignoble vermin would get the better of the argument. Yes, he would begin again. Every day, he would add a funereal list to that of the day before, and he would become famous in the enemy ranks, like a vengeful god who would laugh at bullets and shrapnel.
He would not touch an open town, but fortresses would all be visited. There would be no bridge, viaduct, railway station, redoubt or trench that did not receive the mortal rain of his bombs. He wanted to terrify the armies that, as soon as they saw him appear on the horizon, would feel a great shiver of fear pass through them. On the sea, as on land, he would be a pitiless administrator of justice, and he would do so much damage from the height of the skies that everyone would end up blessing him. Would he not render war impossible henceforth, in destroying the militarism of a bandit people—with commercial capabilities—and imposing respect throughout the world for a work born in France: an iron aircraft with irreducible power?
XVI. While Attempting to Destroy the Zeppelin Nest
At nightfall, Georges Turner got ready to take off. He had filled his airplane’s ammunition-holds and taken on sufficient fuel to keep his turbine going for long hours. The flight he was about to undertake might, indeed, have surprises in store for him, and he wanted to succeed, at all costs.
The evening, which was very cold, made the sad plain into an extent reminiscent of a steppe, over which large black crows were flying in a sinister manner. The cries of these birds of ill-omen could be heard when they perceived the cadaver of a man or a horse in some desolate corner of the terrain—and then their furious croaking as they disputed the prey. From time to time, a distant noise of cannon fire mingled with these lugubrious orchestras, and along with the north wind, blowing in gusts, it all made a poignant music that intimidated the soul.
The aviator was installed in a marshy meadow beside the narrow road leading to the battlefield. Not many soldiers passed by heading for the front, but in the other direction, lamentable processions of the wounded, evacuated families went by, moaning, mingled with cripples of every sort, whose eyes retained the tragic vision of hours of savage battle and a kind of horror, and old men, women and children fleeing the accursed places that had been their pleasant native land only yesterday, their hearth and their life.
The pitiful columns went by. Some individuals, perceiving Turner’s bizarre airplane, so different from other aircraft, looked at it for a few moments, and then, resuming the resigned, fateful expression that characterized all those unhappy faces, continued to march, heads lowered, absorbed by dolorous thoughts of which their moist eyes retained a heart-rending reflection.
Turner had made a resolution: the accomplishment of a project that he could not resist, and which he wanted to carry out that night, of the first of November 1914—All Saints’ Day, the feast-day of all soldiers, of all the martyrs of the world’s liberty—the third month of the war. The decision was anchored in his head. He would set a course for Lake Constance and Friedrichshafen, the nest of the gigantic airships that had been improved every year, if they had not been imagined and created, by Graf von Zeppelin.
To be sure, he had thought of bombarding massively and blowing up the Krupp factories at Essen, the monstrous lair of the Boche cannon. Germany, in his eyes, was symbolized by the power of the Krupp family and the extraordinary city of Essen, a formidable arsenal where arms and engines of murder were forged for an army of barbarians. By reducing that damned factory to ashes, he would play a terrible card in favor of civilization, and perhaps provoke the cessation of hostilities at a stroke. But that exploit, the dream of which was ripening within him, and which he wanted to live with an utterly ferocious enjoyment, would be reserved for a little later. If he preferred, first, to attack the fabric of dirigibles, it was because he was moved by his hatred for the spy, the traitor, the abominable felon who had become so Parisian, Nasenberg.
Undoubtedly, the pirate had had his fellow spy Kauffmann, Henri Rozal’s overseer, copy the plans for the marvelous aircraft; undoubtedly, they were trying to construct a similar engine in an annex to the Friedrichshafen factory, a combat aircraft of equal power to the one he was piloting. At that idea, a rage possessed him.
“It’s imperative,” he murmured, “that I succeed tonight. Thus far, my dear Turner, you’ve only been amusing yourself. Now, to work.”
Activating the gas-feed, he opened the turbine and the aircraft launched forth. It son vanished into a mass of gray cloud on the horizon.
Installed within the steel framework of the fuselage, in a sort of armored shelter where he spent hours without speaking to anyone, entirely occupied by the necessity of “action,” Turner flies through the night, now heading south-eastwards at more than 300 kilometers an hour. So, having reached Belfort at around midnight, he is flying over Switzerland at an altitude of 2000 meters, in an ocean of cloud and snow.
For some twenty minutes, which seem terribly long to him, he no longer knows where he is. Instead of the black, opaque night—which had not, however, prevented him from distinguishing the lights of cities—there is nothing but a sort of moving whiteness, a fleecy turbulence in which he has the impression of rolling. A glacial cold is emanating from the ground—mountains, no doubt, whose summits are nearby; so he climbs higher in order to avoid that dangerous proximity, and finds more oceans of snow, which open in swirls as he passes through, accompanying him with fantastic dances that frighten him slightly.
This time, he is thoroughly lost.
He thinks about Rozal because it is now the second of November, the Day of the Dead, and because all these icy whitenesses eddying around him are reminiscent of the errant souls of the deceased...
He is frightened...
There had been talk of giving him a traveling companion, in case of trouble, or to help him launch his engines of destruction, but he had demanded to be alone. He knows that the aircraft’s great speeds renders it almost invulnerable, in the absence of some fabulous hazard, and to drop his bombs he has devised an apparatus that permits him to dispense with an assistant. In that way, moreover, no one else will know Rozal’s secret—and he wants to test the fantastic aircraft on his own in order to improve it further, if there is scope, in accordance with the lessons of the trial.
Yes, undoubtedly, out there on the shore of Lake Constance, mysterious workers must be constructing a new aircraft—but Turner smiles, even so. No, they don’t have the secret of the turbine! The plans cannot be used without knowing the explanations given orally by Rozal. And if it were possible to fabricate an apparently-identical aircraft, they would not be able to make the turbine spin. To obtain that result, the one and only model was necessary—and that was why Nasenberg, so intelligent and crafty that he had realized the fact, had attempted the worst.
The barometer is now indicating a fantastic height;
he has not made sure that the rudder was motionless during the ascent, and here he is, now, in a more rarefied atmosphere, devoid of snowflakes, in a sort of light ether that is the domain of silence and oblivion. It seems to him that he will never descend to Earth again, that he is beyond the planet...
A sudden, involuntary fall in a moment of mental inertia—but he rights himself 5000 meters from the ground!
“Where am I?” he murmurs.
Courageously, he descends further; but almost immediately he gives the controls a sudden jerk, and exclaims: “Another second and I’d have fallen into the water!”
There is, indeed, water beneath him, in all directions. Above him, more snow, and the limit of vision, scarcely three meters in that infinite snow, is a blank white circular wall, like the wall of a livid well or the tower of a lily-white prison.
Hazard, doubtless blind, but favorable, which the bold man often has on his side, had brought Turner to a position directly above the place he sought—and on that snowy night he might undoubtedly have flown for hours without reaching his target if that abrupt and involuntary descent, in a second of cerebral and quasi-physical inertia, over Lake Constance had not revealed to him that he had arrived.
But the lake is immense; it occupies more than 500 square kilometers in a transversal depression of glacial origin in the pre-Alpine zone, and the waves of the Rhine accumulate there to a depth of nearly 300 meters. Now, although the aviator was steering by compass, he no longer knew whether his direction was true, and the destiny that had caused him to stop a few meters from the water had not told him in which direction the zeppelin factory that he intended to destroy was to be found.
It was three o’clock in the morning. It was terribly cold, and the snow that was still falling, perpetually, in dense flakes that gusts of winds caused to rotate like cyclones around the aviator, gave the night the mysterious unreal whiteness of an icy limbo.
“It’s imperative, however,” Turner said to himself, “that I get out of it.”
There was only one means of doing that: to go straight ahead until he reached the shore of the lake, and then follow the shore until he encountered a town and located the enormous buildings where the dirigibles were born and sheltered.
He headed northwards; then, when he had made sufficient progress for him to assume that he was flying over land, he descended slowly in order to reconnoiter the surroundings. Suddenly, however, he experienced the sensation that there was an obstacle ahead. He scarcely had time to bring the apparatus up as it brushed the tops of a clump of fir-trees on a hillside.
“Uh oh! Prudence...”
He climbed again, and returned in the opposite direction, to the best of his belief, toward the water. Every time he tried to descend, however, he did not find the surface of the lake.
“Still lost in this damned torment of snow!” he sighed. Discouragement gripped him. Had he covered so many leagues, then, to discover his destination by pure luck at the first attempt, only to become, now, an uncertain bird circulating in mid-air amid the turbulence of billions and billions of snowflakes, without knowing where to land?
Certainly, when daylight came, he would be better able to survey the terrain—but dawn was several hours away. From now until then he would be forced to continue this frightful aimless dance through an atmosphere that was too white and too cold, which weighed upon his shoulders, weighing down the aircraft like a shroud.
He regained height, and moved further way, hoping to find a part of the sky where the accursed snow was not falling—but the entire sky seemed to be an ocean of snowflakes, and in that phantasmagoria, which was turning into a nightmare, there was nothing but whiteness in eternal motion, through which passed a terrible southerly wind—the föhn—raising tempestuous waves five or six meters high on the lake. In the atmosphere beset by a storm of snowflakes; the steel bird confronted the föhn.
He climbed again, and when he had exceeded the limits of that sea of cold cotton-wool he found himself once again in the domain of silence he had discovered a little while before, and spent atrocious minutes there, because he had the impression of having entered the realm of eternal death.
Nevertheless, he dared not descend again. At the idea of plunging into the endless turbulent snow again, he experienced anguish. He did not know where he was. In flying too low, in order to try to recognize the lie of the land, he risked crashing into a mountain, or becoming entangled in the trees of a forest.
He began to describe interminable circles, therefore, above the clouds from which the thick snow was falling.
An hour passed in that way, which seemed mortal to him. Soon, he became conscious of a terrible danger: in that calm environment, only troubled by the continual, regular purr of the turbine, he felt a dangerous torpor creeping up on him. He was afraid of falling asleep—and sleep, in such conditions, would inevitably precipitate an abrupt fall and certain disaster, before having accomplished his sacred task.
I mustn’t… I mustn’t…! he thought.
Better to escape that disquieting torpor that was already taking rot in his limbs and his brain; better to plunge back into the nightmare of the snow than to doze off at an altitude of 3000 meters, never to awake!
Stiffening himself, he maneuvered the altitude rudder in order to descend.
Then, for another hour, he circled and circled in the infernal fairyland—and around him, snowflakes also circled, to the extent that he experienced the atrocious sensation of having been carried off to a Sabbat dance in company with powdery Korrigans and Farfadets, which were sniggering in his ears. He was afflicted by vertigo, and a buzzing that grew louder by the minute, filling his sick head.
He would have given anything in the world to discover a solid piece of ground on which he might land, if only briefly, but he would have to search, descending to explore the white night, accompanied by the fleecy dance that seemed never-ending.
Soon, he realized that his strength would not sustain him indefinitely. When he had left to carry out his difficult mission, he had not doubted that he would easily discover the lair to be destroyed, but he had not taken that unfortunate snow into account, which made the Earth, the sky, the trees, the mountains and the water a moving whole without apparent distinctions, in the midst of which he was like a wreck drifting at the mercy of hazard.
Suddenly, as his stiff limbs, gradually abandoned to the fatal numbness, lost control of the movements of the bird, he heard a strange noise below him.
For hours he had not perceived anything but the whistling of the storm-wind and the purr of his turbine. What he could hear now also resembled a hum, but more brutal, more akin to a clatter.
He cocked his ear. The noise seemed to be coming from a long way away. He thought he might descend toward it a little without running any danger.
When he was closer, he murmured, in surprise: “The sound of an internal combustion engine running freely—one might think it was the noise of an automobile.”
Having nothing to guide him but the intensity of the perceived sounds, he set off in pursuit of the noise. When it faded, he knew that he was no longer on the track; when the clatter of the engine became more violent, he deduced that he was no longer very far away. Soon, however, the sound was coming from all directions at once; he had the impression that it was not an automobile that he was chasing but hundreds of them, fleeing in all directions.
“That’s it! I’m going mad...”
Suddenly, the sound seemed incredibly close—and at the same moment, he heard a loud splashing, and the sound of running water.
It was not an automobile, but a motor-boat!
Then an immense joy flooded his heart. He had finally found the lake again!
He descended prudently, diminishing the speed of his aircraft as much as possible in order not to overtake the motor-boat. Moreover, by only traveling at a slow speed, the turbine spun in almost complete silence. It was certainly inaudible at a range of several meters. Gradually drawing nearer to the motor-launc
h, he could clearly hear the sound of the rapid explosions of its engine, and soon, the voices of the people aboard.
Good God!
He needed all his self-control not to cry out in joy; he had just recognized Nasenberg’s voice!
Ah! he thought. I’ve got you, you bandit. This time, you won’t escape me.
To drop a bomb on the motor-boat, however, he needed at least to be able to see it—and in the whitened darkness of the furious snowstorm, visibility was less than three meters.
Turner, determined now to pursue his prey, made incredible efforts to get closer to the motor-launch. That was a difficult task. He could hear the brief conversations more distinctly, but he did not understand them because he did not speak German. After a few minutes, however, he was surprised to catch the end of a sentence in French.
“Yes boss, it definitely tonight. The dispatch I received from one of our secret agents, sent via Pontarlier and Switzerland, leaves me in no doubt. Yesterday morning, Turner had the firm intention of coming to bomb the factory. I’ll answer for the reliability of my information.”
Then came this reflection from Nasenberg: “Would he dare? And if he dared, could he find his way in this weather?”
“The French are courageous; they love adventure.”
“Yes, but it would require a real appetite for risk—and yet, I hope he comes. What does it matter if he destroys a hangar or two in the attempt? The main thing is for us to capture his apparatus, even by bringing it down. And I know that we’ll have it...”
“Are you sure of that, Boss?”
“Yes, our precautions have been well-taken. If he comes by night, the false lighting of our buildings will guide him, entirely at my will, into the range of fire of countless guns. He won’t escape. By day, he’ll be spotted well before he’s upon us...”
The Human Arrow Page 31