The Human Arrow

by Félicien Champsaur

  “But in this frightful snow?”

  “He won’t be able to reconnoiter. That’s a pity, for I’d be delighted to wish him welcome...”

  Turner, no longer able to contain himself, let himself fall a few meters, at the risk of colliding with the launch. Then, sticking his head out of the cockpit, he shouted: “My welcome, Nasenberg, will be your death!”

  After which, jerking the controls, he regained a little height. Immediately, machine-gun bullets whistled around him. A long crackle came from the water, as the noise of the engine died away.

  The aviator started to laugh. “Fire away, you filthy Boche! It’s me who’ll have the last word.”

  And, laughing even more loudly, he amused himself by describing circles, going in all directions to confuse his enemies. The machine-gun stopped firing. From that moment on, there was no longer anything but a tragic silence on the surface of the lake, and Turner wondered where the launch was hiding—but he was quickly reassured. He was certain of resuming his pursuit when the engine was restarted. He had only to wait.

  He waited, in vain, for long minutes. And gradually, the snow stopped falling. At the same time, the darkness dissipated, giving way to a sad cold pre-dawn light, in which the shore of the lake stood out some distance away. Then daylight appeared, imprecise, as if hesitant—and he aviator swore, less energetically than before.

  “Damn it! I’ve let them get away.”

  Indeed, there was no sign of the hull of any boat in the vicinity; Nasenberg’s launch had vanished.

  Turner did not have to spend long searching for the explanation of the mystery; he deducted, without effort, that the vessel had an electrical emergency motor, with which his enemy had escaped soundlessly.

  “Well, that won’t prevent me from completing my mission!”

  On the far side of a headland to his left, Friedrichstafen was visible, and the high roofs of the hangars sheltering the Zeppelins.

  “Let’s go, all the same!” cried the hero.

  Resolutely setting a course for the factory, he flew very rapidly, climbing slightly in order to put himself out of reach of the shells that would unfailingly be directed against him shortly. Remembering the indications given by a neutral in our service, he tried to discover the annex where aircraft were being constructed according to the plans stolen from the Nanterre factory. There was no difficulty in locating, to the right, the large buildings hosing the dirigibles. Immobilizing himself momentarily above that construction, thanks to the supportive propeller that was only usable at low speed, he dropped six bombs, which reduced the point at which he had aimed to rubble.

  Immediately, from every corner of the rocks, roofs, hangars, houses and the ground—from everywhere, came cannon-fire and the crackle of machine-guns. There was a rain of fire around the aviator.

  Uh oh! he thought. They’ve arranged things well!

  He reckoned that the situation was dangerous, and that it was necessary to seek shelter before attacking the other buildings.

  A formidable explosion followed the bomb-blasts. Then the avenging human arrow, proud and invulnerable—Rozal’s apparatus, in Turner’s hands—aimed for the sky and shot upwards. Then the arrow suddenly stopped, turned on one wing, as if broken, and spun: a shell had just reach the starboard armature, throwing the aircraft off-balance.

  Turner was too good a pilot to admit defeat. Undoubtedly, he no longer had at his disposal the docile and powerful bird that toyed with danger, but thanks to the resilience of the turbine, he could still maintain himself in the air and make his escape. It was just a matter of gaining height, in order to commence a long glide, at fantastic speed, that would terminate fifty kilometers away.

  Flight over land being dangerous, the aviator steered toward the lake—but the aircraft launched in his pursuit were tightening their circle. Because they were all armed, he had to avoid their proximity. Climbing was no longer possible. One chance of salvation remained: to fly almost at the level of the waves in order to get out of the circle and gain open water.

  Turner did not hesitate. Recommencing and audacious maneuver, he let himself fall like a stone until he was almost touching the water of the lake. He had no more to do than to fly straight ahead, incessantly readjusting the apparatus because of the broken wing, when a motor-launch surged into his path with a formidable bound. At the same time, a man standing in the bow cried: “It’s just the two of us, Turner! You won’t go any further!”

  But the gleam of vengeance lit up in the Frenchman’s eyes, and he accepted the challenge. If he was defeated in the merciless conflict, at least no one would know the secret of the turbine—for, given the weight of the aircraft, as soon as he set down, damaged, on the surface of the water, he would immediately sink.

  The launch’s two Gatling guns were aimed at the steel bird. When they spat out their discharge, perhaps in half a second, there would be no hope of escaping it—and henceforth, Turner already sensed that the game was lost.

  Well since it was lost, that was one more reason for winning it!

  Standing on the deck of the launch, Nasenberg watched the bird plunge toward him. He was waiting for the exact moment when it would pass overhead to send forth a salvo and wound it mortally,

  “Look out, Nasenberg! You said it—I won’t go any further!”

  At 300 kilometers an hour, the armored aircraft headed directly for the standing man, then, lifting its nose again, it smashed into the motor-launch with a frightful impact.

  Everything aboard the vessel was broken and flattened. In a flash, the passengers were no more than a formless pulp, splashing in all directions. The pulverized hull, suddenly plunged into the water, sank vertically. In its turn, however, the airplane, a twisted, telescoped lamentable mass, followed the enemy scrap-iron to the bottom.

  The entire drama had not lasted more than a second.

  Would the waters, closed again over a depth of 300 meters, one day reveal the secret of the aircraft? Vessels of all kinds arrived, dropping grappling hooks into the lake that attempted to snag the debris of the glorious apparatus, in vain. Launches plowed the surface for a long time, hoping to collect wreckage, but nothing would ever return from the mysterious depths where Henri Rozal’s dream now rested.

  The disappointed German aircraft continued their flight in the grey sky, but their task was finished. Below them, on the ground, factories were ablaze, and furious men were trying to put out the fires.

  It was soon broad daylight. The imprecise gleam of a little while before was succeeded by a brighter glow, announcing the advent of the Sun: the Sun of November 2, 1914, the bleak Festival of the Dead. But before the horizon of the lake took on its first vivid roseate tint, a kind of cold gray fog seemed to rise, as if surging forth from the deep water. At the same time, the sky suddenly darkened, and took on a sinister leaden color—and the snow began to fall again.

  It fell more thickly, more coldly, in crazed sarabands, and every flake, as it met the water, died softly. It was like an immense open shroud, from which dreams were falling—the dreams of the deceased, the innumerable murder-victims of the war, the wan hopes of dead men, which the invisible hand of indifferent nature was sowing upon the liquid expanse, where they melted away

  The snow became whiter, more rapid. It filled the entire atmosphere, the entire sky, hiding from view the silhouette of the shore and the surface of the lake. And it was once again that limitless infernal fairyland, so white and so cold, in which Turner had wandered for hours on end before falling, in the depths of icy waters, mysterious and calm, into the sleep of heroes.

  THE END

  (OF THE 1917 TEXT)

  APPENDIX II: THE 1927 SUPPLEMENT

  XI47. The Monstrous Voice of the War

  The news of Rozal’s exploit, as well as that of its tragic end, arrived in Paris on August 1. The cablegram from New York summarizing the fantastic attempt, the success of the transatlantic flight and also, alas, the fatal crash at the end of the journey, appeared in the eveni
ng newspapers. Because of the formidable circumstances, however, far more dramatic than the glorious death of an inventor of genius and a hero, that sensational dispatch passed almost unnoticed by the general public.

  A brutal anguish hung over Europe; everyone felt an anxiety too profound for the aviator’s magnificent long-distance flight to be the pretext for long articles; the newspapers had a subject of emotion that rendered all others minimal and imperceptible: the immediate threat of a European war.

  In any event, a man had just achieved a feat that made him the equal of a god, since he had flown over the innumerable waves of the Atlantic, tamed the Ocean and the sky, before succumbing—but that prodigious deed and that triumphant death could not retain public attention any longer than an accident in the Metro or a banal fire. That great daily Le Matin, among others, relegated the moving dispatch to the last page, among the three-line items.

  That evening, Paris was an impressive sight. It was the hour at which workplaces closed, on a Saturday. A crowd more numerous than usual was in the streets, because of the disturbing rumors that had been circulating since the beginning of the week. Austria had declared war on Serbia; it was now known that Russia would not allow the valiant little nation to be crushed, and that the intervention of our ally would lead to a conflagration of all the States united for years against one another. In any case, the whole world felt the necessity of that war. It had been threatening for too many years, and the consequences of that threat had weighed too heavily upon the lives of populations: better to get it over with once and for all. For, behind the initial pretext, the true causes were apparent, and the nations looked at one another mistrustfully. There was a formidable and well-prepared Germany confronting a courageous France—and perhaps, in a few hours, the Teutonic hordes would be unleashed toward our frontiers.

  Six o’clock in the evening. The official dispatch announcing general mobilization has been posted everywhere—and from every workshop, from the smallest boutique and the largest department-store, from cafés, and from all the houses in France, men and women, adolescents, boys and girls, hasten to that fateful piece of paper, in which everyone attempts to read his or her destiny, and that of the Nation.

  Immediately, the streets become agitated; a sort of serious and grave joy, grim and anguished, animate them; duty is bravely respired. The men, conscious of the tragic moment and the parcel of force that each of them represents within the powerful unity of the defense of the country, hurry home to make preparations to leave the next day.

  Over that crowd burst the first thunderclaps, precursors of the worldwide cataclysm. No one any longer spares a thought for the man who has just flown over Normandy, the Channel, England and the Atlantic in a single swoop—the first—to New York. The eyes prepared to weep in the street were not doing so for Henri Rozal. Old men who were to see their sons and grandsons leave, had tears in their distressed gazes; wives and mothers were walking as if hallucinated, sobbing. It was thus, in 1914, that during the noise of a formidable war, which brought twenty nations and two continents into conflict, the name of the first man to succeed in crossing the Atlantic by air was submerged.

  XII. Homo-Deus

  It has required thirteen years of invisible forces for another man—an American, Charles Lindbergh—to realize the same feat, in the opposite direction.

  Departing from New York, the victorious hero arrived, the following day, Saturday May 21, 1927, at eleven o’clock in the evening—after 23 hours of solitude, silence and danger—in a monoplane, like Henri Rozal, and alone, like him: a splendid performance of human wings, by a bird from Saint-Louis, a city founded by Frenchmen, by a magnificent young madman going non-stop over the Ocean, like a prodigious horizontal rocket, from the new continent to the old.

  And on a spring night, at the airfield at Le Bourget, Charles Lindbergh, tall in stature and in glory, as blond and smiling as the month of May, with the rosy cheeks of a boy, having just driven for 6000 kilometers without a moment’s rest, emerged from his cockpit amid a spray of American stars, taking off his flying helmet and donning a straw hat in order to wave.

  The journey from Le Bourget to Paris has been more difficult. Hazard? Folly? Genius? The mysteries of nature? But the soul of the hero was able to give the signal to depart. Favored by the hazard of being pushed all the while by a westerly wind, and by himself, Lindbergh has descended from the sky to land, in Paris and in immortality.

  Blériot was the first to crossed the channel by air; Garros, similarly, was the first to cross the Mediterranean. Today, aircraft routinely maintain a daily service, there and back, between Paris and London. Airplanes deliver mail between France and Algeria, from Marseilles to Algiers and back to Marseilles; ditto between Toulouse and Casablanca, Morocco and Gascony. The self-confidence, audacity and tenacity of Charles Lindbergh—after the misfortune thirteen years previously of Henri Rozal—will similarly lead to practical and commercial realizations.

  One day, sooner than one might think, for life moves very quickly—it was in 1901 that Santos-Dumont was a hero for having departed from Saint-Cloud in his airship to double the Eiffel Tower—only sluggards who have time to waste and idlers who have no fear of seasickness will spend a fortnight on transatlantic liners. People will go from Paris to New York and from New York to Paris in dirigible balloons, and that chimera, emerging from its chrysalis, will rapidly become a reality thanks to the creation of floating islands on which dirigibles and aircraft will be able to make repairs and refuel. Thus, our descendants will jeer, and will cross the ocean, flying from one artificial island to another, motionless or mobile, amid the strong sea breezes, as one jumps over a stream by using stepping-stones.

  Humans are pigs, monkeys; humans are wolves to other humans, and even thieves—but humans are gods.

  If the ancient Sun, fatigued, increasingly mottled with larger spots, eventually blackens and grows cold, ending life on all the planets, if the Sun, Pater Noster, is one day good for nothing, the Earth will not perish because of the disappearance of its light and heat. In the atmosphere, surrounded by a globe, through which the stars will still be visible but at which protective sphere the icy effects of the formidable moribund star with stop, humans will invent artificial suns that will replace the old domestic hearth.

  THE END

  (OF THE 1927 TEXT)

  Afterword

  The most important problem facing Félicien Champsaur, when he had to adapt the original version of Les Ailes de l’homme for belated publication in 1917, by writing a hastily-improvised sequel, was that the glorious ambition of Henri Rozal’s invention was, in narrative terms, a double-edged sword. In order to produce a sequel at all, the author had to reconstitute the invention, but in order that the invention should not have made any noticeable difference to the history of the intervening three years, he then had to dispose of it again, more thoroughly than he had initially been required to do. In order to contrive that disposal, he not only had to stretch the plausibility of the new narrative to its utmost limit, but also to undermine the brief that he had presumably been given by the French authorities, who were attempting (as the name of the book’s publisher proudly proclaimed) to bring about a renaissance in literature for the specific purposes of morale-building.48

  If the original version of the text is construed as a moral tale, as its final chapter explicitly suggests, the first element of that moral is that les ailes de l’homme—construed in the narrow sense as “man’s wings” rather than as “human wings”—are always likely to be clipped, at least in the short term, by Nature’s shears, as deployed by her favorite intermediary, the femme fatale. The moral dies not stop there, however, for the text goes on to declare, exuberantly, that those wings will soar nevertheless, because human determination and ingenuity are, in the end, indefatigable. The 1927 edition allowed Champsaur to restate that conviction in no uncertain terms, but in 1917, with the war still dragging on, it was always likely to be a trifle muted.

  Champsaur’s attit
ude, when he concluded the original version of the text, was that the tragic denouement of Henri’s romance with Nelly was a purely personal tragedy—in effect, a martyrdom to a cause that would continue, strengthened by his contribution and perhaps even by his death. Henri’s demise and the destruction of the prototype of his airplane do not imply that the world is, or can be, unchanged; it is obvious at the end of the original version that others will immediately take up where he left off. All of his designs and plans still exist, and so does the factory in which his turbine was built. Crash or no crash, he has demonstrated that his gas turbine works. Even if the relatively trivial problem of landing an aircraft at 100 miles an hour were to be reckoned a serious stumbling block, that would not prevent the gas turbine from having hundreds of terrestrial applications. In particular, it would not prevent it from being extremely useful in constructing military materiel—a side-effect that made it almost impossible for the author to devise a scenario in 1917 that would allow the human arrow to enjoy one more flight without its engine being replicable thereafter.

  The fudge employed by Champsaur—retrospectively equipping Turner not merely with the plans for the turbine but a secret unwritten addendum—stretches credibility too far. Even without the plans, the mere fact of knowing that the technological problems are soluble should have enabled Turner, Nasenberg and a thousand others to produce a similar result eventually. That logical difficulty is, alas, supplemented by a moral difficulty, because its corollaries make Turner’s behavior throughout the sequel seem both criminally stupid and blatantly treasonous.

  As the custodian of knowledge that might be vital to the war effort, Turner is surely obliged to hand over everything he knows to the French military authorities, especially the unwritten addendum to Rozal’s plans that facilitates their execution, and he certainly ought not to play the fool with the mark II aircraft as he does. The fact that the military authorities are seriously derelict in their own duty, given that they knew what Rozal accomplished, in not taking over the Nanterre factory, expanding its capacity to ensure multiple-production and providing it with proper security, then compounding their error by allowing Turner to play the fool with the aircraft instead of having it copied a hundred times over, merely adds to the moral catastrophe. To represent Turner’s actions in the supplement as heroism rather that culpable folly is blatant dishonesty, and it is difficult to understand why any reader might be expected to see things differently.