I. Various strange details of my return to Europe
and momentous arrival in an unknown land.
It was in April 1914 that the Hutchinstone expedition, admirably equipped, set forth on its great voyage of polar exploration. I, Paul Jacquemin, was the expedition’s naturalist. We felt full of confidence and hope. All the scientific notabilities on the world had addressed flattering telegrams to us. They were counting on us, anticipating discoveries of immense interest. Glorious perspectives...
Unfortunately, our boat perished, crushed in a collapse of the ice-sheet, in August of that year, just as we were entering the truly interesting zone of the polar regions. Those of us who did not follow the wreckage of the ship under the accursed ice-cap were able, after various vicissitudes, to set foot on a rocky islet almost constantly surrounded by ice, solely frequented by polar bears and penguins,6 and the poor Hutchinstone expedition was doomed to live for I don’t know how many years in lamentable distress, cut off from all communication with the rest of the world, lost, forgotten and desperate!
However, a few months ago, the Ocean, our jailer, brought to our icy rock the debris of wrecked ships in considerable quantity: an extraordinary windfall, a stroke of luck of which it was necessary to take advantage. Quickly, we set to work, so effectively that we reassembled the least dislocated elements of that debris.
We embarked supplies of bear-meat and frozen cod, and a provision of penguin eggs; and, quivering with joy, we piled into our wreck. Then, with improvised sails, we set forth for good old Europe!
It was a difficult and hazardous voyage, and also very slow. Our sailors were old and disabled, we had no nautical charts, and very little of anything else.
Once we were in the open sea, we expected to be rapidly encountered and picked up by some ship, fishing for cod or whatever, but to our great astonishment, we saw nothing on the deserted ocean but numerous wrecks in a worse state than our own, floating just beneath the surface. What surprised us even more, as we approached what we estimated to be the Scandinavian coast or the north of Scotland, was that there were no lighthouses in the distance to show us the way—not one kindly light to warm our hearts and indicate a hospitable port, before we had finished consuming our supplies of bear-meat.
We were sailing in search of land, groping our way, if I might put it like that, when, I don’t know how, in the middle of the night but in the most beautiful moonlight, as I was on watch, my wide eyes scanning the horizon, a frightful explosion sent us all, passengers and ship, in little pieces, to the bottom.
After the shock, when I came back to the surface and recovered consciousness, along with a little strength, I found that I was the sole survivor of the survivors of the Hutchinstone expedition, hanging on to a fragment of broken mast, face to face with a young man I did not know, who seemed just as frightened as me.
I had never seen him before; he was not a member of the Hutchinstone expedition. Where had he spring from? How did he come to be there, astride my fragment of mast? That was a truly extraordinary surprise.
“How do you come to be here?” I exclaimed, as soon as I could speak. “I don’t know you...”
“I was here before you,” he replied. “This mast is mine. I saw your boat blow up, and even received the pieces on my head. As for me, I was blown up the day before yesterday. I’ve been floating in this deplorable state for forty-eight hours.”
My amazement was redoubled.
When our emotion had calmed down slightly, we introduced ourselves. I was coming from the North Pole, he had arrived after a long haul from a small island in the Pacific Ocean, and we had met up between two explosions in an unknown sea, without having perceived a single sailing ship or steamer during our long journey.
That solitude of the oceans and seas frequented by so many ships, at the intersection of so many shipping lanes, amazed me. It even made cold shivers run down my back—a few more of them, since I was already shivering from that unexpected complete bath. I came back to our accident—or, rather, accidents, since there was also the young sailor’s.
“It’s utterly incomprehensible,” I said to him. “What blew us up? A floating mine? A torpedo?”
“I don’t know,” the young man replied. “But there isn’t much traffic around. For days on end I’ve seen suspicious objects floating among the wreckage and carcasses of ships. I try to keep my mast away from them, for fear of another explosion.”
“What does it all mean?”
“I don’t know—but look over there, at that sort of buoy that the wind seems to be pushing in our direction. Look out! Let’s try to push it away gently if it comes too close. I don’t trust it!”
A little frisson passed through me, and my teeth started chattering. “The water’s cold,” I said, to explain my emotion.
“Yes,” said the young man. “That’s the worst part of the situation—I’m frozen. But perhaps we’ll be lucky enough to see land before nightfall, or encounter a bit of wreckage more comfortable than our bit of mast. It’s quite possible, for since the morning of the day before yesterday, I’ve already passed an empty barrel, a yard-arm, and half a launch—which I had to let go, because it was obviously about to sink. It was a good find, though, that launch, because I was able to pick up this crate of food you can see over there, solidly moored to that bit of topsail. Do you want a bit of sausage and a swig of whisky?”
I accepted enthusiastically, and thanked the providential young man. Then, warmed up by the whisky, I thought about my poor companions on the expedition, who were asleep in the cabin at the moment of the explosion, dreaming about the return to old Europe, their families and friends, and the tranquil life that awaited them there. Where were they now? Rolled by the waves I don’t know how many fathoms deep, alas. Alas!
To escape that vision I recommenced my questions.
“But what does it all mean? We ought to be able to see fifty ships on the horizons: steamers, commercial three-masters, big trawlers, fishing boats…but nothing! Nothing but wrecks. Or mines, which is worse. Has there been some cataclysm, some upheaval, in this region north of Europe? Young man, since 1914 I haven’t seen anyone, not a single human being, except for my unfortunate companions, drowned just now, and I haven’t read a single newspaper. That makes fifteen years, since, if there’s no error in my calculations, it’s now 1929...”
“You don’t know anything, then? You don’t know? I’m only a little better informed myself. Wait until we’re a little more tranquil, and I’ll tell you what I know. For the moment, let’s look out for squalls!”
We had drawn closer together. Both sitting stride our fragment of mast, attached to the topmast by a coil of rope, tossed around by an incessant movement, we scanned the horizon anxiously as we rose to the crests of the waves, to descend again thereafter into the dark green hollows, the sinister valleys of the Ocean, where I thought I glimpsed strange dismantled carcasses, formless and disquieting masses, rolling beneath the surface.
He was right, the young man; more than once, in the course of a long and mortal day, we had to avoid, and with a great deal of difficulty, buoys of malevolent appearance, the impact of which might have pulverized us, or bits of wreckage hurled at us at great speed by the brutal and malevolent waves.
The swell increased, the sea became darker and more difficult, and I closed my eyes in discouragement. Soaked and half-drowned, stunned by the shock of the waves that broke over our heads, what would become of us when night fell?
The young man passed me the whisky again.
“Buck up!” he shouted to me. “Hang on, look over there! There’s a wreck of a boat that seems to me to be in fairly good condition. It’s gaining on us—if we can grab hold of it as it goes past, we could be almost dry before long, and I think we might sleep tonight!”
He was adroit, the young man, and less rheumatic than me. He was able to get hold of the wreck when the waves brought it closer to us, and succeeded in hauling me aboard, after the crate of food had been securely tied down in the most solid part of the boat.
What satisfaction! We were almost dry in that wreck, except when a wave bigger than the rest broke over us.
Night could come; we would try to pass it as least badly as possible.
“Lovely sunset,” said the young man.
I didn’t care about the sunset! Exhausted, I could do no more; I was already closing my eyes, without distinguishing anything but vague red and yellow gleams in a westerly direction.
“Quite beautiful,” the young man went on. “But no sign of wind. Let’s hold on!”
The night wasn’t too bad. We took turns to sleep—or rather, when my turn came to watch, I contented myself with drowsing, opening an eye, with difficulty, every half hour, when the cold woke me up.
Dawn deigned to appear; while I slept, broad daylight arrived; hunger extracted me from my dolorous dreams, and the young man completed my awakening by giving me a thick slice of ham, almost shoving it into my mouth.
“Have we arrived?” I said.
“Not yet,” he replied, “but let’s eat anyway.”
We ate. No land in sight. The day passed. We ate again. I saw, anxiously, that the food supplies were visibly depleted.
Nightfall again. This time, I watched the sun set.
“Lovely!” the young man repeated.
“Sinister,” I said. “Those red and black stripes don’t suggest anything good to me!” Indeed, the inkpot soon overflowed into the sky; the weather was decidedly turning bad. There was no thought of sleep that night. What shocks! And what creakings in every plank of our boat! What furious assaults the waves delivered! We thought more than once that our last moment had arrived.
The squall caught us from behind and we sped. We must have covered a lot of distance! All night we flew vertiginously, in a whirlwind of foam.
Toward morning, without expecting it, having not perceived in the horror of the darkness any shore or beacon, we were hurled on to the coast, tumbling on to sand, fortunately friable, in the midst of the debris of our shattered craft.
I was lying down, or rather embedded, in the sand, half-stunned, and I saw my young stranger rubbing his shoulders and feeling his limbs, fifteen meters away.
“Nothing broken?” I shouted, when I had got my breath back.
“I don’t think so. No, I’m all right, I can stand up. You?”
“Me too,” I said, hauling myself painfully to my feet.
Oof! We were dripping like sponges, bruised and frozen; the air was keen, the dawn hardly casting a few wan gleams over the gray, flat landscape.
Where are we? Norway? England? No rocky cliffs, nor mountains framing our beach, so it’s not Norway.
Anyway, we’ll go and see. Saved! Finally, saved! What joy!
I could have kissed the sand of that beach that had collected us, all in all, rather gently, when we might have been crushed on some rock.
“Let’s walk to warm ourselves up, and try to find help in some village.”
And we set forth, walking straight ahead, at hazard, since we couldn’t see anything: not a single steeple, or house, or farm. The coast was nothing but sand dunes, green or yellow undulations, with no clumps of trees.
We walked for more than an hour. Still nothing, and no one. There were no inhabitants on that shore, then, whose yellow silhouette we could now distinguish, in the daylight, from the somber sea?
Ah, here’s something: traces of human labor, lines dug in the sand, with embankments to the side, retained by fastenings. It’s old and half-demolished. Ouch! I step on a round iron object buried in the sand, and nearly lose my footing.
I clear away the sand and try to pick the object up. Damn! It’s a shell. There must have been firing exercises around here, so we’re in a civilized land.
We go on. Ruins now: a mass of red tiles in an extraordinary chaos of tangled woodwork, on heaps of pulverized bricks. There were once houses here: a group of habitations, a kind of hamlet.
Then there’s a little rivulet…or a canal rather, for there are the remains of stone banks in places, and the iron debris of a bridge, beside more heaps of bricks and wooden beams.
What, then? What’s happened? An earthquake? A cyclone? It’s very strange! I rummage in the debris, looking for a clue. Oh! Over there, in that group of houses, a church! There are the vestiges of the altar, a capital, and a fragment of a Gothic balustrade...
And all that smashed to smithereens. Decidedly, a cyclone must have devastated this corner of old Europe. But those shells? We’re still searching. I pick up bizarre fragments of metal. My anxiety and disturbance increase. In his turn, my companion stumbles over round objects. A shell...two shells...three whole shells...and then others, many others, in fragments of various sizes.
Damn! Damn! Damn! War has passed this way. These ruins seem more recent than the first. We’ve been unlucky!
I scan the horizon in vain; I can’t see anything, except bumps in the ground here and there, which might be more ruins.
No noise: a deathly silence around us; no appearance of movement anywhere.
What does all this signify? This frightfully deserted landscape, this devastation, this silence…what? War? Revolution?
We keep on going, cautiously.
Suddenly, as we’re climbing over heaps of bricks in a fold dip in the terrain, people hurl themselves upon us, uttering clamors in an unknown language. They knock us down, in spite of our resistance, violently applying cloths to our faces soaked in I don’t know what.
We struggle, and we howl, but we’re gagged, jostled and thrown into a dark hole, pell-mell with the brutal men, who hasten to shut a kind of door made of thick planks, after having ignited a heap of straw and branches, already prepared inside.
II. Brigands or rescuers?
The asphyxiating cloud.
What is this band of brigands, and what do they want with us? What are they trying to do to us? Bad luck is pursuing me! I’m bruised all over my body, and my gag is making it very difficult for me to breathe.
While I struggle, I notice that our aggressors are gagged too—or, rather, their faces are covered by a sort of hood or mask with goggles, which gives them a repulsive physiognomy. They have two enormous round or square eyes, with a kind of snout, and a bestially menacing expression.
I must look like them, with this mask that they’ve buckled over my face. There’s some chemical ingredient inside the snout that is suffocating me. I cough and cough!
My young companion is doing the same. In spite of his coughing fits, he’s distributing kicks at the people who are holding him.
As I try, in spite of everything, to remove my gag, I finally distinguish a few words in the inarticulate cries that the bandits are uttering.
“The gas! The gas!” they’re shouting. “Beware, or you’re dead!”
More threats! I shout to my companion to give up, in order to avoid our being killed.
Meanwhile, one of the individuals grabs me from behind and howls in my ear: “Leave it on! Are you mad? We told you there’s Boche gas. Didn’t you see the yellow cloud coming toward us? Boche gas!”
“What’s that?”
“Where have you come from, fool? You look like an intelligent man, though. Boche gas! Asphyxiating gas!”
Ah! I begin to understand, and stop resisting. It appears that they don’t want my life—on the contrary, they’ve saved me from an unknown peril. But what? What gas?
“Explain it to me,” I say.
I can hear masked me all around me, taking in muffled voices. I catch a few words, in Flemish or Dutch, English too, and French, and even Italian. My interlocutor speaks French with a strong foreign accent. What a cavern of Babel! Where are we, then?
Now that I can see better, their eyes, behind the big spectacles, no longer seem as evil. These people are all dressed nearly the same, in bizarre garments, more or less ragged and muddy, and it seems to me that there are a few women among them.
The man who spoke to me first makes me sit down on a charred wooden beam, and sits down next to me. The others form a circle around us. I can see, now, that their expressions are benevolent.
“Don’t worry,” the man says to me. Here, you’re almost safe. With our masks, and staying well wrapped up in our shelter, nothing will happen to us here—at the most, we’ll feel a little stifled, a certain difficulty in breathing. That will pass. But for you, it was just in time. Another five minutes outside, the sheet would have arrived, and you’d be dead. Thank God that we had spare masks with us, as a wise precaution!”
My fear is gradually dissipating, but it gives way to a profound amazement. I renounce trying to comprehend, and let my arms fall. I’m bewildered, nonplussed. It’s too much, too much. I gurgle ohs and ahs, endlessly.
My interlocutor gets impatient.
“Come on, at your age you must be a rational man. How were you imprudent enough…but first, who are you? You’re French, it seems to me.”
“Yes, yes, I’m French...a peaceful man of science, Monsieur,” I reply, sighing. “A man of study and science, cast up on this coast after terrible adventures, by one last shipwreck, after…”
My interlocutor leaps to his feet, suddenly furious.
“Man of science!” he cries. “A scientist! Shh! Don’t mention science—you’re risking a poor welcome here. Look, the others are growling already! You’re a man of science? Me too, unfortunately. I’m not paying you any compliment—oh no! We’re colleagues, then; me, I’m a poor devil of a Danish scientist. Doctor of medicine and many other things…very repentant and disillusioned, I assure you. Oh, that slut Science! The harlot! The whore!”
It seems to me that the others, around me, are looking at me with hostile eyes behind their spectacled masks, uttering muffled exclamations, and their fists are clenching.
“The harlot Science! The horrid slut!” the Dane repeats.
“But please,” I say, astounded. “Please…why the blasphemy?”
“Eh! You can doubt it, then? Without her, would we be buried in these ruins, in peril of death by asphyxiating gas, with other dangers lying in wait for us in every direction: being reduced to pulp by mines, torpedoes, explosions…devastations coming from the skies, by aircraft…diffusions of epidemic disease by means of miasmas, or grenades of high-virulence microbes…etc, etc…what do I know? Not to mention, my dear Monsieur, the danger of dying of hunger, if we escape violent and rapid death—and that danger isn’t the least, as I fear that it’s imminent!”
“What are you saying? What jokes are you babbling? Aren’t we in a civilized country?”
“Yes, if you can see clearly, since it’s full of shells. But you, Monsieur, be more careful what you say...to accuse us of joking! Have you disembarked from the Moon?”
I was seized by a frisson; he seemed sincere in his indignation.
“Where are we, exactly?” I asked.
“In Holland, near Harlem—which is to say, close to the place where the good city of tulips, the lush city of Franz Hals, lived happily and tranquilly before the upheaval...”
I strove to understand.
“Where Harlem was, you say? But...Holland is at war, then? At war against whom, Seigneur?”
“Once again, have you fallen from the Moon?”
“Very nearly!” I cried. “Very nearly! Listen to me, my dear colleague, let me tell you…I’ve arrived from the North Pole! Yes, the Pole! The Hutchinstone Expedition—you must have heard of it. The Hutchinstone Expedition, departed in May 1914, never came back! Prisoner in the ice for fifteen years! Fifteen years! We were finally returning, the survivors, when, two days ago, an explosion, cause unknown, destroyed our vessel. I’m the last…the only one spared! All the others…swallowed up!”
“The Hutchinstone Expedition to the North Pole! I remember—there was a lot of talk about it once, before the Deluge! I remember...I understand…you don’t know, then…you don’t know anything! In that case, I have terrible, lugubrious, fabulous things to tell you, my poor Monsieur! But I can’t tell you all at once…no, your brain would explode! The sole survivor, you say? And your companion?”
“I don’t know him. Encountered at sea on a fragment of mast to which I clung on...”
“Returned from Polynesia,” said the young man, who was following our conversation anxiously. “Marcel Blondeau, twenty years old, approximately. Sad adventures, me too; I’ll tell you about them briefly. A long time ago, about 1914, when I was about four years old, my parents were coming back to France with me. We too were sunk by a floating mine…yes, already! Only a few survivors were able to reach land, an almost deserted rock. I was saved, but I was an orphan and was raised by kindly savages, scarcely rough-hewn, who had been cannibals forty or fifty years earlier...”
“Good and naïve cannibals,” said the doctor, bitterly, “who would never, I’m sure, have invented all these…but do go on!”
“And I was coming back with a few old castaways, driven by nostalgia for old Europe, good old Europe, so beautiful and so sweet! Oh, Monsieur! Their stories, their memories had cradled my childhood on the Polynesian island. We were coming back, and we were blown up again, five days ago. A stray mine again! For the rest, I know a little more than the Monsieur who’s come back from the North Pole, but not much. The war…the nations fighting for such a long time, all that is vague and very muddled in my head. I was coming back; I was bringing my arms, to serve the old country, if I could...”
“Pour young man from Polynesia!” said the Dane. “And poor Monsieur from the North Pole! I’ll tell you everything, as gently as possible, in a little while, when the Boche gas has gone.”
A fit of coughing interrupted him. I started coughing too, and the whole company did likewise; the atmosphere was becoming unbreathable; an odor of sulfur, or bromine—something horrible, I don’t know what—filled our cellar. We looked at one another anxiously, without saying anything. Next to me, an individual of the female sex, muddy, like us, was suffocating and clutching her mask with her hands. It was evidently a woman; that was divinable even though she was enveloped in a kind of old infantry coat, threadbare and ripped.
We struggled against the suffocation for three quarters of an hour; then our suffering eased; the fits of coughing became more widely spaced and less violent.
“You said Boche gas—what does Boche mean? Is it a new scientific term?”
“No! Boche—the horrible Boche, the anthropomorphous Boche of the Prussified German tribes, the Boches of scientific barbarism, in sum! The new Huns, I’d say, if I weren’t certain that, in doing so, I’d be slandering Attila, who didn’t have their hypocritical and scholarly ferocity. Well, those asphyxiating gases are Boche, it’s the Boches of the Palace of Peace in The Hague, not far from here, who send them to us...”
“Why?” I asked, stupidly.
The Dane shrugged his shoulders. “Not to be agreeable to us! Yes, yes, you’ve come back from the Pole, that’s obvious! Know that the Boche trenches are five kilometers from here. The Palace of Peace, you recall, the great Carnegie foundation for the pacific conferences?”
“I know, I know...”
“No, you don’t know. The ex-Palace of Peace, transformed, is both the central redoubt of the Boche positions in that direction, and their great factory of projectiles of all sorts, asphyxiating torpedoes, toxic gases...”
“But how? How? Explain it all to me!”
“Let me get my breath...”
The poor Dane needed a breather. Our semi-asphyxiation, the atmosphere of our cellar, the masks...all of that was hardly calculated to facilitate elocution.
We looked at one another for a while without speaking.
“Oh, great God!” I said finally, when I felt my throat slightly less acrid. “When shall I be in Paris? When shall I recover my pleasant and tranquil apartment in the Boulevard Montparnasse? That, my dear Monsieur, has been my great preoccupation during my fifteen-year sojourn in the Polar regions. On departure, anticipating that the expedition might be forced by circumstances to spend a few winters out there, I entrusted the care of my apartment and my natural history collections—one of which, above all, was particularly dear to me heart, an admirable collection of butterflies, unrivaled...unrivaled, Monsieur!—to my only nephew, a charming young man, tranquil and hard-working, like me, in those days. I made him swear to keep everything in order and await my return, no matter when, however long the delay…and that was fifteen years ago! You understand how much haste I’m in to get to Paris! An unfortunate hitch, this war!”
“Paris!” cried the Dane.
“Paris!” repeated the others, with a kind of snigger.
“Paris! But it’s five years now…yes, a little more than five years, since we’ve had any news of it…five years in which we’ve known nothing. Before then, we succeeded from time to time in picking up a wireless message, and caught a few fragments of news…but along came another scoundrel of a Boche scientist, to discover a means of disrupting wireless reception absolutely and forever, all over the world, and it was all over. No more communication, no more anything!”
“Yes, we live in absolute blackness,” said another, somberly. “Blackness in the head and in the heart, blackness everywhere.”
“News!” sniggered a third. “Oh, yes—that’s what we miss, as much as bread!”
“Newspapers! A newspaper, what a dream!”
“Families? Did we ever have families? Me, I don’t know any more!”
“A house, a nice little apartment! Central heating! Eiderdowns…!”
III. A fine meeting of human wrecks
and the debris of the Old World.
“Five years!” I exclaimed, when I had recovered slightly from the shock. “Five years! This war has being going on for five years?”
“Five years, my dear Monsieur from the North Pole? No, not for five years, for many more. How long, alas, how many years has it lasted, the frightful carnage that has devastated the world and is eating away poor humankind? No one, or almost no one, knows anymore!” He interrupted himself with a fit of suffocation that made him clench his fists.
“Shush! Don’t get angry—that does no good,” said one of his companions. “You’re right, this second war, alas, has lasted too long. Let’s see, it’s now 1929, isn’t it? About the eighth or tenth of July, if I’m not mistaken?”
“The tenth. At the Pole I marked every day in my notebook, for want of a calendar.”
“Here, in our burrows, we make a notch on a piece of wood every morning, for want of a calendar or a notebook. But one might make a mistake, you know...”
“So,” the Dane went on, breathing more easily, “if it’s the tenth of July 1929, the second war has been going on since....”
“Second!” I exclaimed.
“Yes, the second.”
“The first, which concluded in our victory, began in August 1914,” said the young man from Polynesia, advancing his mask before us. “I knew that, myself, out there in that savage island where I was brought up. I learned to read from an old collection of dispatches: French, English, American, Italian, Serb, Rumanian, etc. I would have told you that, Monsieur, on our piece of wreckage, if we’d been able to pay attention to anything but our salvation...”
“Then,” I said, “the second war...”
“Has been going on for nearly ten years.”
“Oh!”
That was like a sledgehammer blow on the back of my neck. I nearly fell backwards, and, in my distress, I snatched my mask away violently. Immediately, I was punished by veritable spasms of suffocation.”
The Dane precipitated himself forward and, in spite of my unconscious efforts, buckled the apparatus over my face again.
“Keep it on! Keep it on for at least another hour or I won’t answer for you! You’d be sick—very sick—and we don’t have anything with which to care for you. My dear Monsieur from the North Pole, you have a great deal to learn. Hold still, and don’t talk anymore! Keep calm—imitate your young friend from Polynesia. He’s holding still...”
“He already knew something, while I’m learning everything at once! And my poor apartment on the Boulevard Montparnasse—can you tell me…?”
“We can’t tell you anything about that, can we, Messieurs?”
All the masks in the circle around me made signs of negation.
“Excuse those personal preoccupations, Messieurs—I’m blushing about them now. I was thinking about my collection of butterflies, which I haven’t seen for such a long time! Tell me, I’ll be strong…let’s see…that first war ended with our victory, though?”
“Yes, by in a botched peace, with ill-conceived conditions, and poorly-taken measures... Lassitude, enervation, the enormity of the questions, the difficulty of finding good solutions, the neglect of indispensable precautions…and above all---above all!—the work of Boche agents, the incredible folly of international socialist parties propagated by mental contagion, under the triumphant sniggers of the Social-demokratic kaiserienne…in brief, instead of radically excising the monster’s claws and carefully breaking its teeth, we were content to erode them slightly, with gentleness and delicacy. False capital! Catastrophic forbearance, of which the entire world is now suffering the frightful consequences! Germany replenished her war materiel with feverish haste, multiplying its perfection tenfold...
“Her claws quickly grew back, her teeth were sharpened more furiously. Her aviation, her submarine fleet, her rolling bombards, her hordes of machine-gunners, flamethrowers and poisoners—the entire organism of massacre—was soon ready to function again, and the second world war burst forth.7 General explosion, universal conflagration, total disruption of the planet. Total, my dear Monsieur—total!”
He stopped, his voiced strangled in his throat.
“Look,” he resumed, after a momentary pause, “You won’t believe me, if I don’t show you right away a picture of the situation: a few human wrecks, the debris of the old world, scattered by the monstrous cataclysm. I’ll introduce you to all these Messieurs, the comrades united here by the solidarity of suffering and the desperate struggle for existence. We have the time, unfortunately, before being able to risk ourselves outside...”
The circle had drawn closer.
“Here, one of your compatriots first: Monsieur Miraud, French aviator.”
One of the men, perhaps the muddiest and most ragged of them all, bowed and raised his mask for a few seconds—just enough for me to see a bearded face that was trying to smile.
“Oh, an aviator dismounted for a long time,” he said, “in this war of moles or burrowing termites, I’ve forgotten the intoxications of rising into the open sky and hunting the enemy aircraft from cloud to cloud, machine-gun duels at three thousand meters…all that’s a long way away.”
“Fallen, his wings broken, on to this coast some years ago, Monsieur Miraud is now with us,” the Dane went on. “He crawls instead of flying. He’s missing his left arm, as you can see—that’s rather inconvenient.”
“Bah! A matter of getting used to it,” said the former aviator.
“Here, now, is Señor Estebano Gomarès, Spanish businessman...”
“At the disposicion de Usted,” said a stout man, lifting his mask slightly. “I came from Barcelona to Amsterdam on business, after the first war. Imprudence, Señor, fatal imprudence! Forced to stay! Then Spain entered the struggle in her turn...imprisoned by the Boche; then retaken by the French, then tossed around with the Americans, the English…but always impossible to find a way to get back to Barcelona, by land, by sea, any way at all! Fatal imprudence—six years since I heard and mention of Barcelona!”
“Monsieur Demetrius Manoli, businessman, owner of oil wells in Rumania, numerous and once abundant. Enriched and ruined two or three times since the first war, ruined for good by this one.”
One of the refugees nodded his head sadly, but all I could see of him was the underside of a rabbit-skin helmet, evidently of his own manufacture.
“Don’t be downhearted, Monsieur Manoli—you’re no more ruined than the comrades...”
“Monsieur Arbydian, also a businessman, from Andrinople…”
“A Turk?” I said.
“An Armenian, Monsieur!” cried a tall fellow, sharply, whose velvet eyes and black plush beard I was able to perceive momentarily. “Let us distinguish, I beg you...
“There is no more Turkey,” the Dane put in, “but there are still Turks, since there are two or three old Turkish regiments with the Boches at the Palace of Peace—Turks Prussified for a long time, who can only pray to Allah in German!”
“But how do you come to be here?”
“I don’t know…affair of banking; I was in finance when there were still finances. Anyway, today, still, I’m the sole capitalist among all these gentlemen, for I still have a pierced English coin, which I conserve as a fetish.” From the pocket of a waistcoat made of packing felt, which certainly had not emerged from the hands of a tailor, he plucked a string, at the end of which hung a halfpenny bearing the effigy of King George.
“A true curiosity now, and a capital, in order to recommence business if the worldwide torment comes to an end one day, one way or another. Personally, Monsieur, I was surprised in Vienna by the tempest and driven all the way here, I don’t know how...soldier enrolled by force by the enemy, prisoner, driver of automobile trucks, explosives worker, ditch-digger, maltreated, starving, tracked a little everywhere, but always escaping, by great good luck, the supreme catastrophe.”
“Mr. Howard Gibson, American billionaire, and Mr. Bob Hatfield, American infantry major.”
The major, dressed in furry pelts, had both legs wrapped up in old rags, but I could see that he was missing an eye. He laughed at me without saying anything, revealing a big gap in his jaw and an enormous gash across his face.
The American billionaire bowed. I glimpsed the long face of an Uncle Sam who had allowed his beard to grow in complete liberty. The billionaire did not look very cheerful, and beneath an old frayed overcoat, I perceived a wooden leg.
“Billionaire?” said Mr. Gibson, trying to force a smile. “That doesn’t prevent me from digging in all my pockets, which are full of holes, in search of a fetish like Mr. Arbydian’s.”
“A billionaire in America, all the same, and that’s something...”
“If I could go there! Any then, what state would I find it in, our America? You don’t know, and me neither.”
“But what are you doing here?” I asked.
“Ah,” said the Dane, “that’s a long story. Mr. Gibson made his billions furnishing cannons, shells, tanks, and so on, in the course of the first war. And wanting to make noble use of that fortune made by war, he disembarked in Europe as soon as hostilities ended, with the intention of adding a considerable wing to the Palace of Peace constructed in 1908 by the American Carnegie, and a Museum of the Horrors of War. All his plans were ready, and his collections already assembled...”
“That was a very noble idea!”
“Yes, and Mr. Gibson was passing on to its execution when the second war broke out. He was in The Hague to hurry the work along and to follow, at the same time, the sessions of a great International Pacifist Congress organized by German intellectuals and Social Democrats. You know the…but no, I’m forgetting that you don’t know how the second war started...
“This is how it went: the Boches, who hadn’t been flattened completely enough, whose war factories hadn’t been fundamentally demolished, nor their machines, materiel and chiefs removed, suddenly threw themselves one vile morning on Holland. Aggression by sea, by land and by air! At the same time there were other attacks by the Swiss and elsewhere...but let’s not bother with that, and stay in The Hague with Mr. Gibson. He was at the Peace Congress. Interesting session; a sensational speech had been announced by a famous German philosopher, but that day, our German intellectuals weren’t in attendance. Suddenly, a coup de théâtre even more sensational than the advertised discourse: bombs falling from the sky, Zeppelins, Gothas and Fokkers, a rain of incendiary, asphyxiant and lachrymogenic shells...
“The Congress is badly hit; the session hall collapses. At the same time, we learn about the capture of Flessingue by Boche submarines, the forcing of the Helder, the bombardment of Harlem, the capture of Rotterdam, etc., etc. Personally, Mr. Gibson lost a leg. He found himself stuck in The Hague, a hostage of the Germans, who were able to amputate it, and a substantial part of his fortune at the same time. And Mr. Gibson only escaped from The Hague last year, after a great many tribulations.”
Mr. Gibson sighed. The poor billionaire’s misfortune had troubled me, but without giving me time to draw breath, the Dane resumed his introductions.
“Maître Saladin. Captain of infantry, previously a notary in a town in Flanders, alas, even more ravaged than him!”
A fit of coughing responded from a mask that inclined. I perceived a man so thin that his garment, a kind of long stiff sack, almost forming a dressing gown, seemed empty—and beneath it, another wooden leg.
A strange captain, and an even stranger notary.
“Monsieur Bustamente, lieutenant in the Peruvian infantry...”
“Peruvian!” I exclaimed. “There are Peruvian infantry in this war!”
“But yes, Monsieur, after we helped Brazil to recover the province of Sao Paolo, proclaimed a German Grand Duchy in 1924, and fought two campaigns on the Panamanian border against Boche guerillas from Mexico...”
“What?”
“Yes, and Monsieur Bustamente is one of the rare officers of a brave Peruvian regiment crushed by mines at the siege of Hamburg in 1926... Well, if you’re surprised to see a Peruvian with us, what will you say when I’ve introduced you to Mr. Archibald Felton, volunteer in the New Zealand Grenadiers, wounded in a mountain skirmish…in Switzerland, during the defense of a pass in the vicinity of Porrentruy! Mr. Felton fell into the hands of the Boches, was able to escape from prison in Germany after three years of the most miserable existence...”
Mute with astonishment, I could only stare at the Peruvian and the New Zealander, while uttering hoarse exclamations in the depths of my mask.
“Don’t splutter,” the doctor continued. “This is Mohammed Bamakou, born on the banks of the Niger, a sergeant in the Senegalese Rifles; Monsieur Konang. the son of a mandarin from Hué, if you please, an officer in the Annamite Rifles; and finally, to return to Europe, Monsieur Jollimay, a professor at the University of Geneva, a soldier in the Helvetic Mountain Artillery; and Monsieur Vandermolen, from Harlem, a ship-owner whose last vessel sank a long time ago, but who weeps above all for the destruction of his home town of Harlem and the loss of his tulip collection.”
Successively, the men thus introduced had raised their masks slightly, and I had been able to distinguish their features. I glimpsed the New Zealander momentarily: a fellow about thirty years old, not at all the tattooed Kanak that I had been expecting. The Senegalese rifleman was a tall fellow of the purest black. The son of the Annamite mandarin I had mistaken for a woman because of his stature, his beardless faced and his small Asiatic eyes. The Swiss artilleryman was a bony fellow of at least forty-five, with long arms and legs, thin features and a benevolent and frank expression.
“This gathering of the most diverse races troubles you a little; that ought to allow you to begin to comprehend the extent to which the worldwide catastrophe has shaken up, mixed up and pulverized its peoples! But I haven’t finished the introductions. There are still two ladies, whom I kept till last; they’re compatriots of yours.”
Indeed, we still had another two companions in our hole. I say two companions because I could see hardly any difference between those ladies and the other refugees. I have mentioned that the garments of both sexes no longer had either form or color. With the masks, all were alike. Only the stature and a certain suppleness in their attitudes could allow their sex to be vaguely divined.
And their footwear! That truly lacked elegance; those ladies, like their companions, were shod in scraps of leather and canvas stitched together with thread or strips of cloth, as one might have seen on the most wretched tziganes in the most miserable land of the Orient.
“Madame Vitalis and Mademoiselle Vitalis,” the Dane continued. “Two Parisiennes, one of whom, I believe, has never seen Paris…or very little! Their adventure is worth being narrated to you in detail, but I’m a little out of breath. Know only that in nineteen-something-or-other, Madame Vitalis, whose husband was a young lieutenant in the infantry, went with her daughter, born at the beginning of the first war, to see her husband on the Belgian front, and at the same time to transport woolen socks and sandals to her twelve godsons in the trenches....”
“Pardon?”
“The ladies will explain it to you later8... Know, then, that Madame Vitalis arrived, unfortunately, just as a gigantic offensive was commencing along the entire front. Caught in the gears, she had to follow all the troop movement with a field hospital: advances, retreats, breakthroughs, charges, attacks and counter-attacks. Completely cut off from Paris, Madame Vitalis finally wound up, still with her daughter, in a village on the Belgian coast, packed off with the wounded.
“She stayed there for some time, while the distant battle carried off her husband, who had become a captain, a commandant and a colonel. She found him again one day, however, in a field hospital, wounded and almost dying. She cared for him, healed him, and lost him again shortly thereafter, forever this time, for one can be sure that he perished in the great attack on the retrenched Krupp camp, near Essen.
“Madame Vitalis and her daughter, after many other tribulations, ended up finding shelter, like us, in the caverns of Harlem, to which we shall go in a few minutes, when the danger has truly passed.”
I was astounded, and I lowered my mask in order to press my forehead, for fear that it might burst. Someone told me that the gas mask ought to be maintained, like an extremely precious possession. But how could I stop the tumultuous gallop of my thoughts in my poor head? How could I master my nerves again, and rediscover the strength to question and reason, in order to try to understand? How many fabulous upheavals I had been enabled to glimpse by that strange gathering in a burrow beneath the dunes of Holland, of people of such diverse origins, specimens of races so scantly related, swept there by the frightful torment!
IV. The Doctor lands a few explanatory hammer-blows on my head.
It took me nearly three-quarters on an hour to recover somewhat from so many successive shocks; I felt, in consequence, a veritable mental collapse.
I must have appeared pitiful, wedged between the Dane and the young man from Polynesia. I bowed my head, but my mask could not stifle my sighs completely. I had been dreaming recklessly, and for such a long time, of the intoxication of the return to European soil, to a civilized country!
Huddled in my hole, my eyes closed, all those dreams passed before my mind’s eyes again, involuntarily. And I no longer knew...
Come on! Let’s see, am I going mad? Or am I dead already?
I was recalled to reality, first of all, by distant detonations, and then by the pangs of my stomach. I was hungry, therefore I was alive.
“What time does one eat lunch here?” I asked my neighbor, the Dane, abruptly, without really knowing what I was saying.
The Dane seemed stupefied. “Lunch?” he said. “You’re hungry?”
“Well, we haven’t eaten anything since yesterday evening, and it must be two or three o’clock in the afternoon, it seems to me. We’ve passed through terrible emotions, which have hollowed out…”
“That’s a pity, but we don’t have anything to offer you. No food at all! We were on a hunting expedition, trying to find some...”
“No one eats lunch any more, and no one eats dinner,” said the professor-artilleryman from Geneva. “One eats when one can, when one has the luck to get one’s hands on something that can almost serve as nourishment...”
“It’s just a habit to acquire,” said the Peruvian.
They were jolly, the joys of return! I certainly pulled a terrible face behind my mask, and I uttered a sigh of desolation that ended in a furious growl.
In order to try to forget my hunger, I started to interrogate the Dane again.
“My dear doctor,” I said, “you’ve made the introductions; now I that know these gentlemen and these ladies, I’d be glad also to know to whom I owe my life—for it was definitely you who hurled yourself upon me first, in order to tip me into this burrow sheltered from the gas...”
“I told you, I’m a wretched man of science, a physician, doctor of natural sciences, something of a chemist; my name is Eric Christiansen, of Copenhagen. Among all the enormous fatalities through which we struggle blindly, destiny has rolled me as harshly as my unfortunate associates. My story is no less somber than theirs. In 1920 I was on campaign as a major attached to a regiment of Danish cavalry, first in Jutland—a rude campaign; then, transported to Italy, I took part in the retaking of Dalmatia from the Bolsheviko-Boches, the march on Vienna and the Bohemian campaign. I passed through Rumania, and then defended Constantinople against the Turco-Bulgaro-Austro…I don’t know, exactly. I found myself in Poland thereafter, with a Portuguese corps, and then…I don’t know any longer...
“Time passed; sometimes we stopped, white and frozen trench against white and frozen trench, during interminable winters. Finally, one day…it was in Silesia…half-frozen and half-burned in an explosion in one of our subterranean forts, three-quarters stunned by the collapse, I found myself a German prisoner. Then there was the prison camp, the forced labor, like all the prisoners, military or civilian, picked up in the lands occupied by the enemy or merely passed through by them. As I was a doctor, they naturally assigned me to making munitions...”
“What? Munitions?”
“Yes—chemical and medical munitions.”
“Eh? What?”
“Chemical munitions—you’ve just sampled a little: a feeble specimen; poison gases. That’s already an old game, but medical munitions…I hope you don’t make their acquaintance, although it’ll be very difficult to avoid it. Anyway, you’ll probably see when the occasion arises…let’s hope, if it comes to pass, that it will be benign!”
“Thank you,” I said, rather anxiously.
“So, I was put to making medical munitions at Chimische-Essen, the pendant to the Essen of Steel, in an immense factory comprising a good five hundred armored laboratories, protected by electrified barricades...oh, well protected! At the slightest attempt to get out of the enclosure, inevitable electrocution! Don’t worry, the installation had been very carefully organized. Twelve hours work per day, with just enough nourishment not to die completely, and the harshest treatment at any protest, or the slightest appearance of ill will. Horribly dangerous work…I’ve seen unfortunate wretches, forced to handle all the viruses, collapse over their bottles, poisoned.
“What work it was! The preparation of infectious cultures, studies of ferments and viruses; breeding and pulverizing of all the microbes and bacilli susceptible of transmitting the worst diseases and causing epidemics to break out; dosage of the products of our culture broths, arrived at maturity, in order to load them into miasmatic torpedoes, bombs, canisters, bottles, tubes, pastilles, etc…
“Those medical munitions, those projectiles if every form and nature, some destined to be employed by the artillery, others, apparently more innocent, seeming to emerge from an honest pharmaceutical laboratory, destined to be sown by aviation or carried by rivers and streams, to spread typhus, tuberculosis, glanders, smallpox, anthrax, cholera, yellow fever, or unknown and mysterious epidemics... The entire medical dictionary, in sum, put in bottles in accordance with formulae studied and established by Boche science!”
“Horror of horrors!”
“Gesta diaboli per Germanos!” said Jollimay, the artilleryman-professor of history at the University of Geneva.9 “There’s no other explanation. Oh, the Germany that we admired naively and stupidly, allowing ourselves to be taken in by its false façade, camouflaged so artfully! What a humiliation it is for us, alas, to remember before the enormous monster the no less enormous candor with which we fell into the trap—along with the entire world, however... Intellectual Germany! Gretchen with the blonde hair picking the petals off the daisy of Science! For us, apart from the Hohenzollerns in the depths of Prussia, apart from a clan of hawks and militaristic Bismarckians, there was nothing but intellectual Germany, the mild, friendly and scientific Germany! And we did not perceive it, loading its cannons behind a protective curtain of suave poets and worthy bespectacled scholars, preparing its satanic arsenal, accumulating its means of aggression, murder and pillage. Blind! Blind!
“Science, like war, was its industry, that Hohenzollern Germany: militaristic and militarizing science, organized with a view to the intensive production of anything that might serve to kill, to destroy, to massacre directly or indirectly... Come to us, chemistry, physics, electricity, radioactivity, bacteriology, etc., etc…and forward march for the King of Prussia!”
“I’m a doctor, alas,” the Danish doctor added. “Well, now, I can give people diseases, but I can’t cure them. I can’t, not any longer! And, then, you remember, Jollimay, when the stock of medical munitions seemed sufficient, we were transferred to chemical munitions... Other abominations, manipulations no less dangerous, for the carboys of sulfur, the gas shells, the phosphorus shells…and the various explosives! The trinitrotoluene and the panclastite, the cresylite, the bromine, nitrogen peroxide....and the various employments of benzenes and kerosenes, and the poisoned mists, and the incendiary fogs, and all the diabolism of previously-unknown compounds, and the entire infernal dictionary of science, all the satanism of Cornu retorts,10 put in requisition and poured over the world by Germany. Gesta diaboli per Germanos!”
“May God crush them, all the instruments of that accursed science!” murmured Jollimay.
“He’s in the process of doing so,” said the doctor, grimly, “and all the rest of us with them: torturers and victims alike, we’re all going the same way. I’ve had plenty of time to reflect on the subject, in all the holes where we vegetate lugubriously. Well, I believe that God has had enough of this planet, which does him no honor, and the creature emerged from his hands, who has decidedly gone to the bad. He’s resolved to finish it and liquidate a failed operation. Once, the Bible assures us, he cleared away his work with a universal Deluge, but as God doesn’t do things twice, he’s renounced the method of water. This time, it’s by fire that he’s proceeded, by a deluge of iron and fire, and he’s confided the work to humans themselves—the humans who find an atrocious satisfaction in deploying all their ferocity, conscientious and perfected, against themselves, in a racial and planetary suicide! The tree of Science, we know only too well now, had been planted by Satan, and Adam got his hands upon it on the very first day!”
“Calm down Doctor,” said Jollimay. “You’re no longer in the Boche factory...”
“No, no, fortunately, I’m no longer there, and nor are you, Jollimay, since we got out at the same time, escaped—God knows how—on the day when three-quarters of the factory blew up after a deflagration of trinitrotoluene, which then spread layers of poisoned fog, mortal waves of corrosive air, over a radius I daren’t estimate! We were locked in our cell underground, but even with the threat, or rather certainty, of an imminent fusillade...”
“Suspicion of sabotage of several tons of a new explosive,” said the artilleryman Jollimay.
“Justified suspicion,” said the doctor, laughing behind his mask, “for we had sabotaged them quite nicely, their gas shells…and others! Infectious bombs whose ferments we had destroyed in advance, bottles of bacilli carefully spoiled, charming little beasties rendered inoffensive...”
I saw his mask stir and shudder for some time under the shocks of silent laughter.
“Our subterranean cell had saved us,” he went on. “We only had to push the door, dislocated by the explosion, and risk ourselves outside, prudently, when it seemed to us that the racket had calmed down. What ravages in the factory of death! But what joy for us! It was sufficient for us to pick up coats and helmets to give us the appearance of Boches, and slip away through the fogs with our masks on—no one could recognize us!
“Six months of traveling across unknown country, ravaged lands...and without a map or a compass, relying on luck to get us all the way to the allied lines...and we ended up, after getting turned around, trying all sorts of directions, always running into obstacles, lying flat in certain places, pursued and tracked, finally to end up here, all together, our group having grown somewhat on the way, swelled by the friends you see assembled, fugitives like us, encountered in equally sorry states, escaped like us from various places and tracked like us. We’ve associated our miseries...”
“In order to try to get out some day, I don’t know when, or how,” Jollimay declared. “There has to be an end to all this diabolism—there has to be!”
The doctor shook his head sadly. “There are two more of us now,” he said, extending his hand to me and the young man from Polynesia.
V. Four wooden legs and a few other snags.
“There’s no more danger—we can take off our masks,” said the Peruvian lieutenant, who had ventured outside the burrow.
“At last!” I exclaimed, “Help me to undo it—I’m stifling underneath it, with that horrible odor of I don’t know what.”
“A mixture of hyposulfite, ammonia and various other products—it smells bad but it’s indispensable. You’ll get used to it, the mask—sometimes it’s necessary to keep them on for entire days.”
Everyone had unmasked, with a visible satisfaction, and we were finally able really to make the acquaintance of the people who had saved our lives—the young man from Polynesia and me. For three or four hours, in our hole, we had been confronted by creatures of nightmare, phantoms with the faces of fantastic beasts. Once we were rid of our hideous hoods, I found them all benevolent faces, very sad but genuinely sympathetic, and I shook hands all round.
Monsieur Bustamente, the Peruvian lieutenant, was a sun-tanned fellow of thirty-five or forty with hair already going white; Monsieur Gomares, the Spanish businessman, whom I had thought very stout, was, on the contrary, thin, with a wrinkled face and neck. He was a formerly obese individual thinned down by the disagreeable life that he had to lead in the burrows to Holland. Only the various sacks of coarse cloth that served him as clothing gave him a false bulk.
Also formerly obese, Maître Saladin the notary-captain, doubly invalid, having lost one arm and one leg, seemed to have kept in spite of everything a certain joviality, for, seeing my gaze stay with alarm from his leg to his arm, he whispered softly into my ear: “It’s not from birth! 310 mortar, a few broken bones at a bargain price and buried under the debris—but don’t worry; pulled out three hours after the fact, just when I was beginning to get bored...”
“The Armenian Arbydian and the Rumanian businessman Manoli, both bronzed, one as curly-haired as a negro, the other with his forehead shaded by thick tresses that seemed carved from ebony, allowed the same expression of distress to ooze through their eyelashes, of Orientals disorientated under the cold sky of Holland, whereas the Senegalese rifleman appeared quite calm and relaxed. That Mohammed was a true negro; thick ruddy lips parted to reveal a formidable set of bright white teeth, his broad smile contrasting with the funereal aspect of most of the others. His eyes gazed at the Danish doctor with an expression of tranquil obedience, ready to do anything at the slightest signal.
The Annamite was ageless; I hesitated between forty-five and fifty years. Certain wrinkles at the corners of his moth made me incline toward the latter figure. I thought he looked intelligent and distinguished, with a certain arrogance. Remaking the introduction, the doctor told me that he was the son of a mandarin, and had graduated from the École Centrale de Paris in the class of 1915.
The artilleryman-professor Jollimay, the New Zealander Felton and the aviator Miraud were very thin, and so was the Dutch ship-owner Vandermolen, in contrast to the common run of burgers of his race. Everyone in the burrow had hollow and fatigued features, but those most of all.
The physique of the two Vitalis ladies was no more copious. In the young woman it might have passed for the slimness of youth, but for her mother it was a circumstantial thinness, like that of the Spanish merchant—which is to say, contrary to her nature, due to the deplorable kind of existence that events had forced them all to lead.
But where had my eyes been? In my disturbance, under the sledgehammer blows of the successive revelations, I had not noticed that Madame Vitalis, like the American billionaire, had a wooden leg. As she saluted with her head and upper body during the introduction, with the fine manners of long ago, I heard a dry click, and saw a wooden pillar scraping the ground lightly.
That made three wooden legs in the little troop. That was already a lot, but in his turn, Monsieur Jollimay, the artilleryman-professor from Geneva extended a leg of bizarre appearance. A fourth pillar! On looking harder, I perceived that the Senegalese rifleman was wearing an iron hook at the end of his right sleeve. Then again, the aviator Miraud was missing an arm...
What else? I examined my companions around me. The Spanish businessman had lost an eye. What that really all?
Madame Vitalis, perceiving my gaze obstinately returning, involuntarily, to the wooden stump projecting from her skirt—frayed and ornamented, if one might put it like that, with numerous pieces of cloth in overly various shades—pulled the pillar back inside, blushing.
Poor lady! Coquetry still, in this cellar under the ruins!
Dr. Christiansen noticed the movement. “My dear Madame Vitalis,” he said, “don’t hide that piece of wood. Doesn’t each of us bear the marks of the savage beast’s fury? Yours was a shell-burst received in a field hospital bombarded and set ablaze. A war wound—a glorious wound!”
Oh yes, all those unfortunates retained the traces of the teeth and claws of the diabolical beast!
Decidedly, I had returned from the Pole at a bad time, and landed in a sorry place.
Let us hope that we’ll find something better further along, and that, notwithstanding the amiability of these good people and their benevolent dispositions in our regard, that we shall remain in this dangerous country for as little time as possible.
The most ravaged of all, in terms of physiology as well as aspect, was the poor Dane, Dr. Christiansen, my savior. I had not expected that funereal, devastated face with hollow cheeks, and haggard eyes profoundly sunk in their orbits: a lamentable face, completed by a drooping moustache and a white beard, a wrinkled forehead and a cranium like yellowed ivory, completely devoid of hair.
“Yes, we can risk ourselves outside,” he said. “The layer of gas has been blown away, and will be lost at sea. We’re all hungry, and we need to find some food before nightfall. We had come out to search for food supplies for Monsieur’s house when we spotted you. Our provisions there are exhausted, and we need to take something back...”
“What?” I asked, slightly anxiously.
“Don’t worry. Hunting, fishing and horticulture will, I hope, furnish us with something to give you for dinner tonight. Oh, very frugally—I beg you in advance to excuse us; our resources are exceedingly thin...”
We emerged from the refuge, and I rediscovered the landscape of devastation and ruins that had caused me such surprise after my first steps on European soil: crushed houses, scattered in heaps of stones and bricks, mingled with charred beams and twisted metal; disrupted terrains, enormous fissures whose origin I could not explain.
“Let’s see—where are we, exactly?”
“I’ve told you—in the suburbs of Harlem.”
“Harlem is over there, look, to the right” the Dutch ship-owner told me, in bad French, which he mingled with phrases incomprehensible to me, “and over here, you see, Monsieur...” He tapped the ground with is wooden leg. “This was my garden, where my fields of tulips were, my bloementiunen…if you had seen them, those rows of flowers, orange, violet, yellow, red…splendid, Monsieur, splendid! I’d paid as much as thousands of florins for certain rare bulbs. And you see, it was here...
“I’ve been able to save a few precious bulbs, which I cultivate in well-sheltered spots. Look, I keep four bulbs on me, in order to be sure of not losing them; once, I wouldn’t have sold them for ten thousand florins, and now, what sadness, one of these days we’ll be obliged to make soup with them, in order not to lose everything! Look, here are the ruins of the little windmill that pumped up the water for irrigation. The hole where we were just now was the cellar of my gardener’s house; it’s still solid, I was right not to skimp on its construction. It’s a good refuge, as you’ve been able to judge...”
“I can’t see Harlem,” I said.
“Because you’re looking for monuments…they’re leveled, the Groot Kerke, the Stadthuis, the Museum…all of them! It’s over there, in the direction of those cut trees; yes, that’s it—there are lines of trenches made with the debris of the houses of the outlying districts. Behind those is the town…somewhat damaged...”
“We’ll be going there shortly,” said the doctor. “We live in one of the best houses, and we’ll offer you hospitality. Presently, it’s our dinner that it’s necessary to find...”
“I’m anxious about our salad vegetables,” said the son of the mandarin from Hué.
I looked at the vegetation on a bank, bizarrely withered and discolored. It had not been like that before. And the wild plants that had invaded the former squares of the tulip garden and covered the rubble everywhere with their vigorous shoots had lost their color.
“It’s the gases that have passed over them,” said Monsieur Vandermolen desolately. “Everything’s withered.”
While our companions dispersed in every direction, the doctor led the ladies, the young man from Polynesia and me toward the entrance to the opening of a trench, which was certainly several years old. We suddenly arrived before immense crevasses carpeted in places by vegetation. Some were very deep and pathways extended over their slopes, all the way to depths filled with yellow pools.
“Mine craters,” the doctor relied to my mute interrogation. “There was a siege six years ago, when Harlem was retaken by the Boches. It made well-sheltered gardens; this is ours. We try to grow a few vegetables there. Alas, today’s gas has spoiled everything—our poor salad vegetables are lost! Here, look at them...”
Indeed, on one of the slopes there were tufts of verdure that ought to have been lettuces, but seemed reddened and burnt.
The young woman had run into a fissure in the crater. The remains of a tunnel opened there—a black shaft into which I would not have ventured willingly. She soon came out with a large wicker basket, which her mother filled with the least sickly salad vegetables.
“Our potatoes look promising. The gas hasn’t done them too much harm. In six weeks, if nothing bad happens, we can start digging them up. The artichokes look beautiful—it’s precious, the artichoke; it grows anywhere!”
We went back up with our harvest. Madame Vitalis’ wooden leg clicked on the pebbles of the crater. We walked for some time, climbing over heaps of rubble, stumbling into depths and following the guts of trenches.
The young woman made us take a detour; she had discovered two or three partly-broken plum trees sheltered in a hole, and wanted to see if there were any ripe plums. We picked a dozen, which went into the basket to join the vegetables.