Part Two: The Age of Burrows

 

 

I. One epidemic more or less.

 

A week! I gave myself that interval, which I thought very large, to finish the last preparations for our escape, and if I can believe my notebook, if I haven’t forgotten to mark a day on the little calendar I’ve improvised, it’s now seventy-three days that I’ve been living in Harlem, in Monsieur Vandermolen’s basements, with all the companions who have become my friends.

And seventy-three very busy days, well furnished with incident, filled with emotions, and with a few new anguishes into the bargain!

We’ve had a few alarms during those seventy-three days. A shell demolished our chimney, but the American billionaire, who is very dexterous, was able to repair the damage. Five or six layers of deleterious miasmas of various sorts have passed over us.

One night, we nearly all perished. The gases were fabulously lacrymogenic. I wept all the tears in my body; it seems to me that I’ll never again be able to shed the smallest one in the chagrins to come. Another time, Madame Vitalis, having adjusted her mask poorly, found herself badly intoxicated, and was in danger for a long week.

Afterwards, we were inconvenienced by infectious shrapnel fired from the first Boche lines, in advance of The Hague. They brought us typhus. There were a great many sick people in the town—by which I mean in the holes, in all the shelters under the heaps of rubble that represent the town of Harlem—and no medicines with which to treat them. The doctor ran around everywhere, but there was a very anxious moment in confrontation with the development of the epidemic.

We avoid going into the town, enclosing ourselves in our cellar, only going out for food supplies in the direction of the dunes. When the weather is good, we gladly spend our days in the midst of excavations of varying profundity, the labyrinth of holes and grassy knolls taking the place of Monsieur Vandermolen’s old tulip garden or the ruins of the windmill that one raised water for its irrigation.

Oh, those gardens! They’ve been terribly watered by shells of all calibers; there were long battles here in the early days of the second war, and in certain places it’s necessary to refrain from touching the ground, for many of the combatants are asleep under all these tumuli, more or less disrupted by the projectiles and invaded by weeds that are covering the remains of crosses.

The epidemic seems to have spared us. The doctor isn’t sparing himself. He does everything he can, but the struggle is very difficult without medicines. Pastors, a few priests and people of good will are devoting themselves heroically to helping the sick, trying to save those whose organisms offer sufficient resistance to the scourge—and bury those who succumb.

Fortunately, according to the doctor, the epidemic isn’t very serious. It’s not like a previous epidemic, four years ago, that made terrible ravages in Amsterdam, Harlem and Delft, and probably elsewhere, claiming thousands of victims in those towns alone.

It seems that the scourge is evolving somewhat; it no longer presents the same characteristics; there are modifications and attenuations in the symptoms and the effects. The doctor attributes these favorable changes to various causes: an attenuation of the toxicity of the microbes because of their great diffusion, or the multiplication of other more or less virulent microbes and the struggle established between them; and then a sort of semi-vaccination acquired by the population, hardened by the kind of existence that they’ve been leading for so long, becoming refractory even to viruses.

Nevertheless, according to the doctor’s own estimates, I know that this benign epidemic has already killed three or four hundred people in the drastically reduced population of the town. We learned from one poor fellow escaped from the German trenches at The Hague that typhus is also rife among the brigands, with almost the same diminished gravity as here.

The doctor has no fear for himself; he had typhus in Silesia, and is now immune to it. We see very little of him. In order not to risk bring the scourge to us, he sleeps at the end of the garden, in the remains of a old stable. Our other companions aren’t afraid; they’ve seen many other scourges and maladies; they declare that they too have been fundamentally vaccinated.

One morning however, there was an alarm among us. Marcel Blondeau, very valiant, very active, and, by virtue of the demands of a twenty-year-old’s appetite, always disposed to run off into the dunes in search of some nourishment—rabbits, rats, vegetables or fish—felt very ill.

The doctor came to see him, and seemed dissatisfied.

“Fresh organism,” he said to me, taking me to one side. “The boy arrived here from a healthy country, free of all our scourges, falling on to ground saturated with horrors, swarming with bacilli, carrying into his veins all the poisons that a frightfully soiled and polluted atmosphere can contain. He can’t present the same resistance as the poor Europeans who are still surviving, for the moment, so many opportunities to die, natural and scientific. We’re mithridated, so to speak, by habituation to the scourges, accustomed to breathing and vegetating in the midst of all the abominations distilled so abundantly on all sides by the satanism of accursed Science. I have a fear fears for him…and for you too, who arrived with the same freshness from a fortunate and tranquil land, perfectly healthy, for at the Pole, you had nothing at all to fear from everything that we suffer. Oh, why the devil did you quit those pleasant Polar lands?”

He caused a cold chill to pass down my back by looking at me an examining me very closely.

“No headache? Let’s see, no pink patches on your skin? No…at least, not yet...”

“You’re not very reassuring, you know, doctor!”

“That’s because I’ve seen pink patches on our young friend’s epidermis which have taken away the last doubts. He has typhus, damn it! Beware of contagion!”

The patient was isolated, very near to the doctor, in the corner of an old automobile garage, almost as comfortable as a coal-hole; and Madame Vitalis took her chair into it in order to keep vigil with the doctor. We had grave fears for several days. The doctor didn’t prognosticate, but when we interrogated him we could tell from his reticence that the boy was gravely afflicted.

Madame Vitalis cared for him with a great deal of devotion—or, rather, nursed him, for deprived of any pharmacy, there was nothing much we could do against the disease. Her daughter was perpetually running to the fields and the dunes, hunting for herbs requested by the doctor for miscellaneous anodyne tisanes, since he didn’t have anything better to wage war against the malady.

The young woman, who hadn’t previously shown any fear of the epidemic, was utterly distressed and demoralized; her eyes were perpetually imploring the doctor, and when he came back from seeing Marcel she bombarded him with anxious questions—but without ever naming the young man.

“And how is our invalid, Doctor? Has he slept? What of your anxieties yesterday evening? You don’t fear for our invalid any longer, do you, Doctor?”

I believed, however, that the two young people had quarreled, since Marcel, ravaged by jealousy, had previously shown poor Jeanne an almost hostile coldness, to which she had responded with an affectation of perfect indifference.

And now, what desolation and anxiety! In the end, the resistant strength of youth and the young man’s mental vigor reckoned with the attack. Madame Vitalis came back to us, in the common room, with her face almost joyful.

“Well,” I demanded, “Is there hope?”

“He’s saved! The doctor is rubbing his hands and he’s gone into town to visit other patients. By the way, it’s said that there’s cholera now...”

“Cholera! And you announce that calmly!”

“Yes, cholera—like last year, the malady has begun very quietly, in the Melkbrug district, where there are little canals obstructed by ruins, and stagnant water...”

“Bah!” said the aviator Miraud, who was coming back from the dunes with two rabbits in a sack. “We’ve seen many others. By taking a few little precautions, we’ll get through your cholera.”

The American billionaire was in the midst of discussions with Mademoiselle Vitalis regarding the repair of his single shoe—he only had one leg—which resembled a Mohican moccasin in a poor state, more like what we would have called a sock prior to 1914. He shrugged his shoulders with a perfectly indifferent expression. Jeanne Vitalis smiled. She had suddenly recovered her gaiety.

“One epidemic more or less,” she said, “is of no importance.”

The worthy Senegalese rifleman rolled his eyes and showed all his teeth in a broad silent laugh. “Boche cholera’s worn out now,” he said. “I don’t care about that.”

So be it—let’s treat these plagues with scorn and think about something else—for example, of getting away from here as soon as possible. “I want to go home, damn it!” I repeat every day it the doctor, who replies with his usual pessimism.

“Home my dear Monsieur? Do you even know whether anything is left of your ‘home?’ Perhaps your apartment, your house, and your entire quarter are in an even worse state than this superb family home, the patrimonial manor of our friend Vandermolen—which is to say, the heap of broken ruins in which we’ve organized our precarious existence.”

A scarcely agreeable perspective! However, the terrible doctor is a little less somber and bitter at the moment, because he’s very busy. He runs to his patients, he agitates, he lavishes petty cares or soothing words on them for want of medicines, or brutalizes them, in accordance with circumstances, in order to rebuilt their morale. While doing that, he spends less time devoting himself to despair, and forgets to roar his wrath and maledictions.

He laughed sarcastically while making me glimpse such awful possibilities for the peaceful apartment that I loved to describe to him in our conversations when, bleak and weary, we went back to our cavern.

Monsieur Jollimay and Maître Saladin laughed too, looking at one another.

“Your peaceful apartment!” said Maître Saladin. “Yes, yes, perhaps—continue to hope, that’s not forbidden to you…as it is to me for my study! Where is it, my poor study? In what state? More damaged than I am, my second clerk told me, when I met him in Bavaria in a village we’d just taken. He was able to inform me about my study. He was in the air force, my second clerk; one day, three or four years ago, patrolling on the western front near here he was able to make a detour to fly over the area. He circled and circled, at a low altitude looking for our poor study…impossible to discover it, to recognize the street, or even the neighborhood. The entire region in little pieces, in smithereens! And I had a major affair in progress—the liquidation of an important inheritance: a magnificent Renaissance château in the area, superb estate, woods, farms, etc. But I think the château, converted to a strong position, was bombarded for eighteen months. Oh, my minutes, my poor minutes!”

“Perhaps your second clerk didn’t see very clearly, or didn’t search very hard,” I said to him, in a low voice. “Listen—what if we were to go to see for ourselves, try to get out of here…?”

Maître Saladin shook his head.

 

II. Excursions and Reconnaissance

 

I go out every day with a few of my companions in the refuge. I’ve explored the surroundings with them, usually circulating in the trenches that are dug more or less everywhere, and which replace roads on the surface, long since disappeared under rubble or invading vegetation.

In order to formulate a plan of campaign I study the routes, trying to obtain dome notion of the facilities or difficulties and the eventual perils—in brief, everything that I might find before me in such and such a direction.

The ruins of villages, almost all dating back several years have a less lamentable appearance than that of the own; nature has rehabilitated them more fully, dressed and ornamented them. Sometimes, we pass the cadaver of a farm or a hamlet, collapsed in the course of some frightful drama and one might think that they were cheerful and verdant hillocks where children go to play among the flowers, picking poppies or strawberries. Sometimes we discover a path where one might expect to see young girls emerging from beneath the foliage, singing, and that path leads to some tumulus planted with hundreds of wooden crosses, keeling over, bearing effaced inscriptions, covered in brushwood, under which one also glimpses shells, old rusty helmets, the debris of weapons...

Where are they, those village girls that I imagine pink and pretty underneath their Dutch plaits, in their old brightly colored picturesque costumes? Where are the insouciant children? Yes, where are they all, alas?

I sometimes perceive inhabitants; I see them coming out of holes underneath the ruins, or burrows similar to the one where we were collected after our disembarkation: people with wan faces, clad in raged costumes, advancing prudently, with anxious expressions, their hands clutching old weapons adapted as clubs. They go forth like us, in search of more or less bizarre game; they head toward some square of ground spared in the genera devastation, where they grow vegetables, the precious potatoes, onion, turnips and carrots, awaited by their families or their companions left behind in the refuges, hidden in the woods or under the ruins.

In such encounters we look at one another suspiciously, one calls out from a distance before approaching. I also interrogate, asking questions, in quest of news; I’d so much like to know what is happening elsewhere, beyond our narrow horizon. Of news, there is none. No one knows anything; everyone stays confined in his hole, hiding like a hunted animal, only trying to live and to endure.

And in the city—in what we persist in calling the city—it’s the same. People live in families or in groups in old solid cellars, which have so far resisted them bombardments, and have often been consolidated by beams and heaps of rubble or sacks of earth. Some quarters, more maltreated than others, are entirely deserted, while the population has concentrated in better protected places, leaving the excessively ruined ruins to packs of dogs and wild cats, thin, bristling and hungry, always hunting and always tracked themselves by hunters with empty bellies.

The human faculty of adaptation is extraordinary, of people living in these deplorable conditions, always under the threat of worse catastrophes, at peril from shells and bombs, collapses, poisoning by gas, maladies and plagues that the world no longer knew, with the dread of famine as well—ever-imminent famine, always possible with brief delay if everyone, in the quotidian struggle for nourishment, doesn’t do his utmost in the perpetual effort to keep going as best they can. And I observe that they seem to consider that wretched day-to-day existence as entirely natural, and don’t appear to be astonished or indignant at all. They only think about the danger at the moment it materializes; the rest of the time, I believe, they don’t think about anything except the pursuit of their daily bread.

What am I saying, bread? There has been no more bread for a long time, since there are no more wheat-fields and no more agriculture. Bread has been replaced by potatoes, which everyone tries to produce in the gardens that are shared between all the available arms, in all the accessible terrains, vague fields and old public promenades.

It’s the triumph of ingenious people, of practical people, and above all of those who possessed, before the great torment, a little knowledge of gardening.

The families of the bourgeois class, in general, the former rich, the people with strong-boxes filed with the title-deeds of income from Estates, of shares that were said to be absolutely safe, have fallen, along with those derisory pieces of paper to the utmost degree of poverty, and are vegetating awkwardly and lamentably in their devastated homes, while the poor devils once devoid of cash are making their way in the new world with more facility. The rich men of today are those who possess a goat or two, or well-protected chickens, precious resources in case of bad days, but over which it is necessary to maintain very careful surveillance, for fear of the envious and hungry marauders.

And those worthy people don’t moan about the misfortunes of the times, and don’t make a fuss about an emission of asphyxiating gas or one epidemic more or less; they try to keep apart, to protect themselves from and against everything, and to live—to live in spite of the accumulation of impossibilities. I scarcely see anyone except the doctor, who doesn’t accept these new conditions of existence, without perpetual protest.

“Well, yes, my dear Monsieur, you’re up to date now. You know as much as I do. You find it jolly, our super-civilized existence, eh? Come on, though, stick out that tongue so that I can see it…not bad. And no headache? That’s good, you’ll avoid the typhus. Anyway, the epidemic is decreasing, petering out! Yes, yes, you see here all Europe in miniature. The same thing everywhere, Monsieur, and the same pleasures!”

“What stupefies me,” I say, “is to see these populations, the peasants, the ravaged villages, the mariners of the coast, as well as the inhabitants of that wretched ruined city, showing such a perfect resignation—or, rather, a tranquil acceptance of their dire lot!”

“Can they do otherwise? It’s necessary. Flee? Seek to go elsewhere? Where, if you please? In the beginning, yes, there was many an exodus of population, bewildered flights from the unleashed Teutonic hordes, fearful of ravages and barrages, under the hail of explosives and he sheets of gas, extinguishing life everywhere in front of the invading troops. But now, where would they go? Flee through all the dangers? Why? To find oneself somewhere else, further away, no matter where, in exactly the same situation? As futile as it is impossible! Better to stay in one’s shelter, and try to endure, with difficulty, scratching the earth to maintain one’s life...”

“If that existence is really worth the trouble...”

“Well, well, you’re in a black mood—are you becoming a somber pessimist too? I told you so! My good Monsieur, examine the state of Europe, only to think about her—look at the picture! Europe! Do you remember the photographs of the Moon, which showed us a world in demolition, a soil covered in holes, in brittle and crumbling craters? Well, if there are astronomers on the Moon, that’s exactly what they must see here now! Undoubtedly, the Moon has passed through the same horrors as us; there will have been some race of prey there, lunatic Boches to devastate everything and turn everything upside-down, to the extent of complete and definitive extinction.

“In our devastated Europe there’s no longer anything but trenches. Those trenches, zigzagging across all countries, furrowing, cutting, slicing and crosshatching plains and mountains, have been, for a long time already, the sole fashion of laboring that the poor earth has known European! The fronts—I don’t say armies; there are no more armies, but entire peoples under arms—the fronts penetrate one another and become entangled, friends and enemies all mixed up, pell-mell. Gradually, they’ve formed islets of a sort, more or less vast; regions of resistance and combat, around a center of war factories, in a state to function more or less actively. The old war materiel, with which the carnage commenced, having been used up long ago, they fabricated improvised materiel as best they can; then it was necessary to have recourse to untried methods, to engines of war entirely new, especially chemical and miasmatic. The modern Bellona was Science, that slut Science! Oh, the frightful visage of the scientific Bellona!”

He went on. He had already repeated all that to me; I knew the picture: the devastated and depopulated countries, the surviving populations crammed together or heaped up in regions forming vast entrenched camps of a sort; war everywhere, danger everywhere, from one end of Europe to the other! Cities destroyed, vast chaotic and desert extents, abandoned fields returned to the wild state, or rather, rendered uncultivable...

Frightful explosives, a hundred thousand infernal volcanoes, have ravaged everything at certain particularly disputed and assailed points, where nothing subsists, neither an intact tree nor a standing section of wall—not even the appearance of houses or edifices. The very soil is burned, corroded and cracked.

Aerial squadrons traverse the skies in rapid flights, bombarding with chemical grenades anything that allows itself to be glimpsed. Death comes, precipitated, rising or falling everywhere.

So it’s finished; humankind finds itself forced to live underground henceforth, in order to escape the diabolical engines, themselves well-hidden and buried, which sweep the ground everywhere with storms of metal, electric or paralyzing currents, corrosive clouds and asphyxiating sheets, visible or invisible, burning and mercilessly ravaging the lungs that breathe them in.

The populations that escaped, in the first years of the general war, being smashed by explosives, intoxicated by sheets of gas, canisters of mortal vapors, infernal projections of flames, acids or miasmas, have buried themselves in the soil. People live underground, hollowing out the fields as profoundly as they can, the good old once-nourishing earth; one digs through clay, through stone or through rock.

The European of today is a troglodyte almost everywhere; he has gone back all the way to the age of caves, has bored shelters under rock and carved out catacombs. I’ve seen all that in Harlem. There are strange architectures, “dug-outs” and “rat-runs” the aviator Miraud calls them. I don’t know those new terms of the art of building. People huddle together in long dark burrows, with entrances as well-concealed as possible—“camouflaged,” as the aviator puts it, once again—and inside, they nourish themselves on privations, vegetate in the pangs of hunger. By night they slip out of the burrows, cautiously, to cultivate some corner of land and plant vegetables on the slops of craters or shell-holes.

This long-distance, blind, scientific warfare, can no longer make any distinction between civilians and belligerents; everyone lives fully exposed to the same dangers, always and everywhere, in the same common infernal furnace, and I distinguish in everyone the submission to the inevitable, the resigned fatalism, that is the new and dismal form of courage.

Thus, all the treasure of civilization, all the capital of beauty heaped up by the golden centuries of the earth, is lost, smashed, crushed, along with the Arts, wealth, with thought itself.

Horror! Terror! Abomination!

 

III. Strange game, wild dogs and horses.

 

My young companion in shipwreck, Marcel Blondeau, has entered into full convalescence. The doctor had given him permission to go out and breathe the sea breeze on the dunes. He is delighted. He has gone with Madame Vitalis and Mr. Gibson, the American billionaire. Two wooden legs constitute a guarantee against the dangers of too long a walk.

The young man is overflowing with cheerful spirit. The return of health is making him see everything rose-tinted. War, massacre and famine, bombs and flames, gas and miasmas—bah! What’s all that? One has heart and solid legs again, the sun is shining…and Jeanne Vitalis’ smile is blossoming frankly again, whenever their eyes meet.

Madame Vitalis has taken a basket in order to bring back vegetables, if she can. Mr. Gibson is hoping to catch crabs on the sand, or catch a few fish on the way. One hears the two wooden legs going tick-tock over the stones of the ruins, and Marcel Blondeau, impatient, runs on ahead. I have to catch him up in order to give him his mask, which he has forgotten.

When they came back, three hours later, Madame Vitalis pulled a face, because her basket only contained a little greenery destined to be converted into spinach, and Mr. Gibson could only display a single eel of very small dimensions, two octopodes and various shellfish. But the young convalescent came back even more joyful than when he set out, and more alert. He had seen the clouds racing across the sky again, under the great breath of the breeze, and the sea sparkling green and yellow under the sun, and the fringes of foam of the yellow sand, and the verdure of the dunes dotted with flowers of every hue.

He brought back a bouquet. Oh, flowers! No one even spared them a glance; my companions gave a better welcome to the fake spinach and the eel. Marcel Blondeau was desolate.

“Bah!” said the doctor, to console him. “Do you think that a bunch of the rosiest and freshest roses, with the accompaniment of pearls of dew, would have had any great effect on the castaways of the Medusa? You don’t suppose so? Well, as I’ve already told you, we’re on the raft of the Medusa.”

Poor Marcel was welcomed more kindly when he offered his bouquet to Mademoiselle Vitalis. The young woman gladly breathed in the perfume of the flowers, which smelled most of all of the open air and the briny mists of the sea. But Marcel had something else to offer: two dozen little strawberries, which he had discovered in a sheltered hollow, doubtless an old shell-hole, behind Monsieur Vandermolen’s old gardens. It was Jeanne, again, who divided them between us all.

 

A few days later, our society was able to rejoice in two windfalls of greater importance. Firstly, it was Mohammed Bamakou, the Senegalese, who came back from a long-distance hunting expedition with the cadaver of an enormous dog over his shoulder and two geese in a sack. As he was beating the country in quest of some sort of game in the direction of the old polders reconquered by the sea since the destruction of the dykes and drainage mills, he had become game himself, attacked by a pack of hungry roaming dogs, living—as I had already had occasion to observe—by hunting.

“Fortunately,” Mohammed told us, showing us the saber-bayonet passed through his belt and the iron hook on his right hand, “I thrust into the dog-pack left-handed, and struck down from above with the right.”

He had got out of it fairly lightly, with only a few nips, and had brought back one of his assailants.

“The biggest one,” he added, with a legitimate pride. “The fattest one too—good to eat!”

My companions palpated the prey and congratulated Mohammed. The Senegalese went to skin his dog right away, and two haunches were salted in order to conserve them as provisions for the winter, since Madame Vitalis was not overstretched with regard to food supplies for the present.

“But what about these two geese, did they attack you too, Mohammed?” asked Monsieur Jollimay, when the Senegalese showed off his other catch.

Mohamed smiled. “These are wild geese that I trapped, wild geese passing through the dunes.”

“Ha ha!” went some of our companions. “Very fat, your wild geese. Mohammed always has good luck hunting!”

“Be careful, Mohammed,” said the doctor. “Hunt as much as you want, but no marauding!”

“Only pilfering,” said the Annamite smiling at Mohammed’s protestations.

The second find that fell into our laps was even bigger. Game again—but the game was a horse.

Horses galloping across deserted and uncultivated fields had already been pointed out to me, in the distance—horses that had reverted to the free and wild state of distant ages, living in groups of three or four, and living rather poorly, because they seemed rather skeletal to me. The Peruvian Lieutenant Bustamente, the New Zealander Clifton and the aviator Miraud had been promising for some time to try to capture one. To that effect they had fabricated lassos and practiced their use in the dunes, without telling anyone about their intention to consider the Dutch countryside as an Argentine pampas.

That day they had gone out hunting rats, taking their lassos just in case.

They came back late in the evening. We were beginning to get anxious about them, because we had head cannon fire in the distance, toward Leyden. Nothing fell on Harlem, though. Doubtless the Boche in The Hague were firing at the lines of Utrecht and Amsterdam, or receiving a few shells themselves.

Finally, night having fallen, utterly black, with no stars in the sky, without the slightest tiny light anywhere, we saw—or, rather, heard—our rat-hunters coming back. They were cheerful, because we could hear muffled laughter and heavy footsteps that were making stones roll. Slightly intrigued, a few of us went up into the courtyard to meet them.

“There you are,” said Monsieur Vandermolen. “How many rats?”

“Only one, but it’s a big one,” Miraud replied.

In a soft voice, to the tune of a funeral march, and bumping into rubble, he sang:

 

Behold the work of the hideous Boche.

Hideous his soul, hideous his sin.

His Kaiser vomited from the trash,

His princes born of the Devil’s kin...

 

A great black shadow appeared between two heaps of debris, drawn by the Peruvian lieutenant and driven from behind by the other two, with blows inflicted by sticks. The moon would have been useful, but it did not show its face.

Our companions’ prey was showing a marked reluctance to come into our abode, but, unceremoniously abused, it was obliged to abandon any idea of resistance.

 

Hypocrite pastors, satanic men of science

Reiters and panders all, slouching to the feast,

Meek poets singing German impenitence

At joyful carnage, slavering like beasts...

 

“Artillery horse,” said Miraud, recovering his ordinary voice. “A bit thin, but it can be fattened up. Damnation, it gave us a hard time!”

“Where did you find it?” asked the doctor.

“Over there, a long way out between the lines, toward the Palace of Peace. We lay in ambush for three or four hours in holes, at the bottom of a slope with yellowing verdure—which, we supposed, ought to be appreciated by the wild cavalry. In the end, as we were beginning to despair, five horses arrived, trotting toward the provender. That was the delicate moment—we feared being spotted in our hiding place. Then, as soon as the horses had their muzzles in the grass, we fell on them. Devilish cavalcade, pursuit, they got the bit in their teeth, and so did we…you can see the gallop from here, and the Boches could have spotted us…anyway, I’ll pass over the details; we haven’t come back empty-handed, but that’s because this big old nag was limping. With a lasso, Monsieur—we caught him with a lasso, like gauchos!”

“To the stable, quickly!” said the Peruvian, “And above all, tie our prey up solidly, he’s run us ragged, and it’s necessary not to let him get away.”

In anticipation of a successful hunt, they had prepared a little stable of sorts some time before, in an old laundry in the basement. It was sufficiently comfortable for a wild horse, and a solidly barricaded door guaranteed it against any escape attempt.

The animal was attached to the iron bars of a small window, a rick of hay brought back from the hunters was put in its trough, and it was left tranquilly to its meditations.

“Artillery horse, a big Pomeranian—a fine animal in his day, for sure,” the aviator went on, sitting down. “He’s slightly lame, but it’s trivial. He must have stumbled in some shell-hole.”

“But what the devil do you intend to do with your Pomeranian?” I asked.

“First of all,” replied the three hunters, all speaking together, “we’re going to pamper him, lavish him with caresses, feed him up—fatten him up, if you prefer—that’s indispensable.”

“And then?”

“Then keep him carefully in the larder for the winter. Think about it—an entire horse; that represents a good provision of meat, and we’ll be very glad to find that in December or January, when food becomes scarce.”

“Poor beast!” I said.

“Yes, pity us,” said the doctor. “There’s yet another lamentable consequence of the frightful cataclysm: the disappearance of the best animal species. That infernal science has precipitated humankind into an ocean of misfortunes, and not only humankind, but also the inferior friends of humankind, the good and worthy beasts that have put all their confidence in humans—a wretched placement! The horse, the ox, the dog, the sheep, docile servants or slaves of humankind…they have nothing to expiate; they don’t have any part in our criminal follies! And where have we led them? To a general massacre, to complete destruction! Where are they? Second-class canon-fodder, which no one thought of sparing, poor beasts thrown into incomprehensible terror, amid the thunder and the flames, under rains of metal falling from the clouds, succumbing under overwhelming fatigues imposed by the dementia of the pitiless master, and rotting in the fields, in ravines, in shell-holes…all of them, crushed, exterminated, eaten, except for a few specimens that escaped the carnage, escaped across the empty fields, wandering miserably among the ruins, in terror and stupor...”

“Yes, there are some,” said Miraud, “which must have their own ideas about the devastation of humankind…humans, the dispensers of caresses, work and nourishment, the masters of everything, the God gone suddenly insane!”

“The ox, the sheep, unknown now, abolished, destroyed. Fabulous animals! The horse and the dog almost as rare!”

“A precious capture, that horse! That gives us a respectable number of assured meals for the impending winter. The winter is the hard season, when hunger and sadness reign in our cellars and dugouts. In spite of all the foresight, all the economy possible in the good months of summer and autumn, rationing is necessary…so, a precious capture, that horse! Smoked horse, you know, is very good, and that conserves it. Oh, if we’d had it last winter, when the potatoes and the artichokes ran out and it was necessary to buckle our belts very tightly!”

“Truly? Nothing to buy, then?”

Everyone looked at me, as if astonished by my naivety. Madame Vitalis burst out laughing, frankly.

I ought to have known, however, that there had been no more question of money for a long time among the Troglodytes among whom I was going to live—and it must be the same in all the desolate regions of unfortunate Europe, no one having anything to buy or to sell. Everyone had to strive to produce and extract from the soil by his own industry what was sufficient for his alimentation. A problem bristling with difficulties—and it was with great difficulty that anyone was able to extract anything from that old earth, spoiled and massacred everywhere as well. It was still necessary to protect it—and sometimes to defend it. A frightful and perpetual worry for wan humankind!

All commerce between humans was now reduced to a few meager exchanges of foodstuffs, or wretched items of any sort.

What use could money be in the new conditions of life? That money, so coveted once for all that it could buy, was no more now than base metal, less useful than iron and utterly disdained, which is worse than being scorned. Gibson, the ex-billionaire, told me that he might still pick up a brand new louis d’or or a pound sterling, if he happened to stumble over one in the street, but only as a simple curiosity of an extinct age, to keep alongside his old check book!

 

IV. Warming discussions for rainy days.

 

We’re living an existence that I find very miserable, for want of habitude. Our comrades are better adapted to it, having been accustomed to it for such a long time, and they have known worse distress and more frightful situations, before arriving at one they genuinely considered to be a haven of refuge.

The good Madame Vitalis has conserved a residue of affectation in our burrow; she wants to show that she was a woman of the world when there was a world. She cares for our burrow; she has fabricated a feather duster, with which she dusts our heap of bricks and stones continually.

Jeanne Vitalis, who cannot have any memory of better days, is very much sat ease in our miserable encampment; she is cheerful, always laughing, especially now that Marcel Blondeau has recovered his health, disposed to find everything perfect and agreeable in our cellar, in the town around us, and perhaps in the entire world, provided that Marcel is no longer sad and that he continues to aid her in her little tasks in the various gardens cultivated here and there, or to ask her advice about the fabrication of rat-traps and rabbit-snares.

The billionaire Howard Gibson also accepts things very well, and doesn’t weep over his vanished millions any more than his missing leg. The man has the blood of a rude squatter, a wood-runner of the Far West, and he doesn’t make any kind of chorus with the complaints and furies of Dr. Christiansen. He is full of valor and takes each day as it comes.

When the sun shines, that works. We go out, we devote ourselves to movement. I try to be of some use in the association, in order not to live here as a costly parasite. But what can I do? How can I play my part in the labor and its profits?

In my capacity as a naturalist, I know mushrooms. I beat the dunes in search of Boletus edulis and other edible cryptogams. I garden a little, but I find that I dig ineptly and that it’s better for everyone if I stick to giving advice, which the practical and experienced men follow when they judge it acceptable. That’s a little humiliating.

But what becomes of me during the long rainy days, when it seems almost impossible to emerge from our cellars, when the downpour stings, when the paths over the rubble become slippery and one paddles through the ravines, running the risk of getting stuck in the mud and drowning? It’s already bad enough in the summer; what will it be like in the winter, when Pluviose, Nivose and Ventose14 come to persecute us?

On days of heavy downpours we have to stay at the bottom of our hole. Mr. Gibson has fabricated a chessboard and plays with Mohammed or Madame Vitalis. The Armenian businessman, the Rumanian and the Spaniard talk about business and commerce, and tell one another about fine deals they once made.

These people of various nationalities and mentalities, get along very well and almost understand one another. They’ve created a kind of dialect particular to our burrow, which, with effort, I’m beginning to grasp. But I let them chatter away and I prefer to talk to the two Frenchwomen, Miraud the aviator or Maître Saladin the captain-notary when Dr. Christiansen and Monsieur Jollimay don’t start an argument when the first raindrops fall, designed to be continued more or less excitedly until the downpour ends.

Monsieur Jollimay almost gives us lectures in history when he fulminates against the imperialisms that have upset the world in the course of the centuries, but at least he fulminates without exploding, in a slow, sad voice, while the doctor, in his rages against science—the servant of imperialisms and the purveyor of engines of death—shouts and vociferates, gesticulates and thumps his fist, to the great peril of our furniture, except when he gurgles muted imprecations in the depths of his throat, when his voice fails him.

“Imperialism, Empire: abominable words that ought to be despised and cursed by all human beings and banished from dictionaries. Despotism weighing upon the submissive and conquered countries, the organized exploitation of peoples to the profit of one man, one family or one patriciate. Always and everywhere, in the history of the world, those empires cemented with blood, crumbling after a time over mountains of ruins, always those hegemonies provoking just revolts, always the insensate dreams of universal domination of a man, a caste or a race, end in slaughter, producing frightful misfortunes, hurricanes, whirlwinds and cataracts of dolor over the world! Follow me, Doctor, let’s take the Oriental Empires of old, and we’ll see...”

“No!” exclaims the doctor. “Let’s leave Nebuchadnezzar and Assurbanipal in the Hell where they’re suffering their punishment, I hope. They’re very petty sires and paltry malefactors by comparison with the satanic Hohenzollerns of today! But who, if you please, has forged and prepared the formidable unknown weapons and perfected them ferociously the while, for the frightful organizers of the universal carnage of today? Who, if not Science?”

“…The folly of domination,” Jollimay goes on, without paying any attention, “the imperialism of despots, their rage of domination and hegemony, producing and propagating the dementia of blind and deluded people...”

“…The furious delirium of a race of prey!” shouts the doctor. “Filthy Prussia, eldest daughter of the Church of Satan, vomit of the Devil! We’re living in full Demonocracy, Monsieur!”

“Agreed!”

“Yes, a people of prey aspiring to booty! But it’s the idea of the invincibility of these new weapons forged by Science that decides the movement and brings peoples to make themselves the instruments of despots when, by study, cunning and duplicity, everything has been prepared for the vast rapines and universal looting!”

“The monstrous appetites of a few ferocious brutes, a caste of feudal lords hungry for wealth and advantages, theoreticians of productive massacre, overlords of great industry and finance avid for billions and power…to table for the feast! To table! Growls and howls of joy, gods and demons of Germanic Hells, Odin, Thor, Wotan and all the rest, and Mephistopheles, and the witches, vampires and ghouls of the Sabbats of the Brocken! You see that: he collective soul of an entire people sold to the Devil at a stroke, fifty million Fausts joyfully signing the pact with Satan that will deliver them all the wealth of the world, universal empire and total power over the Prussified planet!”

“What revelations of humankind!” cries the doctor, hoarsely. “What extraordinary observations, what stupefying data on the real depths of the human soul! The true limits of human nature were unknown, the extreme frontiers of humanity, the limits of human strength and faculties, for evil as well as for good… we didn’t know how far human ferocity could extend...or descend…but we know now. The diabolicoarabic horrors of Germanism have marked the point, never before attained! Do we know the supreme limits of heroism?”

“That’s true,” says Jollimay. “Let’s ask at Verdun, the banks of the Yser, the Marne or the Somme, the plains of Picardy or Champagne... And the high-water level of love and hatred, the limits of endurance, of patience and devotion, of rascality and ignominy, of all the sentiments and all the passions, of all the exacerbated faculties... And the extreme point of madness? Look at Russia...”

“Oh!” clamors the doctor, taking his head in his hands as if he wants to tear it away. “Oh…! Madness! madness! madness! Quickly, the straitjacket for Humankind! What years we have lived! There were times, in the immense terror of that seething fulguration of explosives and gas, grinding the living and the dead into the ground in all directions, sweeping the atmosphere with great gusts of fire and making the planet shudder to its utmost depths, there were times when I felt my brain jumping and colliding with the walls of my skull, and I held my head, ready to fly away; the general, universal madness gripped me…I searched, in the lightning and the fire setting the sky and all the heights ablaze, I searched for the Exterminating Angel of the End of the World... And I saw him, the Exterminating Angel of the End of the World... Yes, I saw him…the Exterminating Angel of the End of the World, sent by God, finally revolted by the delirium of his creature. I saw him greeted in the clouds by an immense barrage of gunfire!”

But the clouds have passed over, the downpour has stopped. One after another, we quit our cavern to climb back up into the daylight. The doctor and Jollimay don’t notice it; they continue their discussion. From outside, I can still hear the two voices, alternating in the depths of our burrow.

“…Science, accomplice for the work of iron and fire…science preparing the bloodbath of the Hohenzollerns...

“And do you know, Monsieur, how many, in the course of the last century—that century of enlightenment and mildness, of refined civilization and increasing rapid progress—how many Europeans in the flower of their age, in the full bloom of their youth, have been devoured in wars, the struggles of various imperialisms? Thirty-five millions, Monsieur, thirty-five, if not forty! European scholarship can be proud of its crushing superiority, for in the same lapse of a single century, warrior massacres hardly caused one or two million people to perish in Africa, a land of savage tribes, a land of ignorant barbarity…scarcely one or two millions...”

“And then, for them, for those worthy cannibals, it was to eat them!” cries Miraud, looking back toward the disputants.

Scaling the slippery banks, the aviator starts declaiming dully into his beard, “Request: Death in the Heavens…a novelty unknown to our ancestors, limited and earthbound...

 

Humankind, ferocious insect, scales the skies,

Surpasses in the azure the eagle of the snowy peaks,

And goes forth bearing death as he sublimely flies,

To splatter blood on clouds and God’s pink cheeks!

 

V. The supreme conference at the Palace of Peace.

 

It was all very well to have a horse, entire and alive, in the larder, but while waiting to sacrifice it to the appetite of the community, it was necessary to feed it, to stuff it with oats and hay to fatten it up.

The difficulties materialized when the question of the indispensable ration of oats came up. How were we to procure that daily ration, that provender, in sufficient quantity? A council was held, and an expedition to lay in supplies was decided. It was necessary to go quite a long way into the grassy meadows of the interior, to have any hope of discovering, for want of oats, enough forage and fresh verdure, not withered, burned or poisoned by emissions of toxic gases.

Early one morning we set off in a troop, well equipped with a very varied collection of weapons and furnished with our masks, which Madame and Mademoiselle Vitalis had checked carefully, or sown up the seams. The ladies remained at the house to carry out domestic tasks, for they had to carry out a thorough cleaning of our burrow and repair a pile of worn-out clothes.

The billionaire Gibson and Maître Saladin, by reason of their wooden legs, stayed to form a garrison with Marcel Blondeau, always active in helping the ladies in case of need, and to see to the gardens in the dunes, as well as the rabbit-snares. The valiant Jollimay, in spite of his wooden leg, had insisted on taking part in the expedition.

The weather was fine; the sun rose behind the hills of sand where the opulent villas of Dutch Nabobs returned from Java, Sumatra and Borneo had once displayed their sumptuous and picturesque white and red facades, beneath the verdure of their parks, refreshed by the benevolent sea breezes.

Where are they, the opulent excessively decorated villas? Blown away by the breath of heavy cannons, pulverized by the squalls of huge shells or aerial torpedoes. Where are the Nabobs? Perhaps crouched in the depths of some cellar, miraculously uncollapsed, in some hole contrived among the ruins of their shattered manors, striving to eke out as best they can a dangerous, precarious and malnourished existence, just like us in Monsieur Vandermolen’s house, for want of being able to go forth under kinder skies.

Monsieur Vandermolen guided us. He often sighed, the poor man, at the memory of the splendors of old; he groaned in passing through certain ruined parks, in front of certain façades shredded by projectiles or certain portals that no longer led to anything but dismal heaps of stonework and tiles.

“Here, Monsieur, I dined at least once a fortnight in the home of my friend Zuremberg... Very rich, my friend Zuremberg, huge fortune brought back from Batavia, plantations of tea, coffee, etc... What dinners, Monsieur! What menus! Can you imagine…?”

“No details please! No menus! Don’t say anything!”

“You’re wrong—they still make my mouth water. And to think that we’ve only been able to bring for our expedition a few boiled potatoes and beets, with no salt! Let me at least console myself be remembering truffled capons, salmis of woodcock...and look, here’s Monsieur Floris’ house—a former planter in Sumatra. Huge fortune, heaps of millions. We had delightful gatherings! Charming woman, Madame Floris! Magnificent dresses from the great Parisian couturiers, Monsieur! Miraculous liqueurs, the curacaos of the Rajahs! Exquisite teas. Cigars such as the gods of Olympus certainly didn’t smoke!”

“Let’s not talk about that, I beg you,” said the Spaniard Gomares and Lieutenant Bustamente, in unison with artilleryman-professor Jollimay, whom I had already caught resignedly smoking elder-pith or some other pseudo-tobacco of a similar ilk.

Monsieur Vandermolen sighed again, but he consented to stop talking about the dinners of yore.

We marched for three or four hours, sometimes in the tunnels of old trenches, sometimes in bare country, through ancient polders, flooded again, where we waded in Indian file over grassy undulations. To begin with we had veered northwards to avoid the marshes, and then turned eastwards, and I perceived thereafter that we were setting a course frankly southwards, in the direction of Leyden and The Hague, to which the Germans—or, rather, the Germano-Turco-Bulgaro-etc.—had been driven back when Dordecht and Rotterdam had been recaptured, Rotterdam, Amsterdam and Harlem blockading the Hague, and blockaded themselves by the enemy forces entrenched toward Nimegen all along the Waal, the southern branch of the Rhine, perhaps linked with those of Antwerp, or those blockading Antwerp…no one knew, exactly…not to mention the little islets, friends or enemies, lost in the unknown in the middle of devastated territories: a complicated geography, very difficult to sort out for lack of reliable information.

We arrived on hills raised about forty meters above sea level, veritable Alps by the standards of flat Holland. We were not sorry to take a breather, well sheltered by bushes, and rest our legs while having our miserable lunch.

A pretty part of the country! I couldn’t help thinking sadly about hunting in the olden days, in the distant times before the deluge...

Monsieur Vandermolen had brought a telescope recovered from the ruins of his house; I borrowed it from him in order to examine the vast spaces we were overlooking, enemy territory or contested deserts, cut by dark lines and speckled with white and yellow patches.

“Way over there is The Hague,” Monsieur Vandermolen said. “Can you make it out?”

“Yes quite clearly.”

“And can you see, in that direction, those big ruins? Are you there?”

“Yes, I can see. One might think it was an enormous redoubt with several lines of trenches in front...”

“The Palace of Peace,” said the doctor. “The Boches have their heavy artillery in there, their biggest guns, the giant cannon and all the improved satanic engines... What hurricanes of fire, what fulgurant cyclones, they unleashed in the early days! The Palace of Peace was flamboyant, like a volcano in continuous eruption, among whirlwinds of multicolored smoke. Hell opening up! It’s calm now; the enormous guns are silent, doubtless for want of projectiles; the monstrous engines are mute, the red mouths no longer spitting out their tons of poisoned explosives!”

As if to give the lie to the doctor, who was waving a furious fist at the Palace of Peace, transformed into a frightful den of war and death, there was a sudden flash in the distance, and in spite of the distance, a frightful detonation made the ground shake around us. The Palace of Peace, or what was left of it, was covered by a cloud of yellow smoke, which overflowed, swirling in a heavy cumulus, and then rose up into the sky in green, red or violet spirals.

I had ducked down involuntarily, and was almost lying down behind our brushwood. There were further flashes and further shocks, which made the foliage shiver—and me too, I confess. I counted five explosions, and then silence fell again, but the thick clouds of smoke, rolling into one another, floated for a long time over the International Palace of Peace, where the speeches of the pacifist Congresses of old had sung so eloquently to us of the joys of peace between men who had become tender lambs again, and announced so exactly the return of the Golden Age to Earth.

What remained of those promises, those bucolics, those garlands of roses swayed by the brutal breath of heavy artillery, those delights announced by the meek prophets and utopians in god faith, among whom had slid a good number of reptilian hypnotists and “social-demokrat” secret agents of Panprussianism and the insatiable vulture of the Hohenzollerns?

What remained of the Palace itself, the imposing architecture of which I remembered vaguely, beneath its colossal ruins, armored shields for the steel monsters of Krupp, the great engineer and stage-setter of the bloody feasts of the old German god Odin, resuscitated by the Hohenzollerns?

“Five!” said the doctor, after the last shock. “But those shells aren’t for us. Listen—follow the rumble in the distance. That must be over Amsterdam or Rotterdam.”

Scarcely had the roar of the fifth shell died away in a swirl that the wind bore away, than a detonation resounded in the distance, jostling the low clouds on the horizon, traversed by the projectile... A dull sound, a ululation, a growing thunderous din, like an approaching railway train…explosion!

And then a cloud of thick red smoke, with jets of bright flame, in the green and yellow turbulence of the Palace of Peace.

“The Peace Conference!” said the doctor.

“Amsterdam’s response,” said Monsieur Vandermolen. “Take a look with the telescope...”

There were three responses; three jets of flames rose high into the sky—and that was all. Rings of variously colored smoke remained suspended for some time, paling, and ended up disappearing. The terrified silence of the countryside was no longer troubled.

“Bromine, trinitrotoluene, peroxide, aminol, etc.,” said the doctor. “I know that; I’ve ground it, alas, when I was a captive in the laboratory, cast into the slavery of the Boche factories. Fortunately, I spoiled their monstrous chemistry as much as possible. Oh, if you had heard the concert in those days, to make brains explode, to make the vaults of heaven collapse! But nowadays the lack of raw materials has forced economies, a dearth of explosives everywhere…they’re trying to make up for it with miasmas, gases, infectious bombs and bacterial shells, but for how long? What we heard just now, Monsieur, is the death-rattle of the expiring scientific Bellona, the supreme convulsions, the coughs of the final agony of the monsters of steel spitting out their last tons of explosives before kicking the bucket…Satan uttering his last howl...”

“And that, Doctor,” I exclaimed, “will be the end of it?”

“The end, no—but it’s the imminent exhaustion of stocks, complete penury everywhere, the absolute lack of munitions.”

“Well, what then?”

“Well, there will still be the other weapons, the old weapons, those of pre-scientific humankind. Everything that can smash, slice and perforate, the blade and the club, the bow and the sword: the sword of the truly valiant! When it’s well established that no one has any more cannons, machine-guns, explosives, mines or torpedoes, when everyone in both camps is certain that they no longer have anything to fear from asphyxiating gases, stupefying vapors, deleterious chemicals or perfidious electrocutions, there will be the savage and hectic charge of all those who have survived the scientific hecatombs, the supreme assault, to finish it off!”

I was about to protest, to show, on the contrary, peace gradually renascent, in the general exhaustion, on the ruins of worn out and demolished engines of war, among the horrified and breathless survivors, when furious clamors cut off my speech, and a horde ragged and hirsute individuals surged out of a trench cutting through the brushwood, brandishing strange weapons.

 

VI. A horde of prehistoric warriors.

 

What an emotion when I think about it! But for the doctor and Monsieur Vandermolen, who had abruptly thrown themselves forward, their arms raised, we would at least have been knocked down and pinned to the ground by those fanatics!

And what a sudden apparition of the most distant past, after the fulgurant recent visions of the most advanced civilization, turned to ferocious kultur and finishing in the monstrous terrors of scientific barbarity, that abrupt return to primitive ages was!

But the doctor and Monsieur Vandermolen shouted things I did not understand in Dutch, protesting and arguing with the most furious members of the menacing horde, and fortunately, the weapons were lowered, the faces relaxed.

Deeply disturbed, in the shock of surprise, we had fallen back and assumed defensive postures. As everything seemed to be settling down, I uttered a sigh of relief.

“Friends, they’re friends!” cried the doctor. “Don’t worry—worthy people like us, who live in the ruins over there…departed in quest of nourishment, vegetables or game of some sort, and who, having mistaken us at a distance for Boche marauders, crept up on us, crawling from hole to hole, in the sweet hope of reducing us to little pieces. Fortunately, we recognized one another in time. It’s settled—we won’t be killing one another; these gentlemen are good friends!”

I considered with wide eyes those “gentlemen” of such unreassuring appearance and such strange clothing.

With what extraordinary weapons they had wanted to exterminate us a little while ago! Out there, in the expiring citadel of the Palace of Peace, the latest perfections and refinements of technology and science, here, the instruments of war of resuscitated prehistoric peoples. He was right, the doctor—as ever...

There really was a return to primitive might, for the last phases of the struggle, for the final act of the formidable tragedy. I recalled a painting by Cormon at one of the Salons of old, depicting the return from a bear-hunt in prehistoric times:15 the rude tribesmen, hirsute and muscular, brandishing stone axes and clubs, returning to the family caves with the felled game.

I rediscovered all of that, minus the bear. The newcomers numbered about twenty, young and old men, mostly thin but robust, with solid arms, suntanned, with beards as bushy as those in Cormon’s painting, covered rather than dressed in rags more reminiscent of those of prehistory than the civilized costumes once worn in this region of neat and tidy Dutch villages of white, pink or pale green houses, pulverized today.

For the most part, they were wearing cassocks of a sort, of coarse cloth; some of them had torsos covered in goat-skins, worn over what might have been the remains of overcoats, secured by rope belts, from which cutlasses dangled.

Leather or canvas socks, extremely worn, and sandals, or rather moccasins, on their feet, and bonnets of furry hide, completed the costumes of the horde.

They all grouped around us in order to gaze at us curiously with their anxious and wild eyes. They were leaning on large clubs garnished with iron spikes, spears or crude axes with long handles. Two or three of them were even clutching large bows in their muscular fists, shiny and polished, and wearing quivers on their backs furnished with long arrows.

In what times were we living, really? The age of caves? Yes, doubtless, on seeing those fellows, but alas, the age of concrete and armored caves, the lairs not of large wild beasts armed simply and honestly with teeth and claws, but of fabulous monsters of steel spitting hellish flames and toxic gases.

Reminiscences flooded by troubled brain. I thought about another painting, by Puvis de Chavannes this time: Doux pays.16 A pastoral eclogue, a noble dream of poetry, truly dolorous to remember in this era of frightful horrors. O mildness of time times gone by, expired, abolished forever, times that will never return, which never can return! O sweetness of the past! Extinct splendors!

And the memory also passed through my head of a motto inscribed on the bell-tower of a Belgian town, Alost, between Termonde and Antwerp: Neither hope nor dread.17

In what condition is it now, the bell-tower of Alost? Neither hope nor dread, a desperate motto engraved in the stone in the sixteenth century, an era of calamities: wars, sacks and plagues, doubtless terrible, but which passed, leaving the tons still standing and their populations in a state to resume their lives.

Wars and plagues, sacking and burnings of old, of the times when men only had their arms for evil endeavors as for others, what are you by comparison with our cyclones of fire, of universal cataclysmic destruction?

It is us, the unfortunate people of today, who bear in our hearts that motto of somber depression! Neither hope: where and how could we find the slightest ray of hope? Hope, the divine cradler of souls, gone forever... Nor dread: the excess of our misfortunes and suffering has given us resignation to the worst, and absolute consent to the inevitable.

But I perceive that I am becoming as funereal as the doctor. It’s the sudden appearance of the prehistoric horde that has caused me to take that plunge into the black. No, no, unfortunate Belgians of Alost and elsewhere, hope regardless! And this impression of the recommencement of the world ought, on the contrary, to comfort us, to warm our hearts. Are we not about to see the end of the Scientific Era and the dawn of a better epoch?

“All’s well, then,” said Dr. Christiansen, at the end of his palaver. “These rude warriors bristling with pikes and cutlasses are friends, the worthy men of Noordwik...”

“That little village you can see over there,” added Monsieur Vandermolen. “They’re inoffensive fishermen and agriculturalists...”

“I can’t see anything at all over there.”

“Yes! Can you make out that reddish line in the green of the dune? That’s the scattered bricks of which the village was constituted. The more visible square to the right was the church, or the tower, at least. The people live under that undulation, in those holes hollowed out in the earth and consolidated with bits of wood.”

“Good, good…they won’t scalp us, as I feared at first sight; I’m very glad of that...”

Monsieur Vandermolen, who served as our interpreter, set about explaining the objective of our expedition to our new friends.

The one who seemed to be their leader was a man at least six feet tall, with broad bony shoulders, and long muscular arms terminating in formidable fists—a kind of thin Hercules, doubtless undernourished—with a long yellow beard, clad in animal skins and armed with a long club with iron spikes. He was smiling at us now, and I liked him better like that than when he was running toward us with his teeth clenched, raising his grim weapon against us.

“It appears that he’s the burgemeester of Noordwik,” the doctor told me. “He commands about forty men like this.”

“He’s replaced the old burgemeester, whom I knew,” added Monsieur Vandermolen. “He was a worthy and peaceful farmer…”

“And now, as of old among the people of the caves, the chief is the strong man,” the doctor continued. “He’s the robust warrior who imposes his direction on the others. And there you are! Our miserable humanity will soon have completed the cycle and returned to the point of departure. So much the better! May the evolution conclude as rapidly as possible!”

“It appears that we won’t find forage in these parts; all the vegetation has been reddened and poisoned by the recent emissions of gas. The chief thinks that it will be necessary for us to go past his village, and circle behind Leyden in the direction of Utrecht; and there, in meadows that haven’t been inundated, we’ll certainly be able to cut a good provision of grass and hay. Let’s go—en route with these gentlemen! We’ll pay a visit to their caves in passing. To see people, new faces, will be an event for the families vegetating in those shelters...”

 

 

VII. The cove of the old mines. A new recruit.

 

Our new friends took the lead in order to show us the way. One by one, in Indian file, they went down the hill through the holes and the brushwood. No danger was perceptible on the horizon; the Palace of Peace would not want to waste a precious shell on a few human ants glimpsed through binoculars twenty-five kilometers away. Nevertheless, our prehistoric—or, rather, post-historic—warriors marched bent over, hiding behind the undulations of the ground or clumps of meager vegetation. It was evident that for a long time, with permanent danger, the unexpected and menace on every side, the habit had taken hold.

Soon we were zigzagging along the slopes in the remains of half-collapsed trenches, and were forced to march more slowly. Obstacles cutting off our route and obliging us to make detours, we had to move cautiously along the rim of some of the enormous holes that I knew so well now, the craters of bombs or mines, filled with salty water, having become dangerous pools or wells, into which it was necessary not to fall. Sometimes that muddy water filled the bottom of the trenches and we had to wade knee-deep in it.

With those obstacles and detours, the road to Noordwik as much longer than I had thought. We could hear the sound of waves breaking gently on the sand nearby, and the trench suddenly ended in a cove, invisible until then.

Through breaches in the abandoned dykes, the sea had crossed the line of the dunes at many points. The furious assault of the waves at high tide, in the bad seasons, enabled it to take a further leap forward every time into the polders, and the reconquest of the Zuider Zee.

Here the sea filled a rather large cleft in the shore; in the calm weather, it was gently caressing it with little tranquil and regular waves, which seemed to be amusing themselves sketching out a few fringes of foam in the manner of Japanese artists.

I admired it, and then I immediately thought that crabs, if I could find any, would be well-received in the kitchen by the Vitalis ladies.

So, very happy to be able to read on fine sand, gentle on the feet, I descended rapidly to the border of the foam and stated hunting, while my companions picked up shellfish as they walked.

I couldn’t help thinking, bitterly, that we had the appearance, on that strand, of bourgeois holidaymakers at the seaside, as in the good old days. Oh yes, the seaside! How far away those times of distraction there! The pleasant beaches with the bourgeois families chatting in front of the beach-huts or the striped tents, the ladies in white bathrobes, the children in swimsuits fishing for shrimp in rock-pools or paddling in the sunshine, the casinos with their concerts and balls...

Beaches fashionable before the deluge—Scheveningen and Zandwort—were not far away. Alas, what strange bathers were on those beaches today? For years, what infernal concerts, what satanic music on all sides! What frightful balls were held there, where death held the great Maestro’s baton, with which to conduct the orchestra!

Come on—I’ve forgotten the crabs! It’s necessary to live, though, and to bring back some nourishment from our excursion. I resume the hunt. Then I perceive huge rusty masses in the water, all covered with algae and encrusted with shellfish, run aground in the sand. What are they? Buoys, presumably. I move closer, and start collecting shellfish, with which I fill my pockets.

But some of our comrades come running, uttering loud cries. They try to attract me attention with broad gestures.

Eh? What’s the matter?”

“Stop! Don’t touch anything!” the doctor shouts at me, while our prehistoric men continue gesticulating.

“What’s the matter? These shellfish are very good—I know them…”

“Fool!” shouts the doctor, out of breath. “Leave it! Don’t touch!”

“What is it, then?”

“Mines! Mines! Unexploded mines—understand?”

“Dangerous!” proffers Monsieur Vandermolen, trotting away in order to distance himself. “Dangerous! Explosives!”

The shock nearly caused me to fall on one of the detestable engines, but the chief of the tribe arrived just in time to catch me.

“How the devil did these infernal machines get here?” I exclaimed. “There must be fifteen of them....”

“It’s the currents that bring them,” said Monsieur Vandermolen, still keeping his distance prudently. “The Boches have sowed so many of them at sea—floating mines, or positional mines that the sea has ended up carrying away—that they’re spread all over the Oceans...”

“That’s true,” I said. “We know something about that...”

“Three-quarters of the mines end up exploding on some rock, but there are plenty more, as you can see! These have been in this cove for a long time, the burgemeester tells me, and he’d really like to be rid of them...”

“All the more so,” added the doctor, “Because, if the Boches in the Palace of Peace, short of explosives, knew of the existence of this little provision, they’d try to get their hands on them...”

“Let’s go, let’s go,” said Monsieur Vandermolen, eager to get out of that troubling neighborhood. “We mustn’t be too late back...”

The domicile of the prehistoric men wasn’t far away. After having gone around the cove with the inconvenient mines, we took a small trench, which, after a few turnings, brought us out in front of a series of holes plunging into the dune, well hidden in the vegetation.

Children leapt outside the holes on hearing the whistles with which the newcomers signaled their approach. Women and men appeared.

All of them were costumed like the warriors of the tribe. In the troglodytes of Harlem one still found a little of the city-dweller of old, but here, far from the town, among these worthy seamen or peasants, they had been using rope for belts for a long time, and had had to be ingenious in making garments, first weaving wool from a few sheep, then tailoring the sails of their boats, and then using the skins of beasts they had eaten: sheep, goats, rabbits... And now, all of them, men, women and children alike, constituted a tribe almost similar to those of the primitive caves.

These people could be perfectly happy in their shelters, in spite of all the dangers of wild nature, against which they knew how to arm themselves and struggle. Over time, moreover, their situation would improve. The future opened, immense and marvelous, before these people of the youth of the world.

But we, alas, who know—how can we support out misery our broken hearts, our crushed spirit, tortured by the memory of better times that will never return, and all the fears that weigh upon us?

The former village once grouped its houses at the base of the dune, around one of those old squat churches built as a pendant of a big windmill amid the greenery, as in the old paintings of the Dutch school, which give such an impression of pleasant and peaceful life, in the atmosphere of a beautiful summer evening...

In front of the village was a beach of yellow sand on which the fishermen had once moored their boats within a framework of dykes made of stakes and cross-pieces. None of that existed any longer. The church, the houses, the surrounding farms and the dykes had all been destroyed, crush and ravaged. The sea and the squalls had completed the ruination of the ruins, and carried away most of the debris. I could scarcely distinguish the location of the unfortunate village when the primitive burgemeester tried to indicate it to me.

I went into a few of the burrows, similar in all respects to those I had already visited in the course of our excursions. The earthworks were maintained by wooden beams, the debris of boats, tree trunks, branches and wickerwork. There were items of furniture saved from the demolished village, and in the depths of the refuges, even a few items of faience, Delft plates, shining softly in the obscurity, sad and dear relics more treasured than ever, wreckage of the tranquil happiness of old, of which these poor folk were trying to conserve the memory. The burrow only seemed sadder in consequence.

In one, under clusters of onions drying on walls of planks, and packets of arrows exactly similar to those once seen in ethnographic museums, with the quivers of tattooed savages, I saw a dainty little blue Delft pot containing a bouquet of dune flowers. A young woman in an exceedingly ragged skirt made of sail-canvas and a worn sheepskin bodice, was mending the sleeve of a leather jacket, doubtless that of one of the robust men of the tribe, a father or perhaps a fiancé—and I immediately imagined an idyll of the cave age.

I noticed that her hair, although a trifle ruffled, was not without a certain coquetry. Eternal femininity still persisted; that caused a vague suggestion of hope to pass through me.

Suddenly, as I had doubtless thought aloud, someone spoke to me in French. Two men were coming back to the troglodyte village; they had been hunting along the shore and were bringing back two wild geese killed with arrows.

One was a Picard from the vicinity of Noyon, a former bowman in his native land, the other a Belgian from Ypres, once a skilled archer, often winning competitions, run aground among these Dutch fishermen after many vicissitudes and bloody adventures.

They utilized their archery skills here now, for want of cartridges or powder, their rifles no longer being able to serve as anything but handles for bayonets.

I questioned the two men about the events that had cast them up here and trapped them in this little corner of the Dutch dunes. Still the same story: deluge of fire, iron and gas; violent drives northwards or southwards, crushed under machines or explosives, slavery in the Boche mines or factories, and to finish, miraculous escapes under fire, through the networks of electrified wire...

Everything they told me about the circumstances only served to confirm the fantastic stories of the doctor and the others; even so, I kept asking questions, hoping for some information about the state of things in France, in the country that held me by the heart, beyond our restricted horizon. It was so close, and yet so far away!

But who is that man who has just joined our group? Prominent cheekbones and hooded eyes, an entirely Asiatic face. He’s very small of stature beside the tall Dutchmen. He has an arm in a sling—or, rather, attacked to his breast by bits of cord, and he’s limping. He’s clad in shiny leather, badly scorched. His only weapon is a long cutlass in his belt.

As I draw him to the attention of the doctor, he advances and says to us in French: “Permit me to introduce myself…Yamato...”

“You’re not Dutch,” I say, naively.

“Yamato Yradonou, of Yeddo, aviator-bombardier of the ninth Japanese army, operating in northern Germany, siege of the lines of Berlin and Danzig...”

A surge of surprise and a flash of joy for me…news, at last!

All that I could say was: “Oh! oh! oh!” as I shook the hand of the man from Japan.

“Not so hard,” he said. “I’m still slightly injured.”

“Excuse me,” I said, “but I’m so glad! Finally, we’re going to have news!”

 

VIII. Imprecise information and not-very-fresh news.

 

“It’s just that we haven’t much time to get back home,” said the placid Monsieur Vandermolen. “It’s getting late.”

“Bah! A few minutes more! Let’s chat first with Monsieur Yamoto. If the news is good we’ll walk all the better afterwards.”

We formed a tightly-knit group in front of the entrances to the burrows. The entire tribe was outside, the men to one side, slightly to the rear, the women, slightly more curious, clustering around us, the late-comers climbing up the bank or the woodwork, some carrying babies in their arms or on their backs, wrapped up to the neck in sheepskins.

“Finally, news!” I exclaimed, still shaking the Japanese aviator’s hand, albeit with a little more care.

“You’re wounded?” asked Dr. Christiansen.

“Yes, yes,” I said, with egotistical haste. “Monsieur Yamato is wounded, that’s obvious. But let him speak first. Fresh news from the rest of the world—you can guess how keen we are to hear it—how keen we all are.”

“Oh, fresh, fresh!” said the Japanese, smiling. “That’s saying a lot, Monsieur, given that I arrived here, falling from the sky...how long ago?...sixteen, seventeen or eighteen…? How long, exactly, burgemeester?”

Monsieur Vandermolen having repeated the question, the prehistoric burgemeester went to a large beam supporting the entrance to one of the raves.

“The Mairie…the the Hôtel de Ville,” the French aviator told me, having taken hold of the hand of his Japanese colleague in his turn.

The stake was engraved from top to bottom with notches of various sizes, figures and letters, carved with a knife.

“Calendar and register of Civil Estates,” the Japanese told me, still smiling.

The burgemeester examine the variously-sized notches, counted and recounted, and then came back to us.

“Not eighteen, nineteen and a half,” Monsieur Vandermolen translated for me.

“It’s not important, to the day,” I said.

“Nineteen and a half, but not days, months! It’s nineteen and a half months since Monsieur Yamato arrived here…

I had suddenly gone considerably colder. The news was going to lack freshness.

“Yes, time passes, all the same,” said Yamato Yradonou. “It’s nineteen months and a half, then, since I had my accident... Well, it’s quite simple; we were manning apparatus 38 of fighter squadron no. 27 of the ninth Japanese army, a biplane armored in four places. Operations before the entrenched camp at Brandenburg had been going on for two and a half days, all going well, good results, the enemy driven back, crushed, defenses demolished, towns in pieces, disappeared, evaporated. We’d taken their big explosives depot, and we were using its provisions ourselves, which we were serving to them in nicely cooked little dishes. Would you care for some trinitrotoluene, superclastite, gases and deleterious vapors? There you see, Messieurs les Boches! Stuff yourselves, eat your fill, since you like it so much!

“To us, squadron 27, only two almost usable aircraft remained, nos. 26 and 38, mine, against a dozen Boches, who scarcely dared show themselves any longer. Shortage of fuel, presumably...”

“Good, good,” I said. “But outside the entrenched camp of Berlin…let’s talk a little about France. How is Paris doing?”

“Paris? Hang on, let’s see…1922, 1923…yes, before Brandenburg, we were operating near Dresden, then retreated to Leipzig, and then the big counter-offensive by the Bulgaro-Turks, to which we gave a warm reception with an Anglo-French corps, and drove back to the lines at Berlin. For the latest news of Paris that makes something like six years...”

“Tell us anyway...”

“All was well…that’s all I know.”

I let myself fall on to a heap of sticks, discouraged.

“To get back to my accident,” Yamato went on, “it’s quite simple. We were carrying our reconnaissance in the direction of Aix-la-Chapelle. Caught by storm, error in direction, engine breakdown, steep descent, disastrous crash behind the Boche lines! Three killed outright, one only three-quarters killed—that was me. So I find myself on the ground, badly demolished, and I set off straight ahead. Not funny! I have no idea where I am and among whom. Hungry and no food. Less and less funny. Not even the possibility, with my broken paws, of trapping a rabbit or picking a lettuce, or even of opening my belly, in the fashion of my ancestors of the good old days, if no other resource remains. Forward march! Two days like that! Not much ground covered. I’m about to turn up my toes, as they say. Forward march! And I suddenly happen upon these Messieurs, who receive me with the points of their improvised halberds. Salvation, or the contrary? It’s salvation! I’m collected, cared for, lodged, and I live with these worthy folk for nineteen months and a half. They’re totally kind, and I like them a lot!”

Monsieur Yamato’s speech plunges me back into the black.

How I envied the beautiful insouciance and resilience of that Far Eastern aviator!

Monsieur Vandermolen, who was getting impatient, reminded us that we had a long way to go to find the forage and get back to Harlem. He was in a hurry to get back to his slippers and the dining room.

“Let’s go! Let’s go!” he said, while my comrades distributed handshakes to the good troglodytes of Noordwik. The clapped the robust shoulders of the burgemeester, weighed the warriors’ clubs in their hands, and arranged a rendezvous for the day of the big push, when the Boches of the Palace of Peace have definitely expended their last explosives.

It was necessary, however, to leave, when Dr. Christiansen had made a tour of the caves to see a few poor old men in the process of ending their existence in such strange circumstances. The burgemeester gave us a few men to serve as guides for a short distance, in order to put us on the right path.

Yamato Yradonou suddenly decided to go with us.

“I’ll go with you,” he said. “I’m sorry to quit these worthy folk and their rude burgemeester, who makes such a fine warrior in the mode of the most distant antiquity, but I can’t stay here forever, sheltered in these burrows in the dune. I’ll go with you—that will be new, other adventures, perhaps a step toward the ninth Japanese army...”

I shook his hand, delighted with that new companion.

We strode forth.

Dunes, polders, marshes, more marshes, more polders, more dunes—and green intervals filled with disorderly brushwood and clumps of wild flowers, from which flocks of little birds rose up, which mocked the follies of men; and desolate spaces strewn with scattered stones or bricks, with dubious pools covered with weeds...

A glance in passing at the ruins of villages, traversed with prudence, or the cadavers of big windmills, finishing their collapse, tragic skeletons that still raise long beams toward the sky, like desperate arms that the wind stirs with plaintive groans. Encounters with a few hunters, always with the same aspect as the prehistoric warriors.

The afternoon advances, the sun declines toward the horizon. Finally, here are the desired grasslands. To work! Rapidly, we cut as much as possible, making large bundles, as much as we can carry. It’s excellent forage; our horse will feast on it; he’ll get fat, and when winter comes he’ll...but no, I expect to be far away, not eating him.

Off we go, in Indian file behind Monsieur Vandermolen, who tries to find his way through the maze of the marshes.

Our caravan makes a picturesque line of hunchbacked silhouettes, outlined against the setting sun, which is setting too rapidly, alas, much too rapidly for us to be able to be certain of still being on the right route.

We climb banks only to tumble down into the sand, climb back up, go round almost-invisible holes, or fall into them. Look out! Let’s not break anything—let’s take precautions!

Those precautions cost us time; the sun finishes putting itself to bed and disappears, and now we’re almost in pitch darkness. Monsieur Vandermolen, already anxious, becomes as somber as the night. He makes the cruel admission that we’re completely lost.

None of us can see anything except the vague outline of the person in front of him. It’s almost necessary to hold hands in order not to get separated. It’s definitely impossible to go any further. A hole—we need a hole, in which there isn’t any water, in order to camp: a shelter, no matter what, in which we can lie down to sleep…without any supper, because our provisions, like our reserves of strength, are exhausted.

But we can’t find one. However, here’s some firm ground without too many cracks; let’s advance slowly, and search...

 

IX. The aviator Miraud. I take a prisoner.

 

It’s Miraud the aviator who is marching in front of me. I only know that because while moving forward, he sings in order that I don’t lose track of the file.

Songs in that funereal décor of ruins, which the night will populate with phantoms—how out of place!

We have been close for some time, poor Miraud and I. Deep down, he held a grudge against me at first for having brought into the association that overly sympathetic coxcomb, that rival who has stolen the heart of Jeanne Vitalis from him, but as he needs to talk in order to distract himself from his troubles, he has taken me for a confidant, for covert admissions, without naming anyone.

And between complaints about the candid cruelty of the sweetest young women, or the unusual luck of certain young coxcombs who have only to appear to conquer, he recounts to me his memories of old, of the brilliant and joyful Paris before the torment, of his cruises in the clouds, his machine-gun combats at fifteen hundred or two thousand meters, and the final bad encounter at the corner of a cumulus cloud...

“…Which won me the pleasure of making your acquaintance, my dear Monsieur...”

Poor Miraud, on an aerial patrol, had run cross a squadron of large armored German airplanes, which had sent his apparatus, his pilot and himself, pierced like a colander by machine-gun bullets, straight down to crash into the ground, fortunately behind the allied lines.

And there, as he put it, he had nearly had to swallow his last rhyme. But that had been sorted out, save for the arm; they had taped up the colander, and the one-armed poet was now lining up black rhymes instead of rosy rhymes, the singer translating into grim verses the wrathful outbursts of Dr. Christiansen.

Extraordinary transformations of everything in this upside-down world! Where are our Montmartrean cabarets, singers and students, poets and painters? And you, old Chat Noir of the distant times of my youth, how, through this nightmare, will I be able to think about you?

Miraud has woken up; the perspective of the imminent great assault, the collision, perhaps supreme, with thrusts of pikes, axes or clubs, has reanimated him and made him vibrate. He’s nervous; his gaze has been keener and more decisive for a few days; I’ve noticed that. He has allowed himself to be overly influenced by the funereal ideas of Dr. Christiansen; he’s detaching himself now that he’s glimpsed a glimmer of hope.

As we stride over the dune he murmurs:

 

Let’s unstuff, let’s unstuff, let’s unstuff all the skulls!

 

I interrogate him about that refrain, which seems singular to me. It isn’t slang, no—merely a metaphor that’s slightly bold but perfectly clear. Let’s unstuff all the heads of everything heaped up therein of false ideas, hollow nonsense and harmful chimeras, utopias or illusions that are doubtless generous but so replete with dangers. Let’s get rid of the stuffing completely, and we’ll see thereafter!18

 

Let’s unstuff them completely, to hell with big words,

Empty of all sense, misleaders of herds,

To the puffed up masters we prefer fools;

Let’s unstuff, let’s unstuff, let’s unstuff all the skulls!

 

He had couplets about philosophical unstuffing, political unstuffing and scientific unstuffing. I didn’t want to follow him as far as that; I supposed that he, like the doctor, wanted to unstuff the skulls of the remaining humans of everything that the doctor called the “deleterious rubbish of knowledge,” in the hope, by rejecting the whole lot, the good with the bad, of putting an end to infamous science.

We were advancing with difficulty, utterly exhausted. I was holding on to the end of Miraud’s bundle of foliage, and was almost being towed, I’m ashamed to say. Truly, I wouldn’t have been sorry finally to encounter a shelter where we might try to sleep, in order to forget hunger and fatigue.

“Pass it along to the guide,” Miraud said to the bundle of forage preceding him. “No need to search for a tourist hotel—we don’t need comfort or electricity; the bottom of a ditch, grass or sand—that’s all!

 

If ever Dame Fortune

Smiles on my desire,

I’d buy myself the moon

And stars by the quire.

 

“Mark me well, we’re going to get lost in the dark, and the column will break up...

 

Quickly by airplane

I’d reach my port

I’d take my refrain

And my kindly thought

 

And my family too

High into the sky

In the infinite blue

As I wave goodbye!

 

He stopped abruptly, and his bundle of forage hit me in the face. The entire column did likewise. Was it finally the shelter so much desired?

The Japanese Yamato went to the head of the column, his nose in the air, striving to pierce the obscurity with his feline eyes.

We put our bundles of forage on the ground and sat down on them.

Monsieur Vandermolen was anxious. Yamato took a few steps forward and came back.

“Look out,” he whispered in Vandermolen’s ear. “I can see something—a big black menacing machine—in front of us. Ruins? Château? Village? Old abandoned battery? I don’t know. Perhaps there are people there; we need to go carefully. I’ll go see—follow slowly...

After taking a few more steps, I too could make out the bizarre silhouette toward which we were marching. It was strange enough as an outline against the blue-black of the sky. Doubtless a ruin, but the ruin of what?

I joined the Japanese, in order to advance on reconnaissance, lying face down on the rough, stony ground, with a mixture of brambles and nettles, semi-brushwood full of thorns, where I left bits of the skin of my hands behind, not to mention a few shreds of my trousers.

Soon, the two of us, Yamoto and I, were getting very close to the ruin, redoubling our prudence before that troubling somber mass, when a ray of moonlight slid between two clouds and made it even more gigantic and stranger still.

Yamoto nudged me with his elbow.

“Machine!” he whispered.

Machine? In fact, I could make out something like the debris of colossal wheels, and above it, what I had thought at first was a wall, I now realized was a kind of iron carapace, holed and dislocated in places.

But what kind of machine was it?

“Tank!” said the Japanese. “Rolling bombard, demolished.”

As no noise was coming from the dune, and it did not seem to be hiding any danger in its flanks, our companions had advanced.

“All seems tranquil to me,” said the doctor. “There’s the desired shelter for the night. Let’s see...”

Yamato had already introduced himself into the place, and was searching the shadow.

“You can come,” he said. “We’ll sleep very well in here.”

Close up, the machine seemed even more forbidding than it had in the vagueness of the night. It was visible now, with the ray of moonlight gliding over the rusty iron. We had to scale a mass of twisted metal, dislocated armor plating, the enormous remains of fabulous wheels, which made me think about steam-rollers for flattening macadam, all heaped up, forming a substructure around a deformed and monstrous breached carapace, pierced by cracks and riddled with holes.

Hoisting myself up, in spite of my fatigue, as far as a black hole, I bumped heads with Yamato, who had just finished exploring the interior.

“We’ll be fine,” he said. “The bundles of forage will make soft beds. Tomorrow we’ll be fresh and rested.”

The bundles of forage were passed up to the Japanese, who laid them out inside the machine, and we formed a short human ladder in order to go and join him. Oof! I sank delightedly into the hay, with a sigh, for, once the legs were tranquilized, the stomach began nagging in its turn, and unfortunately, we had nothing for it.

I tried to think about other things than the untimely demands of appetite.

“But after all, what is it, this war machine?” I asked one of my comrades in misfortune, lying beside me, similarly racked by hunger.

“I told you,” Yamoto replied. “It’s a big allied tank, the cadaver of an armored automobile bombard, demolished in the course of some attack by large-caliber shells.”

“And it was already a ruin a long time ago,” added Monsieur Vandermolen. “Everything is rusty, and vigorous vegetation has slid in everywhere, invading everything. These tanks are formidable machines, much improved after the first war. This ruin of an ambulant fortress must have been here since an attack on the retrenched camp of The Hague five or six years ago. I recall the frightful debauch of explosives of every sort that completed the devastation of the entire region. The Boche in The Hague still had plenty of munitions in those days!”

I was about to ask more questions when I sensed something moving in the heap of scrap iron, under my bed of fodder. But what was it, exactly? I sat up, somewhat anxious. Something gripped my leg, and I uttered a cry, to which a growl responded. My comrades were also sitting up on their couches of hay.

What is it? Paw or hand? Slightly emboldened, I grope in my turn, and I grip an arm. I pull; the growling accentuates and a large bearded head appears through the grass, jabbering rapidly in an imploring tone. I don’t understand very well—there’s Dutch, German, French, and words in an unknown language.

“What is this intrusion?”

My companions got up and pulled the individual from the hiding-place where he had secreted himself when we arrived, between broken iron traverses and a long tube that appears to me to be a torpedo-launcher. In a hurry to lie down, I had thrown my bundle of forage on top of it without looking very hard, and I shivered retrospectively at the thought that I might just as easily have been lying on top of a torpedo or some dangerous chemical bomb.

“Bulgar! Don’t hurt me! Prisoner!” said the intruder.

“Good—a Bulgar!” said Jollimay and Bustamente, shoving the man roughly into a corner. “What are you doing here?”

The doctor having succeeded, with some difficulty in lighting a taper, we were able to see the face of our prisoner. He was an individual of about forty or forty-five, with a thin, even emaciated, face with an unkempt beard and a shock of hair.

Monsieur Vandermolen interrogated him in German. The man replied humbly, and showed that he had no weapon, Our comrades searched the entire bombard to make sure that it did not contain any other occupants. No one. Very frightened, the man swore that he was alone.

But what a mass of twisted iron, the debris of unknown machinery, the feeble light of the taper caused to appear, among fragments of projectiles, bolts, tubes, fragments of mechanisms and plates of armor.

“The latest marvel of science—admire!” said the doctor, bitterly, kicking away some kind of machine-gun corroded by rust.

The interrogation of the man continued. The doctor translated his replies for me. He was a Bulgar escaped from the Palace of Peace, who had been living hidden in this bombard for ten days. According to him, everyone in the Boche camp in The Hague was dying of starvation—and the unfortunate inhabitants even more so. Better still, they were entirely out of explosives, shells and chemical products to make gases. No more munitions! Nothing to eat for the men, and even less for the cannons and all the bulimic engines of war, worn out for the most part, corroded by the infernal storms of gas, red hot or corrosive liquids that they breathed, vomited or poured out over their perimeter of devastation.

The situation out there was frightful. The monstrous factory of massacre was in its death throes. People were killing one another by night in order to snatch a few shreds of nourishment. It was the end. The Bulgar had been able to flee in the company of a few other starvelings, lost on the way.

As he talked a great deal about famine, that reminded us of our appetite. The man understood. He asked permission to get up, and pulled out a heavy sack hooked on to an iron road behind a sheet of armor.

Provisions! Two rabbits and a first-rate rat, almost as fast as the rabbits. A magnificent windfall! At a stroke, our fatigue was forgotten. We got up very quickly; brushwood was piled up under a corner of the bombard, with bits of dry wood, and a flame shone.

Our cooking didn’t take long. The rifleman skinned the two rabbits and the rat and spitted them on iron rods. We all found branches and blew on the fire in order to make the roast go more quickly.

We showed the Bulgar a little more respect.

“Go on, sit down—you’ll have your share.”

The rabbits, browned rather than cooked, were soon dispatched. That was a pleasure. I also had a small slice of rat; it’s a delicate dish that we all appreciate now.

After that almost lavish meal, we would be able to lie down and sleep!

The Bulgar lay down in the hay beside me, finding that better than underneath in his hidey-hole.

 

X. An agitated night in the ruins of a tank.

 

A profound silence is established in our ruined bombard in the depths of that pitch darkness, only disturbed by a few vague sounds of respiration, the rustle of brushwood, and a snore that rises, and abruptly ceases.

I contemplate the slightly brighter sky through the breaches and holes with which the armor is riddled. Thought leaks away from my weary brain; I don’t know exactly where I am. Is that the heavens I perceive up there, through the holes in the carapace above my head? They heavens, with theirs stars, seen through the vaults of Hell? Yes, more like Hell, that’s where we are...

And I stir, I turn over, I struggle...

Then, a shock...

I have an abrupt sensation of a fall on to sharply-pointed rocks. I must have fallen off my bundle of fodder on to the iron debris, which is wounding me. I roll over slightly; I try to get up…impossible. I remain on my side, and sink into an exhausted sleep.

Now I’m dreaming...

Mountains glaciers, precipices, the bristling crowns of gigantic fir trees, twisting and writhing monstrous, menacing arms…that must be the idea of my fall on to jagged rocks just now...

The mountains rise up. It’s the Himalaya. Thunder rumbles…thunder or explosions? And the mountains talk, the Himalaya frowning its eyebrows of white rock, cries furiously: “Come on, you out there, you, the Alps! You, the Caucasus and Carpathians! You have no more volcanoes, then, to finish off these enraged pygmies, these frenetic myrmidons? Shrug your shoulders—a good earthquake to crush the race, summon the fire of heaven to the rescue...”

“Silence, Brother,” replies the terrified Mont Blanc. “It’s those pygmies who have blown the volcanoes up! The fire of heaven? It’s theirs, they have it, they’re making use of it to demolish my peaks and blow up my summits. Shut up, I beg you—I’m scared!”

I don’t know what the Himalaya might have said—someone pushes me again, and the metal on which I’m lying is scratching my sides. The Himalaya disappears; I open my eyes; I can only see blackness, but I can hear bizarre sounds outside in the dark. What is it? Howling in the countryside...

I remember now; we’re a long way from the Himalaya, lying in the ruins of a wheeled bombard. Let’s sleep, then...

Someone pushes me again. It’s the intolerable Bulgar who grabs me by the arm.

“Let me sleep, satanic Balkan Boche! I need my eight hours of sleep.”

“Wolf! Wolf! Wolves!” he shouts in my ear.

“What? Wolves?”

“What?” The comrades have heard the word, vaguely, and are trying to wake up.

“Wolves,” I say to them. “This damned Bulgar doesn’t want to let us sleep.”

“Wolves!” cries the doctor, bounding from his straw at the expense of my tibias. “It’s serious, then! Packs of wolves—I’ve heard talk of them. A bad encounter! Get up! Barricade ourselves in, quickly!”

The howling was getting closer. Mohammed, the Senegalese, got down outside our fortress to reconnoiter, and leapt back up again.

“They’re coming,” he said. “They’re all around us.”

Already we were foraging at hazard under our bedding, pulling out iron rods and fragment of armor plate, the debris of a door, various lumps of iron and piling them up in the breach through which we had got into the tank.

The Bulgar was more familiar than we were with the resources of the rolling blockhouse, his domicile for a week, and he passed us the materials for our barricade. Fortunately, there was no other practicable breach for the four-footed assailants. The other holes not being accessible, we only had to face up to a frontal assault.

We were just in time; as we finished blocking the breach, the wolves leapt to the assault, howling. That woke me up completely. Until then it had seemed that my extravagant dream was continuing, but I saw the embers of their eyes gleaming, I heard their raucous breath and the grinding of their ferocious teeth. They too were hungry!

If they seemed furious, we were even more so, because of our troubled night—and out prehistoric weapons were about to make them see it! Above our barricade, through the scrap iron, we were already thrusting judiciously at the menacing snouts, or into the pack, or at the spines of those that were trying to get through the holes.

That first attack lasted a good quarter of an hour; then the assailants retreated. We heard them circling our refuge, scratching and growling, wearing away their claws on the armor plate.

“The enemy is on the run,” I said to the doctor as the growling and the panting gradually eased. “I think that with a watchman at the barricade, we can resume our interrupted sleep.”

“All right,” he said. “Try. Me, I’ll stand guard—someone can replace me when I’ve had enough.”

It took us a good quarter of an hour to go back to sleep; the battle had started our blood flowing vigorously. But finally, little by little, we all departed again for the land of dreams—a happy land, the sweet land of the past, on which we tried every evening to focus our thoughts, with the hope of going there to find a few hours of repose, forgetful of somber realities.

Personally, I strove to think about my apartment on the Boulevard Montparnasse, my study, my soft bed, my breakfast in the morning, with cream, chocolate, gilded crusty croissants—and I had been savoring the delights of all that for hours, it seemed, when the Bulgar gave me a hard punch.

“Wolf! Wolves!” he cried.

I heard the howling without understanding. I had forgotten the enemy. Fortunately, my comrades, behind the barricade, resumed thrusting at the assailants, more furious and panting harder than the first time. While still half asleep, I did the same as the others, jabbing through the holes at the enemy.

That lasted ten minutes. Again the wolves renounced the assault and resumed circling the tank, howling, or trying to climb up to the higher breaches.

Then they disappeared, and I lay down again.

“Who’ll take guard?” asked the doctor.

Mohammed offered. I didn’t dispute the post, and stretched myself out beside the Bulgar.

…Howling again, pressure again our barricade. Someone comes toward me. I get up, groping, and I go, almost in a dream, to make spear-thrusts, almost at random. The attack weakens; the wolves resume circling. They’re crunching something, jostling one another and growling. I hear the sound of their jaws and I shiver. One of ours, perhaps?

“They’re eating their wounded, for want of anything else,” the doctor tells me. “Will you take the watch?”

I make no response to the invitation. Tranquillized, I’m already asleep again.

Thus, seven or eight times before morning, it’s necessary to wake up, to get up, numbly, cold, yawning and groaning, and endure the assault of the wolves, striking and thrusting at random through the augmented and consolidated barricade—which holds firm.

“Oh, if I only had two or three grenades!” roared the artilleryman Jollimay, finally driven into a rage by all the sudden awakenings.

With daylight, we all wake up, this time for good, harassed, stiff and bent, but definitively rid of our enemies, disappeared at dawn.

When we emerge from the tank to stretch our limbs, we find three carcasses torn apart, scattered bones and bits of bloody skin—all that remains of our victims.

No booty of war. Mohammed and Jollimay grumble. They had hoped to find a few cadavers of wolves to take back for the larder.

In the damp morning mist, our ruined fortress stands out in an impressive and dramatic fashion, dominating a vast and sinister landscape of devastation, where everything is ravage and ruin: the ground cracked and broken, full of asperities, holes and scars, with white or red traces of evaporated farms or villages, disappeared forever; the water of streams with changed courses spread out in stagnant pools in the craters; the trees decapitated, crippled amputated and dislocated, but obstinate in living regardless, putting out new branches and garnishing their miserable broken stumps with foliage.

The tank is grounded on a kind of mound, its rusty mass looming up ponderously on the debris of its enormous wheels, brandishing twisted metal, seemingly still threatening the entire horizon through the black holes of its breaches and battlements.

But I’m not allowed to linger in the contemplation of our fortress; I’m summoned to take up my burden of forage. It’s necessary to get back without wasting time. Monsieur Vandermolen takes the head of the caravan; he has got his bearings and knows approximately where we are.

En route, then, to try to arrive early.

 

XI. The return to the cavern.

The misfortunes of a henhouse.

 

We had been advancing for about half an hour when the doctor, who was walking alongside me, pointed out shadows to our right, moving through the brushwood some distance away, bounding behind the undulations of the dune.

“The wolves,” he told me. “They’re following us. Bah! In daylight, they don’t scare us.”

Old memories came back to me as we marched. My grandmother once told me that in her childhood, after the great Napoleonic wars, wolves had been seen to reappear in her province: the ancient forgotten terror of villages in forests...

Here they are again, brought back by the frightful upheaval, emerging in famished packs from what distant forest, what wild Balkans, what steppes?

Under our bundles of hay, wary eyes watching the wolves, the doctor and I philosophize as we stride along.

“I knew one worthy fellow,” the doctor said, “who contended that the Earth was, in reality, the Purgatory of which our religion speaks: Purgatory, the place of deportation, into which we’re precipitated at birth in order to expiate sins committed on another planet, and where we’re condemned to live a more or less long existence, in accordance with the blackness of our faults, venerable centenarians being, in consequences, those most heavily charged with grave sins. And in sustaining that, he thought himself frightfully bitter and pessimistic, the poor fellow!

“How wrong he was! Our Earth is much better than that, I’m sure, better than a simple and gentle little Purgatory! It’s quite simply Hell, the realm of Satan. Everyone, whoever we are—you, me, the others—if we’ve had the misfortune to be born on this sorry ball, it’s because we’ve merited it thoroughly, by crimes of all sorts, committed elsewhere, in perfectly deplorable anterior existences, which have obliged the great judge to exercise severity on our souls and our bodies...”

“That seems quite probable to me, alas! Yes, we must have been frightful rogues elsewhere...”

“That’ll teach us! Let’s expiate, since we must, expiate and redeem! I swear, from now on, to conduct myself in the most edifying fashion, throughout the time I still have to live. That’s what you say, isn’t it, for a moderately pleasant existence? I swear to show myself, as much as possible, kind, good, helpful, even devoted when I can, in order to merit a reduction in punishment…and if my soul has to come back, as is probable, to animate a substitute body somewhere, please, Lord, let it not be on this accursed Earth! Let it be elsewhere; there’s no lack of room in your universe…send me to some little planet, far, far away from here—as far as you like! O Lord, to obtain that mercy, what would I not do? Penitence, fasting, disgrace and unpleasantness, I can accept it all, even solicit it... Here, my dear Monsieur, put your load of forage on mine—I can easy carry two!”

A little more, in his desire for mortification to augment his merit and his chances, and the doctor would have invited me to climb on to his back. I didn’t want to abuse his good will, and I even kept my bundle of forage.

We kept going. Toward the middle of the day, when noon was sounding in our stomachs, we recognized familiar landscapes. Harlem and home couldn’t be far away. A little more courage, one more stage, and we’d be home.

We went through the remains of a village that we’d visited before. There the doctor found an opportunity to devote himself a little to the relief of the miseries of the world. A few invalids in a few huts were signaled to him. He ran to them. He bled one old woman, set a fisherman’s broken arm, massaged rheumatisms, distributed a dozen gumballs to children with colds, and searched for simples to make tisanes. That was all he could do.

In the meantime, we rested. Monsieur Jollimay, with is wooden leg, needed to catch his breath, and we dined on snails we’d picked up along the way.

The doctor rejoined us exultantly. He had been given four beets for his honoraria—in spite of all his protestations and refusals, I ought to say, but, after all, the beets were very welcome; we ate two of them, reserving the others for the evening salad.

The wolves had abandoned us; we didn’t see them again. We warned the people of the village to look out for their children.

We’re almost home; here is familiar territory, our own dunes, with the holes and craters cultivated by our hands, or those of the people in neighboring caverns.

I’m not sorry to reach port, or our legs can do no more, and if the doctor keeps going on, I think I’ll end up climbing on to his back—but we’ve been spotted; people are coming to meet us, Here comes someone waving their arms at us.

Howard Gibson, the American billionaire and Madame Vitalis tumble down the slope, followed by Mademoiselle Vitalis and Maître Saladin, the captain-notary. The three wooden legs of the captain, the American and Madame Vitalis are going tick-tock on the pebbles.

“How anxious we were yesterday!” cries Madame Vitalis. “We were waiting for you all night...”

“We were too far away and too tired,” I said. “We had to camp in a tranquil spot…relatively tranquil…but here we are, with a good provision of forage, as you see. We’re going to fatten up our horse.…”

“And is all well at the villa?” Monsieur Vandermolen asked

“Yes, yes,” said the two women, in an evasive tone.

“Imprudents!” cried the doctor. “You don’t have your masks with you! What if there was...?”

“Oh, yes…er, no…the thing is, we thought there was no more danger...”

“You don’t know,” said the American. “During your expedition, prisoners have been taken—or, rather, deserters fleeing the Boche lines at the Palace of Peace have turned up. It’s true, it’s right! Out there, they’ve run out of the munitions of their infernal chemistry! We have the details…there are a couple of chemists among the deserters. Nothing’s happening any longer out there; the ammunition dumps are completely empty: no more explosives, and nothing with which to manufacture them, nor anything for the toxic gases.”

“Is that absolutely certain?”

“There’s been penury there for a long time, since an accident, it appears,” said Mademoiselle Vitalis.

“Oh,” said Maître Saladin, “say a catastrophe, a delightful catastrophe! I got the details of the order and the progress…explosions of carboys of asphyxiants in a laboratory, fire spreading from depot to depot, a series of increasingly powerful explosions, the big factory blown up, with all the storage bunkers. The best of all is that the entire general staff of chemists perished along with the laboratory! Nothing to be done, impossible to approach! Eruptions of deleterious gas at every moment, clouds of asphyxiating vapors, geysers of corrosive liquid hurling death in all directions...”

“No more chemists!” the American added.

“Good riddance!” said the doctor.

“No more acids, no more explosives, nor raw materials for mines, no more sulfur, niter, bromine, manganese, benzol, no more iron, no more tin, copper, nickel, no more coal, no more...no more anything...in sum, no more materiel. Engines, machines, cannons—all worn out, finished, and replacement as impossible as the renewal of stocks of munitions. Finished, this war of machines in which humans were only a derisory accessory, destined to be flattened more or less rapidly—the factory war has ended up destroying the factory itself!”

“They’re eking out the scrapings from the bottom of the barrel. What do they have left? A few old torpedoes, a few charges from fished-up mines, a few canisters of viruses and bacilli. They’re the monster’s last spasms!”

We arrived home. What a joy to drop the bundles of forage and sit down properly, while awaiting the dinner we’d certainly earned.

However, it appeared that Madame Vitalis was a trifle melancholy, and she seemed rather embarrassed. Jeanne Vitalis and Marcel Blondeau were plucking the salad without breathing a word, with worry lines on their forehead, which was entirely foreign to their habit, the young people usually exhibiting an insouciance that bordered on cheerfulness.

“What’s wrong?” asked Monsieur Vandermolen, anxiously. “Is the goat all right? And the horse?”

“Very well, very well, but...”

“But?”

“Well...it’s the chickens.”

“What’s wrong with the chickens?”

“They’re…there aren’t any, any more. They’ve been eaten.”

“What? You’ve eaten the chickens!”

“In our absence!” said Miraud, dolorously. “That’s not polite...”

“No, not us—the rats! Last night…an invasion of enormous rats!”

“The henhouse wasn’t properly closed, then?”

“Yes, but there were holes. We heard noises, without suspecting the disaster at first! The rats were killing the hens and the cock. In the end, as the din went on, we arrived...too late, alas! None were left, except for the white hen besieged at the top of the ladder. Monsieur Blondeau fell on the rats, hitting them with a stick. He was heroic—he killed seven or eight!”

“Nine,” said young Marcel.

“He’s closed the door in order to massacre the miserable rats, but he had to open it so that we could help him, or the rats would have devoured him too. Enormous rats—look, look at the plate over there.”

Mohammed got up to run to the henhouse.

“Damn! Damn! Quickly, traps, we need to make traps. I have to kill them all, the rats. It’s your fault—you didn’t want to eat them…very good, though!”

“Fortunately, all is not lost. They didn’t have time to eat the slaughtered hens—that will give us provisions for a few meals.”

The catastrophe of the henhouse saddened our dinner somewhat, although we were all glad to be back after our fatiguing expedition and our nocturnal battle against the wolves. Two of the murdered chickens fortified the dinner and made it more sumptuous than we had hoped; our appetite did honor to the victims. They had very tender flesh—but, alas, there was no hope of any more eggs.

Madame and Mademoiselle Vitalis shivered when we recounted our adventures. Marcel Blondeau regretted not having been with us in our rusty fortress for the battle against the wolves. I’m quite certain that he was insincere, and preferred having stayed behind to help Madame and Mademoiselle Vitalis look after the house and the garden.

Youth, youth! In the ruins of the world you persist! Is it really worth the trouble, though?

Good—now I’m falling back into the black again; Dr. Christiansen has infected me with his pessimism.

There are two more of us now: the Japanese aviator Yamato Yradonou, our new friend, and the Bulgar from the tank. Yamato will share the aviator Miraud’s room; they can tell one another about their experiences of combat in the sky. It’s necessary to find a corner for the Bulgar, our prisoner. What are we going to do with that intruder?

 

XII. The revenge of the pike, the bow and the club.

 

Mange! We all have the mange! Catastrophe! It’s the wretched Bulgar who’s brought the mites from the German lines.

For days now we’ve all been scratching and looking at one another anxiously. The doctor was scratching too, preoccupied and thinking about other things, but one evening, I extracted him from his somber reflections to ask him for a consultation.

“You see, Doctor, horrible itching, unbearable pruritus. I’m scratching, we’re all scratching, everyone here is scratching. What is it?”

The doctor’s only response was to scratch himself—then he slapped his forehead.

“Where’s my head?” he cried. “Of course, it’s the mange! It was well worth the trouble of escaping the wolves in the ruins of our bombard to bring that back! Malediction!”

“It’s nothing serious, Doctor, since it’s only mange, as I thought. Cure us!”

“Cure you? Cure us? That would have been easy once, but today…with what, if you please? I don’t have anything for that...let me think... In the meantime, don’t breathe a word to anyone; leave them ignorant of that displeasure for another day or two...”

Mange! That’s not going to extract me from the depression into which my attack of pessimism has thrown me. Why did I have to come back from the Pole, where we’d organized a supportable, even tranquil, little life, devoid of emotions and torments, with various kinds of hunting for distraction? One is never content! Life there was possible, after all, in a nice cozy cavern, well equipped; the bears furnished us with food and clothing, we had an abundance of aquatic game, birds and fish, with good companions to keep the fire going. I was able to sort out my observations, and even to occupy my mind; I was planning to write a great natural history in fifteen or twenty volumes...

How far away all that is now, since I’ve rediscovered Europe, with its present pleasures, the flood of horror brought by what they called Science and Progress, Civilization and other follies collapsed forever, illusions drowned in rivers of blood.

It’s the doctor who was in the right when I tried to combat his ideas about that and refused to accept his conclusions. Where has that hateful Science led us, which put so many resources and discoveries in the service of a race of prey? That Science, which furnished them with the frightful arsenal from which they gleefully drew their infernal weapons: gas, flames, vapors, acids, viruses and bacilli, all their maleficent chemistry! And iron to fabricate the plowshare with which the labor peoples! Yes, the engine is everything, and the value of the human being, its slave, is nothing, or almost nothing.

Into what bloody gulf has it precipitated us, that famous Progress of which we were so proud, when we puffed ourselves up with admiration for ourselves, the Progress that suddenly permitted the rapid and complete demolition, the sudden collapse, of an illusory civilization, which, in reality, was nothing but degeneracy, and a mortal malady...

I spent a bad night scratching myself, turning back and forth in my fury.

Will we ever get out of the abyss in which we’re struggling? Shall I ever see Paris again? What would I find there? What would I do, what would become of me? Shall we ever see less somber days again, less hideous times? Do we even have a future? I don’t want to stay here forever, though, exchanging somber ideas with the doctor! It’s necessary to go, to go—but how? I’m still looking, always, for the how, rolling more or less absurd projects round my head, which maintain my insomnia...

When morning comes I rush to the doctor, scratching frantically. I’m not the only one; the others arrive, all just as anxious. They know, and are scratching themselves in the knowledge of the cause. We can talk.

“Well, Doctor, have you found it?”

“For the little inconvenience?” says the doctor. “It’s quite simple very easy. I’ll tell you: a little special ointment or black soap, or lotions of essence of turpentine or fuel-oil. In two days, it’s gone. Except that, to reckon with this accursed mange we have no ointment, no black soap, no turpentine, no fuel-oil, and I can’t see where I’m going to find any...”

Such desolation is painted on our faces, and Marcel Blondeau groans so dolorously as he looks at Jeanne Vitalis, as red as a poppy, that the good doctor is moved.

“Wait, though, before lamenting,” he said. “I don’t have anything at the moment, but I’ll search. There’s a means. Let’s go into the town, four or five of us, with spades and pick-axes, to the ruined shops. Let’s dig in the ruins of the pharmacy…or the paint-merchant…yes, that would be better, the paint merchant’s hasn’t been excavated so thoroughly, because there’s nothing worth eating there. There’s more chance of finding something for us...”

“Right away!” I cried. “Let’s go! Quickly!”

Marcel already had a pick in his hand, and Jeanne Vitalis ran to fetch a spade.

“Yes, that’s right—run!” said Madame Vitalis. “Find something!”

The hope of soon being rid of the wretched acarid, the minuscule enemy that has just added its unbearable assaults to all our troubles, makes me forget my other preoccupations.

Everyone wants to go on the expedition; five minutes later we leave, all full of ardor.

People we encounter in the town, in much greater numbers than in previous weeks, grouped in discussion, stop us as we go by, to confirm what everyone already knows about the total exhaustion of resources, and above all of munitions, in the Boche lines. Wretches escaped from The Hague or neighboring ruins are still arriving, their accounts can’t leave the slightest shadow of doubt.

Finally! We’re going to see something new!

But I confess that I was thinking first and foremost about our new enemy, the acarid!

We worked for two days on our excavations, feverishly and furiously, turning over and scattering all the heaps of rubble, without discovering the slightest thing that might serve to massacre that brigand of a mite. Finally, as we were despairing, the doctor laid his hands on I don’t know what horrible hardened mixtures, which resembled paint, in the debris of crushed tins and drums. He brought everything back, carefully, and took possession of Madame Vitalis’ stove, to the detriment of our cooking, in order to devote himself to a nauseating chemistry that was almost as bad, in mephitic terms, as the Boche gases.

I heard the young people moaning in low ones in the corners.

“Marcel, I beg you, don’t look at me with horror,” stammered Mademoiselle Vitalis, still crimson and trying to hide in the shadows of our cave.

“Jeanne, Jeanne, will you love me in spite of these…oh, I’d much rather have a good wound!”

“No, no, Marcel, don’t say that!”

But there’s no need to go into the ridiculous details of our cure. Three days later, the infinitesimal and tenacious enemy was vanquished; we were all cured! We uttered sighs of relief. Mademoiselle Vitalis no longer blushed when she looked at Marcel Blondeau, who gave the impression of having to retain himself in order not to dance and sing. He embarrassed our savior with excessively warm expressions of his immense gratitude, shook the hands of Jeanne and Madame Vitalis, expanded in effusions and came back to congratulate the ladies, to congratulate everyone...

The acarid having been annihilated, crushed in its lairs, my thoughts returned to the other enemy, the frightful monster at bay in its trenches and fortresses, having reached the end of its means of destruction.

Information arrives with increasing certainty. The people buried for such a long time in their holes and their cellars, are emerging and going from ruin to ruin, spreading the good news. They no longer hide during the daylight hours, only risking themselves outside with a thousand precautions, or only after nightfall.

I’m surprised to see so many people emerging from all the holes in a country that I had thought deserted. Children are running over the dunes in the sunlight, without masks: poor children born in misery, famine and suffering in the depths of cellars, where they had lived as little troglodytes, far more unfortunate than their ancestors of the age of caves, who had only had to fear natural forces and ferocious beasts, and not all the horrors and perfected ferocities of the scientific age.

All the men of the surrounding burrows, the Batavian tribes of the ruined villages, are coming into the ruins of Harlem to hold councils and seek allies for the great battle that they’re preparing.

I admire the beautiful clubs and the rude pieces of pointed iron, forged, reshaped and naively equipped with handles by people who are reinventing the lance, the pike, the guisarme, the vouge, the halberd, the mace, the battle-ax—all the old hand-weapons of distant ages—and who will be happy to make use of them in the great final charge at the enemy of the human race.

The bow will also be at the feast, manipulated by men who haven’t forgotten the Fleming and Picard traditions of shooting at birds. There are archers desirous of sending their arrows at the abhorred Boches, at the scholarly barbarians who have crushed them with huge shells, bombs, torpedoes loaded with superdynamite, panclastite, trinitrotoluene, phosphorus, poisoned them with their emissions of asphyxiating, suffocating or corrosive gases, and buried or electrocuted them under the eruptions of electric volcanoes…

Finally!

And their thirst for vengeance grips me. It really is going to be the end of Gesta diaboli per Germanos!

Emissaries are being sent toward the allied lines, toward Amsterdam, to try to find out how things stand there, and to reach an understanding in order to coordinate the movements.

The country is silent, except when Amsterdam launches a few shells—for it still has a small provision—at the Palace of Peace, which no longer responds.

I’m no longer thinking of leaving before the big push, the imminent mass attack that our prehistoric warriors are preparing. I shall be there. We shall all be there!

We’re furbishing weapons in the cellar, as people are doing everywhere. My comrades are rubbing their hands together, joyfully. Yes, one can see people smiling now, and brandishing their primitive weapons at the thought of the use they’re going to make of them, and that perhaps the end of the frightful nightmare is nigh—and the hour of vengeance too.

Mohammed shows his teeth; his smile is a rictus. He has sharpened the tip and blade of a magnificent saber-bayonet, passed through his belt like a dagger, and all day long he polishes spears or hooked vogues with multiple points for our friends or for the amateurs of the neighboring caverns.

The military men of our little association, the wreckage of various armies who have ended up here, brought together by the hazard of catastrophes—the Peruvian lieutenant, the Japanese aviator, Monsieur Jollimay, the Swiss rifleman, Maître Saladin, the captain-notary, and the New Zealander—are organizing those neighbors, with the valid men of the town, into a single company, which has very rapidly become a sizeable battalion, and training them for the supreme hand-to-hand battle with prehistoric clubs. They practice running, combat and skirmishing, in preparation for the great charge, devoid of pity and mercy, that is to liberate the world—“or what still remains of it and is worthy of being conserved,” says the doctor, ever pessimistic.

Marcel Blondeau is showing a frenetic ardor. He goes out, running around incessantly, carrying out distant reconnaissance in the direction of the Boche positions. He recruits warriors with solid fists from the surrounding area, awaiting the great day with impatience.

Jeanne Vitalis is as excited as he is, and when we depart for the battle, she will be there. She is already able to put one arrow in two into the black at fifty paces. It’s an appreciable talent, added to all those she possesses already. She is going to avenge her mother’s wooden leg—poor Madame Vitalis, who is shivering in advance, and would like to prepare, with the doctor, the provisions of lint that we’re certainly going to need before long, when we come to blows. But to make lint one needs cotton, and we don’t have any, or so very little!

 

XIII. A wretch who wants to reinvent gunpowder.

 

And I too shall go to the great battle—me, a man who is so peaceful, even pacifist! I would once have treated as a madman anyone who had told me that I would one day march to combat full of ardor and fury, ax in hand, like a warrior of prehistoric times—but that is what I am going to do.

I feel myself, I look at my arms, I even pick myself to make sure that I’m not dreaming again. No, I’m awake; it’s really me who is brandishing this heavy ax and wearing an enormous cutlass, which Mohammed has carefully sharpened for me, passed through a rope belt.

Through the main square of Harlem—what remains, at least, of the old Groot Markt, so prettily formed by beautiful brick houses and monuments: the Saint Bavo cathedral, the Town Hall with the Franz Hals Museum, and the old meat market with the gigantic Renaissance gable—file a strangely equipped troop of thin but robust men, warriors dressed in badly-worn cassocks of coarse fabric and animal skins, showing glimpses of suntanned chests and muscular arms, all marching with and energetic and decisive stride, carrying various weapons over their shoulders: enormous pikes, clubs, long-handled axes, sparkling scythe-blades attacked to the ends of solid handles.

They all have cutlasses in their belts, or sabers of all forms. Alongside one infantry saber that must have seen service in the army of 1810 or 1830, I perceive a huge rapier from the time of William the Silent, and a bizarrely-sheathed steel blade, the work of some contemporary blacksmith.

Oh, old Franz Hals, painter of the bourgeois guards of the heyday of Harlem, the feasts of pikemen and arquebusiers of the good old days, what would you say if you saw the descendants of your models of yore, the primitive horde that is traversing the main square today and going to line up before the masses of red and white stone, the scattered rubble of the monuments that were the adornment of the destroyed city?

You would not find among their descendants the expansive rubicund faces of the brave bourgeois soldiers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, any more than the well-tailored doublets and the magnificent collars. But you might admire the energetic heads refined by misfortune and long suffering, the attitude of resolution of all these men and all those who are coming to join them, arriving one by one or in small groups from all the streets, or ruins of streets opening on to the great market square, and the paths circling or cutting through the mountain of crumbled stones.

And there are warriors arriving in little troops, armed with pikes or scythes, sometimes in groups of archers carrying quivers on their back garnished with a provision of long arrows.

Some on them have come from a long way away, contingents furnished by the villages of the interior, peasants from farms lost in the polders or coastal fishermen. I recognize our friends from Noordwik, led by the formidable burgemeester, carrying the huge ax of a tribal chieftain of the age of caves. Yamato the Japanese aviator goes to clap him on the shoulder joyfully, happy to see the Batavian Hercules again, who laughs into his coarse beard and must be expressing to him, if I understand correctly, his loud desire to come to blows as soon as possible, his haste to rush to the assault on the Boche fortress of the Palace of Peace.

People come together, fold discussions, bring news from more distant regions, where people are also emerging from caverns and burrows under the ruins. Men go to examine the bands and groups that are arriving.

Every band has its war-chief, who makes them carry out various drill movements, bearing no resemblance to the military maneuvers of old, the days, so near and yet do far away, before the cataclysm.

What we have before our eyes really are the tribes of distant centuries, united by common danger, exercising with primitive weapons, the honest weapons used by the men of old to repel some invasion.

They seem ready, all of them, and disposed to march to battle with the will to win, the resolution to finish off and smash the common enemy, the scourge of humanity, the execrable scientific barbarian who was run out of his diabolical inventions and munitions.

The great day is nigh. Is the dawn of a new and better era about to shine over the ruins of the old world?

Dr. Christiansen and I are looking at one another, very emotional, our hearts beating hopefully, when Monsieur Vandermolen comes over, bringing the doctor a man from Harlem who has a big bulging sack under his arm.

“What’s that?” asks the doctor, when the man opens his sack.

“Saltpeter,” replied Monsieur Vandermolen.

“Saltpeter? What for?”

“To make gunpowder, of course,” says Monsieur Vandermolen, “With carbon and...”

The doctor jumps. His eyebrows frown, his lips purse and his beard juts out, his eyes flamboyant with such indignation that I interpose myself anxiously between him and the man from Harlem.

“So!” cries the doctor. “So, wretch, you want to reinvent gunpowder! What! You infamous scoundrel, you miserable dolt! We have the fortunate, the marvelous, the miraculous luck that all the powder-kegs are empty, that all the explosives are used up, exhausted, finished, that all the satanic horrors that have ravaged the world and reduced the planet to this state of devastation, woe and misery are abolished, and you want to remake them, reproduce them…you want to start all over again! Nothing can and nothing ever will change! What are you saying? What are you saying? You’re proposing to recommence the work of the monk Schwartz, whose soul has gone to the devil!”

His expression contrite, Monsieur Vandermolen bowed his head in shame. The man with the saltpeter dropped his sack.

Dr. Christiansen turned his back on them furiously and kicked the sack. He grabbed me by the arm and dragged me away.

“Oh, it’s like that, is it?” he said to me. “Well, so be it! Let’s go! Let’s plunge back one last time into the abominations of that accursed Science! Let’s go! Listen to me—I haven’t told you everything. I too am, have been, one of those detestable and abominable scientists who have led us to where we are, gradually, step by step, with their pretentious follies, their pursuit of the false progress demanded by the stupid and the imprudent, their rage for false ameliorations transforming the god old ways of life of fortunate centuries, and who rendered possible the frightful adventure, general destruction and universal carnage…that slut Science who has crucified poor unfortunate humanity, the vampire Science, the chimera in spectacles, devourer of man, scavenger of cadavers…that whore science can only be killed by science! Let’s go, let’s force the serpent vomited forth by Hell to bite itself, in order that it does of its own venom!”

The doctor planted himself in front of me; he looked at me with wild eyes, his voice trembling, clenching his fists as if he were about to strangle me.

“I think as you do, Doctor!” I said, swiftly. “You’re right, absolutely right! I too have retreated from the deceitful mirages of false progress, the destroyer of all beauty, the corrupter and demoralizer, and by virtue of that fact, the universal instrument of death. I’ve recovered from the blissful human admiration of that Science, which I curse as you do now that I’ve been able to see and judge the depths of the abyss! You’ve forced me to open my eyes and comprehend! Yes, that Science is nothing, in the final analysis, but the servant of the ferocious and insatiable Moloch to whom she furnishes, more and more abundantly, rations of victims to crush and devour!”

“Yes, yes…Moloch…the last idol, the monstrous idol it’s necessary to cast down…!” The doctor struck me on the shoulder with his fist, as if it were me that he wanted to strike and cast down.

After a momentary pause he went on: “Listen. I didn’t tell you everything when I told you about my miseries in the great German war factory, I didn’t tell you everything! A slave of the factory, condemned to forced labor in their laboratories, I labored…but I also thought, I reflected, I sought…I sought for my own account, and I found! Do you understand? I found…at least, I almost found…yes, yes, it needed so little! And the proof of my success, I was able to obtain it. The proof! The proof...

“You know the explosion that liberated me, that permitted me to escape—well, it was me who provoked it, me who produced it, sooner than I expected by means of…imagine my joy! From the depths of the cell where I was imprisoned, I was able to explode the cartridges in the cartridge-cases of the Landsturmers of the post, then the crates and carboys of explosives in the factory, and then the great depot....”

He could see in my face that I doubted those assertions; he grabbed me by the collar and shook me violently.

“Yes, yes! I repeat to you, I found it, I found it. I have nothing here to demonstrate it by experiment, the proof…I’d need…but you’ll see, you’ll see…since it’s necessary. A few final studies, a verification of the procedure, and it will go. Do you understand? Do you understand?”

“No, Doctor. No. Explain it to me...”

“In brief, this is it: I have...yes, I have the means, with a simple little instrument on the table of my study, or even in my pocket, to cause the explosion, at a distance of x—that remains to be determined—to cause the explosion, I say, of the cartridges in the cartridges cases and the rifles of the enemy soldiers, the shells in the caissons, the depots of munitions or explosive products, the mines, the ammunition-stores of ships, the torpedoes in the bunkers, the powder-kegs, the arsenals…in sum, everything. Everything! To make, at will anything at all capable of explosion, inside or behind no matter what, suddenly enter into deflagration and explode! Do you see now? Do you understand? At will. Whatever, and whenever and wherever I want!

“What?” I said, a trifle bewildered. “What?”

“Simple!” I was led to my discovery by the study of Hertzian rays—I’ll explain all that to you later. You’re going to help me; I’m almost at the end, I only need to determine certain points, regulate the mechanisms. Out there, in the German factory, I reached the final experiments. It was difficult; I had to hide…I wasn’t entirely certain of my discovery yet, I tried somewhat at hazard, hesitantly, but it worked, since the explosion as produced more rapidly than I thought, and in conditions that I can easily rediscover, with a little more research. It’s necessary, then, for me to take up my work again, to go a little further. I lack many things, but when I find a laboratory, it won’t take long. After a few trials, certain difficulties regulated, I’ll soon have it perfected. And then…then, you’ll see!”

“So,” I said, “you’ve become one of the instruments of that accursed Science again?”

“Since it’s necessary! Since, as you can clearly see, humans who haven’t understood anything, haven’t learned anything, want to start again, and will start again. Oh, they want to bring back explosives, powders, mines and torpedoes! Well, I’m going to blow them up in their hands, and make the usage of all that impossible, forever! Do you understand? No more powder, black or gray, no more terrifying explosives to devastate one’s neighbor, no possible artillery! Definitively vanquished, the monster cannon, no more bombards, no more mines, no more anything—I’ll blow it all up, and I’ll even cause all explosive matter, no matter where, to blow up by itself, automatically... That will hinder the industries that use explosives, it will render impossible or difficult certain large-scale works—too bad! We’ll go back to tools alone, to the only means of old. Antiquity didn’t make use of explosives, I think, and it still left great works! So, humans will be forced to revert forever to the old natural weapons! Since humans are determined to remain the arch-tiger of humans, I’ll erode their claws and teeth as far as possible...”

I had understood, and I shook the doctor’s hand vigorously.

“Come on,” he said. “In the meantime, let’s train ourselves with these old weapons for the final assault!”

 

XIV. The death-throes of the scientific Bellona.

 

They were all in full swing, the friends of our refuge, the burrow under the ruins of the Vandermolen house, those soldiers of such diverse races, who had fought the common enemy so far from their fatherlands, and those civilians caught up in the torment and washed up here, all of them felt hope gradually reborn in the depths of their hearts.

The somber motto of the bell-tower of Alost, so discouraged in its resignation, Neither hope not dread, no longer came back unintentionally to chill the blood in my veins and overwhelm my energy. Yes, I have hope now; Dr. Christiansen has hope; we all have hope.

The professor-artilleryman, Monsieur Jollimay, and the doctor no longer engage in those duets of bitter pessimism in the long evenings, in which the historical arguments of the former alternated with the anti-scientific imprecations of the latter, furnishing us with lugubrious dreams and nightmares for the long nights.

“The history of the world is about to commence an entirely new volume,” says Jollimay.

“Blank pages!” says the doctor. “But watch out—I’d like to be able to burn all the old books, too full of dangerous lessons!”

The aviator Miraud no longer has those fits of humor, or black humor, which sudden caused him to pass from an expansive and torrential loquacity—just like a Montmartrean from Toulouse—to the most complete mutism for hours and days on end. He’s started to sing again. In the morning, from his bedroom next to mine, he wakes us up with refrains, murmured at first, and then resumes in a voice that grows gradually louder. He repeats himself, he begins again, he modifies...

 

Here come all the toxic shells.

The strangling, choking wave,

All the torpedoes and chemical wells

That Hell hurls at the brave!

That Hell hurls at the brave.

 

Can you smell in every field,

The clouds of poisoned gases,

Making us keep our faces sealed

Lest they kill our lads and lasses?

Masks on, chaps,

Adjust your straps…

 

I can scarcely sleep, thinking about what’s in preparation, and I call out from my bed: “What’s that you’re saying, Monsieur Miraud?”

“That’s poetry,” replies Mohammed, my neighbor on the other side.

“I’m rhyming,” says Miraud. “It’s coming back to me. I’m thinking about Montmartre again, you know. One arm less doesn’t hinder me as much as I thought for holding a lyre! It’s gone, but the rhymes come all the same. What you hear there is the Marseillaise of Protest, sadly written in our holes, under the projectiles, with the gases and mephitic vapors raining down from the Boche trenches. You ought to remember it, Monsieur, because I sang it to you the day you arrived, under the wave of gas. My self-esteem as a poet is cruelly offended by your inconceivable forgetfulness. Anyway, let’s pass over the dolorous humiliation. Today, I’m rhyming something else, the Marseillaise of Vengeance—you’ll see, the revenge of the innocent army, courageous and loyal, over the ignoble engines of chemical warfare…and then something else, which you’ll have the politeness to learn by heart, the War Cry of the Troglodytes, for the imminent day of the attack…

Mr. Gibson the American billionaire is making plans. If the shock for which we’re waiting really is the last, if calm finally is to be reborn after the frightful cyclone of devastation, he invites us all to spend some time with him in America, in his vast estates in Illinois, which can’t have evaporated like the dozens of millions he brought to New York.

He’s no longer thinking of adding a wing to the Palace of Peace, in order to constitute a museum of the horrors of war. That museum of the horrors of war is the whole of Europe, in its length and breadth, no matter where; one only has to look around.

Monsieur Gomares, the worthy Spanish businessman, Monsieur Arbydian, the Armenian businessman and Demetrius Manoli, industrialist and financier, huddle together in the evenings in our subterranean kitchen in order to converse mysteriously.

God forgive me, they’re talking about the immense upsurge of business that will be provoked by the reconstitution—or, rather, the reconstruction—of society.

Harlem and the surrounding villages are increasingly animated. Armed bands are arriving from all directions, detachments of men sometimes coming from a long way away, carrying, in addition to their weapons—pikes, clubs and cutlasses—packages and luggage for encampment and nourishment, and all of them, like those here, are entirely disposed, with an appetite for combat and a range of vengeance.

The organization is feverish; leaders are being appointed. Scouts have advanced very close to the Boche positions and have set up observation-posts to keep watch on the enemy.

The Boche retrenchments remain silent; the canons are mute. The batteries that thundered for such a long time and so furiously all around the Palace of Peace, collapsed and turned upside-down, transformed by the interminable battle into an extraordinarily strong and complicated citadel, and improbable labyrinth of covered trenches or uncovered tunnels, sheltered galleries for masked and armored batteries, reservoirs or engines of toxic gases, caverns for giant bombards, fixed or mobile…all of it remains mute and inactive.

A heavy silence weighs upon the factory of death; the satanic engines, having vomited their last breath, are like the impotent cadavers of steel monsters, ferocious Leviathans slain in their turn, finally crushed!

When is the battle? I’m getting impatient; our prehistoric warriors are nervous. Everyone wants to get it over with. It’s Dr. Christiansen who moderates that impatience.

“We need every chance,” he says. “Let me work a little longer…be patient, calm down. Just think, what a catastrophe it would be is, with our primitive weapons, we’re going to run into loaded rifles? What if the enemy has conserved cartridges as a supreme resource, or a few shells? No, no, let me work!”

Emissaries have been able to reach the lines of Amsterdam. We’re assured of the cooperation of the people there, who will launch their own mass attack on the day and at the hour that the leaders fix. And they’ve been able to furnish the good doctor, in spite of a little difficulty, with the various things he requested in order to bring his great project to a conclusion.

Enclosed in a redoubt that has been fitted out as an improvised laboratory, he’s working, his eyes shining with a fever of anxiety that causes tremors to pass through his hands, and in his voice when anyone questions him about his results.

Will he discover—or, rather, rediscover—the secret he has already held, in the hazard of trials and triturations, the secret of the sovereign antidote that will cure humankind forever of the infernal chemistry of powders and explosives?

“Well, Doctor?”

Dr. Christiansen emerges from his laboratory, his features convulsed but joyful, We all throw ourselves upon him.

“Well, I finally have it! I hope...I have it…I’m sure of it…I’ve found it again…I’ve reconstituted my machinery. We can prepare for the attack. If the enemy has the slightest quantity of explosives, the smallest munitions store, I’ll blow it up in his hands! I’m going to the Council of Chiefs to make the final preparations. And immediately thereafter, the assault with hand weapons. Their rifles will be nothing more than bayonet-handles; we’ll see the work of our pikes, our clubs, our axes and cutlasses!”

“One more explosive,” I say.

“No, an exploder—the supreme exploder!”

“Bravo, Doctor! Hope! Confidence! Hurrah!”

“Banzai!” cries the Japanese. “Forward march!”

“I’m certain,” the doctor goes on, “but as proof, today, I’m going to make the mines washed up on the coast at Noordwik explode—you know, the ones that gave you such a fright because of your imprudence.”

We shake the doctor’s hand joyfully, and we leap upon our weapons in order to caress the shiny and well-sharpened blades. Yes! They’re going to do good work!

“And forward the Marseillaise of Vengeance!” Miraud shouts to us. “For the deliverance and the great clearance!”

Marcel Blondeau almost dances for joy, and, under the pretext of helping her, squeezes Jeanne Vitalis’ hands as she checks her arrows, as emotional as he is. She doesn’t want to quit Marcel; she will fight by his side.

They appear to me to be symbolic, those two children. Among all of us, old and worn out, lamentable survivors of a generation rushed by the enormity of the fatalities that have descended upon their shoulders, they represent the future in revolt, the future that is detaching itself from the frightful past, the race that will grow and hope—or rather, resume hoping—that will survive the frightful crisis in which it saw the annihilation of the entire heritage of centuries, so slowly accumulated.

And Madame Vitalis, who has understood, kisses both of them feverishly.

There is a great stir all day around Harlem, the concentration into numerous troops, making the final preparations for the march toward The Hague, to occupy the advance positions in front of the Palace of Peace—of complete and definitive peace, this time.

In the afternoon, there are formidable explosions in the direction of Noordwik; they are the old mines run aground in the sand blowing up, and with them, old shells buried in the vicinity, in the dunes.

Other explosions are heard in the distance, at sea; they are surely drifting mines, tossed by the waves. Dr. Christiansen has succeeded—succeeded completely! The era of explosives is definitively closed.

And now, to arms! The big push is tomorrow!

I, the peaceful man, pacific until today, caress the point and the blade of the scythe of sorts that has been fabricated for me, and I clench my teeth...I’m waiting for tomorrow impatiently; I’m slightly nervous but I’m not afraid. On the contrary, I already feel completely stirred by joy, by the intoxication of the battle for the human race, finally liberated from devouring Science...

From tomorrow onwards, a new world will begin, which I can already glimpse...

In the years on end during which all study has been suspended, all education abolished, the connecting thread to the centuries abused by fatal Science has been cut; it’s necessary not to fall back into the gulf...

The Tree of Science has been felled; it’s necessary that it doesn’t grow again, to rip it up, root and branch!

Oh, holy ignorance of recovered infancy, I bless you...