The Napus, page 23
The Conference of Weepers took place of the twenty-second of August 2228 in Potsdam, in the midst of an immense display of blue flags carried by charming young women, daughters of the principal manufacturers of asphyxiant shells and Archimedes in Sweden, Norway, Greenland and the Nordic lands in general, where ballistics has nuances of philanthropy. A prize of a million dollars, restored to parity with the analgo, would be awarded to the author of the finest work for peace. It was awarded to General von Herzius, the author of Archimedes, the inventor of a mechanical parrot that recited the antiwar sermons of the principal Teutonic preachers. At the banquet that followed, the Chancellor of the Empire made a poignant speech about the benefits of universal understanding and the cruel necessity that sometimes arose of temporarily breaking that understanding in order that it could be better reconstituted thereafter.
Forty-eight hours later, when the Weepers had scarcely got home, war was declared for “false suspicion of murder.” That same day, four hundred cases of Napus occurred in Paris, five hundred in London, three hundred and twenty seven in Rome and a thousand in Madrid. A new growth of monstrous mushrooms appeared in the suburbs of Paris, submerging the forest of Fontainebleau. The news from the great African lakes announced the chromonapus of several thousand black people, who had become pale green in a matter of seconds. In China, however, a nation of pullulation, the Disease assumed vast proportions with statistics—obtained, it is true, from the English and American consuls, who like large totals—of approximately a hundred thousand stinking “footprints” in three days. The result was a veritable infection throughout the Celestial Empire.
Among the notable individuals who disappeared without remains, in Paris and elsewhere, were Mère Tougourte and the newspaperman Barouille. Thiberaut, initially inconsolable about the disappearance of his odious Egeria, apparently never ceased repeating: “Yes, in the end, isn’t it, all the same,”—which did not prevent him from departing for Lac Majeur a week late with his young maid, forty years his junior.…all the same, isn’t it, yes, in the end!
The information that the braggart Ochenstein had given me, dismissed as “romances” by our General Staff, prompted me to look into the new German method of combat for myself. Henriette thought my curiosity perfectly legitimate. It only remained or me to obtain authorization from Conrtenaz. A mere formality, I thought, all the more so as the wife of our excellent “good, good” had departed the day before for an unknown destination with one of her husband’s collaborators. I expected to find him prostrate, but, to my great surprise, instead of a sympathetic and resigned cuckold I found an irritable, self-confident, suspicious man, deprived of his verbal tic, who raised a few objections based on my role at the Aristotle, my importance, the Levin affair, etc.
“I need you—and besides, it’s important to me to get a fix on the Napusocryptogamy at Fontainebleau; only a Polyplast of your worth, for far as I can see, can inform me.”
I objected that my collaborator, Henriette, was just as well-informed and capable of replacing me.
“Oh, women!” he said, with an evasive gesture that signified: one can’t count on them. All men in his situation tend to generalize.
After many ifs, buts, fors and verum enim veros,26 it was decided that I would make a succinct report on the situation at Fontainebleau, and that it would then be permissible for me to become a spectator of armies. That was, for a man of science who had become smitten with artistic sensations, a fine opportunity to turn, as they say, the taps of nature: that of natural perversity—pullulation—and that of human perversity: kampfsehnsucht.
Henriette and I arrived at the place where Barbizon had once been toward evening. The door of the palace was obstructed by a dozen enormous mushrooms, gigantic boleti, about which the porter complained sadly, for they had driven away the foreigners and admirers of the forest. They had respected the vestibule, though. They gave off a strong, intoxicating odor of damp foliage. One of them rose all the way to the window of out first-floor room.
We dined rapidly; the moon was shining and I wanted to take account of the strange and universal phenomenon that was intriguing the scientists of the entire world. The Aristotle’s automobile took us to the chaos of Franchard, to Bas-Bréau, the gorges at Apremont and the ruins of Marlotte. Whether it was a matter of beeches or stones, traced roads or impenetrable thickets, the monstrous mushrooms circumvented, scaled, wound around, slid, insinuated and inserted themselves, individually or in groups, like silent invaders. One might have thought them enormous fat umbrellas, open and gleaming beneath triple Hecate. Their unusual height brought them closer to the animal, and their order of implantation and growth gave the illusion of movement.
The force that propelled the phenomenal vegetables and annihilated white or yellow human tissues while discoloring those of black people, was evidently symbiotic, composed of two opposed tendencies or directions: one of growth or discoloration, the other of destruction. Undoubtedly, it was a matter of a cosmic force, originating from a heavenly body in fusion or transformation, and which human intelligence, which had had so much difficulty comprehending the similar origin of cancer and tuberculosis—one and the same malady—had not yet succeeded in disentangling. But was it not possible, too, that force X obscured human intelligence as soon as it latched on to it? That is the case, for example, with mathematics, which kill all reasoning that is not applied to their chimerical and logically-deducible formulae.
Henriette, rendered even more subtle by the night, the moon, the imminence of my departure and the war, pointed out to me that the vast sudden fungal display was no more mysterious or inexplicable that the Forest of Fontainebleau itself, a minero-vegetal masterpiece emerged from water and fire to make the esthetic sprit marvel.
“What’s prodigiously beautiful here, my beloved Poly, is the proximity of a hidden law, that we can only glimpse in a ray of moonlight. But a Beethoven symphony also moves the “pulcherrimum”27 in us by means of the presentiment of a hidden truth, extended like a golden thread between the human mind and the sound, the human heart and the rhythm. In the same way, when you take me in your arms, when you hold me, when you take me, don’t you seek to know as much as to enjoy, and interrogate your avid and curious soul even more than you’re burning senses? What is exalting and splendid is perhaps, in all the walks of the life and thought, what prepares one to know everything that is not yet known. The portico of that knowledge is always something of a Parthenon.”
That lunary night, before the colossal forms of the boleti, the orange-milks, the fly-agarics, the white mushrooms, the puff-balls and club-fungi, like vast and powerful corals, took us both to the highest point of conjugal conjunction and communion. Before the Napus, it would have inclined us toward the problem of death, but today that problem, having become too complex, no longer answered the appeal of amorous desire, and the result of that was a serenity of an exquisite softness—which we owed, in the final analysis, to the unknown scourge.
In consequence of these emotions, the report that I drew up at Cortenaz’s request was much more of a poem than a scientific document. I don’t know what became of it because, on returning to Paris, we learned that the two armies were confronting one another on the plains of Lorraine, where they had confronted one another so many times, and that an engagement was imminent. The Kampfsehnsucht was about to break out!
At about nine o’clock that evening I arrived at the Château de Saint-Paterne, on the Hauts-de-Meuse, where Maréchal Verve’s general headquarters were located. That dwelling, destroyed by the recent Archimedean inundation, had been reconstructed in a matter of hours according to the American method by Annamite workers. One of the latter having been napusified; his “footprint” had left a disagreeable odor by which neither the Maréchal nor the officers gathered around him appeared to be inconvenienced.
Verve was standing, in a blue uniform and boots, at a table covered with maps. He was absorbed in his reflections and shook my hand distractedly. His subordinates welcomed me affectionately, for the Levin affair, in which I had been involved, was still the object of all conversations. La Renaudière was accused of laxity in pursuit of the truth.
“Weakness in politics is always disastrous,” said an officer. “This one, far from preventing the new war.…”
“You mean the rupture of the armistice.”
“All right, the rupture of the armistice…La Renaudière’s climb-down hastened it. It’s unacceptable that, only two and a half centuries after the political education of Maurras, a minister of the King should be so ill-informed about the principles of mastering masters.”
But Verve’s solid and mocking voice rose up: “Enough criticism, Messieurs, and to action! We’ve been told”—here the Maréchal turned mischievously to me—“that the enemy is about to deafen us with the aid of a destructive tumult ten times more intense than any unleashed previously. I conclude from that—excuse me, my dear Polyplast!—that what is in preparation, by contrast, is an old-style battle, and what is important is to equip ourselves in advance for an attack by tanks of the latest model.
“I’ve had two lines of traps dug, hidden under branches and coatings of soft earth. In addition, two anti-tank divisions are ready to set forth, two kilometers from here in Saint-Trigaud. So we’re ready. Our counter-offensive will embrace the entire extent of the battlefield, in liaison with the English army—which, incidentally, hasn’t yet arrived—but it’s been announced, and it’s expected at any moment, and we don’t have to fear an inverse Waterloo.”
I had a strong desire to ask what had been prepared against the noise, just in case, in spite of everything, the Ochenstein information was well-founded, but I dare not raise the question of the mufflers like that.
The young officers were joking about the pretended exactitude and supposed immutability of the English command’s timetables: “They’re never on time—they’ve missed the train, forgotten their luggage. They’re the most distracted, the most poetic and the least practical people on Earth, and that’s why they’ve conquered it. They’re all disembarked mariners and colonizers.”
“And in science, Monsieur Poly 17,177, what are they giving us today?” asked a captain with a frank, naïve and joyful face.
“Great visionaries of the universe, in physics and chemistry, who are also skillful and precise experimenters. In biology, they’re not as good.”
“What do they think of the Napus? What explanation do they give of it? Do they also have Eustaches and Sidoines to develop well-coordinated and compressed fancies?”
I was about to reply but the door opened and, without being announced, Field-Marshal Mugh-Bigfort came in, accompanied by a young interpreter, in whom I immediately recognized a Polyplast of Boche tendency. The significant odor of Germanic sweat-glands, even in a hybrid, is never deceptive. That combined with the odor of the Annamite footprint left by the napusified mason.
“Bonswar,” said the British colossus. “The ball’s about to start, then. All’s well.”
“How many men, Monsieur le Maréchal?” asked Verve, elliptically, rubbing his hands—for he had, in fact, been afraid of a delay.
“Sixty thousand this evening, anther two hundred thousand tomorrow. All’s well that end well.” The Field-Marshal, very literate, willingly quoted Shakepeare and Esbott. He was already drowsy and was yawning as he listened to Verve’s explanations.
I remembered Levin’s considerations regarding forms of battle, previsions and uncertainty. Would this one belong to the category of combats that happen as one of the antagonists has foreseen, and to whom the decision would be granted?
Tolstoy relates that Kutusov slept sitting down during the preliminaries to Borodino; Mugh-Bigfort was sleeping standing up, smoking an enormous cigar, whose ash, not falling, seemed to have suspended the course of time like a blocked clepsydra. He asked for a glass of whisky of a particular brand, Canadian Club, which could no longer be found in the general quarters, although they were well-enough provisioned. Annoyance gave his face the aspect of a mortified ham. “All” was no longer “well.”
At that moment, an agonizing clamor, like the bellowing of a hundred thousand female mastodons having their throats cut, resounded outside, and a large painting hanging on the wall, representing a former proprietor of Saint-Paterne, fell noisily to the floor.
Mugh-Bigfort remained impassive. Verve paled slightly. The officers suppressed a furtive smile. Oschsenstein’s bony face suddenly appeared above my silence. It was the great Boche taraboom that was beginning.
As one distributes candy to children, Verve offered each of us wads of perfumed wax, manufactured in Konigsberg, which we swiftly stuffed into our ears in order to stifle the hypersound. Taking his blue pencil he wrote in large letters on a blank piece of paper, which I can still see: It won’t last. It’s a feint…for that soldier of high intelligence was prodigiously stubborn. He required two or three errors of prevision to rob him of victory, and when he won he maintained subsequently that it was precisely because of those mistakes.
No underground bunker had been set up, but there were still the cellars of the château, filled with the best vintages in France, and where it was necessary to take refuge. The first effect of the taraboom was to cut and crush all telephonic, wireless and other communications, with the result that we were about to find ourselves, for several hours, in complete ignorance of what was happening.
That was also the case for the Germans, as we learned subsequently. They had thought of everything except for that annihilation of means of communication, which realized Sidoine’s desire, but which also, as we shall see, had a result entirely different from the one that Sidoine had expected.
In the cellar—in the depths of the hold, it seemed—we could only record on the manometer the hundredth part of the racket perceived in the apartments of the château. However, and in spite of the ear-plugs, we had the sensation of being plunged in a frying-pan with the dimensions of Lake Geneva., above which a bronze bell was resonating, a sheet of glass continually smashed and reassembled from the height of the towers of Notre-Dame. We communicated in writing, which was not without a certain picturesque quality. The fluid phosphorescence apparatus had not shattered; it was still there; we could see clearly.
I was mistaken, I admit, wrote Verve, but have no fear. It will work out for the best. It’s only a short interval to get through.
The officers smiled sadly, wondering what would become of the French and English troops. Mugh-Bigfort was still drowsy, standing up like a caryatid dressed in rubber cloth, with the ash of his cigar extinct. His interpreter, leaning phlegmatically on the wall of the cellar in spite of the saltpeter dusting it, blinked his eyes with a muted expression. He seemed fit for a firing-squad to me, for he surely belonged to the secret police and was devoured by kampfsehnsucht, but I was the only one who suspected him.
The formidable petard of the Archimedes was joined by the collapse of the paintings, expensive vases, ewers, dressers and other items of the château’s furniture. The walls were trembling and vibrating, as if under the urgent blasts of a hurricane that threatened to shred and pulverize them: Vulcan unchained, or irritated by the treason of blonde Venus, jumping and dancing in a metal shell, trampling a mass of cymbals and turning his forge upside-down.
How long did that unexpected ordeal, worse than any kind of bombardment, go on? I don’t know. We were told afterwards that we had only gone seventeen hours with nothing to eat or drink, reduced to utter impotence in the cellars of Saint-Paterne. I’d like to believe it—but those seventeen hours were the equivalent of seventeen years.
Even so—and this is one of the mysteries of modern warfare—Verve’s personality continued, even living ten feet underground in the absolute impossibility of sending any order to his army, to act and maintain in his heart and his judgment of the French combatants, the certainty of ultimate victory. When all the apparatus, mechanisms and improved systems had bee pulverized by the hypersound, the calculative and warrior emanation of that gentleman with the wrinkled face, as subject to false evaluations as a mother and father, remained intact, transmissible and predominant.
The vastest, most original and most ludicrous of battles are merely a series of duels regulated by the supreme duel of two general staffs and the effluvia of two commanders-in-chief. That seems paradoxical, but is the simple truth. Those two masters of combat each remain seated in his office, meditating on their struggle and concentrating their thoughts, one in Paris, the other in Berlin—of which the final result might be the same as that obtained by the clash of thousands of men, except tht it would not be materialized. The battle is the hectic opposition of two individuals dynamisms, acting on hierarchically-organized hosts. Of those two dynamisms—which is to say, in sum, of those two souls, and not only that of those two minds—the stronger will prevail.
I tell you this, as a Polyplast, not only a metaphysicist but a mystic, floating far above the fields of battle where bloodthirsty crows are feasting.
Suddenly, the fantastic tumult ceased, as it had begun. We thought that it had surpassed the limit that human ears could perceive, beyond which sonic waves destroy rocks and the sphenoid bone without affecting hearing. It was nothing of the sort.
This is what had happened. Not only had the German mufflers not preserved the German army from the rightly-feared counter-shock, but the employment of those mufflers had—at least one presumes so—caused the aphanasia of nearly a hundred thousand enemy officers, non-commissioned officers and soldiers. After an hour, and simultaneously, those hundred thousand Boche had disappeared, napusified, without leaving any kind of trace—not even an oof!—taking with them a hundred thousand uniforms, the hope of the Deutschland, their kampfsehnsucht and their appetite for rape and pillage: a hundred thousand who would not return, as Baudelaire put it “to eat perfumed soup by the hearth in the evening, next to a beloved soul;” a hundred thousand who would not be there on the day of resurrection, between Wotan and Arminius, Grail in hand, celebrating the superiority of the German Archimedes and the slaughter of a billion Frenchmen and Englishmen in four consecutive wars.
