Rouletabille at Krupp's Page 7

  Nourry no longer being there to supply him with information, Rouletabille had been obliged to consult various people, including engineers, who, having only visited Krupp’s before the war, and who had only seen there what people wanted them to see.

  A few conversations that he had had in private with Madame Fulbert had not told him anything new about the Titania itself, but he knew—and it was particularly important to him—that Nicole Fulbert had worked closely with her father, and that she was not unacquainted with the whole of the inventor’s secret.

  Finally, before going into a sewing-machine factory with La Candeur, Rouletabille has assumed another face, another identity. He had allowed his beard to grow and now wore spectacles. That summary transformation of his physiognomy rendered him quite unrecognizable, making him into a different man.

  That other man was named Michel Talmar, and was in possession of identity papers attesting that for five years he had been the supervisor of a workshop at Blin and Company, one of the foremost sewing-machine factories in France.

  Rouletabille had worked in that establishment night and day for three weeks. We shall soon see why he had chosen it—and, in truth, he had not been wasting his time.

  Naturally, La Candeur had gone with him to Blin’s. The gentle giant had devoted himself to the manufacture of particular components, rather delicate in nature, many of which he had broken like wisps of straw to begin with, before succeeding in mastering the work. He did not understand his sudden change of situation, but he was with Rouletabille, and that consideration took precedence over all others. His amazement, bewilderment and despair are easily imaginable when the moment came for Rouletabille to explain to him that he had only been introduced to a sewing-machine factory in order to send him to Essen, and when he discovered the route that he would have to take to arrive more surely at Krupp’s—initially, via the trenches...

  Afterwards…oh, afterwards! Firstly, in a little skirmish ahead of the lines, arranged expressly for him, he had to be skillful enough to get himself taken prisoner by the Boche! It was forbidden for him to be killed or wounded!

  “If you follow the plan exactly,” Rouletabille had told him, by way of consolation, “our separation, which you’re lamenting, will only be brief. Don’t forget to tell the first feldwebel with whom you have dealings that you’ve been working with sewing-machines all your life. It appears that it’s the surest means of being sent to Essen, where we’ll meet up again!”

  “Why not send us there together? Why separate us?” La Candeur had groaned, stubbornly.

  “In order not to awaken any suspicion! I’ll get myself captured at another part of the front. Don’t worry about me!”

  “And what are we going to do in Essen? Can you tell me?”

  “But I’ve already told you, my dear La Candeur—we’re going to make sewing-machines.”

  “Yes, yes—understood. Yet another coup, after your fashion.”

  The operation, well-planned and directed by Rouletabille, had been a complete success. La Candeur had been taken prisoner without sustaining overmuch damage to his person.

  It had not been the same for Rouletabille. The reporter had contrived to be captured at Verdun, in a tunnel that he had chosen himself as the most appropriate for his endeavor. The men in the trench had named the tunnel “the international” because part of it belonged to the French and part to the Germans. Toward the middle, a few bags of earth had been thrown down, behind which the sentinels kept watch, a few paces away from one another. The Boche sentinel and the French sentinel sometimes chatted with one another. Rouletabille now spoke German fluently, having learned it since his marriage, Ivana being something of a polyglot.

  The reporter had agreed with the Boche soldier that there as a very simple and interesting means for both of them to put an end to the dangers of the war; they had only to have themselves taken prisoner, him by the Boche and the other by the French. Passing over the bags, they would crossed over en route and advance, shouting: “Kamerad!”

  The Boche sentinel had agreed enthusiastically, and Rouletabille had begun to carry out the plan agreed by the two parties—but he had no sooner gone past the sentinel than he latter, turning round, had hurled a grenade at him.

  The reporter had been knocked down and wounded in the shoulder. Taken prisoner, he had immediately been evacuated to Rastatt and had remained there for a fortnight.

  The wound was not serious, but what was more serious was the lost time. When it had healed, or nearly so, his anxiety only increased, because, in spite of the information he had been given, the famous sewing-machine trick did not seem, after all, to be succeeding. At any rate, he did not receive any offer of work.

  Another week had gone by in that fashion, and the reporter had begun to work on an entirely different plan, which consisted of escaping from Rastatt and getting to Essen by means of nocturnal marches…but what a difference there would then be between what he still had to do and what he might have hoped to achieve had the Boche introduced himself into the place themselves!

  Then, suddenly, one evening when, in desperation, he was about to put his escape plan into operation, the sewing-machine plan had come together! Someone came to ask him whether he would like to work in his trade, and offered him a salary of three marks a day. He accepted, and as put on a train for Essen. Nourry’s information was sound—and Rouletabille’s plan had been excellent!

  Now the reporter said to himself: As long as La Candeur has had as much success as me and I find him out there! With the worthy giant, God’s help and that of the amiable hooligan Vladimir, we can get to work in earnest!

  Essen! Essen! A gigantic vision! A fantastic, infernal vision! The train carrying Rouletabille was now penetrating into the very heart of that inferno. What he had gone through until now had only been preparation for this nightmare. Hundreds of enormous chimneys spitting incalculable amounts of smoke into the sky, which veiled the face of the sun, stopping its says, and pouring a rain of ash and scoria down upon the city, as a volcanic eruption does—except that, whereas volcanoes sometimes pause, Essen never stops. The god Krupp is more powerful than Vulcan, and the masters of the mythological forge were small beer compared with our modern arms-manufacturers.

  From the moment when the train pulled into the station, the noise of the city became even more deafening; the whistling of the locomotives and the tocsin of trams was abruptly joined by the howling of sirens, and then the distant sound of artillery-fire coming from the range. The bass-line to that prodigious racket was the powerful and continuous sound emitted by the factories: the monstrous respiration of the Hydra with five hundred mouths of flame!

  Rouletabille was stunned by it. He had expected something formidable, but what he saw and heard surpassed all imagination. The twenty French prisoners who had made the journey with him allowed themselves, in their bewilderment, to be shoved, jostled and insulted by their guards.

  Rouletabille had expected that they would first be taken to the camp that Nourry had mentioned, but he soon perceived that he was being taken in a westerly direction, toward the factories. He and his companions were advancing between the soldiers, who had bayonets fitted to their rifles, under the direction of a territorial feldwebel about whom the prisoners had had few complaints to make during the journey.

  Although it was Sunday, and very early in the morning, the streets were full of workers who were all heading in the same westerly direction. They were obviously going to relieve the night shift crews. Men were coming from all directions, as if springing from the ground.

  The entire black swarm marched without an exclamation, without even whispering. Innumerable footfalls could be heard on the paving stones. The little troop in which the reporter was place was drawn along by the mute turbulence.

  That somber army going silently to its frightful work, between the black and smoky facades of houses, before which the lamentable squares of little ragged gardens were displayed like items of dirty laundry, made a sinister impr
ession.

  As they came closer to the factories, the gaze was interrupted by enormous cast-iron conduits that crossed the streets from one wall to the other, connecting the workshops and blocking the horizon at second-floor level. Finally, they came to a wall, and to one of the hundred gates guarded by firemen in red caps on sentry duty, who watched over the workers with the most active vigilance.

  The little troop stopped at the porter’s lodge. The flowing river of workers was engulfed beneath the portico.

  Rouletabille had placed himself in such a way as not to miss any of what was happening during the entry of the workers. Each of them, on going in, unhooked a piece of metal bearing a number from an immense blackboard. Doubtless the worker had to hand it to the foreman on arrival at the workshop; then, it would be handed back at the end of the shift and replaced here, in a container that was shaped like an enormous letter-box—and into which, indeed, a crew emerging hastily at that moment, was throwing its numbers. The next day, each one would find the number in the same place as the day before, and no one would escape being counted.

  Finally, the feldwebel made a sign, and the prisoners started marching again. At that moment, Rouletabille’s emotion was at its peak. He was about to penetrate into the jealously-guarded world of the factories, and it was the Boche themselves who were about to introduce him to it.

  So perfect a realization of his plan filled him with such joy that he had to make an effort to hide it. He had feared so much that he might be forced to work by night, or in the dark, hiding himself, at the risk of a thousand perils, in the region of fog, soot and iron that stretched from Dusseldorf to Dortmund, passing through Elberfeld, Duisburg, Mulheim, Solingem and Oberhausen, of which Essen was merely a district, and of which the factories of Essen were the mighty heart!

  Now, the enemy had taken the trouble to deposit him, Rouletabille, in the very shadow of the Titania.

  They went through the gate. They were in the lair of the beast!

  They were immediately taken into a small room where they had to undergo a minute inspection; it was the fifth of that kind since Rouletabille had been in the custody of the Boche, but this time, the liberties taken and demands made by the redoubtable inquisition were unable to irritate the young man.

  The first things that he read on the walls of Krupp were repeated on multiple posters: Hüttet euch vor espionen und espioninnen...

  Understood, the reporter said to himself. We’ll watch out for spies of both sexes! Go on, look! Nothing in the hands, nothing in the pockets...

  Now they were going through the factory.

  First there was an immense courtyard furrowed by rails, cluttered with engines and debris, covered with steel bars and machine-parts.

  Then there was a stroll through an increasingly deafening racket along the interminable walls. Then there were more yards to cross, steel conduits to step over, tracks to avoid, monstrous machines to go round, while the fire of hell were roaring in giant chimneys and, from time to time, visions of demons in floods of flame surging forth as the door of a workshop opened.

  Finally, at the very center, or at least in the core, of the Krupp establishments, the little troop came to a halt in front of a huge barracks of smoke-blackened brick. They were taken into a crumbling vestibule, whose cracked walls were held up by new beams. The feldwebel took went on to a sordid stairway and called out to someone; another NCO appeared on the greasy black steps. They exchanged pieces of paper and proceeded to take a roll-call of the prisoners.

  Michel Talmar was the first to answer: “Present!” He was immediately escorted by an aged soldier to a lugubrious dormitory. There as a long succession of rooms there, which, the chatty old territorial explained, had once served as a dormitory for unmarried workmen; more recently, the rooms had been devoted to the lodging of prisoners of war who worked in the factory.

  So Rouletabille was to sleep in the factory itself! Oh, how richly rewarded he had been for the flash of genius that had suddenly shown him the use he could make of the passage in Nourry’s story in which the latter had mentioned the manufacture of sewing-machines at Essen! If only he could set eyes on La Candeur! He darted glances into al he rooms whose doors stood ajar, but they were empty. At this hour, the prisoners were in the workshops.

  It was to the far end of the corridor, to the last door on the right, that Rouletabille was taken. His territorial gave him a sign to indicate that he had arrived. He had, however, to wait in the corridor for his companions in captivity before going into the room.

  The latter arrived and halted in their turn before the doors that were indicated to them by the feldwebel. The corridor was only guarded at the two ends. In response to an order, everyone disappeared into the rooms. There was a window in each room. The daylight that penetrated by that route was poor. Rouletabille observed, in fact, that the courtyard at the center of which his barracks were built was surrounded by tall black buildings. It was not through there that he would catch a glimpse of the monstrous edifice in whose flanks the Boche were hiding the Titania.

  Since he had been in Essen he had thought about nothing else, but in vain; at every street corner, in every square, and over walls his gaze had sought a part of that gigantic building, but nothing had reminded him of the fantastic monument of which Nourry had spoken.

  He turned round and studied the little corner in which he was to live and rest between hours of work attentively. There were ten green-painted iron beds there, low and covered in a grey cloth. Beds! Those who consented to work at Krupp’s were definitely cared for, and spoiled!

  Against the walls were seven narrow cupboards, portraits of the emperor and the empress, and those of the Krupps—the father white-bearded with a slender nose, energetic eyes, firm and angular features; the son, the most recent, fat, with an indecisive expression, devoid of will-power, sad and mild, with spectacles perched on his nose. Between the portraits were placards bearing the eternal inscription: Hüttet euch vor espionen und espioninnen...

  That advice, once addressed to German workers and now addressed to French prisoners, made the young man smile again.

  The beds were almost touching. That was the only furniture. It was reproduced exactly in all the rooms, as Rouletabille was able to observe through the windows in the doors. All the doors had windows in, thus facilitating surveillance.

  The feldwebel who was responsible for the floor, like a floor-manager in a fashionable hotel, was a fat man about fifty years of age, with a brick-red face barred by an enormous white moustache, which bobbed up and down untiringly as he rolled his terrible eyes. He was not a bad man to impose on prisoners, and was presumably a good father, as Rouletabille judged to begin with, when he saw him enter the room and heard him call out in resounding and comminatory terms the principal points of the interior regulations.

  Rouletabille received the number 284. He was to occupy bed 9. They got up at five and went to bed at nine. From nine on absolute silence was obligatory. Naturally, each prisoner made his own bed and washed his own linen. He received eighty pfennigs per day, lodgings, a blanket, and a pair of sheets every three weeks. They were spoiled! Spoiled!

  A whistle-blast resounded in the corridor. It appeared that soup was being served for the new arrivals. Behind the feldwebel, the young men went into a large room; there was one of that kind for every five dormitories or rooms like the one to which Rouletabille had been assigned.

  There too were the inevitable four portraits, the notice regarding spies, and a long table surrounded by stools. A rather rudimentary breakfast was served to the travelers, who had not eaten since noon the previous day, and who were dying of hunger. A table and chairs! They were definitely being treated as workers rather than prisoners! The table was set! A deep plate of enameled iron, a fork and a wrought iron spoon! What luxury!

  The soup, served by old women who arrived from the kitchens, was some kind of stew, in which a few morsels of unidentifiable meat were floating, and five hundred grams of bread for the day, wate
r at their discretion—but they had the option of having beer sent up from the canteen. At the end of the meal there was a little water tasting of acorns, which pretended to be coffee. But what did that matter to Rouletabille? He was hardly preoccupied with nourishment.

  The brick-tinted feldwebel, who was glad to hear a Frenchman speaking German, prided himself on being able to understand and speak a little French. He said Rouletabille, who, while thinking about something else entirely, seemed to be looking at his plate unenthusiastically: “Ja. Ja—sad! That’s war for you!”

  After breakfast, they were shown, still on the same floor, a room with a few greasy bathtubs, and another with a central trough in which the prisoners could wash their own linen Rouletabille took advantage of finding himself standing beside the feldwebel to ask: “We do everything here? We never go out?”

  “Never—unless it’s to go to the workshops or walk in the courtyard—but no one ever goes out of the factory—nie und nimmermehr!”

  “Well, that’s me informed.”

  They were allowed to freshen up. They were allowed to go into the common rooms—the bathroom, the laundry and the dining-room—but could not go anywhere else, except their rooms, without risking court-martial. On the feldwebel’s orders, Rouletabille had to explain that part of the regulations to his companions in captivity.

  After the ablutions, therefore, the reporter went back to his room—or, rather, his dormitory—not to sleep, but to think.

  Chapter XI

  Rouletabille Gets His Bearings

  Two months had gone by since Nourry had told his story. At that time, Fulbert had considered that, within five months, the Boche would realize that they had been partly deceived by the Pole, and that, in consequence, that latter would be called upon to surrender the whole of the inventor’s secret. Less than three months remained, therefore, for Rouletabille to save Paris from the redoubtable Titania—but that lapse of time could not be guaranteed; in the last two months, events might have moved on, and reduced it considerably.