Investigations of the Future

by Brian Stableford

  All that is known is that, on the vastest terrain, hostilities were engaged in conditions almost identical to those that gave rise in 300 to the Andalusian-Moroccan conflict. Misunderstandings generated by the bad faith of the Sultan gradually determined an acute overexcitement on both sides. Europe, without admitting the possibility of its definitive annihilation, was nevertheless not unaware of Ibrahim’s military resources; it feared a new strike on another portion of its territory. Its fault—a most honorable one—was in believing once again in justice, right and reason, and wasting its time in diplomatic negotiations with an adversary decided on the worst violence. Some have suggested, it is true, that such manifest forbearance can be explained simply be a natural reluctance to fight, but such hypotheses are tantamount to nothing less than an accusation of cowardice.

  In the spring of 329, the Sharif revealed his intentions brutally with the invasion of Spain, a disembarkation in southern Italy and the pillage of several inoffensive localities on the coast of the former French Provence. At the same time, two Asiatic emigrations began, one toward the Balkan peninsula, the other toward Russia by way of the northern coast of the Caspian, picking up along their route the innumerable hordes every-ready for adventures, and dragging in their wake a population of women and children. It was not a war; barbaric Asia and Africa were overflowing simultaneously into Europe.

  As soon as the first impact, the latter folded up. It possessed no navy, no armies, no defensive works, nor any administration save for a few hundred thousand disparate petty municipal organizations, in no condition to agree on any communal action in two or three weeks. Certain of its scientific superiority, it had been living for generations in the blind faith that the discoveries of its chemists and engineers would guarantee an eternal security. It simply forgot that, in the midst of the general pacification, it had totally neglected the maintenance of its destructive machinery; it forgot, above all, that in the first and second centuries of the Republican Era, while it was spreading its civilization among neighboring races, it had taught them the existence, the manufacture and the use of the engines that were now being turned against it.

  Confronted with the simultaneous attack on five points of the frontier, there was chaos on a gigantic scale: an enormous and abrupt flow of populations toward the center and the north. The wave of invaders rolled through dead cities; it slowed down to disperse through the deserted territories—but only the winter, one of the most precocious and rigorous mentioned in history, arrested its surge. Islam had already reached the banks of the Dnieper in the east; in the south it occupied the Danube valley, Lombardy, the Mediterranean coast from the Alps to the Pyrenees, the southern slope of the Garonne basin and the whole of Spain. It was only waiting for the favorable season to resume its march.

  That respite, which seemed to leave room for residue of hope, was perhaps, in contrast, the most atrocious episode of the drama. An immediate denouement would have been preferable to the prolonged agony of the five months of feverish terror. The last illusions crumbled rapidly; the vision of the inevitable imposed itself; it only remained, from one day to the next, to await the arrival of the final catastrophe.

  One is obliged to recognize, however, that no supreme effort was neglected for the salvation of Europe. All were in vain. The Muslim militias, probably bought by their co-religionists, scarcely took the trouble, in the presence of public misfortunes, to hide their sentiments. From the start, partial mutinies occurred; discipline relaxed; it became impossible to place any trust in troops whose loyalty as suspect. At the slightest attempt at repression, rebellions burst forth; in several communes, the civil authorities were attacked by the soldiers, people were massacred and houses sacked. An internal war was evidently imminent. People congratulated themselves on being able, almost everywhere, to pay off the mercenaries that had not already deserted, taking their weapons with them.

  In spite of the gravity of the situation, the energy of the vanquished did not give way yet. It was necessary to reconstitute effective militias in haste. Ancient administrative rules were exhumed from libraries, which attempts were made to apply as best anyone could. Virtual conscription was introduced. Dictatorships had emerged in several places, without anyone wanting to ask why or how; they were, at least, able to pursue and constrain the refractory, improvise different services, provide the most urgent measures and put a vague cohesion into the chaos of individual initiatives. Their work would have been entirely worthy of praise if it had not been due to an authority whose legal origin for which one sought in vain.

  In the spring of 330, without counting three further armies in Poland, Bohemia and western France, a hundred and twenty-five thousand men found themselves concentrated south of the Loire, entrenched behind the Cévennes, ready for action in the Rhône valley. In the absence of superior officers, they had been put under the orders of a Council of General Command made up of twenty members and charged with guiding the movements of the ensemble. Among them, the biographer of Charlemagne and Napoléon, the celebrated Adolphe Thibaudier enjoyed a reputation for competence merited by previous endeavors. In the meeting where the commencement of operations was discussed, he reminded his colleagues that all illustrious strategists always commended offensive tactics; he quoted examples, and his opinion—coldly received at first—ended up rallying the majority vote.

  The army of the center started marching, already demoralized by the fatigues of the new life to which it had been subject for four months. Divided into five corps, it was to head for Lyon by five different roads in order to take up the most favorable position from which to fight thereafter.

  It will one day be a very interesting subject of study to discover how the dislocation—one might say the vanishing—of that mass of men occurred. Many doubtless died of disease and privation; many probably also allowed themselves to be overtaken by discouragement and abandoned the posts confided to them. The rout must have been completed in a continuous fashion by a multitude of individual desertions, for no one ever advertised any insubordination on the part of any substantial group refusing to obey their leaders’ orders collectively. As for soldiers killed in pitched battle, they cannot enter the calculation; the number of those who fell under the sabers of Moorish cavalrymen in the vicinity of Roanne has been establish incontrovertibly; it amounts to exactly eighty-two.

  That unique encounter with a handful of Muslim scouts was, however, sufficient to determine the final disaster. Ibrahim had calculated well in distributing far ahead of him, sometimes sixty, eighty or a hundred leagues from his first line, a few isolated squadrons whose mere passage frightened the populations and paralyzed all resistance. On 18 Prairial 330, three leagues from Roane, when the enemy forces were still moving through the Dauphiné and had not yet passed Valence, one of the parts of this extreme advance guard ran into a European column. The most frightful stampede immediately broke out, spreading with astounding rapidity, even to those whom distance sheltered from an immediate attack. Fortunately, the Arabs, sensing their mounts were tired, only demanded one effort from them and did not repeat the charge. They had lost five men, one of whom broke his back falling off his horse and four others being killed by the explosion of an ammunition-wagon.

  The moral effect of this unfortunate engagement was no less immense for that. It reverberated in two or three days to the limits of what remained of the civilized world. The ruination of an entire army was nothing compared to the devastation of the last surviving energy. Terror and despair hallucinated imaginations; the refinements of cruel atrocities were attributed to the Muslims; people had nightmarish dreams of torture while awake.

  To cap it all, epidemics that had vanished centuries ago—typhus, smallpox and the plague—arrived along with the Asiatic hordes. Abruptly extracted from the distant receptacles in which they were eternally dormant, whipped up by the coming-and-going of enormous human agglomerations, the horrible scourges traveled the entire extent of the immense battlefield in less than a month. Victors and vanquish
ed, equally afflicted, succumbed in hundreds of thousands. Cadavers rotted in the open air, on the roads or in abandoned houses, thus incessantly creating nuclei of contagious infection. While the voids in the ranks of the invaders were incessantly filled by the flood of new immigrants, however, some invaded regions, and those on the brink of invasion, were depopulated in a matter of days, without anyone, in the universal disarray, thinking of helping the victims.

  Then, confronted by that sudden accumulation of misfortune and suffering, a wind of furious madness seemed to have passed through Europe. Men, woman and even children refused to await their imminent destiny and killed themselves. That communal suicide was the last macabre elegance of that great society’s death-throes. Rendezvous were arranged for a particular time; after indescribable orgies in which blood was shed more often than not, in the midst of the fumes of intoxication, the guests cut one another’s throats or burned one another alive in their homes. The crowd watched these lugubrious spectacles dazedly, or applauded them with cries of incoherent joy, their eyes already shining with a similar dementia.

  Soon, the nervous frenzy of the wretches reached its paroxysm. A kind of homicidal delirium shook their deranged brains. Instances of cannibalism were cited in several cities, some of which were accompanied by dreadful circumstances. All the inmates of all the madhouses appeared to have poured out simultaneously into society. Bands of lunatics descended into the streets, uttering hysterical howls at random, massacring passer-by, whose cadavers they tore apart with their fingernails, and bringing down building with explosive charges. Sometimes, battles were fought between two troops of these madmen. Entire communes were seen annihilating themselves in this manner with their own hands, in a sudden and general crisis of destructive fury.

  When the Muslim armies filed into Orléans, the city had been nothing more than a heap of smoking ashes for nine days.

  On 28 Vendemiaire 331 Ibrahim-el-Kebir arrived in Flanders. Military operations had been terminated almost everywhere. The cantons of mountainous Switzerland and Scotland, where the debris of a few European families still persist today, were alone in being spared by the invaders. The Sultan came in person to take possession of his new empire.

  When he reached the shore of the North Sea, in the vicinity of Blankenberghe, the conqueror, halting his escort, launched himself at a gallop to the edge of the beach. With his horse’s hooves in the foam of the waves, he remained silent and motionless for a long time contemplating the waves, whose glaucous gleam he had never seen, and the cold, gray and misty sky from which the pale sunlight of septentrional regions descended.

  Before the unknown of the desert horizon, it seemed to him that he had pushed his victorious march to the limits of the world;50 the pride of satisfied domination swelled his heart. It was then that he dictated to the marabout Hassan-ben-Nafich the famous proclamation whose text has been preserved, and by which a cycle of history was closed;

  “In the name of God the all-powerful and merciful!

  “Praise be to him! Glory to his prophets! Glory and benediction to the believers who have vanquished beneath the sacred standard! Iron, fire and blood have erased putrefaction from the earth.

  “God is above us; and he has guided me, Ibrahim, by his hand to the furthest confines of space, to exterminate the Infidels who scorn the holy word, and who abandon themselves to vain sciences extracted from books, to softness and idleness.

  “In the name of the unique and venerable faith, I shall abolish the last vestiges of their corruption; I shall grind into the dust that paltry and enervated race, and I shall share out the rich kingdoms that they possessed between the strong and the brave; I shall reduce to oblivion the perverse knowledge in which they gloried; I shall destroy the monuments of their luxury; and I shall build in their stead thousands of eternal sanctuaries, from which prayers will rise up to the heavens.

  “Go! And obey what I have said! Cultivate the soil that belongs to you henceforth. Resign yourselves to poverty or grief. Listen to the leaders who command you. Enjoy the pleasures of life and have no fear of death. Human destiny is not in human hands. And if it is written that you shall perish one day in battle, paradise is in the shadow of sabers!”

  And now, alas, nothing remains standing of that which was built by the labor of centuries. The invaders have trodden underfoot the most admirable work of human wisdom. A gross morality, sanctioned by belief in God, has replaced the delicate scientific tolerance of yore; criminals are punished; indifferent to amelioration or general wellbeing, people occupy themselves with observing a pretended divine law, the rational foundations of which they neglect to analyze; they submit themselves to governmental authorities that they do not even debate; they only esteem the virtues of brutes—faith, patience, sobriety and courage—and only practice vulgar duties. Glad and proud of their strength, unconscious of their servitude, their ignorance and their poverty, unacquainted with the marvelous subtleties of the modern mind, which they disdain for lack of comprehension, they boast of having annihilated Europe; they have installed themselves there, organized themselves there and are multiplying there with the fecundity of inferior races. And even the most intelligent among them would be incapable of citing the minerals of which Sirius is composed...

  The barbarians have reconquered the world. Civilization is dead.

  Jean Jullien: An Investigation of the World of the Future

  (1909)

  I. The Prophet

  A few years ago, the editor of the Universal Informer commissioned me to make an investigation of the United States. It was a matter of interviewing thinkers, scientists and scholars such as James Milner, Professor Fuss, the engineer John Eddy—all the geniuses in whose brains the destiny of the future world is unfolding. I have, in consequence, not done what my colleagues in reportage do, giving a glimpse into the present states of minds in the Great Republic, but have researched what it will be tomorrow and thereafter.

  From that excursion into the other world I will report the materials necessary to establish an exact picture of its society, as it will function when we have disappeared. You will admit that, for a newspaper, that is definitely the last word in information.

  My first impressions were rather discouraging. The meddlesome formalism of an administration given free rein, the affectation of an unfortunately superficial correction, the rush of crowds after bluffers and a thousand other features of its mores suggested to me a civilization in decline, in which the brutal release of individualism, reinforced by imperialism, marked a return toward a certain savagery. I did not, however, attach any more importance to the eddies of that crowd throwing itself into life and fighting over it, in the midst of eternal conflicts of interest, than to the eddies of the sea breaking untiringly against the rocks. The masses live their own times; they do not prepare the future. Only minorities work for that, grouped around men of science or art, builders of hypotheses or utopians, whose dreams are the next realities.

  In the Union more than anywhere else, it is necessary to recognize, the most vertiginous conceptions easily find ways to emerge from the domain of the abstract and speculative, while, in our old world, they incubate for centuries. There, a sense of practicality has taken possession of the most disinterested minds; people are not content to caress chimeras; they domesticate them and bring them down to earth.

  How many futile words have been pronounced here and among our neighbors regarding the march of progress? How many projects, each more wonderful than the last, for the reform of society? How many popular orators promise happiness and how many poets sing about it, who see nothing more therein than words? How many prophets announce the new life, who obtain nothing from their apostolic mission but the disdainful shrug of our fellow citizens’ shoulders? What hope is there, anyway, for a civilization like ours, where inventor is synonymous with crackpot?

  It is not like that in the United States. Prophets are not armchair apostles; they act; they draw crowds, become forces—and the trade is, in fact, quite
lucrative. Could I do better, in order to be informed as to the future, than to address myself to one of these seers?

  I have little confidence, I must admit, in those variously inspired people who tell you things, with an imperturbable aplomb, that cannot be checked, and who have thrived on credulity for as long as humankind has existed. But I was told about a prophet, a man of science, and the man in question seemed to me to be so extraordinary that I did not hesitate to consult him.

  He lived in the vicinity of Kansas City, and answered to the imposing name of Hierophas. I expected, as you might imagine, to find a thin old man with a long white beard living a solitary and ascetic existence of privation and mortification in his Thébaïd, in order that his mind might focus on the future with all its acuity of perception. How surprised I was when I arrived at the door of the most sumptuous of cottages.

  A tall ostentatiously-uniformed black man came to open the door by a crack and ask me whether I had an appointment. I replied that I had something better than that, and handed him the card that accredited me as a representative of the Universal Informer. The black man examined it attentively—he must not have known how to read—passed it to a groom, who disappeared, and opened the doors of the waiting room with an expansive gesture.

  Scarcely had I had time to admire a few nice paintings and other art-works imported from Europe than an usher introduced me to the reception hall. Imagine a throne-room for a petty monarch, with the ambience and mysterious solemnity of a sanctuary. Hierophas took great care with his stage-setting. I expected to see him appear in antique garb, emerging from a trap-door, but he was a middle-aged gentleman of commanding bearing, who, in a grey jacket with a carnation in his buttonhole, simply came in through the door.