The Humanisphere

by Brian Stableford

  We arrived at a large blue portico fabricated in the Chinese fashion. Before the drawbridge, the entire crowd stopped. They lined up, and then fell silent.

  Then we heard, as at our entry to the station, the bellowing of livestock behind the walls whose ceramics represented hunting scenes, and we knew that these were the Abattoirs.

  An officer came to collect us, and to guide us. We reached a kind of low triangular tower where an entire general staff was seated.

  We witnessed hecatombs.

  To the west of the plain in front of us the trains were disgorging nations of cattle, ewes and pigs, immediately released into immense muddy meadows. Companies of soldiers armed with prods surrounded the mass, harassing them and driving them toward areas surrounded by low walls, increasingly narrow, until the animals pricked by the lances of the cavaliers, riding on the other side of the low wall, reached a short tunnel. At the exit, they received on the back of the neck the blow of a bone mallet driving in a blade fixed at its center. Several colossal soldiers were operating that instrument of death with vigor and promptitude from the summit of the portico at the issue from the tunnel.

  The ox falls in a mass on a wagon whose surface prolongs the floor of the tunnel and which, as soon as it is released, slides down a slope toward a vast courtyard where squadron of men and women welcome them, equipped with knives, saws, hammers and bowls. They fall upon the animal, decapitate it, slice it up, open it up, holding out the bowls to trickles of blood, detach the fry, the heart, the viscera, saw through the bones, strip off the hide, disarticulate the feet, split the skull, remove the brain, wash away the flowing grease and then roll up the intestines, stir the blood with a pole, collect the fibrin on rods and, in less than ten minutes, all that remains of the ox is a dozen pieces of butchery, all fuming, but rectangularly sectioned, tied, wrapped and ready for another wagon that carries them away, to the rattle of its wheels, toward the culinary factories situated to the east of the plain.

  Immediately, the squadron in red aprons races to the death-throes of another animal sent down from the porticos, and reduces it to the same comestible state.

  There are a hundred and fifty tunnels, which end in the same number of corridors, and terminate in the same number of porticos, above each of which stand two colossal soldiers equipped with bladed mallets.

  For the sheep and the pigs, the tunnels and the porticos are not as high.

  That abattoir service seems to furnish the people with pleasure. Merrily, the women and men fall upon the felled beasts and cover them like flies on ordure. Clouds of cries and laugher swirl over the blood. In the distance, the companies driving the still-living beasts toward the corridors and porticos launch glorious clamors toward the heavens. Around the slayers, on mounds and crests, companies of the line cheer the artful blows if the beast falls in a mass into the mobile wagon, immediately detached. Young women gambol around the hides while their companions scrape the interior, up to their knees in viscera and slime.

  Toward the north, in the middle of vast esplanades, the schools of the battalion are drilling. The captains’ horses race; batteries go through firing exercises. The infantrymen study dispersed order, service in the field and battle formations; the columns file past to the muffled rhythm of a thousand cadenced footfalls. The cannonade rumbles; the automobile caissons flee to the horizon in the stridency of their wheels and the trepidations of drivers. That does not prevent the drums and clarions from battling in the fields, not the bands from exciting hymns of majestic ferocity.

  “How can you,” I said to Théa, “by reducing the duties of war to the work of the abattoir, inculcate your soldiers with the sentiments of honor and courage that their function necessitates? Here, from what I can see, the prison camp and the army are confused. Here, as in Europe, you allow the subsistence of prison, forced labor, disciplinary punishments, the authority of leaders. And there, above our heads, an aerial ship is circling, whose great wings cast the shadow of an exterminating archangel over the camp, for one can make out the chaplets of torpedoes suspended from the gangway. In truth, I don’t understand this organization at all.”

  “Why not?” said Théa. “We enroll in the army those who manifest their appetite for conquest by theft, their appetite for death by the thirst for alcohol, their appetite for destruction by disobedience to the laws of production. Far be it from the State to have the idea of punishing them. They are simple assimilated to the métier that seduces their temperament the most.

  “What better soldier is there than a brute, a thief, a drunkard, a smuggler or a murderer, since his social duty is to vanquish, to conquer, to intoxicate himself with rage in order to kill, to use cunning in order to deceive the enemy, to put the weakest to death? Except that we prefer that those sick individuals exercise the virtues of their energy against the peoples menacing social harmony.

  “In the army we count one general who remains one of our most fertile scientific minds. He wanted to kill his mistress and his rival. His group designated him to command troops. He has brought back victory after victory for ten years. He invented a strategy. He has charged at the head of his cavalry in a battle that recalls the statues in the squares of arms. His wrath and his jealousy serve the cause of civilization admirably.

  “You’re astonished to see the abattoirs constructed on the drill-fields. On the contrary, that habituation to giving death, of seeing blood flow, of not softening at the sight of a gasping, sliced up, boned and skinned victim prepares our military personnel in a marvelous fashion not to fear wounds or to be astonished in battle. We develop the desire to kill by all means, the habit of killing and the instinct of victory. Listen to those clamors of joy!

  “Look—the bladed mallet falls on a pig, half-decapitated by the force of the blow. The blood spurts in two fountains; the bewildered beast grunts and agitates; it splashes the hedge of gawkers with red spittle and they amuse themselves by offering their faces to the jet of blood. How can those people be frightened later if the enemy decapitates their comrade of equal rank alongside them?

  “Look to the left at those young women pursuing an escaped sheep. What agility, what grace and what rapidity in their course! Now they’ve about to reach it. The tall redhead is brandishing the knife. The little black-haired one is trying to overtake her in order to strike first. A third gallops up. She’s gaining ground. Can you hear them laughing? Can you see them pouncing. That’s that—the black-haired girl has seized the beast. The blade flashes. Bang! She rolls on the ground with the sheep. Look: all those blades plunge into the bleating life; they get up again red. Oh, the little one holding by the fleece the severed ovine head, from which a rag of flesh hangs down! Behold the warrior spirit in all its glory. Listen to the laughter of the intoxication of victory...”

  Pythie sniggered. I felt sick and asked to leave. We drew away.

  Everywhere, one encountered men and women stained with large red spots, with hair and viscous clots on their gaiters. As inebriated as if they had been drinking, they were staggering, singing, talking feverishly, kissing one another, coupling randomly on the ground, insulting one another among their gasps of joy.

  A tram took us far away from that ignoble phantasmagoria. A crown of fire circled my head. Nausea stirred my stomach. Pythie made me sniff smelling salts.

  “But why that diatribe?” she replied to my exclamations. “Is it not logical to divide the forces of citizens into productive and destructive, according to individual temperaments? Certainly, Jérôme’s companions hoped, like the present day anarchists, for a people composed exclusively of excellent and benign souls. It was necessary to retreat from it. The better compromise has been adopted, of parking the instinctive and the stupid in the army, where their brutality becomes merit, honor and glory. As they aren’t permitted to leave the military territories, they don’t corrupt the minds of the pacific. They don’t molest them and don’t summon either a riposte or a struggle.

  “It’s only at the price of an absolute separation
that intelligence has been able to increase to such an extent in Minerve, Jupiter and Mercure. These in Mars are our physical vigor, our redoubtable physical vigor. Of these soldiers, the majority don’t even think about the difference between living and dying. They eat, they fornicate, and they kill. Giving death appears to them to be a good joke. Thus, for a little girl, it seems amusing to pinch her younger sister. They put malice and slyness into it in a puerile spirit of play. They don’t understand pity or sensibility, any more than your soldiers understood it in Cuba, or Manila, or the Turks in Armenia. Except, here, we have the frankness not to make magnificent deities of courage and murder named Glory, Honor, Abnegation, Patriotism, etc...”

  The tram took us to the culinary factories. They are unremarkable: ten thousand cooks, male and female, shredding, seasoning, cooking, grilling, organizing into terrines and packing, in immense edifices of blue iron and white ceramic. Clad in the fashion of our European scullions, in immaculate cotton, those people, quadragenarians for the most part, operate in front of monstrous cooking-pots.

  Then we visited the tanneries and the currieries, where the soldiers’ haversacks and belts and leather harnesses are made. As everywhere, the workshops are vast, the enamel walls represent subject appropriate to the industry of the place. Men and women work in common at neat benches. There is none of the filthiness habitual to our Occidental factories. The ventilators project perfumed air. Jets of water fall back into bowls. The workers are seated in good capacious armchairs. An organ plays pleasant tunes, for the rule of silence is admitted and observed by everyone.

  That excursion concluded with a trip to the crematoria.

  In the middle of a dense wood, the mystery of the Temple receives visitors with its long and monstrous columns in blue ceramic. Trains bringing cadavers from all points in the Dictatorship stop behind the buildings in a special station. Steeped in phenol, embalmed, coated with odorous wax, the dead do not stink. Before the voyage all are subjected to a scrupulous autopsy before delegates of the group to which the defunct individual belonged. After the cremation, the ashes are analyzed chemically. Thus, no death occasioned by a crime can pass unperceived.

  The blue ceramic cupola covers a rotunda in which two hundred ovens are open around an electric hearth developing a temperature of a thousand degrees. Hoisted into its compartment, the naked corpse is immediately exposed to the radiation of that destructive heat. A lucid strip of mica permits the process of cremation to be followed through the ocular of a telescope. When we went in, past the blooms of the celestial flower-beds we were subjected to the curiosity of a military audience whom the spectacle of cadavers inflated by the heat amused greatly.

  The young women laughed at the horrible pustules swelling on the bellies, the tumors that quickly deformed the blue faces with a violet gleam. In a coffin of sparkling plates with a quasi-solar glare, the corpse very quickly takes on the appearance of an enormous blister blown up by the bellows of a forge. That swells, undulated, rises, stretches, bursts, collapses, flows, dries up, cracks and crumbles. After ten minutes, nothing remains but a white powder.

  Then the operator turns switches. The five faces of the coffin sink, reddened and blackened. The mica ocular is closed, to the great disappointment of the gawkers, who protest. The ash, placed in a casket, is transmitted to the laboratory for analysis.

  That spectacle delights the audience. The same interjections that salute the masks of the carnival in our streets bid adieu to the absurd rictus of the deceased, to green lips pulled back over tarnished teeth, to eyes that have become, by decomposition, larger than hens’ eggs and protruding from ripped lids.

  All that populace sniggers, insults, writhes with joy. Childish remarks excite unanimous laughter. While we were there, a young woman unfastened her dolman and pretended to reanimate the corpse of an old man, already boiling, with the sight of her charms. The heat caused a pustule to grow on the cadaver, which grew and stood up. The entire society, seized by delirium, carried the slut away in triumph.

  LETTER VII

  Camp of the Red Forest.

  We quit the railway three days ago. It was necessary to leave the automobiles yesterday; the road came to an end. Now we’re in the bush, an expanse of red and green thorny plants into which the cannons sink to their wheel-hubs. And above it weighs a sky charged with storms, an insipid air. In front of us, the cavalry is burning the grass and the thickets to fray a route for the caissons and the columns. One rides over warm ashes. Sometimes sparks blow up when the wind blows. Overhead, the aerial squadrons make a noise as they fly; the great wings of the ships cover us with shadow. Some of them seen to tilt, cleaving the thick air with the profile of their gray sail. The chaplets of torpedoes gleam under the inferior gangway. A wheel three meters in diameter spins at the rear with a velocity that causes the image of its pokes to vanish. That wheel surrounds the singular apparition like a halo when it overtakes you.

  Advance parties, the aerial squadrons have just bombarded the woods and villages held by the enemy. The infantry and the cavalry units only operate in their wake to occupy the positions and complete the victory.

  As far as the eye can see the black helmets of the regiments are progressing. The absolute silence demanded by rigorous discipline reveals nothing of that march. Even the women of the artillery are not chattering. Seated on the banquettes of the prolongations following the guns, they remain mute and meek, chin-straps tight, hands on the knees of their broad canvas breeches, like those of your zouaves.

  At the halt, everyone scatters, lays vast cloaks on the ground, sits down and cook.

  In every squadron two men carry a can of oil in his knapsack; when the lid of the cylinder is unscrewed, three thick wicks appear that are lit. Springs push up a metal disk. That is the hotplate. A mess-tin full of water is placed on the disk.

  The soldier’s sack is not, like that of his European colleague, a heavy and formidable thing destined to reduce his agility, reinforce his fatigue and render him weary and useless. That pocket of thin rubber contains a few small packets of compacted rice, a tin containing a kind of liebig,36 a uniform of rolled cloth, and a packet of brushes and needles. That’s all. On the exterior one doesn’t see the heavy cooking apparatus that overwhelms the European soldier. The catering corps cooks all the meat and vegetables behind the lines. When they make camp, if the caterers can catch up with them, as if usually the case, the soldier finds his ration prepared and seasoned. He can warm it up or eat it as it is. Thus, the meat doesn’t arrive stinking, for having been piled up in the wagons, not blued by commencing corruption. If the caterers cannot succeed in reaching the camp, he soldier cooks his rice with meat extract on the bivouac. One of the oil cylinders aids that cooking. The other serves to heat water, into which coffee essence is tipped, filling the dosages of a metallic flask.

  The soldier also carries two pouches; the one on the left contains bread; the other, on the right, contains cartridges. In a gourd he had water slightly alcoholized by mint. All the weight is thus not concentrated on his back and the man can march upright, run and defend himself without the hump beloved by European general staffs.

  The rifle supports, along the barrel, another cylinder of aluminum, which is simply the tube of a telescope extending from the butt to the sight. That telescope brings the silhouette of the enemy very much closer and facilitates the shot. The mechanism of the back-sight raises it or lowers it. The artillery pieces are provides with an analogous telescope of astonishing power.

  The miracle of that equipment is the mantle. Imagine a cloak similar to that of cavalry officers, Light, coated with gum, the fabric protects against the most tropical rainstorms. It covers the soldier from the helmet, under which the collar fits, to the gaiters. There it tapers, and the rain runs off it like the slope of a roof. At the camp, the mantle is spread on the ground. It is a round carpet that protects the sleeper from dampness in the ground and paludal miasmas. A comrade sets his up like a tent of which a rifle planted by the bayonet
forms the support. Carpet and tent constitute a warm impermeable shelter in which two men can repose at their ease. It would be difficult to perform gymnastics therein, but one can sit up or lie down. Ingenious dispositions seal the hut hermetically or leave it open, according to the caprices of the sky.

  Another advantage: those low gray huts seem almost invisible in the bush. Ten thousand men can camp without being perceived before encountering the sentinels. The gleams of the oil cylinders do not shine in such a fashion as to denounce the presence of troops for three leagues around, like our bivouac fires and their smoke. It is indispensable for an army having to undertake a campaign in regions devoid of villages, to possess a system of discreet encampment.

  Vast and supple, the mantle does not hinder the movements of the shooter if, having donned it again, he meets the enemy. Two large slits at shoulder level permit him to pass his arms trough and move them freely. I think of the poor French troops of 1870, whom the Prussians so often surprised occupied in drying their capes laden with rainwater, and who were obliged to put on damp uniforms, heavy and rough, in order to fight. Here, no soldier is attained by a drop of rain. Under his cloak, he remains dry and agile.

  On the first evening of the march we camped at the bottom of a valley protected by a plateau covered by patrols and lines of sentinels. The cavalry had sounded the woods eighteen kilometers ahead; the security was therefore absolute. When the meal was finished, as the cool of the tropical night descended upon us, the soldiers organized dances in order to warm themselves up. That, in this immoral land, concluded with gallant fellows coming to visit the camp of the artillery and sanitary service, where women are numerous. Nothing happens with noise or fury, but familiarly.