When Hitler Took Cocaine and Lenin Lost His Brain (17 page)

Léon went into another room, ‘where I found the father Delavaud, still clothed and lying on the bed, dead. He was purple and inflated, but the clothing was intact.'

By now Léon was desperate, ‘crazed and almost overcome'. Unable to move, he lay on a bed, ‘inert and awaiting death'.

The people still outside in the streets were doomed, for there was no hope of outrunning the advancing avalanche. But there were to be a few witnesses to the ensuing disaster – people on boats at the time of the eruption. They watched in appalled fascination as the torrent of toxic rock slammed into the outskirts of the town, flattening everything in its path.

Seconds later, it engulfed the centre of Saint-Pierre. ‘The town vanished before our eyes,' said one.

Virtually everyone in Saint-Pierre was killed in seconds, either gassed by the noxious fumes or incinerated by the solid wall of heat. But there were to be a couple of miracle survivors on that bleak morning in 1902.

One hour after the avalanche had struck the town, Léon Compère-Léandre suddenly awoke. He had lost consciousness at the moment the debris reached Saint-Pierre and was in a daze as to what had happened.

He picked his way out of his shattered house and found a scene of absolute desolation. The town of his childhood was a charred and smoking ruin with scarcely a single building left standing. He stumbled over the hot cinders, walking for miles until he eventually left the zone of destruction and reached a village where he told astonished locals the story of his survival.

How he managed to escape the burning avalanche remains a complete mystery. The cloud of toxic gas, boiling dust and molten rock had left him completely unscathed.

But Léon was not the only survivor of that terrible spring day in 1902. One other man emerged alive from the inferno and he was able to recount exactly how he had cheated death on that grim morning.

Louis-Auguste Cyparis had been incarcerated in the city's prison on the day before the eruption, having been involved in a violent pub brawl. He was locked into an underground cell with windowless stone-built walls. The only ventilation came from a grating in the metal door that faced away from the volcano.

Cyparis heard the violent explosion and immediately realised that Mount Pelée had erupted. The sunlight that he could glimpse through the grating vanished in an instant.

Seconds later, scorching air and burning ash began filtering into his cell, causing him severe burns. He urinated on his clothes and stuffed them into the ventilation hole in order to protect himself. He knew that if the ash kept falling, he would soon be trapped in an underground tomb.

A rescue operation began within hours of the eruption. The warship
Suchet
reached the burning town at 12.30 p.m. But the wreckage of Saint-Pierre was still pumping out such ferocious heat that the vessel could not dock until 3 p.m., when the captain finally managed to get ashore.

He was staggered by what he found. Not a building, nor even a tree, was left standing. Everything was charred beyond recognition. The entire 30,000 population was dead.

Except for one. Cyparis was still trapped in his lonely tomb and he would remain there for fully four days until a team of rescuers heard his forlorn cries. He was dug from the compacted ash and helped to safety by his astonished rescuers. He eventually recovered from his burns, was pardoned for his crime and would earn a celebrity of sorts as a performer with Barnum and Bailey's circus.

The only other survivor of that terrible morning was a young girl named Haviva Da Ifrile. Her escape was even more bizarre than the other two. She was found adrift in a boat, unconscious but alive. She had no recollection of how she got there.

 

15

The Female Robinson Crusoe

In the third week of August, 1923, the good ship
Donaldson
arrived at the desolate shores of Wrangel Island, far to the north of Siberia. The crew were bringing supplies to five colonists left here two years earlier and were expecting to find them all in good health. Instead, they found just one of those colonists, a half-starved young woman named Ada Blackjack. She was gaunt and sick, but alive. And she had an incredible story to tell.

Two years earlier, Ada Blackjack had volunteered to take part in one of the strangest missions in the history of colonization. She and four others were to test the feasibility of living on ice-bound Wrangel Island.

The 1921 colonial experiment was the brainchild of Arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson. One of his key goals was to claim the land for Canada. Another was to prove that this bleak land was habitable. Stefansson entertained hopes of establishing an extreme tourism company that would offer adventure tours of this remote outpost.

Four of Stefansson's team were men: three Americans named Lorne Knight, Milton Galle and Fred Maurer, and a Canadian called Allan Crawford. They had impressive academic credentials but rather less experience of surviving in extreme Arctic conditions.

The fifth colonist was a young Inuit woman named Ada Blackjack. Ada's husband had died some years earlier leaving her destitute. She also had a child with chronic tuberculosis, an illness that required costly treatment. She decided to join the expedition for a year, lured by the promise of a good salary. She was officially employed as the team's seamstress.

Just twenty-five years of age, Ada was an odd choice to accompany the mission. She knew nothing about hunting or trapping and had never before lived off the land. She didn't even know how to build an igloo.

The rest of the team expressed deep misgivings when they learned that she had been selected to join them. They said she would be a hindrance to the others and was too frail to survive the harsh conditions. But their concerns were overruled by Vilhjalmur Stefansson. Ada Blackjack was officially employed as the fifth member of the team.

On 16 September 1921, the five colonists were left on barren Wrangel Island, far to the north of Siberia. Stefansson, who declined to accompany the expedition, believed the island to be so well stocked with wildlife that he left the colonists with enough food for just six months. He promised to send a supply ship in the following summer: in the meantime, the five would have to fend for themselves.

The mission got off to a flying start. The colonists built a large snow house and had great success in hunting the local wildlife. They managed to kill ten polar bears, thirty seals and many geese and duck. They were confident that they could survive until the ship's return.

But the promised vessel failed to materialize and the five settlers realized they faced a long and arduous autumn. They soon ran short of tea, coffee and sugar. They then ate the last of their flour and beans. As the November gale whipped in a ferocious Arctic winter, the wild game disappeared and the five found themselves critically short of food. Worse still, Lorne Knight developed a serious illness.

On 28 January 1923, Crawford, Galle and Maurer decided to attempt to traverse the frozen Chukchi Sea in order to reach the Siberian mainland. They wanted to alert people to the fact they were in desperate need of help.

The three of them were never seen again and their fate remains a mystery. Either they fell through the ice and drowned in the freezing seawater or they froze to death in an Arctic blizzard.

Lorne Knight had meanwhile taken a turn for the worse. He was now suffering from acute scurvy and could scarcely move his joints. He was nursed by Ada until April, when his body gave up the ghost. Ada now found herself utterly alone in this ice-bound wilderness.

She had no idea how to hunt and had never even fired the rifle that had been left behind. But she soon worked out how to use it and managed to kill seals, foxes and ducks. She then stewed the meat to make it more palatable.

She managed to prevent the fire from going out, even though fuel was scarce, and kept insanity at bay by reading the Bible. But as another summer slipped into autumn, she grew increasingly weak. She knew that her own death was now inevitable.

She had given up hope of ever being rescued when she sighted a vessel on the horizon. It was the
Donaldson
, which arrived at Wrangel Island on 23 August. The crew were astonished to stumble across Ada Blackjack and even more surprised to learn that three of her male comrades were missing and the fourth was dead.

When her story reached the outside world, the newspapers labelled her the ‘female Robinson Crusoe'. Her survival, they said, was nothing short of a miracle. She had received no training in survival techniques, yet had kept herself alive for twenty-three months.

Ada did not take kindly to the media circus and shunned the publicity. She wanted nothing more than to be reunited with her son, using the expedition salary to take him to Seattle in order to cure his tuberculosis.

But the fact that she had a sickly child – who was eventually cured – brought a new dimension to the story. Ada became an unwitting celebrity, heralded as a heroic survivor in books and magazines. ‘Her physical stomach wasn't a bit more adapted to seal oil and blubber than theirs [the men's],' wrote one. ‘But in Ada's heart there was a fire that isn't easily blown out.'

Ada never went back to Wrangel Island, but she did return to the Arctic and eventually made it her home. The freezing climate seems to have suited her, for she finally died at the ripe old age of eighty-five.

 

PART VI

O What a Lovely War!

ashdladiin dóó
ba'ąą
náhást'éidi mííl tsosts'idi neeznádiin dízdįįhastaa

THE NUMBER 59,746 IN NAVAJO, THE HIGHLY COMPLEX NATIVE AMERICAN LANGUAGE USED FOR AMERICAN BATTLEFIELD COMMUNICATIONS DURING THE SECOND WORLD WAR

 

16

The Last Post

American conscript Henry Gunther was appalled when he arrived at the battlefields of northern France in the winter of 1917. The mud-filled trenches were bleaker than he was expecting and the atmosphere of decay hung heavy in the air.

Gunther had been drafted into the 313th Regiment, known as Baltimore's Own, just a few weeks earlier. He was a supply sergeant, responsible for the clothing of his regiment.

Now, staring across a landscape of shattered buildings and trees, he felt profoundly depressed. He had no desire to fight in a war that was thousands of miles from his native land. It was a world away from the book-keeping job he had at the Bank of Baltimore. Homesick and depressed, he wrote to a friend complaining of the ‘miserable conditions' in which he found himself. He told that friend to do whatever he could to dodge the draft.

It was unfortunate for Gunther that his letter was read by an army censor. The censor was appalled by such defeatist sentiments and reported Gunther to his superior. There was never any doubt that he would be punished for his lack of patriotism, but the chosen punishment was to leave him with a deep psychological scar. He was demoted from sergeant to private, bringing shame on both himself and his family.

‘He brooded a great deal over his reduction in rank and became obsessed with a determination to make good before his officers and fellow soldiers.' So wrote James M. Cain, a war reporter for the
Baltimore Sun
. ‘He was worried because he thought himself suspected of being a German sympathizer. The regiment went into action a few days after he was reduced [in rank] and from the start he displayed the most unusual willingness to expose himself to all sorts of risks.'

The question uppermost in Gunther's mind was how he could best ‘make good' for his perceived lack of patriotism. The war was rapidly drawing to a close and there were already rumours that the German army was on the point of surrendering. As dawn broke on 11 November, Gunther knew that he needed to do something in the very near future.

In common with most soldiers on that chilly morning, Gunther had no idea that the armistice had already been signed. At 5.20 a.m., British, French and German officials had met in a railway carriage to the north of Paris and brought the First World War to an end. Now, all they needed to do was transmit the news to the troops on the ground.

This was not easy. Many battalions were using old and inadequate communications and many more were completely cut off from their command centres. The generals realized that it would take time to notify all the troops. They decreed that the peace would not come into effect until 11 a.m.

Henry Gunther and his men learned of the approaching armistice at 10.30 a.m. Their wisest course of action would have been to lie low for the next half an hour until it was officially declared. Instead, they continued their march towards Chaumont-devant-Damvillers, a village near Metz, arriving at the outskirts as it approached eleven o'clock.

As they made their way along the country road, they found their path blocked by two enemy machine-gun posts. The Germans were under orders to open fire, but they deliberately shot into the air so as not to claim any more lives.

Gunther's comrades were touched by the action of the Germans, who were clearly aware of the impending armistice. But Gunther himself saw things rather differently. Aware that he had just a couple of minutes to make a heroic impact, he expressed his outrage at the fact that they had fired their guns. Against the orders of his sergeant (and close friend) Ernest Powell, he made a dramatic charge through the thick fog towards the German machine guns.

According to reporter James M. Cain, ‘he was fired by a desire to demonstrate, even at the last minute, that he was courageous and all-American'.

The German soldiers were horrified when they saw their position being charged by a lone soldier. ‘They waved at him and called out, in such broken English as they could, to go back, that the war was over. He paid no heed to them, however, and kept on firing a shot or two as he went.'

When the Germans saw that he was determined to keep up his forlorn charge, they had no option but to turn their machine gun on him. Gunther fell in action at 10.59 a.m. and is officially recognized as the last soldier to be killed in the First World War.