To those who believe that the techniques and weapons of a destructive Blitzkrieg were first conceived by Hitler’s militarists and inventors, there is a rude awakening to be found in the drawings and comments from the pen of a forgotten French humorist-author-editor-artist who described twentieth-century warfare as far back as 1869.
In the yellowing files of French humor magazines, notably Polichinelle and La Caricature (he founded and edited the latter), Albert Robida startled, entertained, and horrified his readers with war prophecies so fantastic that no one considered him anything but a mischievous wit.
But in the light of events in 1939-41, Robida and his war prognoses suddenly take on interest and significance. Even a casual glance at them will bear out that this comic artist conceived many a truth in jest.
With considerable detail he describes how future great powers impose their will on weak nations and he draws livid pictures of “the greatest battle on African soil since the mixed nations of young Africa were initiated into the supreme beauties of progress and civilization.”
In visualizing an imaginary war between imaginary powers on different continents, he states that the commanding officers are trained scientists and engineers. At the war’s commencement, an engineer-general opposes invasion with 800 armored tanks, 12,000 armored locomotives, a strong aerial division, and 625,000 troops.
But, he goes on, the aggressor-power had secretly dispatched a division of minelaying submarines even before it declared war, and in the very hour that the declaration is made, the submarine admiral presses a button and discharges a network of mines sown along a 20-kilometer shore line, destroying many vessels, mostly the property of neutrals.
The rescue of Robida’s works from oblivion draws interest to the fact that he prophesied without honor in his native France, largely, we suspect, because much of his work appeared in humorous periodicals where he could not suppress a satirical wit, no matter how grimly significant his subject. It was this comic environment and cartoon treatment that prevented a serious consideration of his notions.
Robida’s chimerical fancies of twentieth- century weapons and strategy might serve as an index to a treatise on Blitz warfare. He illustrated the Blitzkrieg technique by describing formidable land, sea, and air fleets; he portrayed mechanized armies, chemical warfare, aerial bombardments, smoke screens, anti-aircraft guns, armored trains, floating dreadnoughts, long-range cannon, gas masks for men and beasts, terrorization of civilians, liquid flame throwers, and massed air raids.
He observed that twentieth-century armies would be extraordinarily complicated organisms in which the gears and springs must function with unfailing precision.
He also had forebodings of chemical warfare which he pictured in its advanced stages. Asphyxiating and paralyzing gases he placed in tubes for short-range operations; for long-range operations he conceived of light shells hurled 30 to 40 kilometers by electrical guns. Field equipment for chemical warfare consists of elaborate retorts, boilers, storage tanks, distilling machinery, and fieldpieces for discharging gas shells at distant targets. Both men and animals wear gas masks. The men also wear metal helmets with visors and armored breastplates.
His imagination spawned shoals of submarines armed with offensive and defensive weapons. Duels to the death between the crews of submersibles take place above and below sea level. The larger submarines, with portholes and heavy guns, attempt to sink each other with huge battering rams. In memory of romantic individualism, he visualized the one-man submarine, a mechanical sea horse mounted by an armored sub-seaman who worries and “stings” the larger craft and jousts with the enemy’s one-man subs.
Another supplement to Robida’s prognosis is underground war. Although he does not mention an equivalent of the Maginot Line, he sees European nations surrounded by strong barricades and he perceived that fighting underground might grow important. A network of pneumatic tubes, tunnels, and transmission lines fall into the periphery of his twentieth-century vision.
In 1883, Robida published in La Caricature a sketch of a gigantic metal screw, or perforator, designed to drill tunnels into the enemy’s fortified position at the rate of two kilometers per hour. As a matter of record, an underground invasion was reported to be under consideration by the present German High Command, when it was faced by the formidable defenses of the Maginot Line. If France had been as well prepared above the surface as she was below, perhaps the Germans might have attempted a so-called underground attack.
Other items in our contemporary press reflect glory on Robida’s clairvoyance. For example, on December 29, 1939, the United Press reported from Paris that,
The present war’s first major contribution to military aviation progress will be an aerial battle cruiser. . . Experts believe that both Germany and Britain are developing one ... it will have exceptionally heavy and versatile armament. . . . Some authorities predict that a new theory of aerial combat tactics will result . . . and the chief action would be withering broadside attacks. . . .
The same trend in aerial military tactics is mentioned by Hanson Baldwin, writing from Washington in the New York Times on March 10, 1940.
For a complete set of blueprints on this so-called “first major contribution” and so-called “new theory of aerial combat tactics,” I refer you to a number of La Caricature published October 27, 1883, written and illustrated by Albert Robida. Here are graphic illustrations of aircraft protected by thick armor; mighty aerial dreadnoughts blasting each other with large-caliber cannon firing broadsides. Moreover, Robida carries military tactics beyond this when he conceives of pitched battles between air fleets and land batteries, the latter mounted on armored locomotives, electrically propelled. The land batteries frown more menacingly than anything in today’s military arsenal. One bristles with at least 20 large-caliber barrels mounted on an axle, like spokes of a wheel. These weapons are loaded at the hub and can be fired in an arc of 180 degrees. Robida suggests other possible measures against an aerial enemy. In cities he shows long-barreled guns mounted on towers and steeples; in outline, at least, these guns bear strong resemblance to modern anti-aircraft weapons.
Robida’s multiple machine guns resemble the familiar pom-poms that blaze at sky raiders from the decks of British war craft. As Robida conceived the modern machine gunner, he commands a battery of seven barrels, spread out wider than the body, thus confronting the enemy with a sheet of flame. Another variation shows a dozen barrels bunched together in the form of a cylinder. Both aircraft and armored locomotives mount multiple machine guns as auxiliary weapons to the large-caliber cannon. In aerial combat, war planes cannonade each other while the hostile machine gunners pepper the civilian population from the stern of their craft.
A network of rail lines speeds the march of armored locomotives from one battle front to another. Aside from the danger of aerial assault, the locomotives are targets for land attacks from what he calls “block- haus roulantes,” rolling forts—in other words, tanks. Robida’s tank designs are strongly reminiscent of present-day models, except for caterpillar treads. Armored to the ground and mounting heavy guns, they travel on wheels instead of endless treads.
General E. D. Swinton, of the British Royal Engineers, is commonly credited with having originated the idea for the tanks used by the British against the Germans in the first World War. It is more correct to say that the tank is an engineering anthology with whiskers on its origin. One of the earliest, if not the earliest, inspirations for the modern military tank may be seen in Robida’s cartoon illustrations published in 1883.
By no means does Robida commit the common error of referring to explosives as the ultimate stage of war. He forecasts an end of explosive warfare and its replacement by medical, or bacteriological, war, with frontiers guarded by curtains of gas, to ward off germ attacks.
His medical warfare describes two main phases, offensive and defensive. Up to the present, of course, medicine has fought a defensive war, attempting to repair and save human bodies. But on the offensive side, he declares, no blood is shed. The aim of belligerent powers is to spread the virus of disease, and this takes us back to that grim biological reality, survival of the fittest—unless Robida means racial extermination.
The potency of a medical offensive may be realized from his anticipation that one dose of pathogenic ferment can infect a zone 40 kilometers in diameter. A machine helps to multiply the microbes and they are speedily carried to the enemy by electrical guns. With this new era, he observes that munitions magnates seek to control the drug industry.
C’est la guerre medicale!
Fortunately for our nerves, he does not project his mind beyond the medical offensive stage, which seems to be the ultimate and final phase of all warfare, pointing to the general extinction of romantic heroism and bravery in armed hostilities.
“Science,” writes Robida, “is like a flood, spreading evenly over the globe and placing everyone on the same plane, so to speak. The remote peoples were unable to compete before, but now they have the same engines and explosives. . . .
“There’s nothing like a treaty brought about by torpedo shells. You get rich between wars, tear up your treaty and start over again.
“Today the dominating realist reigns. We make wars as much, and more than we used to, not with vague ideas and reveries, but on the contrary, with some idea of advantage and profit in view. . . .”
Written circa 1880, these and similar statements prove that Robida was moved by a strong social conscience, and in visualizing the horrors of accelerated warfare, he was neither proposing nor defending but merely warning what one might expect.
About 35 years after he sounded these verbal and graphic alarms, one of his sons died on a World War battlefield and another son received serious wounds. He was not astonished by man’s near-perfection of mass murder, for he had had forebodings of it.
Although he prophesied the advancement of science in the twentieth century, actually he was no lover of progress along many so-called scientific lines. He dreaded that progress which razes old castles, picturesque towns, historic monuments, etc., and erects signs and garages on their sites. First and last he venerated the life and customs of the Middle Ages, which he defended against all mechanical progress.
Albert Robida was born in that famous city of armistice and revenge—Compiegne, in 1848. The son of a furniture maker, he soon expressed his dislike for legal studies, realizing that he was cut out for something else. From early boyhood he had been drawing free-hand pictures, and one day when the celebrated caricaturist Cham came to attend the court of Emperor Napoleon III, in Compiegne, young Albert found courage to submit his drawings for a professional opinion.
Evidently Cham encouraged him, for the longing to become an illustrator and cartoonist seized him. After placing himself in the bad graces of his employer by writing a satirical essay entitled “A Manual for the Perfect Lawyer,” and after obtaining financial aid from a friendly doctor, Robida set out for Paris armed with letters of recommendation, one of which was addressed to Alexandre Dumas.
During the siege of Paris, in 1870, he witnessed war at the front as artist-correspondent for an illustrated weekly. When the Commune gained power, he roamed Paris, oblivious to personal danger, recording and illustrating many dramatic episodes on his pad.
The Commune period gave him his most harrowing experiences. The virago wife of a sergeant tried to make him enroll in the militia and when he declined, she denounced Robida as a slacker and drove him into hiding. He lived in a clammy cellar, sleeping on damp straw and working by a smoky candle. With empty stomach and ears cocked, he listened for whistling shells. One night he crawled forth to see Paris in flames and filled page after page of his sketchbook with memorable scenes.
At length he was sentenced to die as a Communard on the testimony of his concierge. With other prisoners he was briefly tried, then hustled away by a squad of soldiers. In passing through a door issuing into the street, his bodyguard turned right while Robida, unnoticed, turned left and concealed himself until it was safe to emerge. His fellow prisoners were led to a wall and executed.
And so he was saved for his future work. He lived to be 78, working with untiring energy, but his hand never caught up with his imagination. When Robida died in Paris on October 11, 1926, the press gave his passing scant notice. Aside from his family, those at his funeral included members of the Society of French Artists and the Society of Humorists.
“Peace on Earth,” wrote Robida, “is old-fashioned. We must also worry about peace on earth and in the air.”
This prophecy mixed with prayer was set down in the early 1880’s by Albert Robida, whose prescience of wars to come intensified his anxiety for peace.