Gladiator by Philip Wylie (great novels txt) 📕

his vision and saw the object that had descended. A package of yellow sticks tied to a great mass of iron—wired to it. Instead of running, he grasped it. His strength was not enough to lift it. Then, for one short eternity, he saw a sizzling spark move toward the sticks. He clutched at it. "Help! The guns must be saved. A bomb!" He knew his arms surrounded death. "I cannot—"

His feeble voice was blown to the four winds at that instant. A terrible explosion burst from him, shattering the escaping men, blasting the howitzers into fragments, enlarging the pit to enormous dimensions. Both fronts clattered with machine-gun fire. Flares lit the terrain. Hugo, running as if with seven-league boots, was thrown on his face by the concussion.

Winter. Mud. A light fall of snow that was split into festers by the guns before it could anneal the ancient sores. Hugo shivered and stared into no man's land, whence a groan had issued for twenty hours, audible occasionally over the tumult of the artillery. He saw German eyes turned mutely on the same heap of rags that moved pitifully over the snow, leaving a red wake, dragging a bloody thing behind. It rose and fell, moving parallel to the two trenches. Many machine-gun bullets had either missed it or increased its crimson torment. Hugo went out and killed the heap of rags, with a revolver that cracked until the groans stopped in a low moan. Breaths on both sides were bated. The rags had been gray-green. A shout of low, rumbling praise came from the silent enemy trenches. Hugo looked over there for a moment and smiled. He looked down at the thing and vomited. The guns began again.

Another winter. Time had become stagnant. All about it was a pool of mud and suppuration, and shot through it was the sound of guns and the scent of women, the taste of wine and the touch of cold flesh. Somewhere, he could not remember distinctly where, Hugo had a clean uniform, a portfolio of papers, a jewel-case of medals. He was a great man—a man feared. The Colorado in the Foreign Legion. Men would talk about what they had seen him accomplish all through the next fifty years—at watering places in the Sahara, at the crackling fires of country-house parties in Shropshire, on the shores of the South Seas, on the moon, maybe. Old men, at the last, would clear the phlegm from their skinny throats and begin: "When I was a-fightin' with the Legion in my youngest days, there was a fellow in our company that came from some place in wild America that I disrecollect." And younger, more sanguine men would listen and shake their heads and wish that there was a war for them to fight.

Hugo was not satisfied with that. Still, he could see no decent exit and contrive no better use for himself. He clung frantically to the ideals he had taken with him and to the splendid purpose with which he had emblazoned his mad lust to enlist. Marseilles and the sentiment it had inspired seemed very far away. He thought about it as he walked toward the front, his head bent into the gale and his helmet pitched to protect his eyes from the sting of the rain.

That night he slept with Shayne, a lieutenant now, twice wounded, thrice decorated, and, like Hugo, thinner than he had been, older, with eyes grown bleak, and seldom vehement. He resembled his lean Yankee ancestors after their exhausting campaigns of the wilderness, alive and sentient only through a sheer stubbornness that brooked neither element nor disaster. Only at rare moments did the slight strain of his French blood lift him from that grim posture. Such a moment was afforded by the arrival of Hugo.

"Great God, Hugo! We haven't seen you in a dog's age." Other soldiers smiled and brought rusty cigarettes into the dug-out where they sat and smoked.

Hugo held out his hand. "Been busy. Glad to see you."

"Yes. I know how busy you've been. Up and down the lines we hear about you. Le Colorado. Damn funny war. You'd think you weren't human, or anywhere near human, to hear these birds. Wish you'd tell me how you get away with it. Hasn't one nicked you yet?"

"Not yet."

"God damn. Got me here"—he tapped his shoulder—"and here"—his thigh.

"That's tough. I guess the sort of work I do isn't calculated to be as risky as yours," Hugo said.

"Huh! That you can tell to Sweeny." The Frenchmen were still sitting politely, listening to a dialogue they could not understand. Hugo and Shayne eyed each other in silence. A long, penetrating silence. At length the latter said soberly: "Still as enthusiastic as you were that night in Marseilles?"

"Are you?"

"I didn't have much conception of what war would be then."

"Neither did I," Hugo responded. "And I'm not very enthusiastic any more."

"Oh, well—"

"Exactly."

"Heard from your family?"

"Sure."

"Well—"

They relapsed into silence again. By and by they ate a meal of cold food, supplemented by rank, steaming coffee. Then they slept. Before dawn Hugo woke feeling like a man in the mouth of a volcano that had commenced to erupt. The universe was shaking. The walls of the dug-out were molting chunks of earth. The scream and burst of shells were constant. He heard Shayne's voice above the din, issuing orders in French. Their batteries were to be phoned. A protective counter-fire. A barrage in readiness in case of attack, which seemed imminent. Larger shells drowned the voice. Hugo rose and stood beside Shayne.

"Coming over?"

"Coming over."

A shapeless face spoke in the gloom. The voice panted. "We must get out of here, my lieutenant. They are smashing in the dug-out." A methodical scramble to the orifice. Hell was rampaging in the trench. The shells fell everywhere. Shayne shook his head. It was neither light nor dark. The incessant blinding fire did not make things visible except for fragments of time and in fantastic perspectives. Things belched and boomed and smashed the earth and whistled and howled. It was impossible to see how life could exist in that caldron, and yet men stood calmly all along the line. A few of them, here and there, were obliterated.

The red sky in the southeast became redder with the rising sun. Hugo remained close to the wall. It was no novelty for him to be under shell fire. But at such times he felt the need of a caution with which he could ordinarily dispense. If one of the steel cylinders found him, even his mighty frame might not contain itself. Even he might be rent asunder. Shayne saw him and smiled. Twenty yards away a geyser of fire sprayed the heavens. Ten feet away a fragment of shell lashed down a pile of sand-bags. Shayne's smile widened. Hugo returned it.

Then red fury enveloped the two men. Hugo was crushed ferociously against the wall and liberated in the same second. He fell forward, his ears singing and his head dizzy. He lay there, aching. Dark red stains flowed over his face from his nose and ears. Painfully he stood up. A soldier was watching him from a distance with alarmed eyes. Hugo stepped. He found that locomotion was possible. The bedlam increased. It brought a sort of madness. He remembered Shayne. He searched in the smoking, stinking muck. He found the shoulders and part of Shayne's head. He picked them up in his hands, disregarding the butchered ends of the raw gobbet. White electricity crackled in his head.

He leaped to the parapet, shaking his fists. "God damn you dirty sons of bitches. I'll make you pay for this. You got him, got him, you bastards! I'll shove your filthy hides down the devil's throat and through his guts. Oh, Jesus!" He did not feel the frantic tugging of his fellows. He ran into that bubbling, doom-ridden chaos, waving his arms and shouting maniacal profanities. A dozen times he was knocked down. He bled slowly where fragments had battered him. He crossed over and paused on the German parapet. He was like a being of steel. Bullets sprayed him. His arms dangled and lifted. Barbed wire trailed behind him.

Down before him, shoulder to shoulder, the attacking regiments waited for the last crescendo of the bombardment. They saw him come out of the fury and smiled grimly. They knew such madness. They shot. He came on. At last they could hear his voice dimly through the tumult. Someone shouted that he was mad—to beware when he fell. Hugo jumped among them. Bayonets rose. Hugo wrenched three knives from their wielders in one wild clutch. His hands went out, snatching and squeezing. That was all. No weapons, no defence. Just—hands. Whatever they caught they crushed flat, and heads fell into those dreadful fingers, sides, legs, arms, bellies. Bayonets slid from his tawny skin, taking his clothes. By and by, except for his shoes, he was naked. His fingers had made a hundred bunches of clotted pulp and then a thousand as he walked swiftly forward in that trench. Ahead of him was a file of green; behind, a clogged row of writhing men. Scarcely did the occupants of each new traverse see him before they were smitten. The wounds he inflicted were monstrous. On he walked, his voice now stilled, his breath sucking and whistling through his teeth, his hands flailing and pinching and spurting red with every contact. No more formidable engine of desolation had been seen by man, no more titanic fury, no swifter and surer death. For thirty minutes he raged through that line. The men thinned. He had crossed the attacking front.

Then the barrage lifted. But no whistles blew. No soldiers rose. A few raised their heads and then lay down again. Hugo stopped and went back into the abattoir. He leaped to the parapet. The French saw him, silhouetted against the sky. The second German wave, coming slowly over a far hill, saw him and hesitated. No ragged line of advancing men. No cacophony of rifle fire. Only that strange, savage figure. A man dipped in scarlet, nude, dripping, panting. Slowly in that hiatus he wheeled. His lungs thundered to the French. "Come on, you black bastards. I've killed them all. Come on. We'll send them down to hell."

The officers looked and understood that something phenomenal had happened. No Germans were coming. A man stood above their trench. "Come, quick!" Hugo shouted. He saw that they did not understand. He stood an instant, fell into the trench; and presently a shower of German corpses flung through the air in wide arcs and landed on the very edge of the French position. Then they came, and Hugo, seeing them, went on alone to meet the second line. He might have forged on through that bloody swathe to the heart of the Empire if his vitality had been endless. But, some time in the battle, he fell unconscious on the field, and his forward-leaning comrades, pushing back the startled enemy, found him lying there.

They made a little knot around him, silent, quivering. "It is the Colorado," someone said. "His friend, Shayne—it is he who was the lieutenant just killed."

They shook their heads and felt a strange fear of the unconscious man. "He is breathing." They called for stretcher-bearers. They faced the enemy again, bent over on the stocks of their rifles, surged forward.

Hugo was washed and dressed in pyjamas. His wounds had healed without the necessity of a single stitch. He was grateful for that. Otherwise the surgeons might have had a surprise which would have been difficult to allay. He sat in a wheel chair, staring across a lawn. An angular woman in an angular hat and tailored clothes was trying to engage him in conversation.

"Is it very painful, my man?"

Hugo was seeing that trench again—the pulp and blood and hate of it. "Not very."

Her tongue and saliva made a noise. "Don't tell me. I know it was. I know how you all bleed and suffer."

"Madam, it happens that my wounds were quite superficial."

"Nonsense, my boy. They wouldn't have brought you to a base hospital in that case. You can't fool me."

"I was suffering only from exhaustion."

She paused. He saw a gleam in her eye. "I suppose you don't like to talk—about things. Poor boy! But I imagine your life has been so full of horror that it would be good for you to unburden yourself. Now tell me, just what does it feel like to bayonet a man?"

Hugo trembled. He controlled his voice. "Madam," he replied, "it feels exactly like sticking your finger into a warm, steaming pile of cow-dung."

"Oh!" she gasped. And he heard her repeat it again in the corridor.

XIV

"Mr. and Mrs. Ralph Jordan Shayne," Hugo wrote. Then he paused in thought. He began again. "I met your son in Marseilles and was