Gladiator - Philip Wylie (readnow .TXT) 📗

back the Kaiser himself. I thought he was mad. I made him peel potatoes. He did not say any more foolish things. He was a good soldier. Then the battle came and I saw him, not believing I saw him, standing on the parapet and wielding his rifle like the lightning, killing I do not know how many men. Hundreds certainly, perhaps thousands. Ah, it is as I said, the Colorados are the finest soldiers on earth. They are more than men.”

“He comes!”

Hugo burst from the sky, moving like a hawk. He came from the direction of the lines, many miles away. There was a bundle slung across his shoulder. There were holes in his uniform. He landed heavily among the officers and set down his burden. It was a German. He dropped to the ground.

“Water for him,” Hugo panted. “He has fainted. I snatched him from his outpost in a trench.”

XIII

At Blaisencourt it was spring again. The war was nearly a year old. Blaisencourt was now a street of houses’ ghosts, of rubble and dirt, populated by soldiers. A little new grass sprouted peevishly here and there; an occasional house retained enough of its original shape to harbour an industry. Captain Crouan, his arm in a sling, was looking over a heap of debris with the aid of field glasses.

“I see him,” he said, pointing to a place on the boiling field where an apparent lump of soil had detached itself.

“He rises! He goes on! He takes one of his mighty leaps! Ah, God, if I only had a company of such men!”

His aide, squatted near by, muttered something under his breath. The captain spoke again. “He is very near their infernal little gun now. He has taken his rope. Ahaaaa! He spins it in the air. It falls. They are astonished. They rise up in the trench. Quick, Phèdre! Give me a rifle.” The rifle barked sharply four, five times. Its bullet found a mark. Then another. “Ahaaa! Two of them! And M. Danner now has his rope on that pig’s breath. It comes up. See! He has taken it under his arm! They are shooting their machine guns. He drops into a shell hole. He has been hit, but he is laughing at them. He leaps. Look out, Phèdre!”

Hugo landed behind the debris with a small German trench mortar in his arms. He set it on the floor. The captain opened his mouth, and Hugo waved to him to be silent. Deliberately, Hugo looked over the rickety parapet of loose stones. He elevated the muzzle of the gun and drew back the lanyard. The captain, grinning, watched through his glasses. The gun roared.

Its shell exploded presently on the brow of the enemy trench, tossing up a column of smoke and earth. “I should have brought some ammunition with me,” Hugo said.

Captain Crouan stared at the little gun. “Pig,” he said. “Son of a pig! Five of my men are in your little belly! Bah!” He kicked it.

Summer in Aix-au-Dixvaches. A tall Englishman addressing Captain Crouan. His voice was irritated by the heat. “Is it true that you French have an Indian scout here who can bash in those Minenwerfers?”

“Pardon, mon colonel, mais je ne comprends pas l’anglais.”

He began again in bad French. Captain Crouan smiled. “Ah? You are troubled there on your sector? You wish to borrow our astonishing soldier? It will be a pleasure, I assure you.”

Hot calm night. The sky pinpricked with stars, the air redolent with the mushy flavour of dead meat. So strong it left a taste in the mouth. So strong that food and water tasted like faintly chlorinated putrescence. Hugo, his blue uniform darker with perspiration, tramped through the blackness to a dugout. Fifteen minutes in candlelight with a man who spoke English in an odd manner.

“They’ve been raisin’ bloody hell with us from a point about there.” The tap of a pencil. “We’ve got little enough confidence in you, God knows⁠—”

“Thank you.”

“Don’t be huffy. We’re obliged to your captain for the loan of you. But we’ve lost too many trying to take the place ourselves not to be fed up with it. I suppose you’ll want a raiding party?”

“No, thanks.”

“But, cripes, you can’t make it there alone.”

“I can do it.” Hugo smiled. “And you’ve lost so many of your own men⁠—”

“Very well.”

Otto Meyer pushed his helmet back on his sandy-haired head and gasped in the feverish air. A noncommissioned officer passing behind him shoved the helmet over his eyes with a muttered word of caution. Otto shrugged. Half a dozen men lounged near by. Beside and above them were the muzzles of four squat guns and the irregular silhouette of a heap of ammunition. Two of the men rolled onto their backs and panted. “I wish,” one said in a soft voice, “that I was back in the Hofbrau at Munich with a tall stein of beer, with that fat Fräulein that kissed me in the Potsdam station last September sitting at my side and the orchestra playing⁠—”

Otto flung a clod of dank earth at the speaker. There were chuckles from the shadows that sucked in and exhaled the rancid air. Outside the pit in which they lay, there was a gentle thud.

Otto scrambled into a sitting posture. “What is that?”

“Nothing. Even these damned English aren’t low enough to fight us in this weather.”

“You can never tell. At night, in the first battle of⁠—listen!”

The thud was repeated, much closer. It was an ominous sound, like the drop of a sack of earth from a great height. Otto picked up a gun. He was a man who perspired freely, and now, in that single minute, his face trickled. He pointed the gun into the air and pulled the trigger. It kicked back and jarred his arm. In the glaring light that followed, six men peered through the spiderweb of the wire. They saw nothing.

“You see?”

Their eyes smarted with the light and dark,