Gladiator - Philip Wylie (readnow .TXT) 📗

so swiftly exchanged. Came a thud in their midst. A great thud that spattered the dirt in all directions. “Something has fallen.” “A shell!” “It’s a dud!”

The men rose and tried to run. Otto had regained 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 dugout 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 dugout 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 dugout.” A methodical scramble to the orifice. Hell was rampaging in the trench.