Gladiator - Philip Wylie (readnow .TXT) 📗

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 cauldron, 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 sandbags. 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