Just as the eastern horizon became light with something more steady than
the flare of the guns, the command came. Hugo bit his lip till it bled
darkly. He would show them--now. They might command him to wait--he
could restrain himself no longer. The men had been standing there tense
and calm, their needle-like bayonets pointing straight up. "_En avant!_"
His heart gave a tremendous surge. It made his hands falter as he
reached for the ladder rung. "Here we go, Hugo."
"Luck, Tom."
He saw Shayne go over. He followed slowly. He looked at no man's land.
They had come up in the night and he had never seen it. The scene of
holocaust resembled nothing more than the municipal ash dump at Indian
Creek. It startled him. The grey earth in irregular heaps, the litter of
metal and equipment. He realized that he was walking forward with the
other men. The ground under his feet was mushy, like ashes. Then he saw
part of a human body. It changed his thoughts.
The man on Hugo's right emitted a noise like a squeak and jumped up in
the air. He had been hit. Out of the corner of his eye Hugo saw him
fall, get up quickly, and fall again very slowly. His foot kicked after
he lay down. The rumbling in the sky grew louder and blotted out all
other sound.
They walked on and on. It was like some eternal journey through the dun,
vacant realms of Hades. Not much light, one single sound, and ghostly
companions who faced always forward. The air in front of him was
suddenly dyed orange and he felt the concussion of a shell. His ears
rang. He was still walking. He walked what he thought was a number of
miles.
His great strength seemed to have left him, and in its place was a
complete enervation. With a deliberate effort he tested himself, kicking
his foot into the earth. It sank out of sight. He squared his shoulders.
A man came near him, yelling something. It was Shayne. Hugo shook his
head. Then he heard the voice, a feeble shrill note. "Soon be there."
"Yeah?"
"Over that hill."
Shayne turned away and became part of the ghost escort of Hugo and his
peculiarly lucid thoughts. He believed that he was more conscious of
himself and things then than ever before in his life. But he did not
notice one-tenth of the expression and action about himself. The top of
the rise was near. He saw an officer silhouetted against it for an
instant. The officer moved down the other side. He could see over the
rise, then.
Across the grey ashes was a long hole. In front of it a maze of wire. In
it--mushrooms. German helmets. Hugo gaped at them. All that training,
all that restraint, had been expended for this. They were small and
without meaning. He felt a sharp sting above his collar bone. He looked
there. A row of little holes had appeared in his shirt.
"Good God," he whispered, "a machine gun."
But there was no blood. He sat down. He presumed, as a casualty, he was
justified in sitting down. He opened his shirt by ripping it down. On
his dark-tanned skin there were four red marks. The bullets had not
penetrated him. Too tough! He stared numbly at the walking men. They had
passed him. The magnitude of his realization held him fixed for a full
minute. He was invulnerable! He should have known it--otherwise he would
have torn himself apart by his own strength. Suddenly he roared and
leaped to his feet. He snatched his rifle, cracking the stock in his
fervour. He vaulted toward the helmets in the trench.
He dropped from the parapet and was confronted by a long knife on a gun.
His lips parted, his eyes shut to slits, he drew back his own weapon.
There was an instant's pause as they faced each other--two men, both
knowing that in a few seconds one would be dead. Then Hugo, out of his
scarlet fury, had one glimpse of his antagonist's face and person. The
glimpse was but a flash. It was finished in quick motions. He was a
little man--a foot shorter than Hugo. His eyes looked out from under his
helmet with a sort of pathetic earnestness. And he was worried, horribly
worried, standing there with his rifle lifted and trying to remember the
precise technique of what would follow even while he fought back the
realization that it was hopeless. In that split second Hugo felt a
human, amazing urge to tell him that it was all right, and that he ought
to hold his bayonet a little higher and come forward a bit faster. The
image faded back to an enemy. Hugo acted mechanically from the rituals
of drill. His own knife flashed. He saw the man's clothes part smoothly
from his bowels, where the point had been inserted, up to the gray-green
collar. The seam reddened, gushed blood, and a length of intestine
slipped out of it. The man's eyes looked at Hugo. He shook his head
twice. The look became far-away. He fell forward.
Hugo stepped over him. He was trembling and nauseated. A more formidable
man approached warily. The bellow of battle returned to Hugo's ears. He
pushed back the threatening rifle easily and caught the neck in one
hand, crushing it to a wet, sticky handful. So he walked through the
trench, a machine that killed quickly and remorselessly--a black warrior
from a distant realm of the universe where the gods had bred another
kind of man.
He came upon Shayne and found him engaged. Hugo stuck his opponent in
the back. No thought of fair play, no object but to kill--it did not
matter how. Dead Legionnaires and dead Germans mingled blood underfoot.
The trench was like the floor of an _abattoir_. Someone gave him a
drink. The men who remained went on across the ash dump to a second
trench.
It was night. The men, almost too tired to see or move, were trying to
barricade themselves against the ceaseless shell fire of the enemy. They
filled bags with gory mud and lifted them on the crumbling walls. At
dawn the Germans would return to do what they had done. The darkness
reverberated and quivered. Hugo worked like a Trojan. His efforts had
made a wide and deep hole in which machine guns were being placed.
Shayne fell at his feet. Hugo lifted him up. The captain nodded. "Give
him a drink."
Someone brought liquor, and Hugo poured it between Shayne's teeth.
"Huh!" Shayne said.
"Come on, boy."
"How did you like it, Danner?"
Hugo did not answer. Shayne went on, "I didn't either--much. This is no
gentleman's war. Jesus! I saw a thing or two this morning. A guy walking
with all his--"
"Never mind. Take another drink."
"Got anything to eat?"
"No."
"Oh, well, we can fight on empty bellies. The Germans will empty them
for us anyhow."
"The hell they will."
"I'm pretty nearly all in."
"So's everyone."
They put Hugo on watch because he still seemed fresh. Those men who were
not compelled to stay awake fell into the dirt and slept immediately.
Toward dawn Hugo heard sounds in no man's land. He leaped over the
parapet. In three jumps he found himself among the enemy. They were
creeping forward. Hugo leaped back. "_Ils viennent!_"
Men who slept like death were kicked conscious. They rose and fired into
the night. The surprise of the attack was destroyed. The enemy came on,
engaging in the darkness with the exhausted Legionnaires. Twice Hugo
went among them when inundation threatened and, using his rifle barrel
as a club, laid waste on every hand. He walked through them striking and
shattering. And twice he saved his salient from extermination. Day came
sullenly. It began to rain. The men stood silently among their dead.
Hugo lit a cigarette. His eyes moved up and down the shambles. At
intervals of two yards a man, his helmet trickling rain, his clothes
filthy, his face inscrutable. Shayne was there on sagging knees. Hugo
could not understand why he had not been killed.
Hugo was learning about war. He thought then that the task which he had
set for himself was not altogether to his liking. There should be other
and more important things for him to do. He did not like to slaughter
individuals. The day passed like a cycle in hell. No change in the
personnel except that made by an occasional death. No food. No water.
They seemed to be exiled by their countrymen in a pool of fire and
famine and destruction. At dusk Hugo spoke to the captain.
"We cannot last another night without water, food," he said.
"We shall die here, then."
"I should like, sir, to volunteer to go back and bring food."
"We need ammunition more."
"Ammunition, then."
"One man could not bring enough to assist--much."
"I can."
"You are valuable here. With your club and your charmed life, you have
already saved this remnant of good soldiers."
"I will return in less than an hour."
"Good luck, then."
Where there had been a man, there was nothing. The captain blinked his
eyes and stared at the place. He swore softly in French and plunged into
his dug-out at the sound of ripping in the sky.
A half hour passed. The steady, nerve-racking bombardment continued at
an unvaried pace. Then there was a heavy thud like that of a shell
landing and not exploding. The captain looked. A great bundle, tied
together by ropes, had descended into the trench. A man emerged from
beneath it. The captain passed his hand over his eyes. Here was
ammunition for the rifles and the machine guns in plenty. Here was food.
Here were four huge tins of water, one of them leaking where a shell
fragment had pierced it. Here was a crate of canned meat and a sack of
onions and a stack of bread loaves. Hugo broke the ropes. His chest rose
and fell rapidly. He was sweating. The bundle he had carried weighed
more than a ton--and he had been running very swiftly.
The captain looked again. A case of cognac. Hugo was carrying things
into the dug-out. "Where?" the captain asked.
Hugo smiled and named a town thirty kilometres behind the lines. A town
where citizens and soldiers together were even then in frenzied
discussion over the giant who had fallen upon their stores and supplies
and taken them, running off like a locomotive, in a hail of bullets that
did no harm to him.
"And how?" the captain asked.
"I am strong."
The captain shrugged and turned his head away. His men were eating the
food, and drinking water mixed with brandy, and stuffing their pouches
with ammunition. The machine gunners were laughing. They would not be
forced to spare the precious belts when the Germans came in the
morning. Hugo sat among them, dining his tremendous appetite.
Three days went by. Every day, twice, five times, they were attacked.
But no offence seemed capable of driving that demoniac cluster of men
from their position. A demon, so the enemy whispered, came out and
fought for them. On the third day the enemy retreated along four
kilometres of front, and the French moved up to reclaim many, many acres
of their beloved soil. The Legionnaires were relieved and another
episode was added to their valiant history.
Hugo slept for twenty hours in the wooden barracks. After that he was
wakened by the captain's orderly and summoned to his quarters. The
captain smiled when he saluted. "My friend," he said, "I wish to thank
you in behalf of my country for your labour. I have recommended you for
the Croix de Guerre."