"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 spider-web of the wire. They saw nothing.
"You see?"
Their eyes smarted with the light and dark, 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 dug-out where they sat and
smoked.