"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 dug-out
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 dug-out." A methodical
scramble to the orifice. Hell was rampaging in the trench. 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 caldron, 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 sand-bags. 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
conversation.
"Is it very painful, my man?"
Hugo was seeing that trench again--the pulp and blood and hate of it.
"Not very."
Her tongue and saliva made a noise. "Don't tell me. I know it was. I
know how you all bleed and suffer."
"Madam, it happens that my wounds were quite superficial."
"Nonsense, my boy. They wouldn't have brought you to a base hospital in
that case. You can't fool me."
"I was suffering only from exhaustion."
She paused. He saw a gleam in her eye. "I suppose you don't like to
talk--about things. Poor boy! But I imagine your life has been so full
of horror that it would be good for you to unburden yourself. Now tell
me, just what does it feel like to bayonet a man?"
Hugo trembled. He controlled his voice. "Madam," he replied, "it feels
exactly like sticking your finger into a warm, steaming pile of
cow-dung."
"Oh!" she gasped. And he heard her repeat it again in the corridor.