Gladiator (19 page)

“I think,” he said, “that the Prussians are undoubtedly our most dangerous foe. On our own side we have—”

“Begging the colonel's pardon,” the captain said, “there is a species of fighter unknown, or almost unknown, in this part of the world, who excels by far all others.”

“And who may they be?” the colonel asked stiffly.

“Have you ever heard of the Colorados?”

“No,” the colonel said.

Another officer meditated. “They are redskins, American Indians, are they not?”

The captain shrugged. “I do not know. I know only that they are superior to all other soldiers.”

“And in what way?”

The captain's eyes flickered. “I have one Colorado in my troops. I will tell you what he did in five days near the town of Barsine.” The officers listened. When the captain finished, the colonel patted his shoulder. “That is a very amusing fabrication. Very. With a thousand such men, the war would be ended in a week. Captain Crouan, I fear you have been overgenerous in pouring the wine.”

The captain rose, saluted. “With your permission, I shall cause my Colorado to be brought and you shall see.”

The other men laughed. “Bring him, by all means.”

The captain dispatched an orderly. A few minutes later, Hugo was announced at headquarters. The captain introduced him. “Here, messieurs, is a Colorado. What will you have him do?”

The
colonel, who had expected the soldier to be both embarrassed and made ridiculous, was impressed by Hugo's calm demeanour. “You are strong?” he said with a faint irony.

“Exceedingly.”

“He is not humble, at least, gentlemen.” Laughter. The colonel fixed Hugo with his eye. “Then, my good fellow, if you are so strong, if you can run so swiftly and carry such burdens, bring us one of our beautiful seventy-fives from the artillery.”

“With your written order, if you please.”

The colonel started, wrote the order laughingly, and gave it to Hugo. He left the room.

“It is a good joke,” the colonel said. “But I fear it is harsh on the private.”

The captain shrugged. Wine was poured. In a few minutes they heard heavy footsteps outside the tent. “He is here!” the captain cried. The officers rushed forward. Hugo stood outside the tent with the cannon they had requested lifted over his head in one hand. With that same hand clasped on the breach, he set it down. The colonel paled and gulped. “Name of the mother of God! He has brought it.”

Hugo nodded. “It was as nothing, my colonel. Now I will show you what we men from Colorado can do. Watch.”

They eyed him. There was a grating sound beneath his feet. Those who were quickest of vision saw his body catapult through the air high over their heads. It landed, bounced prodigiously, vanished.

Captain Crouan coughed and swallowed. He faced his superiors, trying to seem nonchalant. “That, gentlemen, is the sort of thing the Colorados do—for sport.”

The colonel recovered first. “It is not human. Gentlemen, we have been in the presence of the devil himself.”

“Or the Good Lord.”

The captain shook his head. “He is a man, I tell you. In Colorado all the men are like that. He told me so himself. When he first enlisted, he came to me and asked for a special commission to go to Berlin and smash the Reich—to bring back the
Kaiser
himself. I thought he was mad. I made him peel potatoes. He did not say any more foolish things. He was a good soldier. Then the battle came and I saw him, not believing I saw him, standing on the parapet and wielding his rifle like the lightning, killing I do not know how many men. Hundreds certainly, perhaps thousands. Ah, it is as I said, the Colorados are the finest soldiers on earth. They are more than men.”

“He comes!”

Hugo burst from the sky, moving like a hawk. He came from the direction of the lines, many miles away. There was a bundle slung across his shoulder. There were holes in his uniform. He landed heavily among the officers and set down his burden. It was a German. He dropped to the ground.

“Water for him,” Hugo panted. “He has fainted. I snatched him from his outpost in a trench.”

Chapter
XIII

A
T
Blaisencourt it was spring again. The war was nearly a year old. Blaisencourt was now a street of houses' ghosts, of rubble and dirt, populated by soldiers. A little new grass sprouted peevishly here and there; an occasional house retained enough of its original shape to harbour an industry. Captain Crouan, his arm in a sling, was looking over a heap of débris with the aid of field glasses.

“I see him,” he said, pointing to a place on the boiling field where an apparent lump of soil had detached itself.

“He rises! He goes on! He takes one of his mighty leaps! Ah, God, if I only had a company of such men!”

His aide, squatted near by, muttered something under his breath. The captain spoke again. “He is very near their infernal little gun now. He has taken his rope. Ahaaaa! He spins it in the air. It falls. They are astonished. They rise up in the trench. Quick, Phèdre! Give me a rifle.” The rifle barked sharply four, five times. Its bullet found a mark. Then another. “Ahaaa! Two of them! And M. Danner now has his rope on that pig's breath. It comes up. See! He has taken it under his arm! They are shooting their machine guns. He drops into a shell hole. He has been hit, but he is laughing at them. He leaps. Look out, Phèdre!”

Hugo landed behind the débris with a small German trench mortar in his arms. He set it on the floor. The captain opened his mouth, and Hugo waved to him to be silent. Deliberately, Hugo looked over the rickety parapet of loose stones. He elevated the muzzle of the gun and drew back the lanyard. The captain, grinning, watched through his glasses. The gun roared.

Its shell exploded presently on the brow of the enemy trench, tossing up a column of smoke and earth. “I should have brought some ammunition with me,” Hugo said.

Captain
Crouan stared at the little gun. “Pig,” he said. “Son of a pig! Five of my men are in your little belly! Bah!” He kicked it.

Summer in Aix-au-Dixvaches. A tall Englishman addressing Captain Crouan. His voice was irritated by the heat. “Is it true that you French have an Indian scout here who can bash in those Minenwerfers?”

“
Pardon, mon colonel, mais je ne comprends pas l'anglais.
”

He began again in bad French. Captain Crouan smiled. “Ah? You are troubled there on your sector? You wish to borrow our astonishing soldier? It will be a pleasure, I assure you.”

Hot calm night. The sky pin-pricked with stars, the air redolent with the mushy flavour of dead meat. So strong it left a taste in the mouth. So strong that food and water tasted like faintly chlorinated putrescence. Hugo, his blue uniform darker with perspiration, tramped through the blackness to a dug-out. Fifteen minutes in candlelight with a man who spoke English in an odd manner.

“They've been raisin' bloody hell with us from a point about there.” The tap of a pencil. “We've got little enough confidence in you, God knows—”

“Thank you.”

“Don't be huffy. We're obliged to your captain for the loan of you. But we've lost too many trying to take the place ourselves not to be fed up with it. I suppose you'll want a raiding party?”

“No, thanks.”

“But, cripes, you can't make it there alone.”

“I can do it.” Hugo smiled. “And you've lost so many of your own men—”

“Very well.”

Otto Meyer pushed his helmet back on his sandy-haired head and gasped in the feverish air. A non-commissioned officer passing behind him shoved the helmet over his eyes with a
muttered
word of caution. Otto shrugged. Half a dozen men lounged near by. Beside and above them were the muzzles of four squat guns and the irregular silhouette of a heap of ammunition. Two of the men rolled onto their backs and panted. “I wish,” one said in a soft voice, “that I was back in the Hofbrau at Munich with a tall stein of beer, with that fat
Fräulein
that kissed me in the Potsdam station last September sitting at my side and the orchestra playing—”

Otto flung a clod of dank earth at the speaker. There were chuckles from the shadows that sucked in and exhaled the rancid air. Outside the pit in which they lay, there was a gentle thud.

Otto scrambled into a sitting posture. “What is that?”

“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 machinegun 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.

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.”