Gladiator

by Wylie, Philip;

  Winter. Time had become stagnant. All about it was a pool of mud and supuration, 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.”

  “Oh, well—”

  “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. Some one 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 defense. 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. 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 hear
t 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, pushed back the startled enemy, found him lying there.

  They made a little knot around him, silent, quivering. “It is the Colorado,” some one 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 pajamas. 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 wheelchair, 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 strength 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 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 cowdung.”

  “Oh!” she gasped. And he heard her repeat it again in the corridor.

  Chapter XIV

  MR. AND MRS. RALPH JORDAN SHAYNE,” Hugo wrote. Then he paused in thought. He began again:

  �����“I met your son in Marseilles and was with him most of time until his death.” He hesitated. “In fact, he died in my arms from the effect of the same shell which sent me to this hospital. He is buried in Carcy cemetery, on the south side. It is for that reason I take the liberty to address you.

  �����“I thought that you would like to know some of the things that he did not write to you. Your son enlisted because he felt the war involved certain ideals that were worthy of preservation. That he gave his life for those ideals must be a source of pride to you. In training he was always controlled, kindly, unquarrelsome, comprehending. In battle he was aggressive, brilliant, and more courageous than any other man I have ever known.

  �����“In October, a year ago, he was decorated for bringing in Captain Crouan, who was severely wounded during an attack that was repulsed. Under heavy shell fire Tom went boldly into no man’s land and carried the officer from a shell pit on his back. At the time Tom himself sustained three wounds. He was mentioned a number of times in the dispatches for his leadership of attacks and patrols. He was decorated a second time for the capture of a German field officer and three of his staff, a coup which your son executed almost single-handed.

  �����“Following his death his company made an attack to avenge him, which wiped out the entire enemy position along a sector nearly a kilometer in width and which brought a permanent advantage to the Allied lines. That is mute testimony of his popularity among the officers and men. I know of no man more worthy of the name ‘American,’ no American more worthy of the words ‘gentleman,’ and ‘hero.’

  �����“I realize the slight comfort of these things, and yet I feel bound to tell you of them, because Tom was my friend, and his death is grievous to me as well as to you. “Yours sincerely,

  �����”(LIEUTENANT) HUGO DANNER”

  Hugo posted the letter. When the answer came, he was once again in action, the guns chugging and rumbling, the earth shaking. The reply read:

  “DEAR LIEUTENANT DANNER:

  �����“Thank you for your letter in reference to our son. We knew that he had enlisted in some foreign service. We did not know of his death. I am having your statements checked, because, if they are true, I shall be one of the happiest persons alive, and his mother will be both happy and sad. The side of young Tom which you claim to have seen is one quite unfamiliar to us. At home he was always a waster, much of a snob, and impossible to control. It may be harsh to say such things of him now that he is dead, but I cannot recall one noble deed, one unselfish act, in his life here with us.

  �����“That I have a dead son would not sadden me. Tom had been disinherited by us, his mother and father. But that my dead son was a hero makes me feel that at last, coming into the Shayne blood and heritage, he has atoned. And so I honor him. If the records show that all you said of him is true, I shall not only honor him in this country, but I shall come to France to pay my tribute with a full heart and a knowledge that neither he nor I lived in vain.

  �����“Gratefully yours,

  �����“R. J. SHAYNE”

  Hugo reread the letter and stood awhile with wistful eyes. He remembered Shayne’s Aunt Emma, Shayne’s bitter calumniation of his family. Well, they had not understood him and he had not wanted them to understand him. Perhaps Shayne had been more content than he admitted in the mud of the trenches. The war had been a real thing to him. Hugo thought of its insufficiencies for himself. The world was not enough for Shayne, but the war had been. Both were insufficient for Hugo Danner. He listened to the thunder in the sky tiredly.

  Two months later Hugo was ordered from rest billets to the major’s quarters. A middle-aged man and woman accompanied by a sleek Frenchman awaited him. The man stepped forward with dignified courtesy. “I am Tom Shayne’s father. This is Mrs. Shayne.”

  Hugo felt a great lack of interest in them. They had come too late. It was their son who had been his friend. He almost regretted the letter. He shook hands with them. Mrs. Shayne went to an automobile. Her husband invited Hugo to a cafe. Over the wine he became suddenly less dignified, more human, and almost pathetic. “Tell me about him, Danner. I loved that kid once, you know.”

  Hugo found himself unexpectedly moved. The man was so eager, so strangely happy. He stroked his white mustache and turned away moist eyes. So Hugo told him. He talked endlessly of the trenches and the dark wet nights and the fire that stabbed through them. He invented brave sorties for his friend, tripled his accomplishments, and put gayety and wit in his mouth. The father drank in every syllable as if he was committing the whole story to memory as the text of a life’s solace. At last he was crying.

  “That was the Tom I knew,” Hugo said softly. “And that was the Tom I dreamed and hoped and thought he would become when he was a little shaver. Well, he did, Danner.”

  “A thousand times he did.”

  Ralph Jordan Shayne blew his nose unashamedly. He thought of his patiently waiting wife. “I’ve got to go, I suppose. This has been more than kind of you, Mr. Danner—Lieutenant Danner. I’m glad—more glad than I can say—that you were there. I understand from the major that you’re no small shakes in this army yourself.” He smiled deferentially. “I wish there was something we could do for you.”

  “Nothing. Thank you, Mr. Shayne.”

  “I’m going to give you my card. In New York—my name is not without meaning.”

  “It is very familiar to me. Was before I met your son.”

  “If you ever come to the city—I mean, when you come—you must look us up. Anything we can do—in the way of jobs, position—” He was confused.

  Hugo shook his head. “That’s very kind of you, sir. But I have some means of my own and, right now, I’m not even thinking of going back to New York.”

  Mr. Shayne stepped into the car. “I would like to do something.” Hugo realized the sincerity of that desire. He reflected

  �
��Nothing I can think of—”

  “I’m a banker. Perhaps—if I might take the liberty—I could handle your affairs?”

  Hugo smiled. “My affairs consist of one bank account in City Loan that would seem very small to you, Mr. Shayne.”

  “Why, that’s one of my banks. I’ll arrange it. You know and I know how small the matter of money is. But I’d appreciate your turning over some of your capital to me. I would consider it a blessed opportunity to return a service, a great service with a small one, I’m afraid.”

  “Thanks,” Hugo said.

  The banker scribbled a statement, asked a question, and raised his eyebrows over the amount Hugo gave him. Then he was the father again. “We’ve been to the cemetery, Danner. We owe that privilege to you. It says there, in French: The remains of a great hero who gave his life for France.’ Not America, my boy; but I think that France was a worthy cause.”

  When they had gone, Hugo spent a disturbed afternoon. He had not been so moved in many, many months.

  Chapter XV

  NOW the streets of Paris were assailed by the color of olive drab, the twang of Yankee accents, the music of Broadway songs. Hugo watched the first parade with eyes somewhat proud and not a little somber. Each shuffling step seemed to ask a rhythmic question. Who would not return to Paris? Who would return once and not again? Who would be blind? Who would be hideous? Who would be armless, legless, who would wear silver plates and leather props for his declining years? Hugo wondered, and, looking into those sometimes stern and sometimes ribald faces, he saw that they had not yet commenced to wonder.

  Hugo was transferred to an American unit. The officers belittled the recommendations that came with him. They put him in the ranks. He served behind the lines for a week. Then his regiment moved up. As soon as the guns began to rumble, a nervous second lieutenant edged toward the demoted private. “Say, Danner, you’ve been in this before. Do you think it’s all right to keep on along this road the way we are?”