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."