"You are valuable here. With your club and your charmed life, you have already saved this remnant of good soldiers."
"I will return in less than an hour."
"Good luck, then."
Where there had been a man, there was nothing. The captain blinked his eyes and stared at the place. He swore softly in French and plunged into his dug-out at the sound of ripping in the sky.
A half hour passed. The steady, nerve-racking bombardment continued at an unvaried pace. Then there was a heavy thud like that of a shell landing and not exploding. The captain looked. A great bundle, tied together by ropes, had descended into the trench. A man emerged from beneath it. The captain passed his hand over his eyes. Here was ammunition for the rifles and the machine guns in plenty. Here was food. Here were four huge tins of water, one of them leaking where a shell fragment had pierced it. Here was a crate of canned meat and a sack of onions and a stack of bread loaves. Hugo broke the ropes. His chest rose and fell rapidly. He was sweating. The bundle he had carried weighed more than a ton—and he had been running very swiftly.
The captain looked again. A case of cognac. Hugo was carrying things into the dug-out. "Where?" the captain asked.
Hugo smiled and named a town thirty kilometres behind the lines. A town where citizens and soldiers together were even then in frenzied discussion over the giant who had fallen upon their stores and supplies and taken them, running off like a locomotive, in a hail of bullets that did no harm to him.
"And how?" the captain asked.
"I am strong."
The captain shrugged and turned his head away. His men were eating the food, and drinking water mixed with brandy, and stuffing their pouches with ammunition. The machine gunners were laughing. They would not be forced to spare the precious belts when the Germans came in the morning. Hugo sat among them, dining his tremendous appetite.