Continuing a look at GLADIATOR in light of the theory that Hugo Danner and Clark Kent were one and the same...

Clark left Webster at the end of 1912, after being at college only a year and a half. For the first six months, he kept himself alive in a manner that he could scarcely remember, afterwards. He drove trucks, worked on farms, dug in roads, his mind a bitter blank, his valiant dreams all dead. Then, one day, after six months were up...

He saved a man's life. Wylie didn't chronicle how, but the reaction to that was small, but it was definite. The strength that could slay was also a strength that could succour. He repeated the act in another emergency, some time later. "He felt it was a kind of atonement. After that, he sought deliberately to go where he might be of assistance. (emphasis mine.) In the city again, in September of 1913, when a fire engine clanged and whooped through the streets, he followed and carried a woman from a blazing roof as if by a miracle."

In December 1913, he ended a year of dull work ashore by signing up as a sailor on the Katrina. His earliest days at sea was still filled with despair and taciturnity and yes, hatred for mankind. Yet each life saved helped him a little. A full month of work on heaving deck on the ship helped him bury that attitude, a little.

Then, the Katrina docked at Christobal. Clark then had a dark beard to match his dark hair, a tanned skin and steely muscles, corded like cable. Then another man leaned against a rail which he hadn't noticed was partially unhooked. He screamed and fell overboard, a shark swimming underneath...

Clark jumped from where he stood, clearing the scuppers and faling through the air before the victim of the slack rail hit the water. Others saw Clark lifting the man out of the water, treading water furiously. Clark shouted for a rope. The man climbed up, but Clark dived under water, feeling the rake of teeth across his leg---powerful teeth which nonetheless did not penetrate his skin. He grabbed the lower jaw in one hand and the upper jaw in the other, and the twelve-foot shark's mouth grew wider than it was ever meant to get. Then the shark died, with fingers like steel claws tearing at its brain, and floated, belly up.

"That's four," said Clark, as he climbed out---four lives he had saved. Then to the thanks of the man whose life he had saved,he said,

"It's all right. Forget it. I've had a lot of experience with sharks."

He had never seen one before in his life.

"How'd you do it?"

"It's a trick I can't explain very well. You use their rush to break their jaws. It takes a good deal of muscle."

Perhaps his self-condemnation for the boy who had fallen on the field at Webster would be stifled eventually. Human life seemed very precious to Clark then.

Perhaps, in a sense, his entire Superman career would be a way to make up for the life he had taken, in the surcease of pain and bitterness in saving lives. But that lay in the future...

The Katrina went on to the islands of the South Pacific. On one of the smaller islands an accident forced the Katrina to linger for two weeks. One day, Clark saw the natives dive for oysters, and followed them, out of sheer curiosity. For a whole day he watched them do it, and the next day he dove with one of them. Clark's blood was designed to take more oxygen from the air, and his greater density so he could stay down naturally, suited him naturally for the work...the pressure could not harm him, and he could stay down longer than any human pearl diver, although he was careful not to show them he could stay down over a few minutes. (Actually, he could stay down as long as two hours, at least.) He explored and found his own oyster bed, and...

By the end of the stay he had collected more than sixty pearls of great value and two hundred of moderate worth.

He sold his pearls when the ship touched at large cities---a handful here and a dozen there, bargaining carefully and forwarding the profit to a bank in New York. He might have stayed a seaman for a while, exploring the world and forgetting his past...but when the Katrina rounded the Bec d'Aiglon and docked at Marseilles, Clark heard that war had been declared by Germany, Austria, France, Russia, England...a world war!

It was August 5th, 1914.

On that day the last veil of mist, numbing his thought and feelings, cleared. He bought a paper and read French accounts of the mobilization. Clark wanted to be in it. He was startled by the impact of that desire. All the ferocity of him, the unleashed desire to rend and kill, was blazing in him--but subtly, in terms of duty, to use his one perfect opportunity to a use worthy of his gift. A Frenchmen asked the American swilling beer why he wasn't a soldier.

"I will be."

The next day, tales of the war, highly magnified reached the crowds, and Clark was caught up in the war fever.

"God damn," said a lean wealthy American with light-blue eyes.

Clark said,"There sure is hell to pay."

"American?"

"Yeah."

"Let's have a drink."

"My name's Kent."

"Mine's Wayne. Thomas Mathew Wayne." Wylie changed his last name to Shayne. "I'm from New York."

"So am I, in a way. I as on a ship that was stranded here by the war. At loose ends now."

They discussed the war, and then Wayne astounded him by offering him a hundred francs.

"Good Lord, man," Clark answered,"I said my ship was stuck. Not me. And these drinks are mine."

He brought out a wad of French and American notes.

"Sorry, old man. You see, all day I've been fighting off starving and startled Americans and I thought you were one. I apologize for my mistake. As a matter of fact, I'm a little skittish about patriotism. And about war. Of course, I'm going to be in it. The first entertaining thing that has happened in a dog's age. But I'm a conscientious objector on principles. I rather thought I'd enlist in the Foreign Legion tomorrow."

Later that night, dining together, Wayne asked Clark's name again. When Clark told him...

"Good God! Not the football player--?"

"I did play football---some time ago."

"I saw you against Cornell--when was it?---two years ago. You were magnificent. How does it happen--?"

"That I'm here? I'll tell you. Why not? I killed a man in the game--and quit. Beat it."

They agreed to join the Foreign Legion together, and then Shayne, more wordly, led them to roullette tables and later the embraces of two Frenchwomen called MArcelle and Claudine.

Shayne woke him up. Then Claudine, by his side awoke. "Cheri!"

"Boy! What a binge!"

"You like eet?"

"Loved it, darling. And now we're going to war."

"Bonne chance!"

They signed papers to a recruiter in steely blue. That night they marched for the first time. A week later they were sweating and swearing over the French manual of arms. Clark had offered his services to the commanding officer, Captain Crouan, and been summarily denied an audience or a chance to exhibit his abilities. He was put to work peeling potatoes instead.

When he reached the lines, though, he'd have a chance to show what he could do.

Just as the eastern horizon became light with something more steady than the flare of the guns, the command came.

"En avant!"

Tom Wayne said, "Here we go, Clark."

"Luck, Tom."

The ground of no-man's land looked like the municipal ash dump of Smallville. They walked for miles. Then Wayne said,

"Soon be there."

"Yeah?"

"Over that hill."

As he came over it, he saw the barbed wire, the German helmts. He felt a sharp sting above his collar bone. He looked and saw a row of little holes had appeared in his shirt---but no blood. He whispered,

"Good God, a machine gun."

Ripping open his shirt he saw four red marks. His skin was too tough for them to penetrate. He was invulnerable! He should have known it---otherwise he would have torn himself apart with his own strength. When he fought future criminals with the Legion of Super-Heroes, he fought exotic ray-weaponry, and had no idea...none---that he was bulletproof. Before this, he thought he was as vulnerable as any man to a gun. But now...

Roaring, leaping to his feet, cracking the stock of his rifle in his fervor, he vaulted towards the helmets in the trench. He killed his first German quickly, with the bayonet, and when a more wary German came, caught the German by the neck, crushing it to a wet, sticky handful. Walking 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," wrote Wylie, hinting at his extraterrestrial origins.

He came upon Tom engaged with an enemy, and stuck his opponent in the back, with no thought of fair play, no object but to kill. When night fell, Clark worked like a Trojan, his efforts making a wide and deep hole where machine guns were being placed. Wayne talked about how,

"This is no gentleman's war. Jesus! I saw a thing or two this morning..."

They put Clark on watch because he still seemed fresh. Toward dawn Clark heard sounds from no-man's land, and leaped over the parapet, and in three massive jumps he found himself among the enemy. Clark leaped back, and yelled,

"Ils viennent!"

The Germans no longer had the surprise. Twice Clark went among the Germans when they threatened to inundate the Legionnaires, and, using his rifle barrel as a club, laid waste on every hand, twice saving his group from extermination.

The day passed like a cycle from hell. No food, no water, seemingly exiled by their countryman in a pool of fire and famine and destruction. At dusk Clark spoke to Captain Crouan.

"We cannot last another night without water, food. I should like, sir, to volunteer to go back and bring food."

"We need ammunition more."

"Ammunition, then."

"One man could not bring enough to assist--much. You are valuable here. With your club and your charmed life, you have already saved this remnent of good soliders."

"I will return in less than an hour."

"Good luck, then."

Where there was a man, now there was nothing.

A half hour later, there was a heavy thud. A great bundle, tied together with ropes, had descended on the trench, and a man emerged from beneath it, Clark. There was ammunition in plenty, food, four tins of water, a crate of canned meat, a sack of onions, a case of cognac, and a stack of bread loaves. Clark's chest was sweating and rose and fell rapidly as he broke the ropes. The bundle he had carried weighed more than a ton, and he had been running very rapidly, even for him.

"Where?" asked the Captain.

Clark smiled and named a town thirty kilometers 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 hal of bullets that did no harm to him," as Wylie put it.

"And how?"

"I am strong."

For three days the enemies attacked, and three times they were beaten back. A demon, so the enemy whispered, came out and fought for them. On the third day the enemy retreated along four kilometers of front. Clark slept for twenty hours and then was waken by the Captain's orderly.

"My friend," Captain Crouan said,"I wish to thank you in behalf of my country for your labour. I have recommended you for the Croix de Guerre. Now you will tell me how you executed that so unusual coup."

Clark told a modification of the truth, because he didn't want them to send him to their biologists, or to distrust him as they would a "thing from another world". So he made Krypton...what little he knew of Krypton, from what the Legionnaires told him...into Colorado.

"Have you heard of Colorado? A place in America. A place that has scarcely been explored. And all the men of Colorado are born as I was born, and are like me. We are very strong. We are great fighters. We cannot be wounded except by the largest shells. I took that package by force and I carried it to you on my back, running swiftly. It is the truth---and I shall show you."

He took the sentry outside and carried him in by his collar. Then he took the sentry's gun and bent the barrel double, and then he tore it from its stock and broke them apart with a swift wrench.

Clark waited outside while poor Captain Crouan went to the staff meeting, where he tried to explain about "the Colorado". There was laughter within, and then Captain Crouan came out for him and brought him in.

"Here, messieurs, is a Colorado. What would you have him do?"

The colonel asked with a faint irony,"You are strong?"

"Exceedingly."

"He is not humble, at least, gentlemen. 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."

A few minutes later, they heard heavy footsteps outside the tent. Captain Crouan cried,

"He is here!"

The seventy-five millimeter cannon they requested was lifted over his head in one hand. With that same hand clasped on the breach, he let it down.

"Name of the mother of God!" cried the colonel. "He has bought it."

"It was as nothing, my colonel. Now I will show you what we men from 'Colorado' can do. Watch."

Wylie's words do it best. "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 prodigously, vanished.

"That, gentlemen," said Captain Crouan,"is the sort of thing the Colorados do---for sport."

"It is not human. Gentlemen, we have been in the presence of the devil himself."

"Or the Good Lord."

"He is a man, I tell you. In Colorado all the men are like that. 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, maybe thousands. Ah, the Colorados are the finest soldiers on earth. They are more than men."

"He comes!"

Clark 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 shoulders, and holes in his uniform. He landed heavily among the officers and let loose his burden, a German. Clark said,

"Water for him. He has fainted. I snatched him from his outpost in a trench."

Blaisencourt, Spring 1915. Captain Crouan looking through field glasses.

"I see him. He rises! He goes on! He takes one of his mighty leaps! Ah, God, if I only had a company of such men! He is very near their infernal little gun now. He had take his rope. Ahaaa! He spins it in the air. It falls. They are astonished. They rise up in the trench. Quick, Phedre! Give me a rifle."

There were several shots in succession.

"Ahaaa! Two of them. And M. Kent 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, Phedre!"

Clark lands with the German trench mortar in his arms. Clark sets it up and sends a shell from it back to the German trench. "I should have brought some ammunition with me."

The Captain stared at the mortar. "Five of my men are in your belly!"

Summer: Aix-au-Dixvaches. A tall Englishman addresses Captain Crouan in English, and Crouan tells him he doesn't understand. In bad French, he asks about the "Indian scout who can bash in those Minenwerfers."

"Ah? You are troubled there on your sector? You wish to borrow our astonishing soldier? It will be a pleasure, I assure you."

Hugo had on his blue Legionnaire's uniform, was in a dugout speaking to a large man who spoke English in an odd manner for a non-American.

"They've been raisin' bloody hell with us from a point about there. We've got little enough confidence in you, God knows---"

"Thank you."

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

"No, thanks."

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

Clark smiled. He liked this pleasantly ugly man who spoke a slangy British.

"I can do it. And you've lost to many of your own men, Captain Drummond---"

A huge explosive, larger than a man could lift, landed in the midst of the German pit, blasting howitzers into fragments. Clark, running as if with seven-league boots, was thrown on his face by the concussion.

Winter, 1914. Clark killed a crawling heap of rags that had been a man, more out of mercy than out of battlelust, in the midst of no man's land---and vomited.

Winter 1915: He had a clean uniform somewhere, a jewel-case of medals. He was a great and feared man--the Colorado of the Foreign Legion. Wayne was now a lieutenant, twice wounded, thrice decorated.

"Great God, Clark! We haven't seen you in a dog's age."

"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---and here." Later, Wayne asked,"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. And I'm not very enthusiastic any more."

They woke up in the middle of shell fire. Clark 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 ordinary dispense. If one of the steel cylinders found him, even his mighty frame might not contain itself. Even he might be rent asunder." Wayne smiled and Clark smiled back---

Then red fury enveloped the two men. Clark was crushed ferociously against the wall and liberated at the same second. Dark red stains flowed from his nose and ears. He got up, in a sort of madness. He remembered Wayne. He found the shoulders and part of Wayne's head. He picked them up in his hands, disregarding the butchered ends of the raw robbet. White electricity crackled in his head.

Leaping to the parapet, he shook 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 slove your filthy hides down the devil's throat and through his guts. Oh, Jesus!"

Wylie said, "He didn't 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." (Emphasis mine.)

Bullets sprayed him, barbed wire trailed behind him. "His hands went out, snatching and squeezing. That was all. No weapons, no defence. Just--hands. Whatever they cuaght they crushed flat, and heads fell into those dreadful fingers, sides, legs, arms, bellies."

For thirty minutes he did his dreadful work, and then called out to the French.

"Come on, you black bastards. I've killed them all. Come on. We'll send them down to hell."

A shower of German corpses flying through the air in wide arcs convinced them. Clark encountered the second line. He might have continued on all the way to the Heart of the Prussian empire, but his vitality was not endless. He fell unconscious on the field, and his awestruck comrades sent him to a military hospital.

Clark's wounds healed very quickly, without the necessity of a single stitch. Clark was greatful for that---otherwise the surgeons might have had a surprise which would have been difficult to allay. He wrote a letter to Tom Wayne's parents, praising Tom's courage and heroism. When he had returned to battle, he received a letter back from the senior Wayne, Phillip Ralph Jordan Wayne, of the father's pride, finally, in the son.

Two months later, he met the Waynes. He recounted the Tom Wayne he knew, and the father was grateful.

"I'm a banker. Perhaps---if I might take the liberty---I could handle your affairs?"

"My affairs consist of one bank account in the City Loan that would seem very small to you, Mr. Wayne."

"Why, that's one of my banks. I'll arrange it."

Clark had not been so moved in many, many months.

In 1917 America entered the war. Clark was transferred to an American unit under a Major Ingalls. The officers belittled the recommendations that came with him, and put him in ranks. His transferance cost him his commission, and gave him barely-repressed anger at the stupidity of American headquarters, their assumption of knowledge superior to that gained by three years of actual fighting.

Clark virtually took charge of his company, ignoring the bickering of a lieutenant who swore and shouted and was presently beheaded for his lack of caution. A month later, after the American troops had some feeling of respect for the enemy---Clark was returned his commission. Clark worked like a slave out beyond the front trenches, scouting, spying, destroying, salvaging, bending his heart and shoulders to a task which long since become an acid routine.

September. October. November. Clark, having no sleep for two days, was riding in a camion, and for once, felt tired---of killing, of hating, of suffering, even of an ideal.

He was let out a mile from the battary he was going to, and passed some walking wounded.

An oddly familiar voice said,

"The devil with hurting, boy. So do I, for that matter. I feel like there was a hot poker in my brains. Wish I had a drink..."

Clark said,

"Hey, you guys. Here's some water. And a shot of cognac, too. Go on. I can get more in a couple of hours," he lied. "And finish off with a shot of this....Good God, it's Lefty!"

The blind soldier---his old college friend--stiffened.

"Who are you?"

"Clark Kent."

"Clark Kent? Clark! Good old Clark! What, in the name of Jesus, are you doing here?"

"Same thing you are. Put it there, Clark."

"Got it bad, Lefty?"

"Not so bad. I guess---I kind of feel that I won't be able to see much anymore. Eyes all washed out. Got mustard gas in 'em. But I'll be all right, you know. A litle thing like that's nothing. Glad to be alive. Still have my sex appeal. But---listen--what happened to you? Why in hell did you quit? Woodman nearly went crazy looking for you."

"Oh---oh, I just couldn't stick it. Say you guys, wait a minute. Wait here." A minute later he returned. "I got it all fixed up for you two to ride in. No limosine, but it'll carry you."

"Gee--Jesus Christ--that's decent. I don't feel so dusty today. Damn it, if I had any eyes, I guess I'd cry. Must be the cognac."

"Nothing at all, Lefty old kid. HEre, I'll give you a hand."

"Still got the old fight. Been in this mess long?"

"Since the beginning." The irony of the blind man telling him "see you later" stayed with him as Lefty was driven away.

Even he couldn't end the war single-handedly. He had been the equivelent of a thousand men, maybe ten thousand---but millions died in this war. Of the 45 thousand Legionnaires who fought Germany in this war, 31 thousand were killed, wounded, or missing in action, nearly three out of four. Those who witnessed his deeds ran the greatest risk of being killed, on either side of the war. No wonder he had kept his secret.

The next war would have quite a few superhumans fighting. This World War only had one.

He had seen acts of incredible, criminal stupidity on the part of commanders of both sides. Such as Passchaendale, where half a million Allied soldiers died, drowning in mud or mowed down by German machine guns. Or the chilling corpse-field of Loos, where of ten thousand sent over the top on the second day, less than two thousand survived, and sixty thousand died over the course of that action. Or the four hundred thousand Frenchmen who died defending Verdun.

His acts of heroism in the early months of the war, unbeknownst to the Allied high command, had helped the Schlieffen Plan, the Race to the Sea, the German plan to encircle the French armies, to miss coming to fruition by a hair's-bredth. Yet sometimes he felt rather than saving France, he had caused the unending agony of trench warfare...

Running through his mind was, Even if this war is not worth while, you have committed yourself to it. You are bound and pledged to see it to the bitter end. You cannot finish it on a declining note. Tonight, tomorrow, you must begin again.

He planned what he should do. For the next night, he would eat enormously, rest as much as he could, and then start south and east with a plane. Driving it as far into Germany as he could, he would crash it, and leap his way to Berlin, strangle the Kaiser, slay the generals, and pull the buildings apart with his Samsonian arms.

He hadn't the heart or resolve to do so before. Yet seeing Lefty, rich happy Lefty, a blind soldier, gave him that.

He told Major Ingalls he was going to bomb a battary of big guns, and was given an old plane. He had seen enough of flying---of piloting, rather--in his French service to understand its navigation. Making his way to his hanger, to what he thought would be his last adventure...

Yet a dispatch rider, charing on to the field in a roaring motor cycle, announced the signing of the Armistice and the end of the war.

Clark was rigid. His first gesture was to lift his clenched fist and search for an object to smash with it. The fist lingered in the air. His rage passed. He relaxed. His arm fell, and he ruffled his black hair, and his eyes stared and then twinkled. His lips smiled for the first time in many months, and his shoulders sagged.

"I should have guessed it."

At least the first World War gave Clark a chance to truly exercise his abilities to the fullest. At least he discovered how invulnerable, how bulletproof, he really was. He also discovered, in the years after the death of the football player, how saving other people's lives gave him the only small measure of satisfaction he could get...

If the later Superman hated the horrible butchery of war---if he made Novell, the munitions manufacturer join the army ---in the midst of a civil war in "San Monte" he had helped foster in Action#2---perhaps it was because of his firsthand experience with it. If he called war a "senseless terrible conflagration", if he couldn't understand those who chose to make money over the deaths of thousands...

Perhaps we understand his viewpoint a little better.

PARTIAL LIST OF SOURCES:

Of course, TARZAN ALIVE and DOC SAVAGE: HIS APOCALYPTIC LIFE by Philip Jose Farmer.

GLADIATOR, Philip Wylie.

Those interested with comments, suggestions, things I have forgotten, things I messed up, contact me at...
E-Mail:al.schroeder@nashville.com

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Speculations Copyright © Al Schroeder. Superman is owned by DC Comics, Warner Communications, and the Siegels. All other characters copyrighted by their respective owners.