Passport to Hell

by Hyde, Robin

  They started on the last lap of their journey to Armentières. The billeting of the men at night lay with the quartermaster, and they might find themselves in house, barn, stable, deserted theatre, pigsty, or eating peppery little stolen turnips in the lee of a haystack. They passed through the town of Arrantes, marching out at eight in a grey morning after a night when thirty of them had slept on straw in a stable.

  At Estaires, after a lap of twenty-five miles, they saw a few wounded being moved back from the front lines, and heard the first mutter of the Big Boys—just a low growl far away on the horizon. Ten of them went to an estaminet here and bought a bottle of whisky, allegedly for the officers’ mess. While Froggy dived down to get the liquor, the soldiers sent out a spy to watch where he went. They saw the old man dive down into a little lean-to at the back of the house. Then a raiding-party of five created a diversion, starting a fight in the estaminet, and while the whole staff were busy wringing their hands, shouting and pouncing, Paddy, Starkie, and Fleshy McLeod made away with the shaky old lock on the cellar door and brought up into God’s sunshine three cases of whisky and one of vin rouge. There was one casualty among the raiders when an old lady knocked a Digger out with her hefty ashplant staff; but the wounded comrade was lugged along with the rest when they joined their battalion, and all were out of earshot before the theft was discovered.

  Thereafter the robbers marched in comfort, Tent Eight’s old comrades linked up with Tommie McFarlane, Arthur Kelliher from Invercargill, and Andrew Bourse, a Dunedin man, who had done their bit in the raid. They kept the spoils mostly to themselves, claiming that he who would not thieve, neither should he drink. But the men were as contented as sandboys. ‘Cock o’ the North’ floated back to them, and they fell into step, swaggering along the white roads, cursing the French cobblestones when they struck a village.

  For more than half the men in Otago Fourth, it was the last trip they ever made.

  The country grew deserted as they came near the lines, and they could hear the reason why. A few Froggies stuck on at their little farms, too mean, too dazed, or too penniless to pack their bundles and take the long trail back to safety. They found women in deserted houses, living somehow within three miles of Armentières. The road began to thicken and clot with wheels, as ambulances, forage-waggons, munition-waggons, lumbered past them. Then they saw their first Armentières estaminet standing up as gaunt and forlorn as a scarecrow. It had one wall and one chimney left standing. The rest was an enormous heap of rubble.

  The Devil had climbed into the Noah’s Ark and tossed all the tiny figures and their trees and houses helter-skelter. At 11.30 and in the blanched moonlight of early autumn they marched into Armentières town. The buildings lay collapsed in the torn-up streets, piles of broken shards and masonry. One clock-tower thrust up its menacing finger at the sky, its clock-hands stopped at the very hour of their arrival—11.30. The troops christened this place Half-past Eleven Square.

  Colonel Chalmers was in charge of the show now, and pretty soon word was passed back along the lines: ‘No talking … no lights … no cigarettes … no smoking….’ They were nearing the front lines, and for all they had seen on Gallipoli, the spectral black and white rubbish-pile of the moonlit town, the sight of a few mangy cats slinking by, snarling and spitting at the approach of human beings, the terse order to douse their lights, put a clammy finger on a good many mouths not used to silence.

  ‘Huh! The old man’s windy, isn’t he?’ whispered Paddy.

  Starkie answered not at all. His own hair was pricking along his scalp.

  Quite suddenly there was a terrific din. Ghosts came shouting, singing, and yelling round the corner of an Armentières street. At sight of the silent ranks of the New Zealanders the ghosts stopped, obviously perplexed.

  ‘Strike me pink!’ invited an unmistakable Tommy voice. ‘’Ave you seen a ruddy, muckin’ spook, or wot? Ain’t the bleedin’ ’Uns fourteen miles away?’

  The New Zealanders remained quiet for just one moment. Then, from the front ranks to the soldiers who didn’t know the joke, one yell of hysterical laughter went from mouth to mouth. Laughing, shouting, singing, damning the Kaiser and the Colonel impartially, the Fourth went through the ghost town, tramping past squares and churches which looked as though an earthquake had hit them. Nothing was spared. Sometimes, as though to cheat strangers with a shadow of its old sturdy dignity, a cathedral or a hall—very proud in the long ago—showed a façade whose stone columns, carved in the Middle Ages with little grey flowers and running animals, remained unperturbed. The moonlight smote once upon the lustrous blue and crimson of a great rose window, its panels of exquisite stained glass unbroken. But the miracle that had spared that lonely beauty had not laid its finger on the buildings behind. Where colonnade and aisle had lifted up their lofty prayer to the heaven in which their builders had placed full faith, there were now blackened grottoes of ruin, their arches broken like stalactites.

  The seats had been ripped out of the churches and smashed up for firewood by the troops. Lying on the ground outside one grotesque shell of a church were the great Armentières bells, cast in bronze, many of them now tipped uselessly on their battered sides, as big as the round tables of a council hall. It was possible to discern by moonlight worn inscriptions engraved on some. The boys could make nothing of the thin French script, but little rows of numerals told how the greatest of the bells had been for centuries the voice of the city. Love, death, flood, fire, foreboding of danger—what had they not pealed down through their rich years to the children who knew them as soon as they knew their mothers’ voices? And now in the dust and ruins they were dumb, as though the strength that had built up the churches and gifted them with that deep and mellow voice was for ever gone out of the limbs and soul of Armentières. But on the horizon spoke the new voice of the city—the quick, stuttering duet of the machine-guns. The boys called it the Song of Hell.

  Very near was the thunder of the shells and vivid blue flashes stabbed into the sky. The nearer flashes showed where the English guns were answering the German entrenchments. Sometimes a hard staccato told where Parapet Joe was playing on his machine-gun. Half dazed and wholly weary, the gay marchers stumbled at last into their billet for the night—an old brewery. Candle-stubs were stuck into brackets. The half-light, pale and furtive, fell upon faces grimed with the sweat of marching and heavy with sleep. A stew of bully-beef was hashed up for them and handed around in tin pannikins. They ate it with their fingers, not bothering to unpack their kits and hunt for spoons or forks. Leaning propped against one another, the men fell asleep just as they sat.

  A rattle at the door, and a sergeant—Bob Phayre—poked his red face into the room. ‘Buck up and be ready to march in ten minutes,’ he shouted, and vanished into darkness.

  The men cursed as they dragged themselves out of their half-sleep. ‘The dirty, rotten, motherless, lousy, red-tape worms!’ Everyone from Generals to Lance-Corporals came in for mention in their commination service. Buttons undone, hair unkempt, they tumbled out into the bleak street, and were trotted away three hundred yards.

  Then the storm burst over Armentières. Violent colours, orange, blue, and livid white, gashed the sky. There was a terrific rattling din, and those of the houses that yet stood began to collapse like a pack of cards, sliding inwards together from the handsome castle which some childish hand has raised. The men, staring back, saw the old brewery which they had just left flatten itself out into a heap of bricks and a white, spouting fountain of dust. By ten minutes they had missed being buried alive or blown to pieces.

  ‘Great chaps, those Intelligence Department fellows. They must ’a’ knowed it. Great chaps….’

  With which mild eulogy the men, half-dead, dragged themselves to the roadside and spent the rest of the night in the open. The air grew bitterly cold towards morning.

  When day came they had clear sight of Armentières—and what a sight it was! Masses of broken bricks, whole buildings lying in the str
eet, trees which had been calm and stately snapped in two like tooth-picks, stared at them desolate and accusing. Houses and estaminets, still undamaged, stood just as their owners had left them. The soldiers wandered into these deserted buildings, and the friendly look of kitchen and hearthstone struck them into silence. Most of the French kitchens had tall, scrubbed dressers of white pine, and from shining brass hooks still dangled the thick earthenware of the family—moustache-cups, patterned with roses, for the old men; little mugs with gay and fantastic designs for the children, whose red shoes had been left behind in wardrobes.

  The hearths were deep, and lined with broken bricks or tiles of a sunburnt hue. On huge stoves stood shining pots and pans, their tin polished like silver. In the cupboards mildew had raised its bluish crust over provisions which had been left behind. Dead or alive, those struggling exiles who had run down the uptorn road from Armentières? It was so easy to picture—in the great chairs, still dragged comfortably near the hearth-side, a woman somewhat different to those met by the soldiers on their marches—deep-eyed, and with hair like the red corn.

  The only estaminet still open in the neighbourhood was a Flemish place, on land which had changed hands twice between German and Allied troops. Here the New Zealanders found themselves about as popular as a bad case of smallpox. The Flemish tavern-keeper and his fat servants grunted at the boys when they tramped in.

  ‘Très bon, the Allemand—he pay for everything he get. You men pay till drunk, then you rob us.’

  The virtues of the German soldier apparently precluded any chance the Colonial might have of making a hit. When the men drifted into the inn-yards to beg for a drink of water, they would find the pumps locked up and a grinning Flemish yokel mounting guard over them. Any one of these stolid gentry would tell the Colonial soldier that the German was all right, the British no bloody good.

  In the end the boys became convinced that the Flemish innkeeper had the right end of the story, and it was up to them to do nothing to disappoint him. So they smashed the pumps and bilked the estaminet for their drinks, drunk or sober. After that they went out and got shot to bits holding the popular Hun back from the disputed patch of ground. Allemand, Tommy, Digger, Aussie, the Flemish inn still stood on, surly, unbreakable, inhospitable. The boys said that, très bon or otherwise, the Hun couldn’t be worse than the Flemish.

  Little vendettas were born in the broken streets. One gang of men found a baby cot crushed to splinters in the ruins under a house, and the floor sticky red with dried blood. ‘They want a lot of mercy, and they’ll get it,’ went the grim promise. But there were compensations. The cellars were still full of wine and beer for the taking—good stuff, some of it fruity vintages from gentlemen’s prized and cobwebbed bottles.

  Still holding the fort of their brick convent remained a little company of French nuns, women in blue wimples, whose queer little starched white frills crumpled like the paper edgings of chocolates around their serene faces. In their garden, vegetable marrows, scarlet Turks’ Cap pumpkins, the bright patches of blue and white flowers where bees droned over their kitchen garden, struggled into life between brown pits where shells had buried themselves in the soil. The convent itself remained unhit, and was used by the New Zealand officers as battalion headquarters. The nuns stayed on, helping the friendless, sheltering the homeless. Before and behind them life splintered into matchwood.

  ‘Waiting for what? Why don’t they rat like the rest?’ growled Paddy Bridgeman.

  True enough, there was something a little indecent in fighting so near to that curious pool of quietude. Nobody believed any more in the hand of Providence. This wasn’t a war when people who really wanted to fight marched out into the open, blew a trumpet, flourished a silken banner, and dived for one another’s throats. It was a war against droning bees, rows of blue flowers, babies’ cots, shining tin pots on a hearth still warm, brick buildings faded to the colour of autumn leaves, sedate women walking to and fro in their garden, their faces framed in starched frill and blue veil. But if the French nuns ever minded, they didn’t show it to the soldiers. Their faces bore sedate smiles of greeting. When the troops tramped into the halls of their convent they brought them tea in cups of thin porcelain, and very sweet strawberries—survivors from both starlings and shell-pits in the convent garden. Only the muddy boots of the soldiers terribly distressed the old porteress. She would run after them along the tiled hall, clicking her tongue and scolding, ‘Tchk, tchk, tchk, tchk,’ like a venerable starling herself.

  11 Suicide Club

  IT WAS all right in the front-line trenches until some fool of an officer with the Third Australians, who had followed along behind the New Zealanders to Armentières, got ambitious and woke the Germans up with a packet of shells. After that, just when two days of quiet had begun to make the boys fond of their new home, Brother Boche let them have it. The veterans of the Gallipoli campaign found out the difference between German and Turk when the minenwerfer shells started to land in the trenches. The concussion alone was enough to knock a man silly, and things were too busy for nervous breakdowns to be permitted round about Armentières. When the ground had stopped rocking you could crawl along and find great holes as big as houses torn out of the earth. If any man had chanced to occupy the spot the minenwerfers picked out for their landing-ground it wasn’t worth while trying to pick up the bits.

  For a solid two hours hand-grenades, shells, and trench-mortar shots smacked into the New Zealand lines, and after that the Germans spent a happy night sending up flares, absinthe green and bright yellow, fifty at a time. Their parachute flares sailed grandly up into the sky and hung aloft, blazing for ten minutes, giving them plenty of time to attend to any of the boys who had happened to be out on No Man’s Land with the wiring-parties or on patrol duty.

  Tent Eight broke up its old company for good the third day out from Armentières. Farmer Giles went off with a bullet through his shoulder; Ginger Sheeth was carried away writhing and groaning, both hips smashed; and Stuttering Bob Butts went down with a shattered ankle. All Blighty ones, and poor old Goliath dead long ago. Fleshy McLeod and Starkie came through unwounded with Paddy Bridgeman and Arthur Kelliher to keep them cheerful. Then Starkie picked up a new pal, Jackie MacKenzie, who made up in cheek what he lacked in weight.

  Jackie was about knee-high to a duck, a thin little shaver with the merriest brown eyes in the lines, and the pertest tongue. He’d enlisted years under age in a false name—Williams, his correct and lawful title was—to get away from fond parents who would have held him back. It wasn’t only his youth—he was sixteen, not so much younger than Starkie—but the nerve of him and the speed with which his thin little body wriggled out of the dug-outs at night to join in any fun on No Man’s Land that happened to be going on.

  Finally Paddy, Fleshy, Starkie, and Arthur Kelliher, who was as good as one of the boys, more especially if the party were headed for a raid on the estaminet, decided that something had to be done about Jackie. He was formally adopted as mascot, and told he’d get the tail lammed off him if he went sticking his nose into danger. Jackie accepted it all with a twinkle in his brown eyes. He had a girl in Dunedin, a little brunette who’d shave you smooth as a new penny or curl your hair for you if you went into her dad’s barber-shop. Jackie carried Letty’s picture next to his heart in the regular soldier’s manner, and behaved as sober as a married man with twins.

  The front line hadn’t been picked out for its looks, not now with the rain of autumn washing the trenches into heaps of slushy mud. And there was a citizen of No Man’s Land that the boys didn’t like so much better than the Gallipoli flies. Grey as ghosts and bigger than house-cats, the naked, mangy rats of No Man’s Land crawled into the dug-outs, and their sharp teeth gnawed through leather, cloth, and soap with fine impartiality. When the men turned in at night there would be a rustle and scuttle underfoot, and the loathsome grey scavenger, its lean back covered with scabs, its bright eyes inexpressibly hideous in their eagerness, would sli
de into the shadows. Their rations were shared and fouled by the rats. The bread, doled out in the early mornings, could only be left in the dug-outs. In the evening the rats might have left a crust, but little more. Out on No Man’s Land lay the nobler banquets of the trench ghouls—bodies face downwards in the mud, the lobes of their ears eaten away. Where the men could they killed the rats as terriers would have killed them, breaking their backs, shaking them, sticking them with bayonets. It was useless. There were never fewer shadows to slink out from their dug-outs when they threw themselves down in the evenings.

  Out of the blue came Starkie’s first twig of laurel from his commanding officer. He was told to round up a volunteer squad of bombers. About twenty-one were needed, and they weren’t hard to find. Bomber or officer, you got your bullet in the long run, and whether it was Blighty or the rats was a matter of luck. Fleshy McLeod, Arthur Kelliher, and Paddy Bridgeman all joined the Bombers’ Suicide Club; and Jackie put his name down, but was only allowed the rank of mascot.

  Some of the boys wanted to be bombers because it was one way of winning the V.C., but most of them got wooden crosses instead. Their main job until the raiding-parties were organized in good earnest was to smash the German covering and wiring-parties on No Man’s Land at night. They went out fifty yards ahead of the New Zealand wiring-parties, lay down, Mills bombs slung into their bombers’ jackets, or carried in their pockets. When the Germans showed up, it was their job to kill as quickly and frequently as possible. The Mills bombs—little iron chaps the size of an apple—exploded exactly four seconds after you drew out the pin, flinging splinters of iron into face and body. It was tough work—but better than sticking in the trenches eating, sleeping, dying in water-holes, reeking mud, and rotting sandbags.