by Hyde, Robin
The Second Auckland crowd had been raided and cut to bits in Seventy-Seven Trench, trapped against their own barbed-wire entanglements when the Boche came over. Their main trench led into a little subsidiary one, and it was here that they were caught. Some were killed, some captured, a few scored decent wounds. It was told among the Otago lines that just one man in the trench got off unwounded and scot-free. The Otago bombers shifted up to Seventy-Seven Trench to relieve them, and found an empty hole scattered with bomb-pins. Trapped the Aucklanders might have been, but they had put up a show. Otago was lucky. They waited in the trap all night, but the cat never came back.
Since the company had arrived at Armentières, Starkie’s career had been almost too quiet to be natural. It couldn’t last, especially not when a couple of Aussie soldiers turned up in town and introduced him to absinthe—which tasted like soap and aniseed, but worked. After that he went back to his billet and had hot words with a sergeant—Taine. Sergeant Taine was short-tempered, and a fight ensued. It ended without dignity—the sergeant departing hotly pursued by Starkie, who just missed him as he dived through the canteen door, his eyes rolling and a naked bayonet gleaming in his hand.
Appeared on the scene Captain Hewitt, who told Starkie his job was to fight for his King and Country and not with his fellowmen. At another time this might have gone well enough, but Starkie was entirely unsophisticated as far as absinthe was concerned. So he told Captain Hewitt what he could do with the King and other members of the British Royal Family, and left in quest of Sergeant Taine—who had taken refuge in a lavatory. Ordinarily the sergeant’s lavatory might have been his castle; Starkie locked the door and fired ten rounds, not blank, through the door. Then he opened the door. Sergeant Taine fell out. Two bullet-holes had punctured his clothing, but by some miraculous chance the rest of him was undamaged. Starkie decided to call it a day, and quite peacefully went off to bed.
In the morning he had very little recollection of the stirring events of the day before. Official memory was longer. The men tramped out on parade. Captain Smythe, a sinister gleam in his eye, tapped Starkie on the shoulder.
‘Fall out, you! You’re under arrest!’
Starkie remembered just enough not to be taken aback by this; but he was surprised when they gave him a guard of twenty-one to march him to the lock-up, which happened to be the pleasant old Armentières nunnery. He spent three weeks of more or less informal captivity here, visited not only by soldiers but by the little nuns—who morning and evening brought him tea and huge leaves filled with the bright-red strawberries from the convent garden. Incurious, bright-eyed, serene, they glided in and out of his days, leaving him staring after them uncomprehending.
The court-martial preliminaries were taken before a solemn-faced Colonel Chalmers. Starkie’s charges were read out to him. He found that he stood accused of striking an N.C.O.; half-strangling Captain Hewitt; firing ten rounds at an N.C.O. in a lavatory; blaspheming the King, Queen, and Royal Family, and threatening to give information to the enemy. The grounds for the last charge were perfectly vague in his mind, but he gathered that he had declared he would, at the first possible opportunity, cross to the German lines and tell the other b——s everything of interest that was known to him.
It looked bad. Nobody seemed encouraging—except the little nuns, whose delicate porcelain smiles and sharp-flavoured strawberries were just the same during the two days of his remand before field-general court martial.
Time was up. He was marched under escort to Canterbury Headquarters, and found himself in the presence of a Colonel, a Captain, and a Major. His crime-sheet was read out, and he was asked how he pleaded. Groaning inwardly, Starkie admitted that he was guilty. He was then warned that he was liable to the death penalty, and asked if anyone would speak for him. No Captain Dombey hove in sight across the stormy waters this time; but a sharp-faced camp lawyer, whom he had hardly met, inexplicably came up and told his judges a melting tale, and several soldiers from the ranks put in their word for him.
Starkie was marched out of the court-room under guard. An hour later he was called in, and tried hard to discern in the unbending faces of his judges some sign that they took the affair as a joke.
They read out his sentence. Fifteen years’ penal servitude, to be served in England.
When he heard that, all the fight was knocked out of him. He stared round desperately for a moment, looking for the champion who wasn’t there. Fifteen years … the Ring and Dummy smashed back into his mind; the grey walls of the prison-house rose up and said to him, ‘We are stronger than Gallipoli’. He wished he hadn’t pleaded guilty, or that Captain Dombey’s harvest moon of a face would suddenly glow scarlet among all these grey, precise people and tell them that he was a good soldier in action, one of the Bombers’ Suicide Club. It wasn’t any use, not even if he passed a resolution that he’d never drink absinthe or back-answer an N.C.O. again. For fifteen years he wouldn’t have the chance. When he got out he’d be thirty-two, and maybe the War would be over and done with.
He was taken out—not to the little nunnery, but to the abattoirs where military prisoners convicted and sentenced were held in Armentières before the authorities shipped them back to England. The abattoirs stood at one end of a long stone bridge. Half-way across you were no longer in France, but in Belgium. A tall old avenue of elms rustled down their russet and orange leaves on a road pitted with shell-fire. It was here that the despatch-riders, racing by on their cycles, were trapped in enemy wires and killed. The Germans used to run the low wires, just eighteen inches off the ground, across the road after dark. If the rider didn’t break his neck when his machine somersaulted, a bullet from behind the trees crashed into his spine before he could pull himself to his feet.
In the abattoirs prison, Starkie found that the principal brands of suffering were digging all day long, no tobacco, and quarter rations of bread and meat. He had known worse. On the third day he was taken out and told that his sentence was broken down to five years. Colonel Chalmers announced the concessions, staring the prisoner unwinkingly in the eyes. ‘Bombers’ raid,’ thought Starkie. He was right. On the fourth day all that remained of his fifteen years’ penal servitude was fifteen days’ probation. Starkie was more useful throwing bombs for the next twenty-four hours than eating his King and Country’s rations for the next fifteen years.
Starkie was wrong, however, in thinking that if he had stayed in prison he would necessarily have taken two legs and two arms out into the world again. Just before he was sent up the lines, the Germans got the range of the abattoirs nicely, and shelled the place.
There was a punishment used in military prisons for soldiers who got too obstreperous. The soldiers called it ‘crucifixion’, but of course the prison officials could laugh that off. There weren’t any nails used, just straps that pegged a man’s body tight against the stone wall, his arms spreadeagled with the palms turned out, until he decided to be a good boy. It wasn’t what you could call a comfortable position, because after a bit, standing on your toes against a wall makes every vertebra in your spine burn and ache as though red-hot. As it happened, Charlie Dunsterville—one of the boys from the Otago crowd—had been playing up that day, and they brought him along for crucifixion. When they had him neatly stretched out against the wall, standing on tiptoe, they left him there to cool off—as no doubt he would have done sooner or later if the Boche shell hadn’t got there first. As it was, they found what was left of Charlie hanging from his wrist-straps still perfectly conscious. One leg was torn clean off at the hip, the other was half severed and hanging, while the blood rained out of him, and Charlie kept saying, ‘Mother, Mother, Mother! …’ Fortunately, before they were able to take him down, Charlie had died on his cross.
Starkie was never so glad of anything as to see his mates again. But there was a snag in this raid. Nobody wanted Jackie MacKenzie in trouble, and the kid wouldn’t see it. ‘If it’s good enough for you, it’s good enough for me,’ he said languidly.
Starkie threatened to punch his head, but the brown eyes only twinkled at him.
The Suicide Club decided it would be bad luck to lose their mascot, so they sent a deputation to Captain Knowles—who, although an officer, was a gentleman. Starkie was the deputation. He explained that Jackie was only a kid and should be left at home. The Captain said he understood, and ten minutes before the raid was on, he called the bombers together and said that any man who didn’t feel up to going was to stay in the lines.
Jackie stood his ground like a veteran. There was only one thing to be done, and the boys did it. Starkie and Paddy enticed Jackie into the dug-out for a drink. Then Starkie hit him over the head, and the thin little body crumpled up and went down into the mud. Starkie picked him up very gently and stretched him out on his blankets. He hated to do it, but the kid was best out of mischief. Jackie, though he wouldn’t have admitted it to the others, meant more to him than Tent Eight—which had meant a good deal. But Jackie, with his merry, screwed-up face, cheeky as a marmoset, was such a kid, and so dead game.
The men commenced to file out. Every one of the bombers had his face grotesquely blackened with nugget polish, which would save them from confusing their own show with the enemy. When the flares went up, every man with a white face was due to be killed if they could manage it. The night was very calm and not a shot interrupted them as they crept out of the Otago trenches.
‘Too quiet,’ said Paddy. ‘Two minutes to go, and the blighters might all be dead for all the sound they’re making.’
Otago Fourth were the driving wedge of the attack, holding the centre position as the company advanced across No Man’s Land. Flanking them as covering parties were the Fourteenth and Tenth Companies, one on either side. The centre troops were the killers, the flanks were to stop the Boche from wiping the centre out.
A minute before the order to advance was given, down came the shells. There was a crash, a whistle, and the heavens opened right over No Man’s Land. Men who saw one another’s blackened faces for one instant in the blue shell-flashes knew desperately that the raid which had been kept so dark was no news to the Germans after all. If it had come as a surprise, the enemy fire would have been directed on the Otago trenches, not on No Man’s Land. But they were wise, laughing there beyond the dark and the barbed wire. Crashing straight on No Man’s Land came the steel fruits, shells, bombs, trench-mortar, and howitzer.
Behind Otago played the answering fire of the British barrage, tearing into the enemy lines. It was too late to save the raid. The German fire had ripped great holes in the lines drawn up for attack; and No Man’s Land found its voice—a voice that rose from a long groan into a sobbing, intermittent shriek; a mindless, sightless voice that howled on and on. No Man’s Land was a picture of hell. Wherever the men went the wires caught them—clever little knee-high patches of wire so inoffensive until you stumble into its tearing, clawing cobweb on a black night and wait for the spider to pounce. After the main bombardment the maxims went hunting, a noise like the rattlesnake’s coming from their throats. Out of black nowhere the word came for the men to advance. With one great cry, mingled thankfulness and agony, they began to run across No Man’s Land.
There was no order in the advance. Starkie heard Paddy Bridgeman yell to the men behind him, ‘Come on, you loafers, come on!’
And a young Lieutenant stopped beside him, shouting, ‘Take care of yourselves, boys; I’m off for a V.C.!’ Then he was gone, and Starkie never saw him again, living or dead, with V.C. or without it. But more than he had disappeared. In the central attacking wedge two hundred and eighty men had crossed the top. Of his own crowd seven got across to the other edge of the pit that was No Man’s Land.
After that Starkie’s picture grew blurred. He was bleeding at nose and ears from the concussion of the shell-fire, and he saw in the light of the flares other bloody faces, grotesque as the scarlet poured over their blackened mouths and chins. He saw Paddy Bridgeman bearing wounded towards the Otago lines. On his second trip Paddy stumbled and went down, and Starkie groped his way towards him. Out of the darkness came the Irishman’s laugh, faint but quite pleased with this strange world. ‘Jakeloo, Starkie; she’s a little beauty, clean through my arm!’ So that one with his big, jolly laugh and his Irish pluck wouldn’t lie in the muck of No Man’s Land for the great grey rats. Starkie started off again across the cumbered ground. He stumbled on something that moved and moaned a little. When he turned it over he could make out Captain Knowles’s features. His hip was blown away.
Starkie hoisted the Captain on his back and started at a staggering trot for the trenches. There was a shriek in the air and a violent blow flung him to his knees. The body held sack-like across his shoulders jerked and was still. Starkie knelt to pick Captain Knowles up again, and to his amazement heard him speak.
A voice whispered, infinitely far away, ‘I’m done; get some of the boys.’
Starkie’s hand came away wet. Captain Knowles’s head was almost split in two. He shivered, then stretched out full length. The darkness had taken him.
The next was little Jimmy Peters, whose ghastly wound, like a blow from some gigantic and brutal battle-axe of the Middle Ages, had shorn down from left shoulder to waist. Starkie picked him up easily enough and carried the boy in his arms to the temporary Red Cross dressing-station set up in the lines. The Red Cross people started to bandage Jimmy; but as Starkie turned to go the boy called out to him, ‘Starkie, please take me out; I want to roll on the grass.’
‘Let him alone, he’s going,’ said a medical officer, gently enough.
But Starkie picked Jimmy up and took him out to No Man’s Land. There wasn’t any grass there, as there might indeed have been on those tawny old Dunedin hills which were little Jimmy Peters’s home. But the dying have their own ways of escape from fact; and Jimmy whispered urgently, urgently, ‘I want to roll on the grass.’ So Starkie laid him down on the thick grey mud, churned up by the feet of a thousand running men. Jimmy said, ‘Starkie …’ and started to tell him something. Then he gave a big sigh and his head dropped on one side like a dead sparrow’s. Jimmy lay dead in the deep, heavy-seeded grass of an Otago valley, where the grasses are mingled—cocksfoot, blue Yorkshire mist, tinker-grass on which the New Zealand children tell their fortunes—and in between the grasses the thin pink and blue pennants of wild-flowers. It was a happy ending to Jimmy. The boy who lived went back over No Man’s Land.
The next one he found was another Dunedin boy, Alec Payle. His shoulder was blown off, exposing the mass of the lung. He said: ‘Curtains for me, Starkie.’ Starkie offered him a cigarette, lit it, and put it in his mouth. He couldn’t hold it between his lips, but said gently, quietly, ‘Stay with me.’ Then he said: ‘Tell Mum’—and died.
Norman White was next, with both legs smashed—in too much pain to bite back the cries from his throat, ‘Take me away from this, take me away from this!’ But before they got to the trenches he was dead. Starkie lowered his body down into the trench. There were others, but he didn’t know their names. Only a dreadful weariness and blood clotting in mouth, nostrils, and ears as the shell concussion tore in two the delicate fibres of little bloodvessels. The dead in No Man’s Land had not even the dignity of death. Their nugget-blacked faces made them look like limp and shattered Christy minstrels. Yet grotesquely he remembered a high room in the Gladstone School, and a school-teacher with blue eyes and fluffy hair leaning over a desk repeating poetry.
Baldur the beautiful is dead, is dead.
When he got back to the trenches in early morning he asked for Jackie MacKenzie. Nobody had seen him. Then Starkie went mad. He ran up and down the trenches shouting, tearing in and out of empty dug-outs. A trench-mortar crew called to him. No, they hadn’t seen Jackie. He ran down the trench, then went back to ask them to help him get up a search-party for Jackie. The trench-mortar crew was no longer there. A shell had burst where they were standing. Every man of them was blown to fragments just three minutes after their gruff, wea
ry, friendly voices had called to him as he ran.
Starkie went on No Man’s Land again, this time out to get even. A German machine-gun was still getting the wounded as they crawled towards the trenches. Starkie crawled on his stomach through mud and wire until he lay above the gun. Then he drew the pin out of the Mills bomb, pressing his hand down into the mud so that it wouldn’t explode too soon. Very gently he rolled the bomb down into the machine-gun nest. There were five men there. He had just a glimpse of startled white faces when the bomb turned the place into a spouting fountain of earth and flesh. He wasn’t quite sure about the gun. He dragged it over to the British wires and left it there. The five gunners were dead, so not likely to miss it.
Again he hunted among the wounded, turning over bodies that lay awkwardly face downward in the mud. Then among the corpses with blackened faces he saw one with a white face looking up at the sky. Jackie, and not even the little chance that the blacking might have given him. Starkie searched for his wound and found it under the boy’s tunic, the little blue mark over the heart. It was the Mercy Death that got Jackie—and may be best, in this world that groaned for such a long time before it died. But there was nobody else he cared for like little Jackie. Starkie carried the boy back to the trenches and laid him down very carefully, not in the Red Cross dressing-station, but in his own dug-out. He took one wild look round. The kid didn’t look any different now from when, just a few hours ago, Starkie had knocked him out and left him wrapped up in the blankets. ‘If you’d only stayed here, you poor, game little fool!’ he shouted; but the merry brown eyes didn’t open to laugh at him. He ran out of the dug-out and blundered across No Man’s Land.
There was a German maxim-gun with a crew of three that in the rising dawn made merry across No Man’s Land, telling the story of a raid that got cut to pieces before it reached the lines. But as the maxim sang there was a shout overhead and a terrible figure crashed down upon it. The figure wore a tunic torn open at its waist, clotted and dyed and hideous with blood. Blood dripped from its nose and open mouth, blood stained its nightmare club—a great axe-handle with an iron cog nailed to one end. It was neither white man nor black. Under the blacking smeared on face and throat the skin shone red-brown. So much the three German gunners had time to see before the figure uttered a madman’s shriek, and with a madman’s strength leapt down on them. The axe-handle swung twice, and twice the iron cog came away with hair and blood sticking to it. Then the butt end was thrust into the third gunner’s face as he turned to run. The three lay in the pit. The figure groped forward with great brown hands, swung the machine-gun round until its muzzle pointed directly at the gunners. Then the rattle of bullets began. The maxim sang again and its gunners lay on the ground, their bodies impaled by the sharp little tusks of lead.
