Passport to Hell

by Hyde, Robin

  The terrible figure met an officer from the Otago lines as it dragged the maxim towards the British wire. The officer, a Major, stopped and said: ‘Good work, Starkie!’ Starkie stared at him, a red world swimming before his eyes. He wasn’t the only one. Officers—men gently brought up, trained in decency and self-restraint—were wandering about like madmen, silly from the concussion of shell-fire. Their eyes were bloodshot and dazed, and in their hands they carried naked bayonets, wet with blood. They were still hunting, like animals, with no idea whom they sought or why. Presently they would come to; you would notice nothing unusual about them except in quiet moments, when the thick, glaucous glaze swam over the pupils of their eyes again.

  Starkie took Jackie on his shoulders and walked off alone on the wearisome tramp to Armentières. Jackie was very light, and all the way little things seemed to happen that Starkie should have been able to tell him. Even the rich gold of the sunlight on the Armentières road was a thing he shouldn’t have missed after the shrieking darkness of last night. But in Armentières Starkie found an old French undertaker, who planed a coffin of beech-boards for Jackie. Then Starkie took him to the public cemetery, and with neither sexton nor priest to aid him, dug a grave in consecrated soil among the weather-worn old French tombs. The graveyard was very full, and he couldn’t tell whether the grass and the tangled moon-white daisies he turned over with his pick were the property of some quieter dead—a French girl whose eyes had been startled wide and grey, an old man whose memories of the Crimea had faded away into a rich and peaceful sunset. But how could they mind Jackie, these tranquil dead? It might be natural that the older and harder soldiers should rot in the mire; but surely not a child, who never in his life had done anything worse than laugh, stay clean for the memory of one pretty girl, and fight because at school they had told him that all good lads do fight for their King and Country?

  Starkie borrowed a camera from the old undertaker and took a snapshot of Jackie’s grave to send his girl. Then he was arrested for taking photographs, taken, still filthy with blood and mire, in front of the provost-marshal, asked his number, name, and battalion. He was sent back to the lines under escort. But this time Colonel Chalmers came along and asked the trouble, and when they told him he said pretty sharply, ‘Let that man go!’

  Starkie crawled into his dug-out. He was the only one left. On a shelf he saw the letters his mates had written before going out on the raid. It was a standing order that the ones who pulled through posted off the letters for those who didn’t, but he never thought he would have to be postman for every one of them. Fleshy was wounded and sent back to Blighty, and old Paddy safe enough. He couldn’t help grinning when he saw Paddy’s letter. On top was the pencilled injunction, ‘Post this to my old mother in Ireland’—but Paddy hadn’t left the address, and where his old mother in Ireland might abide Starkie had no idea. Jackie had left two letters—one for his mother, one for his girl. Starkie buttoned them all into his tunic. Then he stretched himself out on the bench and lay still. The blood from his nose and mouth trickled steadily into his throat.

  In the afternoon Colonel Chalmers tramped through the mud and congratulated him. ‘You’ve been recommended for the V.C., Starkie,’ he said. ‘And whatever comes of it, I don’t think you’ll hear any more of the other business.’

  The other business … fifteen years in prison, the abattoirs, Charlie Dunsterville…. Starkie shut his eyes. For the time he had forgotten all about it.

  The raid got into the New Zealand papers, Starkie’s V.C. recommendation included. Down south five Invercargill schools, including the Burnham Industrial, proudly and publicly claimed him as an ex-pupil. None of them mentioned the fact that they had all expelled him except the Burnham Industrial, which had shipped him off on the Kittawa instead. But the V.C. never got through to him, it not being considered the thing at headquarters for a soldier to win his country’s highest honour while on probation for a proud and picturesque crime-sheet. They didn’t send Starkie back to the abattoirs, neither did they give him his V.C. Upon learning which the Invercargill papers promptly and discreetly forgot all about him, and none of the five Invercargill schools ever again stressed the fact that he was an ex-pupil.

  12 Brothers

  THE LITTLE estaminet—not the dour Flemish establishment, but an improvised saloon in a caved-in house rather like a cheerful rat-hole—flared now with pale-yellow light. There were no girls present, and almost all the men were drunk. Starkie had passed the black line of sobriety a good hour before. Now he was in a mind to make everybody laugh—even the old Frenchman, dim-eyed as a mole, who peered at him and shook his white head so disapprovingly before once again he turned the tap on his keg and let the liquor splash down, beaded with crisp foam, into the glasses. The company was making noise enough for most, but Starkie wanted more. He was on the table shouting for a song when somebody caught his ankle in a grip like a leglock. Before he had time to turn round, the same person gave him a shove in the small of the back. He crashed to the floor and sat up blinking like an owl.

  His brother George, surprisingly in the uniform of an infantryman, said, ‘And what the hell do you think you’re doing on the drink?’

  Starkie hadn’t seen George since their last leave in Alexandria. For a long time he had had nobody to talk to except Arthur Kelliher, and Kelliher only cursed and told him to shut up if he said the things that were screaming somewhere in the back of his mind. He didn’t bother now to get up, and, anyhow, the floor was pitching like the deck of a ship at sea. He started in a loud, unsteady voice, to tell George all about it. George knew Invercargill and Dunedin like the back of his hand, he’d know the names of most of the boys who had gone over in the raid. Starkie passionately wanted somebody else to know about them. When he had finished, he saw to his amazement that two tears trickled, large and slow, down his brother’s face. George passed his arm around Starkie’s arm-pits, and pulled him to his feet. Then he dusted his uniform down very carefully with his big hands, as though Starkie had just emerged from one of the many fights of his schooldays and must be made presentable for the eye of classmates and schoolmaster.

  ‘Go along home, kid, and get to bed,’ George said gruffly.

  Starkie nodded. He was feeling deathly sick, and staggered outside into the draught of the keen air blowing up the long black tunnel which was lit at intervals with the frosty glimmer of stars. But he didn’t go home. He slept in a little out-shed, and in the morning, unshaven and dirty, went back to the estaminet again.

  Preparations had started for the Somme offensive of 1916. As yet the word Somme meant nothing in this corner of the world. The men were jaded and listless. As far as they were concerned the worst had happened that could be expected to happen. Somme was rumoured to be a big show. They got their kits together, tramped with their bands still playing for the marching feet of ghosts past the great fallen bells of the city and the Flemish estaminet that locked up its pumps when the British soldiers were near. Très bon, the Allemand! Starkie couldn’t bear to look aside at the weedgrown patch where Jackie lay. He had a wild idea of telling the nuns about it, and then drew back from the black robes and serene faces. So many dead … where would women be if they started noticing which was which?

  The route march put the men into better spirits. Twenty miles out from Armentières and they were singing again. The brass throats of the trumpets, the bagpipes, yelled their defiance to the level French sky. ‘We’re still alive, still alive.’ Morval in the lower Somme area was their first stop. Nothing there but manoeuvres piled on manoeuvres and Generals looking picturesque in red tabs and smart leather gaiters. The troops were entrained or pushed on by foot from here.

  They arrived in Fricourt and couldn’t see the place for mud. The rains had started here in good earnest—not the violent, brief rains or silvery drizzle to which the New Zealanders were accustomed, but hour after hour of level, steady, slow-pattering rain, which bogged them in misery. In the middle of the rainstorm, their boo
ts clogged with the khaki-coloured mud, they manoeuvred, formed fours, wove and interwove in circles, staged mock rushes and cursed. N.C.O.s yapped like sheep-dogs on their flanks. It was nothing but dazed eyes, clogged running boots, and the sea of mud, dirty yellow, around them as wide and formidable as another flood, shutting them off from any imagining of peace and security. They slept in rough billets at night, and in a short while marched in as supports elsewhere where they heard again the crack of the guns.

  Somme became like an enormous picnic, and at first sheer weight of numbers and the daily arrival of fresh troops—New Zealanders, Australians, Scottish, and Welsh—kept the men good-humoured. Arthur Kelliher came back from leave and joined forces with Starkie. They stuck together on the way to the trenches. Kelliher was a fine figure of an Irishman, two inches taller than Starkie, broad-shouldered, broad-tongued. All the way from Fricourt he told dirty stories. When they were in sight of the trenches he still showed no signs of running out.

  The men knew they were near home two hundred yards from the trenches. On the air hung the deathly stench of a battlefield. When they reached the lines where they must live until they were killed or relieved, they found them full of rotting corpses. The German attack had failed here, and the bodies in their sodden field-grey lay unburied, the reek of their decay crying out the horrible and unheard protest of Abel. Young and old men, Bavarians with their big square heads, youths crumpled up with their arms drawn over their faces as if asleep, until a hand touched them and their flesh fell apart…. The dead welcomed the living into their homes on the Somme.

  There was church parade on the following Sunday. The lines attended in full force, and a good many of the men found some childish comfort in an hour of quiet and droning words. But this day the chaplain read out the Decalogue. The steady voice said, ‘Thou shalt not … thou shalt not …’ And at last, ‘Thou shalt do no murder.’

  Starkie got up and walked off.

  A sergeant followed him and clapped a hand on his shoulder, swearing under his breath, ‘You come along back, and quick about it.’

  Starkie marched back.

  The man with the steady voice asked him what the trouble was. He stared at them—officers with expressionless faces, men shuffling their feet, uneasy, their eyes fastened on their boots. Then he spoke, and to his surprise his voice sounded high and squeaky. ‘What’s the use of praying not to kill one moment and sending us out murdering the next?’

  They let him go, and he never attended church parade again—though for a long time going into action, like many of the soldiers, he carried his own cross on his back—two light pieces of wood nailed together and carved with his name, strapped under his tunic. There was a horror of the unnamed graves of No Man’s Land.

  All leave was in Fricourt—not a bad little spot, though you’d have to be hard of hearing if you wanted to miss the constant stutter and rumble of the guns. He got two days clear at the same time as his brother’s final leave, before the mass attack. They were good days. George and Starkie hunted together, Starkie trotting at his immense brother’s heels as he swung along the roads, tramping for exercise—a heresy of which very few of the troops would have been guilty while there was a pub handy. Since their meeting in Armentières, George had grown less formidable to his brother. The gap in age and height wasn’t so alarming. Starkie began to see how they could have been friends… how George had always been a friend really in his tough, not too talkative way. Only, being younger, Starkie was the kid brother to George. As a matter of policy and duty he had to have his head smacked now and again, to have the starch taken out of him, to be shouldered off the primrose path. It was funny, really, considering all he’d seen and done since they threw him into the Dummy. But he could see George’s point of view now as he couldn’t before. He had felt something like that with Jackie MacKenzie. Not to have punched Jackie’s head on the night of the raid would have seemed like a crime. If Jackie had tried to get tight in the estaminets, Starkie had yanked him out by the collar. The feeling one has for a younger man….

  Starkie was glad of it, tramping after George. He was dreadfully tired, with a weariness which had nothing to do with a fine-trained, springy body. In the evenings they did hit the estaminets, and filled up together. But if he carried it over the edge, George’s voice boomed reproachfully, ‘Now, kid … Now, kid …’ He couldn’t hold his liquor as well as he had done before the Armentières raid. It wasn’t that he pigged it like some of them, but he got excited. A few drinks and something like a brilliant blue electric spark flashed, crackled, and snapped inside his head. The snap was a horrible moment, because after it happened—just for a minute or so—he wouldn’t be able to move either arms or legs. He found himself waiting for it. Sometimes it was a long time coming. Then the brilliant blue spark, visible to some inner eye, lighted up again inside his brain, and he had an insane impulse to start yelling and never stop. Snap … his body was a log, nothing more, dumb and motionless. Nobody ever seemed to notice.

  When it was over, in sheer relief, he found himself talking sixteen to the dozen, sending up words like sky-rockets. Like the spark inside his brain, the words flashed and crackled. But they made other people uncomfortable. He saw them stare. That was why, after a while, it was very good to be pulled out of the room by George, urged gently like a sheep up the black crevasse of the staircase, put to bed. George pulled his boots off, dented the pillow under his head with his great fist. Then he lifted Starkie on to the bed and pulled the covers over him. Himself, he seemed not to feel the need of sleep.

  He sat beside the bed, a vaguely outlined figure in the grey light, head propped upon his hands, straight black hair falling down over his eyes. It was a weary, patient attitude: that of a thinker rather than that of a fighter. It suddenly occurred to Starkie that his brother George really didn’t like fighting. That must be why he originally joined up with the Donkey Mob. Not afraid … there had certainly never been a man in Invercargill that George couldn’t lick … he just didn’t like it. Then why had he transferred here? To be near Starkie. That conclusion safely arrived at, Starkie turned over and went to sleep. For a ridiculous moment, on the edge of that warm tide, it seemed to him that in spite of his great height and his hatchet face, George was very like their mother, not in the least like their father.

  At the last minute Starkie asked for permission to join up with George’s crowd, but it was a busy time and he was refused. They said good-bye, shaking hands gravely, on the way to the trenches. Then George said, ‘Best of luck, kid’, and strode away, his huge strides seeming to carry him over the edge of the world.

  The dead men in the trenches had been buried, they and the unanswered argument of their decomposition. But now a drizzling grey rain broke and made a long daybreak for the troops. It was the early morning of September 15th, and at six in the morning the guns started, the first warning of the Somme offensive.

  First the tanks went across. In the grey morning their huge bulks, lumbering and yet gifted with an uncanny swiftness, were weird enough to Starkie, who had never seen them in action before. But at night, when nothing was to be seen but the flaring orange eyes of their headlights and a shadow behind, they were like prowling monsters from the first slime of the world. The Otago Second Battalion crowd, George with them, went over the top in advance of the rest. It was impossible to follow their straggling run very far. The smoke from bursting shells, and a yellow cloud that might be gas, hid them from sight. Heavy bombardment started to hit the British lines, and the men, fidgeting in their places, shouted when they got the order to advance fifteen minutes after the Second Battalion had left their trenches. A whistle shrieked; then they were over the top and running across broken country, hideously pitted with the great torn-up gaps of the shellholes.

  Face blackened with smoke, Starkie was halted in his run by a wounded man from the Second Battalion who hadn’t been badly hit, but seemed to have gone crazy. A splinter of steel had torn part of the calf from one leg, so that he limp
ed grotesquely, like a shot rabbit trying to run. To Starkie’s surprise the wounded man seemed to know him. The wide-open mouth in his vacant face shouted, and his hands gesticulated. He shouted, ‘Do you know who that is?’

  Starkie stared at the object the wounded man indicated with his circling hands. It lay on the ground, but at first he couldn’t see why the wounded man had asked him who it was. What would have been the right word. It was dark and bloody and messy. A horrible foreboding curiosity tore at him. He fell on his knees beside the thing and turned it over. There wasn’t much of it, only a head and shoulders. The legs that should have belonged to it sprawled fifty yards away, and there wasn’t any middle at all—the shell had ripped it in half.

  But the head and shoulders belonged to his brother George. The wounded soldier stared at him, vacant eyes quite mad, but he never knew. There should have been some terrible, vital argument between him and the grim mouth of this thing lying on the ground. Where had George gone to? The eyes, open and agonized, couldn’t tell him. But the thing might have been important to George, so Starkie scooped it up and carried it over to the fragmentary trunk. Then he started to dig a shallow pit in No Man’s Land, tearing at the soil like a dog, sometimes with his bayonet, sometimes with naked hands. When it was about three feet deep he put the awful contorted bits of George into the pit, but he couldn’t make them look like a body. So he tore off his tunic and hid what he could with that; and then, denting the pillow of the earth as George a night before had dented his own pillow for him, found that the head, lying back in the brown soil, looked comparatively peaceful.