by Hyde, Robin
The food here was rotten, nine men to a loaf of stale bread, four men to a tin of sardines. When you started handing in the boxes of explosives, that little far-away tap-tap-tap became something like the way a man’s heart throbs and bursts when he struggles to wake himself from a nightmare. You didn’t need to hear it unless you put on the ear-phones, but the temptation and fascination of putting them on again was too much. After that, you wanted to bang your head up against the mud walls and have done with it. The tunnels narrowed and pressed in on the men as they worked, and the stifling air tightened their throats up with inconceivable thirst.
Then kneel down and lap up the water from the cave-pools. It stinks, but what’s that between friends? All the seepage of No Man’s Land has oozed down into those little patches of water. The Canadians, with their shadowy hatchet-faces and steady swinging arms, take life in the tunnels better than the New Zealanders, but everyone knows they’re bloody amphibians and keep beaver-tails stowed away in the seats of their breeches.
The luxury—the wine-aired, wind-cooled luxury—of sleeping at night in a pigsty. The billet’s at Neuve Eglise, and kings couldn’t ask for better. Planks nailed across the feeding-troughs, and there you are with a dining-table. In the stalls the men spread straw and sleep as quietly as the swine did before the exigencies of war made their pampered bodies into bacon. No common swine, those weren’t. The pigsties appertain to the florid château of the Hennessy’s Three Star Brandy king, who has gone away forgetting to leave any of his popular medicine in his cellars for the troops. If you wander in the gardens of the château, with its background of slim black boughs and belated leaves swaying like orange fans, you will find the lawns straggling with clear springing grass, pale green and unkempt. Through the black mould of long garden beds, crocuses push the little flame-blue ellipses of their pointed buds. There is a delicious smell in the air of lemon-scented verbena, and in the avenues shuffle russet-coloured horse chestnuts, piled up high in the gutters. Once upon a time, maybe, peacocks with white breasts or sapphire strutted up and down on terrace and lawn. But the pigs were more important. To live as well as the Hennessy pigs used to do is a pretty fair achievement in times like these.
Then it’s a shift to Green Camp, so called because everything about it is painted green to hide from German sky-riding bombers the hangars where fifty or more British war-planes drone in and out like enormous wasps. Queer game, that fighting in the air. It makes men look so little. When a German ’plane broke its back in a cow-paddock overnight, the pilot and his mechanic, scampering away in their leather helmets from the pursuing British, looked like toy figures on a great green playing-field. They were caught and marched to the compound, of course; war all over for the two of them.
At a little Y.M.C.A. near Green Camp you could get cups of cocoa and penny packets of biscuit, not bad when you came dripping out of the tunnels. If your taste didn’t run to Y.M.C.A.s, there was a tramp of some few miles to Bailleul and Val’s little estaminet. The old man and his wife still nodded on, folded hands, white head, shiny pale-blue eyes; but grand-daughter Val ran the place, with her flyaway golden pigtails and her jolly laugh. Starkie got on well with Val, but on strictly respectable lines. She wasn’t the sort of girl who took you upstairs to bed afterwards. There were two little sisters, very prim, very solemn, and never allowed inside the warm room where the soldiers drank. But if you liked kids you could slip into the parlour where they practised on an ancient piano—just as bad as New Zealand kiddies: nothing but thump, thump, thump, the loud pedal on half the time; and then a brown goblin face peering over one shoulder to see how you liked the effect. Starkie and Kelliher helped about the place and garden whenever they could dodge away from the tunnels and from Green Camp, and, as far as Val was concerned, they could have stopped at the estaminet till the end of the War. Unlike many of the French girls, Val wasn’t tight-fisted. When they came in late there were always huge door-step sandwiches of fresh French bread, with slices of ham and sweet pickles in them, just like the old counter-lunches you could once get in any New Zealand pub by putting down sixpence for a handle of beer.
One evening at eight o’clock the boys went back to Val’s estaminet again, singing about what Shang said to Patsie, which was the pet song with Otago, and had begun to spread among the Canadians too. What Shang said to Patsie was pretty good in spots, but it can’t be printed, so let it go at that. Anyhow, it kept their feet moving until they got to the gate and turned down the garden patch again. It was too dark to see until they got right up to it, that the estaminet wasn’t there.
Not even part of it—a wall of the room where they used to drink, or the wreck of the kids’ piano. The bomb from up in the sky had registered a direct hit, and—well, that jagged hole in the ground was all. The old French couple, gran’père and gran’mère, Val’s golden plaits and the two kid sisters, hadn’t even fragmentary existence. Saved burial expenses, the Hun flier did; and blotted out at one shot all the fun, the gentleness, and the laughter that had waited for the men when they climbed out of the stinking pits of the tunnels.
Maybe it’s hard for those who haven’t seen it to imagine what if feels like to be blown up. A few days after Val’s estaminet was hit the Otago’s men got a pretty fair idea. The morning after their last tramp up the road to the estaminet, their work with the Canadians was finished.
They were lined up and drafted back to their own battalions, and glad to go. You lose a friend, one among many, but somehow individual for her white teeth and her merry eyes. After that the place is like death to you. And it isn’t likely, after that, you’d remember that ten months before you knocked an N.C.O. into a ditch. What’s a tumble into the mud, with friends to hoist you out again? Maybe the estaminet people were sound asleep when it happened. Or maybe the kids woke up and saw the bedroom roof cave in on them.
But the Messines business was done on the grand scale, and with dress-circle seats for the troops, all in broad daylight. At 3.10 a.m. on June 7th, 1917, promptly, it all began. There was a hill that had stood rooted in the earth for many ages. Its people, hare and grass and cloud, had never thought of any change. Then it was lifted in its entirety from its pedestal, and a hundred feet in the air it disintegrated into rock-masses and crumbling torrents of mud. A village which had clung to the gentle slope of one side became instantly a mass of rubble and broken bricks. In the air was one long, high, continuous scream. A mere ghost of agony, as though the earth itself cried out. In imagination one saw clear against the sky several little figures of men, jerked high on their invisible wires against the curtains of this ghastly puppet show. When they descended again to earth their bodies seemed to vanish: the force of the fall drove them head first, feet first, into the ground, and the British troops, running over that wreckage a few minutes later, came upon arms, legs, and heads protruding from the tomb of clay, just as though some god had seized on a vast tent-mallet and hammered them like pegs into the earth. Those bodies which remained on the surface of the ground had one peculiarity: they could be rolled up like pieces of paper. Every smallest bone in them had been smashed. Pipe-spills made of twisted flesh….
Birthday Farm is where Sam Frickleton got his V.C., leading his platoon straight through enemy barrage to take a German trench with rifle and bayonet, turn on the captured machine-guns, and play the ‘Song of Hell’. Nobody knows whose birthday the farm was named for, unless it was Sam’s. It was a place deader than death. Otago was ordered to hold a trench, and stuck it under heavy fire. In the morning the troops advanced, capturing three field-guns, nineteen machine-guns, and three hundred prisoners, several officers among them. The Dinks—the New Zealand Rifle Brigade—had been getting it in the neck here with every sort of music the opposition could turn on. Then the bombers got the order to clean out a row of German dug-outs.
Cleaning out dug-outs is quick work, and not without its thrill, as you never know who’s laying for you down under in the mud and brushwood. The padded jackets of the bombers are fi
lled with the iron apples, which give four seconds’ notice before an explosion. The job is done in three movements—jump down into the trench, pull out the bomb-pin, and throw it straight into the dug-out. The rest can safely be left to nature; and one thing about it is you very seldom know how many were inside the dug-out when the bomb arrived.
In the last dug-out there was an unnatural absence of sound or movement. No bullet whipped out as the New Zealanders ran along the parapet. They broke in the door.
For six days the German wounded hadn’t been able to get down the lines, and no medical officer had contrived to fight his way through and bandage their wounds. Those who lived were all badly wounded men. The dead lay twisted on the dug-out floor, and their companions, unable to escape from the contamination of their putrefaction, lay beside them, or propped up on earthen benches, huge-eyed, starving, with ghostly, unshaven faces. Not a man among them spoke as the bombing party burst in. Every man’s eyes had the dreadful and quiet patience of the dreamer who has drifted almost across the black, forgetful river. Every man’s wound showed the white, moving crust of maggots. It was as though dead and living, silent in their tomb, cried out with one terrible whisper, ‘Leave us in peace!’ The river of death crawled between living and living over the dug-out floor. And on the other side British soldiers stood cursing and weeping.
After that, Otago was relieved and sent back to town billets at Nieppe. The dwindling companies were reinforced and swung out again on route marches southwards.
You wouldn’t think a corporal would remember that nearly twelve months before he’d been hit on the nose. He couldn’t have been inside a dug-out like that last one…. Starkie was spotted before he had gone twenty miles on the route march. There wasn’t any alibi, for all the other coloured soldiers among the New Zealanders were in the Maori Pioneer Corps, and Starkie couldn’t pretend that the corporal’s nose had been hit by a horse of another colour. The Villains picked him up and he spent a night in the lock-up with George Moran and George Cummings, also in line for trouble. Next day Colonel Chalmers prescribed a field-general court martial for him. This time nobody appeared to speak for him. He got ten years’ penal servitude, and, by the gleam in his Colonel’s eye, somehow he felt that this time he was for it.
The prison billet where he was locked up that night was an informal sort of half-way house to Hell—otherwise Le Havre, where the toughest military prison in France was situated—and right next door were Otago headquarters. When the heavy German bombardment began at eleven o’clock next morning, everyone promptly left the neighbourhood, taking with them Moran, who must have been a good boy to one of the guards, and leaving Cummings and Starkie to do what they liked about it. The doors were locked on them, but Starkie picked the lock and got into headquarters, where a careless person had left an automatic lying about. He removed it for safe keeping and strolled outside, to find that Colonel Chalmers, returning quite alone, was staring up anxiously at the sky.
Something was going on up there. German and British warbirds were mixing it in an aerial free-for-all. A scarlet ’plane, like a dragonfly suddenly hysterical, darted again and again past the British fliers. Suddenly it described a graceful arc and nose-dived straight for the ground, trailing behind it a plume of thick black smoke. As the ’plane hit the earth its body opened into a towering sheaf of flames. Two little figures struggled and screamed in the cockpit. Colonel Chalmers and Starkie started to run towards the burning ’plane across the field, but it was too late. Either the pilot and his mechanic were disabled, or their bodies were jammed in the cockpit. They dropped back into the incandescent heat of the red ’plane like two chestnuts fallen from the bars of a fire-grate into the heart of the flames.
Colonel Chalmers looked for a moment like an out-of-breath old man. He said, ‘Poor devils, poor devils! What a death to die!’
Starkie had had every intention of shooting his Colonel. But for the moment he felt almost soft towards him. As they went back, quite slowly and without loss of face on either side, in the direction of the lock-up, he dropped the automatic into the grass. Whether it was found or not he never knew, but the next day they told him that his ten years’ sentence had been broken down to two years, and that was final. Colonel Chalmers seemed not to realize that two years is a long time, and Le Havre a place with a very unsavoury name. Starkie longed for his automatic, but it was too late. They handcuffed him between Moran and Cummings. The three men were stripped of all arms and badges of their soldierhood. Then they were started at a jog-trot to cattle-trucks, and sat in irons, jolted to bits on the crawling journey to the French coast, the train stopping every now and again to pick up Tommies and Australians.
In the prison-yard at Le Havre they were lined up in a concrete square and their handcuffs removed. A tall English Major read out the charges one after another. When he came to Starkie’s—assault on an N.C.O.—he nodded amiably and said, ‘We’ll fix you up.’ The prisoners were ordered to stand to attention. Starkie didn’t like the tone adopted by officials in this place, and gradually his feet wandered apart; but not for long. In a moment a sergeant-major’s cane—a thin and wicked little jade—flicked out and slashed him across the legs.
Somewhere back in the memories of Starkie’s childhood there stirred the phantom of a face he had always bitterly disliked, though he could hardly have said why. Then it wasn’t one face, but many … a rapid and flickering succession, a portrait gallery. All the faces had in common their tight lips and hard eyes.
The sergeant-major had also a very determined chin. Starkie hit him hard on the end of it, and then became a little confused about events. He was lying on the concrete, heavy boots were crashing into his ribs with a certain mathematical precision. When he woke up he first became conscious of an appalling pain that split him in two between his shoulder-blades. He had known something of the sort before, but never to such an excruciating degree…. Figure Eights … no use trying to wriggle your numbed arms free of that iron grip. At least he could pass his tongue over his lips, which were split and felt enormously swollen. When he did so he felt the bleeding gap where three of his front teeth had been knocked out.
He was lying face downwards on the concrete floor of a box-like apartment with galvanized iron roof and walls. Dimly he guessed that this was the state-room in the most unpleasant place as yet known to him, either as old lag or as soldier.
14 Le Havre
FIRST the barbed wire, not little eighteen-inch cobwebs such as were spun over No Man’s Land, but sprawling entanglements of a considerable height; then the tents where the military prisoners lived, except when under special punishment, which meant indoors attention in the galvanized iron boxes. All around the compound, which covered about an acre and a half, were little sentry-towers like the pill-boxes of No Man’s Land. Separated from the military prisoners only by the barbed-wire entanglements, German prisoners sang, worked, and tramped stolidly up and down their own little cage in full view of the three hundred British soldiers—Tommies, Australians, New Zealanders, Canadians, men from every corner of the Empire—who were the especial charge of the English Major and N.C.O.s who ran the gaol. These were all Imperial Army men, and tougher than their own boots, or even than the meat they served out to the prisoners.
Starkie’s first three days were in the cell. He was kept in irons, and lived on the daily ration of a pound loaf of bread, thrown into his little box every morning. They gave him as much water as he could drink, but no tobacco and no society, for which, at the end of his spell in solitary confinement, he was beginning to pine. There wasn’t even the tramp of a sentry passing by. He was as alone as though the blazing crumps had really finished the world once and for all, as so often in the trenches they had threatened to do.
On his fourth day in Le Havre he was put into a tent with Ginger Crombie, of the Royal Irish Rifles, doing a stretch of five years, and the two new-comers who had arrived with him—George Moran and George Cummings. Moran seemed dazed and stupid; but as soon as Sta
rkie had time to settle in his tent, he knew that part of it was all right. Each one of his tent-mates passed him over a little parcel, bread and meat saved up from their own rations. It was law in the military prison that the prisoners stood together, and infinitely closer to them than the officers were the round-eyed, square-headed giants whose vacant faces stared through the barbed-wire entanglements from the German compound.
But when the prisoners were put to work next morning, Starkie knew that this was no place for him. The basic idea of discipline for the refractory was ‘breaking them in’. This was best done by endless, purposeless tasks, with no reason and no completion: no moment when the satisfaction of a job finished and done with might make a man’s eyes light up. The individualist was dealt with by being treated as the ox under the goad. Early in the morning they started to roll heavy bridge timbers, fourteen feet in length, across the prison-yard, building them up in tiers of an equal height. When this was finished, they tore the timber-stacks down, rolled them on to handcarts and trundled them off to be stacked up again in another corner. Over and over again the same movements, the wrenching, back-breaking tugging at the great timber-piles, were made, and made for nothing. The rain poured down, but in no way infringed on their occupation. At noon they were marched back to the gaol, given potatoes and a tin of fat and water glorified by the name of bully beef, taken back to the yards, and put to precisely the same toil. At four o’clock they were marched back to the gaol and locked up.
There is another excellent means of taming the rebellious, and it was used at Le Havre. Hunger. After a few days Starkie was used to seeing military prisoners hunt like pariah dogs for scraps of food. They grubbed in the mud for pieces of banana and orange peel, and the days which took them down to the beach to hammer stakes into the sand were welcomed for the chance they brought of picking up potatoes washed in from the boats. Cigarette butts were treasured like gold. French soldiers walked past the prisoners on the beach, chewing tobacco, and when they spat the cuds from their mouths, these were picked up, taken back to the compound and dried out, to be rolled in bits of bark for cigarettes. Tobacco was the worst craving, and gaunt British soldiers handed bread over the wires to the German prisoners, who would trade cigarettes for food. No gift packages, however belated, ever got through to the military prisoners, whereas the Germans did occasionally get the parcels made up for them by mothers and sweethearts in little towns behind the Black Forest. Hunger and cold weren’t as formidable as the craving for tobacco. Soldiers hung about by the compound wire, dodged the guards, and threw the shirts from their backs to the Germans, in the hope—usually vain—that a cigarette might be tossed back.
