Passport to Hell

by Hyde, Robin

  The four o’clock march back to the prison tents didn’t mean any cessation of their duties. Each man was given a prison task of burnishing up old iron—stirrups, spurs, and chains, left lying about on the battlefields. It came into the prison with the red rust of its months on No Man’s Land eating into it; the prisoners, with rags and sandpaper, had the duty of burnishing it like silver. Failure at this meant shot drill.

  Starkie got three days’ shot drill at an early date. The prisoners were marched out into an exercise yard under Sergeant Jackson. Each man was given a forty-pound block of concrete. He had to hold this straight out from his body, keeping his arms rigid, march four paces, bend his knees, and lower the concrete block to the ground, his arms still held straight; then rise, lift the block back to its first position again, march another four paces, and go through the same performance. It had the same happy logic possessed by the treadmill and the crank in the vilest of the early Victorian gaols.

  When Starkie had lifted and lowered the concrete block twenty times, Sergeant Jackson still didn’t like the way he held his arms. ‘I’ll show you how to hold that thing,’ he snapped, and did so. ‘Hold it like this.’ Starkie received the block thrust into his arms again, but only for a moment. Then he dropped it on the sergeant’s toes, and a howl of fury showed that even the Imperial Army self-control may be flawed in certain emergencies.

  After that he was given seven days on bread and water in the punishment cell, with ‘figure eights’ for four hours each day. When the bread was thrown in, early in the morning, his arms were locked behind him at wrist and elbow. A wise man would have waited for freedom, but his body was crying out for food. He would creep across the stone floor of the cell, and kneeling or lying on the ground eat the bread exactly as a dog gnaws a bone. The contortions involved by this amused his guard, and he usually had an audience of grinning faces and voices barking encouragement. The ghost of a chance, and he would have murdered at least one of those men—it wouldn’t have mattered which, they were all the same, shadows of the face he had loathed since his childhood. He could dream at night of bringing down his handcuffs on their heads, waiting behind the wood-stack with a club. The chance never came.

  The men were woken at six o’clock, in the bitter black twilight of the winter mornings, with a faint rime of sea-salt on the wind. They stripped to their trousers and were marched out to the square. Half the company drilled while the others crowded into the wash-house to scrub faces and heads under a tap. A watch was kept on them in the latrines, and if they didn’t tumble out quickly enough to suit their guards they were dragged out. After half an hour’s drill they were marched into line and received their breakfast dole—bread, a bowl of porridge without either milk or sugar, and water in lieu of tea. A new prison task was set for them after the first few weeks. They were put to making duckboards for the trenches.

  Every man was expected to make thirty duckboards a day, and it couldn’t be done. A little yellow-faced devil of an ex-carpenter curried favour by setting a crack pace, and grinned over his shoulder as the inexperienced, with their butter-fingers, cursed in trying to keep up with him. They hurried, blundered, smashed their fingers and thumbs with the hammers, and were always behind in the end. Starkie knocked off work for a moment to pick up what looked like a heaven-sent cigarette butt from the mud. Sergeant Jackson’s little cane played its tattoo on the back of his knuckles.

  This time Starkie didn’t hit the sergeant or anyone else. He grew as pale as is possible for a man of his colour, and stared at him.

  ‘Well, Butterfingers, what about it?’ invited Sergeant Jackson.

  ‘I’m going to get out of here, I’m going to escape.’

  ‘Mad, are you? Well, try escaping from the clink for a start.’

  Door locked, walls of iron, floors of stone, no sky, no voice. Then the tall Major stood over him.

  ‘What’s this about escape, Stark?’

  Unconcerned, colourless tones, that sounded somehow hollow and thin.

  Starkie had known a murderer with more of a man’s voice than that. He said, ‘I’m going to get out of here.’

  The colourless voice spoke over his head.

  ‘White men have tried to escape from this prison, Stark, and they didn’t bring it off. We’re not afraid of a black man getting away.’

  Footsteps retreated. Black man! Black man! … Somehow the words held a significance he found hard to grasp. Was it because he was a black man that he found the civilized world his enemy?

  ‘I’m going to get out of here. I’m going to get out of here.’

  On the following night, white men managed to break the prison camp from the German compound, but they couldn’t have done it without the help of the Major’s black man. Among the scrap-iron brought in from No Man’s Land were rusty wire-cutters. Starkie and his tent-mates, when the iron was handed out to them for burnishing, went around and helped themselves besides at the pile from which the other men could withdraw their task-materials. Their own wire-cutters they kept safely in their pockets. The spares they threw over the entanglements to the German compound.

  The Germans weren’t having as rough a passage as the British military prisoners, but you could read in their big, fair-skinned faces and hollow eyes what the French call le cafard. That dreadful homesickness, when the whole of life is one unending procession of laborious little pictures—pictures of cottages and firelight and women and public-houses, pictures of the irretrievably lost. A man in civilian life and apparently in normal circumstances can become affected by this same complaint. Nothing exists but the dead past; he can’t get to it, yet he must, even if it means crashing his way out of life over a high bridge or under the wheels of a train. The Germans, with that look in their eyes, weren’t getting much flavour out of their tobacco. The night the prisoners passed them over the wire-cutters seventeen of them made a run for it.

  Starkie never knew whether any man of the seventeen got away for keeps. Four escaped all right, but not down the roads. The sentries’ bullets got them between the shoulders as they ran.

  There was hell to pay over the wire-cutters, but nobody could prove anything. Starkie and his mates could produce their wire-cutters on demand. If any of the other prisoners had seen who helped themselves to the spare scrap-iron they weren’t saying so.

  Three mornings later they were making duckboards in the outer yard. On one side lay the prison tents, on the other, in full view, the German prison compound behind the barbed wire. Through the yard gate at one end messengers and officers passed to and fro. An N.C.O., his rifle on his shoulder, kept guard there. The other gate was a mass of barbed wire.

  Riley was Sergeant Jackson’s pet hate next to Starkie. Starkie tried to create a diversion by getting Riley to tell Sergeant Jackson he was wanted at the other gate, but Sergeant Jackson said, ‘Mind your own business and get back on the job’; so Riley was outed as a means of support. Inspiration came to Starkie as he saw a soldier land his hammer on his hand, instead of the duckboard, and curse profusely.

  Starkie’s hammer, brought down with the full weight of his body behind it, smashed the thumb on his left hand into a bleeding pulp. There was no acting about the yell he gave, nor the pain-twisted face with which he staggered towards Sergeant Jackson.

  ‘My hand’s done for, Sergeant. Look at it!’

  The blood trickling down his wrist put Sergeant Jackson off his guard for just the one necessary moment. It was enough. Sergeant Jackson fell like a sack among the duckboards, and Starkie, expecting the crack of a bullet behind his ear, dived for the gate. As he ran the prisoners in the German compound watched him and raised a wild, strange cheer. He saw a military policeman on one of the sentry-towers lift his rifle. The gun snapped like a whiplash, but the shot was a clean miss, and he was running as he had never run before, down the three-miles ribbon of road between the prison camp and the seaport of Le Havre.

  At a bend in the road he ran straight into the arms of a big gendarme, but he had one adv
antage: he was expecting trouble; the gendarme was not. He hit low, and the man doubled up on the ground, writhing and speechless. A side lane opened its cool tunnel and he flung himself into the shelter of its long brick walls. He had been seen, and he heard a guard shout, ‘Halt, or I fire!’ Starkie set his teeth and ran on. A bullet might, with luck, mean hospital. Going back meant hell.

  For a moment his heart stopped, and the sweat poured off his face and chest as he stood still. The lane whose curve now hid him from sight was a blind alley. He had missed, a few yards up, the turning that would have taken him to sea-beach and railway station. In the five seconds it would take him to retrace his steps, the military police would have him. There was no way out. High and blind, a twelve-foot wall rose before him, its top garnished with spikes and broken glass.

  He heard them shout, and knew that in a moment they would be round the corner and upon him. Then came an interlude that was nothing afterwards in his memory but an incredible scramble. Starkie was climbing like a cat, toes in a crack of the wall. As he flung himself over the top the broken glass caught his hands and cut deeply into them, marking his flesh in scores and scores of vertical slashes which in twenty years’ time still showed their record of the day’s events. He missed by inches the sharpened iron spike that would have impaled him. Holding by bleeding hands to the top of the wall, he dropped, and was lying in the grass of an old orchard. His left ankle began to throb in a curious way which sent spasms of nausea shuddering through his stomach, and he knew that he had sprained it. The place was a wild tangle of trees, high, ancient, and deserted. He flung himself into the lowest boughs of a great quince tree, and started to climb. By the time he heard voices and tramping feet on the other side of the wall he was lying overhead, stretched out like a cat along one of the highest boughs. The beautiful wild neglect of the unpruned trees hid him from sight.

  He heard a voice say, ‘No man ever jumped that wall.’ Another voice answered discontentedly, ‘Better look what’s on the other side,’ and they tramped off. He knew they were hunting for a gate.

  It seemed incredible that they shouldn’t hear the steady pumping of his heart. The Villains were in the garden, hunting among a thick, waist-high growth of blackberries. Yes, not a bad place to hide, but the quince tree was better. One man was talking almost affectionately to a dog-track among the blackberry bushes, ‘You’d better come out of there, Stark. I don’t want to fire into the bushes and kill you. This is your last chance, Stark.’

  Another man scoffed at the beguiler. ‘Hell, a fine time he’d be having lying there on his belly waiting for us to pump lead in him. That chap never stopped running. He took the turn higher up and beat it for the railway station. I tell you he’s under cover in a cattle-truck and laughing at us. There’ll be some of you mugs for the front lines over this. I’m getting fed up.’

  Blessed, blessed rain … darkening the sky with its sudden veil, swishing in big drops among the quince-leaves, parting the long wild hair of the grasses below. It started to stream down, after the first heavy patter among the branches. The men below stared round them uneasily.

  ‘Come on,’ said the man who had insisted that Starkie was hiding in a cattle-truck, ‘I’m getting out of this. Leave a guard if you like, or empty your gun into those bloody nettles. It’s just waste of time; the bastard isn’t here.’

  Even then he wasn’t sure they had really gone. He lay perfectly still, listening on his bough for the slightest sound. There was nothing but the swish of the rain, and in a far tree a blackbird’s voice lifted, a wild little peal of sheer gaiety, as silken blue-black feathers made themselves seemly in the shining fall of big, steady drops. Starkie dared to make himself comfortable in the top of the tree. He was dry with thirst, and hard little unripened quinces were pleasantly tart in his mouth when he reached out to pluck them.

  Presently it was night. He slipped down from the quince tree in heavy rain, limped over to the wall and climbed another tree, whose sturdy branches leaned horizontally across the top. As he had expected, a sentry was posted beneath, not fifty feet away. He didn’t look very big for one of the Villains. Starkie waited until the Villain was directly underneath; then he dropped, and so did his prey. There wasn’t any fight. The weight of his body knocked the smaller man unconscious. To make sure, Starkie half-strangled the guard and then turned the limp body over to see who it might be. To his joy he recognized one of the men who had worked on him in the prison, a little terrier who had once filled his eyes up when he couldn’t hit back. Starkie did the same for him, robbed his pockets of eighteen francs, walked away. Fifteen yards distant he remembered something. He limped back and drove his sound foot into the man’s side. ‘That’s for my mates left behind, you dirty little bastard.’

  Starkie kept away from the railway station. They seemed to be expecting him over there. He struck the American base camp, and remembered it was the glorious Fourth of July, his own birthday, and the big night with all the George Washingtons, when he saw what was going on in the American lines. The big messroom’s windows flashed with light. All you could see inside was Stars and Stripes, for which Starkie didn’t care so much, and poultry and fruit, for which, his stomach concave under his belt, he would have given his very dim hopes of heaven.

  Two white-coated men, mess orderlies by the cut of their jib, came flying out of a side door, and hastened to a hut. Those white coats bulged too much to be natural. Starkie waited till they had returned to their post of duty, then crept into the hut; and in ten seconds was putting himself outside of two delicious little roasted squabs and two bottles of ice-chilled lager beer. The sheer ecstasy of eating good food, food that tasted, took away half the heavy poison from his mind. He wasn’t so much afraid now. The friendly hut offered a way out of another big difficulty. Starkie decided to become a Yankee.

  In a short time he was surveying himself with curiosity and admiration. He was a U.S.A. soldier down to the brass letters on his shoulders, and what was more, he had more stripes, flags, and crossed guns on his tunic than a British Field-Marshal. The Yanks kept themselves warm that way. The little white spats that went with his fancy dress were a good deal of a social problem. He put them on at least a dozen times, and each time they looked somehow queerer than before. Finally he decided it was his legs that were wrong and not the spats, and left them on. He didn’t help himself to his Yankee friend’s automatic, but he took all the tobacco he could lay hands on. Then he went straight into Le Havre. It was dark enough to hide his bronze skin unless he stood directly under a street lamp and whistled up the police. Besides, Starkie was leaving town that night, preferably for another and a better land where the sergeants ceased from troubling and the Villains were at rest.

  He went to town and spent two of his eighteen francs on beer, after which he felt like a man again. Down on the wharf things weren’t any too promising. At the gangways of the big boat now in port he could see the stalwart bodies of the Military Police; and he knew just what they were waiting for. Up and down the hold gangways passed an endless chain of men, all carrying bags.

  They went up from the wharf with their loads, set them down, and filed straight off down the next gangway. Starkie’s heart nearly stopped once again when he came near enough to see the sweaty faces, lifting, wide-mouthed and grinning, into the lamplight. The Negro Labour Corps were working on the wharves at Le Havre. Providence had taken him by the buttonhole of his handsome new Yankee uniform, and was now whispering gently, ‘Get rid of these duds.’ Starkie went down to the latrines on the wharf. Here he picked up one of the labour corps’ three-cornered bags and sacrificed his all, down to his trousers and singlet. With the bag on his shoulder, bending almost double, he dropped into line and went up the gangway, brown face, brown shoulders and arms inconspicuous among others that ranged from the sickly mulatto yellows to the glossy black of the full-blooded, thick-lipped African negro.

  He was on board. The ship swayed just a little under his feet, very gently, reminding him that lan
d is one kingdom, sea another. On the sea a ship’s captain is king. Ship’s captains are funny birds; some of them sour as mildewed mustard pickle, others with clipped speech, frosty blue eyes, and nerve enough to tell the King of Hell what he could do with himself sooner than pass over a refugee. Starkie wasn’t taking any chances. He hung about in the shadows until a whistle blew for the negroes’ smoke-oh. Then he asked a big buck nigger what time the boat sailed. His throat stiffened again with disappointment when the nigger said, ‘Day after tomorrow.’

  Two days—give the Villains two days, and there’d be no exit for Starkie. It had to be tonight or never.

  Fifty yards out to sea, her sharp bows a darker line against the grey mist of the sea, stood another ship. Starkie learned from one of the lounging negroes who were beginning now to stare at him with curious eyes, that she was due to sail at midnight. It was the one chance left. Quietly he slipped to the far side of the boat, hung by his two hands a moment from the deck-rail, then dropped.