Passport to Hell

by Hyde, Robin

  Starkie lived for a hundred years on the ocean floor, only sensible of two things—his bursting lungs and the terrible, steel-toothed cold that ate into his spine. Gasping and labouring, he fought to escape from the dense green water-blankets that enfolded him. He knew he was never going to make it, and the salt water in his lungs turned him limp. Just as he felt that his troubles were all over, his head shot up violently into air as cold as an ice-chamber’s. He couldn’t swim for a few minutes, but lay on his back, dog-paddling with both hands. When at last he had shaken the water out of his eyes and ears he couldn’t see the ship for which he had started. The mist was thicker than he had thought, and from water-level she was invisible.

  Then a dreadful panic overtook him, and for a time he floundered about in the water like a goldfish in its bowl, swimming in circles. He had never been a first-class swimmer, and his injured ankle, together with the numbing cold of the water, were too much for him. He would have opened his mouth to yell for help, but already the outgoing tide had swept him a good twenty yards from the black ship which had been his refuge for five minutes. Nobody was going after a deserter into water as bitter as this. He let the tide do what it liked with him, splashing just enough with hands and one foot to keep himself above water for a little longer yet. It was breathless surprise when something tall and solid loomed out of the mist before him. He heard the stiff rattle of the ship’s anchor chain, and hung there a minute, completely exhausted. Then he paddled his way round the side of the ship until he found what he wanted—a rope-ladder.

  Anything was better than the soft, freezing death under the waters. At the top of the ladder Starkie met a man in a jersey and a funny little round hat, who opened his mouth like a codfish and said, ‘Christ, if we ain’t picked up a—mermaid!’

  ‘Le Havre—the cooler.’ It was all Starkie could get out.

  The man in the little round hat said ‘Christ!’ again. He added, ‘One of the chaps down in the stoke’old ’as a brother up there. You wait ’ere. No, come over among them winches, where you won’t be seen.’

  Starkie crouched dripping among the winches. In two minutes his friend came back again, finger on his lips. A china jug-handle was thrust into his hand. He tilted it, and down his throat—stiffened with cold so that he could hardly breathe or speak —poured the steaming, muddy coffee. Life began to stir in his veins, and for a moment was exquisitely painful. His hurt ankle, which he had barely remembered since he had left the quince tree, now began to throb as though its bruised flesh would burst.

  ‘’Ere, take this. Not much, it ain’t. Dry ’ash.’ The little man’s voice was so mournful that Starkie could have laughed.

  Dry hash, sailor? Ever see a man hang about on the sands till a Froggy spits the tobacco out of his mouth, then take it away and dry out the spittle and say, ‘Thank you, gentle Jesus’?

  When he had eaten the hash he was taken down into the stokehold. There wasn’t any time for introduction to the demons down there. Stokers and trimmers didn’t mind a runaway, but there was no telling what the first mate would have to say about it. In five minutes nothing of Starkie was visible to the world but his mouth and nose. They buried him in slack coal.

  About 11.30 the violent ringing of bells woke him out of a half-stupor. The ship pulsed under them, a creature come alive. Starkie in his coal bin smiled as best the slack and coal-dust would let him. ‘Black man, Major—too bloody right, I’m a black man. If you could only see me at the moment, you’d notice I’m a lot blacker than you thought. But you and I aren’t seeing each other from now on. The black man’s gone and broke your gaol.’

  His eyes, the lashes clogged with a mixture of salt and coal-dust, screwed up for a moment, trying to picture the expression of rage and disgust on the composite face that he hated. It was no use. The weight of sleep was too much for both pain and excitement in his strong young body. Still buried in the coal, he fell sound asleep.

  15 Runaway’s Odyssey

  THOSE chaps down in the stokehold were pretty good to me. In the morning a hand shook me up, and I heard a voice say, ‘Come along, now, Darkness, it’s time for you to hop out of bed.’ When I looked up there were men standing grinning all along the little black passages between the boilers. So they unburied me, and a trimmer nips in with a towel and a basin of hot, soapy water. The chap who got me on board told me to strip, and after a lot of burnishing they had me pretty near clean again. We were a day and a half at sea on the way to Boulogne, and before we got to port I felt I was among friends. We spent the night swapping war yarns, and I wasn’t too worried about what was going to happen when we got on shore again. I’d already decided to strike out for No Man’s Land, yell ‘Kamerad!’ when I saw a Hun with the right sort of face come along, and try what the German prisons were like. There was no place for me in France but Le Havre—and maybe Dartmoor or Broadmoor if I got to England—so I figured Germany where they’d treat me as a regular soldier, couldn’t be any worse.

  When we reached Boulogne the military police guarded every gangway, but the boys in the stokehold had a way of getting me out. Every man of them, stokers, firemen, and trimmers blackened their faces and arms with coal-dust, until they were so filthy there was no telling any difference between us. I was blacked up to the eyebrows as well, and we went down the gangway, chipping the Villains as we passed them. I did my share. One of the boys said, very loud, ‘How’d you like to be a military policeman, Doug?’ ‘Better be a stinking, rat-eaten corpse out on No Man’s Land,’ I told him, and the Villain looked sore, but he was stood there on business looking out for a dangerous criminal, and hadn’t any time to take notice of what two ignorant ship’s trimmers had to say to each other.

  In a Boulogne estaminet I struck some Aussies who hadn’t too much of the discipline look about them. Aussies, same as the New Zealanders, were apt to kick up their heels sometimes, and by this stage of the War you could have found a good many of them in gaols and lunatic asylums here and there in France and England. The bunch in the estaminet didn’t make any secret of the fact that they were all A.W.O.L. Some had been missing from their lines for two years, some just for two months, living by their wits. Wherever they went they hung together, and when you asked them the name of their battalion they’d round on you. I was in good company, so I told them where I came from myself, and within ten minutes I was an Australian Light Horse Trooper, down to my new shiny spurs, and liked it a lot better than being a Yankee, because this time I hadn’t got to wear any dinky little white spats.

  All six Aussies were up against military law, and each man among them carried a gun. After a bit we left the estaminet and went along to the Green Lamp district to get some sympathy. The girls in the Green Lamp houses were just the ordinary French girls: dark skins, plump, and with the beginnings of moustaches along their upper lips. Their dresses were pretty, what there was of them. After a while we went back to the estaminet and decided we’d had enough of Boulogne, so we went down to the railway station and stowed away for Paris in a cattle-truck.

  In Paris we couldn’t go out in the daytime. The streets were rank with the military police of all nations, mounted on everything from horses to elephants—or pretty near it. That city was a pickpocket’s nightmare. We’d heard a lot about the Apaches, but though we went up their part of the town we never struck anything, and we figured they were like ourselves—waiting till God did something about the superfluous cop problem.

  There were some Yankees at the estaminet, too, and though they were a bit inclined to lord it over the rest, having plenty of cash in their pockets, they fraternized with the Aussies. Finally one Yankee tried to drink as much as one of our crowd, but he collapsed and the Aussies carried him upstairs and put him to bed. In the morning he wasn’t grateful, claiming that he had been robbed of three thousand francs and his wrist-watch. When I got downstairs I knew at once that something was in the wind, for the Yankees, instead of breakfasting with us as they had done in the past week, sat by themselves at another t
able and looked as sour as lemon-peel. I asked the Aussies what was wrong, and they told me all Yankees were liars; which we knew before—so why take exception to it then? Then, after two or three drinks, I strolled over to the Yankee table and asked them what was wrong; and what they said about the Aussies couldn’t be repeated, but it meant they were thieves and robbers and Judases, every man of them.

  They also told me they were going to get even. So, being in an awkward position if the military police should arrive—as they were bound to do the moment the Yankees and Aussies started to mix it—I decided I’d leave for the trenches. I called my girl friend, who came down in her dressing-gown, and after a bit of fooling we pretended we were going upstairs for something we’d forgot. When we got outside the main room I kissed her good-bye and ran for it. No, it wasn’t I that got the Yankee’s three thousand francs and his wrist-watch. I didn’t even know he had it on him. The Aussies were good sorts on the whole, but they didn’t divvy up with the spoils like our crowd would have done. Just as I left the estaminet I heard the war begin, and I knew the front lines would be nothing to it. So I never stopped until I got to the railway station and, hunting around the trucks, found a row labelled ‘Bapaume’.

  There were little sliding windows on the side of each truck. I climbed in and made myself comfortable among bags of oats. After a wait of hours I found she was moving. I thought, ‘It won’t be long now’; but for two days she kept on going, and during that time I hadn’t a drop of water. Try eating the husks of oats with a dry throat. On the third day from Paris we stopped to shunt at a wayside station, and looking out I saw a pool of water gleaming in an old tarpaulin. So I opened my porthole, climbed out, lay down and drank. A brakesman saw me as I was climbing into the truck again, caught me by both legs, and tried to drag me out. The train started moving, and I kicked. He fell away, and we were off again; but I knew that would mean trouble soon, so at the next stop I got off and hunted for another truck. I found one full of frozen beef, and for the next twelve hours lived on strips of blackened meat peeled away from the edges of the carcases. That night the train backed into Bapaume station, but I couldn’t see any New Zealanders about. I met a traffic cop and asked him, and, by God, for a cop of any sort he wasn’t bad. He took me into his hut and fed me on bully beef and boiling tea, and told me the New Zealanders were out at the front line.

  Early in the morning I jumped a munition train for the line, and got as far as the supports, where I was told the New Zealanders were all hundreds of miles away at Ypres. That nearly finished me. I knew that at any time I was liable to be picked up and sent back to Le Havre, but I thought that if I could get back to my own mates again they’d take me in if they could. I was lost and worried. I saw the light train chuck off its load and take on field-guns, so I thought there must be something in this story of a wholesale shift to Ypres.

  That was the time when Fritzie broke through at Bapaume and captured, I believe, a large number of prisoners. Headquarters left Bapaume on the same train as I did, but not in the trucks, like me. We went back to a place called Steenwerck. The heads were all vanishing in their cars into a beautiful moonlit night when I heard the high drone of a Boche flier right above. That was enough for me. I dived straight into a four-foot ditch of stinking green slime, and stayed right there till the war in the railway station was over, where the ’plane dropped a bomb dead centre. I didn’t know whether he hit any Generals, but I hoped so.

  At daybreak I crawled out of the ditch and met some Tommie soldiers. I heard about Otago from them. The Tommies left for Morbecque by train, and I travelled with them. When I got there Otago Fourth, my old lot, were quartered there. I could hardly believe it was true, and could have howled like a kid when I saw a face here and there that I knew. I was still in the Aussie Light Horse Trooper’s uniform, barring the hat, which I had lost. So I waited till I saw two boys I knew: Dick Simmonds, a quartermaster-sergeant, and Bob McCullogh. They had me into their billet in five minutes, and gave me tucker and a New Zealand uniform. I hadn’t any pay-book, any regular rations, any number, any official place in the world at all. In a fortnight they called for guards from the munition dump and works at Reninghelst from the Fourth, and I thought I might as well go there as anywhere else, so I moved on. Twenty men were chosen from the company, but there were twenty-one who shifted with the Otago crowd, and the heads none the wiser. The men just passed me the word when officers or N.C.O.s were coming, and I ducked till further orders.

  At Reninghelst there was nothing much to do but drink beer in the estaminets. The German ’planes had been over the place several times and dropped bombs, missing the ammunition dumps, but each time hitting the Chinese Labour Compound. The little Chinks hated the Boche like hell, and you couldn’t blame them. About a hundred and fifty of them had been slaughtered in the last air raid, and never a chance to hit back. The French, to my mind, treated the Chinks like dogs, for all they came ready and willing to help. They were kept behind barbed wire in compounds like the V.D. men, and marched to and fro under guard to their work every morning. Some said it was because they made things too hot with the French women, and there’d been no end of a row when inspection revealed that some of the Chink Labour Corps were women, come all the way from their own country to stick it out with their men. Can you imagine it? I’d always heard the little yellow girls had their feet tied up—‘golden lilies’ they used to call it—but these women had marched from the seaports same as the men, and worked as hard, like the women coolies do in China. Not all the Chinks were coolies either. Some of them were young student chaps who could talk English pretty near as good as I do. But you’ve got to own it looked pretty odd when Chinese babies kept on getting themselves born in the compound. One night the Chinks broke out of the barbed wire, and we had the job of chasing them half over France. I brought home seven, but not in too much of a hurry. Live and let live. Anyhow, they’d come a good long way to do their bit for La Belle France, and prettily she thanked them for it.

  Next day I was at the munition dump, looking at salvage bombs: picking them up, trying their detonators, tightening them up. A good many duds had been brought in, but a huge pile was in perfect order. First thing I knew, three little Chinks stood over me waving their hands and pointing. I could see they wanted something, but didn’t know what. By and by I had an audience of about twenty, all in their cardigan jackets, khaki trousers, and little stocking caps. I looked around to see nobody was watching who would take too much interest, and then exploded a couple of grenades for them just as a treat. Believe it or not, while the men of every other country bit their finger-nails when the bombs went off, the little Chinks used to brighten up and take a real pleasure in life. It seems they’ve got the idea that the air is full of devils, and noise scares ’em away. When in the evenings they were marched back in droves to their compound, they used to light little bunches of stolen cordite and throw it up in the air, devil-chasing. You’d know the Chinks were coming by that little crackle and red sparkle, like the beginning of a gorse fire.

  My two bombs must have just about finished off some of their leading devils, or scared ten years’ growth out of them, anyway, for when I looked up the circle of little yellow men were as pleased as kids at a Punch-and-Judy show, clapping their hands and pointing. From the signs they made I could see they wanted bad to learn how to use the bombs. So I made signs of my own with a twenty-franc piece, and they fished in their cardigan pockets—Chinks always have money—and parted with twenty francs each for bombing instruction. I felt as if I were back in the old days at Armentières when we formed the Bombers’ Suicide Club, and I don’t mind saying I never had smarter pupils than those Chinks. It wasn’t long before they could pull the pin out, put a detonator in, let the spring go, and away she goes, inside of four seconds. There was a lot of noise, but they were used to it round about the munition dumps. In the finish I reckoned the Chinks were the best bombers I’d ever had through my hands, and I couldn’t see why they didn’t get more enc
ouragement in France.

  I found out one reason that night. Chinks are supposed to be phlegmatic, but don’t you believe it. They’re subject to funny impulses, and there’s absolutely no holding them. Also, they were born with weird ideas, like hating devils, and when they hate, they hate hard. The Chinese hated the Germans for wiping out their men—maybe some of their smuggled womenfolk, too—from the air. In their shoes, I’d have hated the French worse, as an ungrateful set of bastards with a bossy manner. But it didn’t work out like that. We’d had three boxes of bombs open, and before they knocked off for the march home that night each Chink helped himself to four, and hid them under his cardigan jacket.

  That part of it I saw, and smiled to myself, thinking, ‘Well, Old Man Devil’s going to get the fright of his life tonight if those little yellow boys have anything to do with it.’

  But there I failed to understand the heathen. Instead of going home in the ordinary way, when they came to the German prisoners’ compound they split into two files and marched around it. It was all done in such apple-pie order that the dumb guards thought new commands had been sent from up top, and nobody had the sense to halt them. Along they went, solemn as yellow images, until their two ranks closed like a letter O around the compound. Then the men with the bombs chucked them straight over the barbed wire in amongst the prisoners, with not so much as a ‘By your leave’ to their guards. Straight on they marched, while guards yelled at them; and from behind the barbed wire came the shrieks and groans of German prisoners, caught unawares, some wounded, others blown to glory, and those who got off with their skins undamaged half crazy with terror.