‘There now,’ she said, putting down the glasses. ‘Drink and go!’
‘Ah, at last!’ The blue-eyed soldier’s happy voice trickled through the dark. ‘What do you think? Isn’t it just as I said? Hasn’t it got a taste of excellent—ex-cellent whiskey?’
(1915)
Robin Hyde, from Passport to Hell
Suicide Club
It was all right in the front-line trenches until some fool of an officer with the Third Australians, who had followed along behind the New Zealanders to Armentières, got ambitious and woke the Germans up with a packet of shells. After that, just when two days of quiet had begun to make the boys fond of their new home, Brother Boche let them have it. The veterans of the Gallipoli campaign found out the difference between German and Turk when the minenwerfer shells started to land in the trenches. The concussion alone was enough to knock a man silly, and things were too busy for nervous breakdowns to be permitted round about Armentières. When the ground had stopped rocking you could crawl along and find great holes as big as houses torn out of the earth. If any man had chanced to occupy the spot the minenwerfers picked out for their landing-ground it wasn’t worth while trying to pick up the bits.
For a solid two hours hand-grenades, shells, and trench-mortar shots smacked into the New Zealand lines, and after that the Germans spent a happy night sending up flares, absinthe green and bright yellow, fifty at a time. Their parachute flares sailed grandly up into the sky and hung aloft, blazing for ten minutes, giving them plenty of time to attend to any of the boys who had happened to be out on No Man’s Land with the wiring-parties or on patrol duty.
Tent Eight broke up its old company for good the third day out from Armentières. Farmer Giles went off with a bullet through his shoulder; Ginger Sheeth was carried away writhing and groaning, both hips smashed; and Stuttering Bob Butts went down with a shattered ankle. All Blighty ones, and poor old Goliath dead long ago. Fleshy McLeod and Starkie came through unwounded with Paddy Bridgeman and Arthur Kelliher to keep them cheerful. Then Starkie picked up a new pal, Jackie MacKenzie, who made up in cheek what he lacked in weight.
Jackie was about knee-high to a duck, a thin little shaver with the merriest brown eyes in the lines, and the pertest tongue. He’d enlisted years under age in a false name—Williams, his correct and lawful title was—to get away from fond parents who would have held him back. It wasn’t only his youth—he was sixteen, not so much younger than Starkie—but the nerve of him and the speed with which his thin little body wriggled out of the dug-outs at night to join in any fun on No Man’s Land that happened to be going on.
Finally Paddy, Fleshy, Starkie, and Arthur Kelliher, who was as good as one of the boys, more especially if the party were headed for a raid on the estaminet, decided that something had to be done about Jackie. He was formally adopted as mascot, and told he’d get the tail lammed off him if he went sticking his nose into danger. Jackie accepted it all with a twinkle in his brown eyes. He had a girl in Dunedin, a little brunette who’d shave you smooth as a new penny or curl your hair for you if you went into her dad’s barber-shop. Jackie carried Letty’s picture next to his heart in the regular soldier’s manner, and behaved as sober as a married man with twins.
The front line hadn’t been picked out for its looks, not now with the rain of autumn washing the trenches into heaps of slushy mud. And there was a citizen of No Man’s Land that the boys didn’t like so much better than the Gallipoli flies. Grey as ghosts and bigger than house-cats, the naked, mangy rats of No Man’s Land crawled into the dug-outs, and their sharp teeth gnawed through leather, cloth, and soap with fine impartiality. When the men turned in at night there would be a rustle and scuttle underfoot, and the loathsome grey scavenger, its lean back covered with scabs, its bright eyes inexpressibly hideous in their eagerness, would slide into the shadows. Their rations were shared and fouled by the rats. The bread, doled out in the early mornings, could only be left in the dug-outs. In the evening the rats might have left a crust, but little more. Out on No Man’s Land lay the nobler banquets of the trench ghouls—bodies face downwards in the mud, the lobes of their ears eaten away. Where the men could they killed the rats as terriers would have killed them, breaking their backs, shaking them, sticking them with bayonets. It was useless. There were never fewer shadows to slink out from their dug-outs when they threw themselves down in the evenings.
Out of the blue came Starkie’s first twig of laurel from his commanding officer. He was told to round up a volunteer squad of bombers. About twenty-one were needed, and they weren’t hard to find. Bomber or officer, you got your bullet in the long run, and whether it was Blighty or the rats was a matter of luck. Fleshy McLeod, Arthur Kelliher, and Paddy Bridgeman all joined the Bombers’ Suicide Club; and Jackie put his name down, but was only allowed the rank of mascot.
Some of the boys wanted to be bombers because it was one way of winning the VC, but most of them got wooden crosses instead. Their main job until the raiding-parties were organised in good earnest was to smash the German covering and wiring-parties on No Man’s Land at night. They went out fifty yards ahead of the New Zealand wiring-parties, lay down, Mills bombs slung into their bombers’ jackets, or carried in their pockets. When the Germans showed up, it was their job to kill as quickly and frequently as possible. The Mills bombs—little iron chaps the size of an apple—exploded exactly four seconds after you drew out the pin, flinging splinters of iron into face and body. It was tough work—but better than sticking in the trenches eating, sleeping, dying in water-holes, reeking mud, and rotting sandbags.
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 fellow-men. 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 le
ss 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 NCO; half-strangling Captain Hewitt; firing ten rounds at an NCO 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 NCO 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.
(1936)
Archibald Baxter, from We Will Not Cease
We arrived at Folkestone late at night and waited hour after hour in the streets, in the cold drizzling rain. While we waited the officer in charge of the draft came over to me and said it would relieve his mind very much if I would give my word to do nothing rash on the trip across to France. I assured him I would do nothing violent to myself or anyone else, and that, as far as I was concerned, he had nothing to worry about. He thanked me and seemed greatly relieved.
At last a corporal came along and said: ‘We’ve found a place.’
We were marched into an old building, foul-smelling and dirty. Each man cleared a space enough for himself and we sat on the floor with our backs against the wall. One man said: ‘What a rotten show!’
Another said: ‘It’s worse outside.’
We had marched away from Sling to a lively tune on the bagpipes, but now everyone seemed depressed and gloomy and hardly a word was spoken. After a while we got a drink of tea, which helped matters considerably by putting some warmth into us, and, very soon afterwards, most of us were dozing uncomfortably against the walls.
With the first streak of daylight we went aboard. Surrounded by our convoy we moved out into the Channel. On our right was a large paddle-steamer crowded with Chinese. Some of our men shouted abuse across to them and the Chinese retaliated with equally lurid language, more than holding their end up, with the result that there was a laugh from our side. We made our way across between the minesweepers, a boatload of silent men, overhung with an atmosphere of gloom and tension.
The coast of France rose before us in the winter sunlight, for the day had become bright and clear. After a very brief stay at Boulogne, which afterwards I was to know better, we proceeded in motor trucks to Étaples, reaching it about midday. I wandered about the camp, getting my bearings. Two German aeroplanes were circling, like silvery fish, high above in the blue sky, out of range of the anti-aircraft guns. White puffs of smoke showed where the shells were exploding harmlessly far below them. A little dog had appeared from somewhere and was inviting me to have a game with him, when I heard my name called, and looking round, I saw Palton and Harland, two of the Waitemata deportees. They took me to a hut where I got some food, and I gave them an outline of my experiences since I had left them at Capetown. They were able to give me information about some of the fourteen. Three, my brother being one of them, had been court-martialled and sent to a military prison in France. Briggs had been separated from the others, and they had heard that, as he continued to refuse orders, he would probably be shot. They themselves had taken on ambulance work. Palton told me he had be
en sent to a compound and put on No. 1 Field Punishment, and had been struck by a guard.
I was brought before Colonel Simpson. He asked me the usual questions, and I explained my attitude and gave my reasons for refusing to serve. He told me that some of the objectors from New Zealand had been sent to a military prison.
‘There’s a Baxter among them; your brother, is he?’
‘Yes, my brother.’
He said he would not like to have me sent to a military prison.
‘Those places are run by the lowest type of men in the army, and I know the brutal methods they use. They’d probably kill you.’
He showed me a letter which he said he had received from one of the men in prison, offering to come out and do ambulance work.
‘Of course we know what that means,’ he said. ‘It’s the treatment they’ve had in prison. I told them to write to me if they had any communication to make. I’m going down there in a week or two, and I expect to find them all of the same mind.’
Such bitterness and anger surged up in me that I had difficulty in controlling myself. He would not like to have me sent there! And these others, mere boys, thought likely to be more amenable because of their youth, delivered over to ruthless brutality, had he no feeling for them? No, only satisfaction when he thought the methods had been successful. I afterwards heard from my brother Sandy just what those methods were. On arrival at the prison, having refused to work, he was sentenced to three days in irons in the punishment cells on bread and water. At the end of the day the irons were removed, but his arms, powerless after twelve hours behind his back in figure-eight handcuffs, were entirely useless. One of the warders came into the cell, and, his jaws slavering and the saliva dribbling over his chin, gave him a frightful gruelling, taking care, however, never to give him a blow that would knock him completely out. He was told, and he knew it was the truth and no idle threat, that he would get it again and again, on and on, without end, until he gave in. He told me, too, of an Australian soldier who came into the prison while he was there, a splendid physical specimen, full of pluck and of a manly spirit of independence. He told the other men when he first came in that nothing on earth would make him give in to the bullying and brutality prevalent in the prison. They wondered what would happen. He vanished into the punishment cells. After some time had gone by they used to hear his screams. At the end of a fortnight, he came out, his magnificent physique gone, his nerve gone, a cringing, abject creature, eager to jump at the slightest word from the guards, who used to amuse themselves demonstrating the lengths to which he would go in the completeness of his subjection.
The Auckland University Press Anthology of New Zealand Literature Page 34