Passport to Hell

by Hyde, Robin

  Starkie hopped. Finding his way to Number Eight, D Lines, meant negotiating a route through a sea of mud, yellowish brown, like his newly issued khaki. For three days before the arrival of Otago Fourth, rain had pelted down on the flat spaces of the Trentham Camp, and the rabbit-warren trenches were awash. This wasn’t Flanders, however, and you could sleep in a bell-tent. Starkie found his, bobbed under the tent-flap, and then cast one despairing glance at the outer world. There were already seven men seated in his tent, and they weren’t, strictly speaking, men at all—they were monsters.

  An enormous voice bellowed at him, ‘Siddown!’

  Another enormous voice shouted, ‘Take a hand!’ and he observed that the giants were playing Rummy. One of them had flaming red hair; another’s nose was sunburned and peeling cruelly in a bright red face. The second largest of the giants stuttered horribly and talked more than the rest put together. Their boots, their bodies, their voices, overflowed the tent, and they all looked too large for their uniforms. Even in gaol, man to man, Starkie had been as substantial as the average warder, and better than most. Here he was the baby, and he wasn’t surprised when a booming voice elected him mess orderly. Sadly he asked for a list of his duties.

  ‘It means that you go get our tucker, see?’

  ‘And get in good and early, before the cookhouse is rushed.’

  ‘And see there’s enough straw in the tent for decent beds.’

  ‘And when there’s latrine duty, you’re it.’

  ‘And you answer the roll call for two if one of us don’t want to play.’

  ‘And you do what you’re told, see?’

  Starkie saw. He nodded. Then a laugh rumbled from one of the giant’s stomachs, a hand like a leg of mutton smote him horribly between the shoulder-blades. He was introduced in turn to the gentleman with the sunburned nose, Jim McLeod—courtesy title, ‘Fleshy’; ‘Ginger’ Sheeth; Silver, whose fifteen stone drew him the pet name ‘Goliath’; ‘Stuttering Bob’ Butts, Jack Frew, and Matthews, who was a sheep-owner and was to be known as ‘Farmer Giles’.

  ‘You gotta have a name,’ Fleshy told him. ‘Let’s have a look at you. Yes, you can be Coon.’

  After that there was a scrimmage, Starkie disliking the race of Coons and any personal reference to his own dusky complexion from strangers. When the scrimmage was finished, everybody was happy, particularly Fleshy and Bob Butts, who before reaching Trentham had taken the precaution of absorbing a good deal of beer.

  Starkie secured their first dinner from the cookhouse, an enormous leg of mutton. This Fleshy undertook to carve, propping it on a truss of straw on the tent floor. In the excitement of the moment he set his foot on it. Into the mud slid the dinner.

  ‘Oh, God!’ said Goliath resignedly. ‘Come along down to the canteen.’

  On tea and little pork pies of a restrained size and parched interior they made their first meal in Trentham.

  Getting to bed in the bell-tents wasn’t a picnic, unless you were one of the Lilliputians who could really fit the minute trusses of straw doled out by the camp authorities. In Tent Eight this was quite out of the question; Starkie, the lightest of the company, turning the scales at twelve stone.

  While the lights still flared in the canteen, Fleshy McLeod tapped him on the shoulder, whispering, ‘C’mon.’ Tent Eight’s mess orderly crept out of the canteen at the heels of his lord and master, and the two made their beds up and turned in while the rest were still putting away pies and tea.

  In an hour their tent-mates returned and there was an argument, the upshot of which was that the whole of Starkie’s bedding was fairly enough distributed among the others. In the next tent they were audibly drawing lots for their bed-straw, but the results didn’t matter, for Starkie, creeping on his stomach to the rear of the tent, cut a slit in the canvas and gently dragged out the straw. All was peace in Tent Eight until after reveille, when it was discovered by the outraged inhabitants of Tent Seven that straw had been dropped between the two tents. In the morning there was a court of inquiry, and Captain Dombey decided that the amount of straw in Tent Eight was against reason and the nature—never very lavish—of the storeman.

  Starkie looked round to see which of his mates would spill the beans, but the seven giants remained mute as flitches of bacon, their eyes twinkling in large red faces. Tent Eight got three days’ C.B. all round, during which none of his mates chose to reproach their mess orderly. After that Starkie decided that he was going to like the War.

  Latrine duty was an undignified aspect of camp life, and affected him more painfully than the incessant barkings of ‘Left, right, left, right! … About tur-r-r-rn! … Quick march! … Double march! … Forrrm Fourrrs! … Forrrm two-deep!’ with which a drill sergeant—whose yell was all on the one hysterical note—haunted their hours in the drill ground. The primitive sanitary accommodation of the camp consisted of rows of kerosene tins, neatly set, with as much privacy as could be arranged, between the white rows of tents. Latrine duty entailed a slow and painful ‘nightmare’ progress among these tins after dusk. Upon the indignities of this Starkie pondered. As his tent-mates had prophesied, the lowest and most untouchable occupations always fell upon him, and he rather suspected that his colouring had something to do with it. The Maoris had marched off in a Pioneer Corps of their own, and Starkie was the only black sheep in the battalion. Nevertheless, he had a mind for higher things than latrine duty, and worried a great deal as to the possible dodging of it. By and by he found a solution, and things were much easier for the next two nights in succession. But his record-breaking performances thereafter did not escape the eye of authority, and he scented the beginning of the end when Sergeant Taine stood affectionately beside a latrine tin for a full half hour, pouring in water and staring with a hypnotized yet incredulous expression as the water miraculously drained away.

  Presently Starkie was summoned to Captain Dombey’s tent. Here, in serried phalanxes, were sixty-five latrine tins, the bottom of each punctured with four holes. Starkie had employed an unusually large nail, and the effect was ruinous. He was unable satisfactorily to explain this, and got six days’ C.B., which was, however, little more uncomfortable than the normal routine of camp duty at Trentham. Exception was also taken to the words ‘Rummies’ Retreat’, which appeared in enormous letters of nugget-black upon Tent Eight: for this a further three days’ C.B. was bestowed upon him, and he learned more about drill than some soldiers are perplexed with in a lifetime.

  Trainloads of girls came up to the Hutt towns from Wellington every night. In camp the tea bugle sounded at five; the mess orderlies went up for tea, meat, and vegetables; the dishes were washed and returned to the cookhouse, and after that, barring C.B., the bright young night was all your own to play with. The boys used to walk up to the little Upper Hutt towns, where in the big white riverbank houses liquor was to be had; and their clumsy military boots shuffled in the pre-war dances—the old waltz, the schottische, the Maxina, the Valeta, and for the really spry fellow, square dances, the Lancers and the d’Alberts—always called the Dee Alberts. These were danced with the figures all wrong, and a jolly bloke with a concertina shouting, ‘Take your partners for the next set! Swing! …’ Swing they did, the little feet of the girls lifting off the floor, their bodies, with a soldier’s arm passed under each arm-pit, flying out dangerously, almost horizontal; their breasts panting in the old-fashioned evening gowns of crêpe de Chine and China silk; their faces scarlet.

  When they were through with dancing, there was the riverbank outside. The Hutt is only a little river, though its sudden deep pot-holes and odd currents have drowned many a stout swimmer. It creeps, ten yards wide, under silver birch trees and stiff russet-leaved osiers, the kind whose slim, reddish boughs are used in basket-making. Here and there the yellow bank caves in, making niches where among the spangled wild-flowers and tall grass, boy and girl could curl up, arm around each other’s waist, tousled poppy-head dropping on khaki shoulder.

  The men in camp s
hould, according to regulations, have been between the ages of eighteen and forty-five. In actual fact, the New Zealand ranks from the first held scores of straight-held heads that under their dye would have been white-haired, and still more youngsters who looked the recruiting-agent straight in the eye and lied about their sixteen years.

  Some of the khaki-clad who used to make for the Hutt after washing their dishes were shy-babies from the country—kids who had never been kissed. It was easy to kiss a girl in manly style under the tufted willow trees, and to make up unimaginative but sincere little romances in which everything happened ‘after the War’. Then they said good-bye, the very shy ones who really were smitten—the not-so-shy who were trying out their manhood for the first time. What did it matter? Under the osiers the upturned faces of the girls were sweet and earnest; and if they were lied to, they need not face the long disillusion of living together. Lie, truth, half-truth, vanished into the black gulf between one world and the next. Some of the men left their mark on the young bodies in crêpe de Chine and China silk, and children were born. But that generation of New Zealand girls, and the next, were to learn that there are things worse than babies.

  Coming home, there were running fights with the military police, the villains known by their blue hat-bands, their omniscience, and the shamelessness of their behaviour. In camp, during their off-hours, the boys kept themselves warm with fist-bouts among themselves. In Tent Eight, Fleshy suggested a glove fight, and Starkie and Jack Frew took it on. It started off as a pretty little bout, though neither knew much about the leather, but its tempo changed when Starkie’s fist slipped and landed too hard in Jack Frew’s wind.

  As soon as Frew could speak again he called Starkie a black bastard, and after that the fight started in earnest and attracted a large audience, all cheering. Captain Dombey came down and pulled them off one another, stopping the night’s leave for both men. Starkie was sore. That night he was the first out of camp, and instead of taking the Hutt trek, caught a train and made straight for the city of Wellington. In the aloof grey streets of the capital he wandered about thinking what a pity it was he hadn’t a girl friend. He roamed from Post Office Square to the wharves, where black and mysterious the little waves suck under sea-rotted, weed-twined piles, from the wharves back again to various haunts of publicans and sinners. Somewhere about midnight it was no longer true that Starkie hadn’t a girl friend, and he spent the night at her place in Cambridge Terrace, coming back to Trentham at ten in the morning. He was just in time for Captain Dombey’s court of inquiry, to which he was taken straight from the guard-room, a military policeman on either side. Jack Frew was the other accused.

  Captain Dombey rapped the table and asked for details, and Starkie explained about the Black Bastard allegation. Jack Frew spoke up for himself and made a better job of it than Starkie. Starkie drew three days’ C.B., Jack Frew was dismissed, or would have been had not Starkie hit him on the chin as he passed by. This caused a contretemps and lèse-majesté. Jack Frew, being hit by Starkie, hit the table, the table hit Captain Dombey, Captain Dombey protested with force, and words passed between judge and accused into which it would be purposeless to inquire. Starkie was put under guard in a tent which stood all by itself in a barbed-wire enclosure, patrolled by a sentry with a fixed bayonet. He had nothing to do but sit, eat, and play solitaire, whilst occasionally his tent-mates, Jack Frew included, came to stare mournfully at him through the barbed wire and slip him cigarettes. By and by the guard conducted him before a major.

  ‘Hat off! … One pace forward! … Quick march! … Enter the guard-room! …’

  Starkie did as he was bid and pleaded guilty to a charge of assault, and another of using language to Captain Dombey. He was given twenty-one days’ barracks.

  The barracks, housed in a narrow-faced brick building, stand almost in the heart of Wellington city, on a hill not ten minutes’ walk from the main streets. Here they made Starkie a housemaid, and he spent his time polishing brass, scrubbing floors, washing dishes, emptying pots, and going back to shine the brass over again. Beyond making him a brass expert, the Buckle Street authorities treated him with no manner of savagery. The prisoners who got it handed out tough there were the twenty-one Germans brought in from their internment camp on Somes Island because they refused to cart shingle to the top of the hill from the beach. The internment camp spread itself at the base of the green hill-island in the middle of Wellington Harbour, now used for the quarantining of smallpox cases. During the War its life was secret. It came into the lime-light just once, when three prisoners risked their lives in the long swim through freezing waters to the mainland. The seven miles’ swim did for one of them, and his comrades left him dead on the rocks. Their own straggling flight didn’t get them far. They were caught and taken back, disappearing from New Zealand ken, whilst the old ladies who disapproved of all Germans talked with virtuous indignation of the Hun bestiality which enabled them to leave their dead comrade behind.

  The Huns weren’t at any time sitting pretty in Buckle Street, and when they struck on their prison task—wheeling barrows of shingle round, world without end—they were put on bread and water. Here Starkie’s housemaid chores enabled him to put up a protest against the usages of society. Inside the loaves were clamped nuggets of butter. He wasn’t caught out, but the German prisoners got to know which of the men was slipping them extra provisions, and when he left they gave him the only send-off he had in New Zealand. The guard stared suspiciously at the soldier who got cheered by the Huns, but as far as Starkie was concerned Buckle Street’s reign was then over.

  In Trentham Captain Dombey was in softened mood. He was sorry, he said, that he had had to put a soldier in barracks. On the strength of it Starkie borrowed ten shillings from him and that night went again to Wellington and his girl friend. When he got back, Captain Dombey wanted to know the reason why.

  ‘You gave me the money, sir,’ said Starkie.

  Captain Dombey shrugged his shoulders. ‘Get along. I can’t make anything of you.’

  It was the parting of the ways. Thereafter Starkie was a soldier and not a soldier. He was useful at times. But they couldn’t make anything of him. The final inspection came before they knew it, and involved a trifle of sabotage and rape, for half the men had been giving away items from their kit. Starkie had passed on many of his possessions to the kid brother of his girl, who was short of gear. The Salvation Army saved the situation by giving a final band concert in camp. All the boys went up to listen, for the Army’s brassy blare fitted in better than you would have thought with the mud-holes and flag parade. Tent Eight stayed at home and raided the enemy lines.

  At kit inspection their gear was all present and correct. Then they got six days’ final leave, and Starkie went off to Wellington to be shown the town by Mabel, a dark lass and tall, who, having lived there since her childhood, knew everything from the zoo to the places where the police weren’t so quick off the mark if the landlord passed a few sleevers over the counter after six o’clock.

  In Wellington there is a far larger Oriental quarter than in any of the other New Zealand cities. This lies four-square over a big block in the lower part of the town—little streets threading and inter-threading over a dusty flatness, where at night the thin, high squeals of the Chinese fiddles are eerie among the dark-crannied shops. With the exception of the white prostitutes who live there, it isn’t entirely squalid.

  Besides the Chinese, there are scores of Hindoos, with their sparrow legs, enormous eyes, and beautifully cut features. The Hindoo babies look like birds, all eyes and nakedness. The Chinese babies are adorable, pink flushing up through the amber of their skins, their tiny mothers handling them with a delicacy and reserve which the white mother of the slums never knows. You don’t see a Chinese woman suckle her baby in public. There is a savour of life in the streets there, life secretive, vivid, tainted with the rotting sweetness of stored fruits, curious with the odour of ginger.

  And that isn’t al
l of Wellington. There are the dark, slanting hills, and those enormous crystal-green waves which pour in, translucent hillocks, by the Red Rocks. If you can once be perfectly alone with the hills and sea of Wellington, you have something they can’t take away from you, no matter where and why they lock you up. Starkie wasn’t alone—he had Mabel, and sometimes her girl friends and their boy friends. But it was a kind good-bye.

  The camp, where he arrived a day late, looked already curiously forlorn and empty. Kits were packed, the straw bedding had been taken out of the tents; the sign of a tribe’s passing was written in the dust and stir of the khaki place. The mud had dried in a spell of fine weather, but it was all that flat brown; the stockades they had made of wired, dry manuka; and behind the leaning hills, shoulder to shoulder, marching across the sky like ugly futuristic giants. They were lined up and told they were the finest body of men that had ever left New Zealand. This was not a new experience for most of them. On the Invercargill station a fat man had told them the same thing. At Christchurch, where the wet brigade had joined them and turned their progress into the first real grog party, a man yet fatter had repeated it. Once again on the Wellington wharves they were informed of their own fineness; and as with one voice the troops replied:

  ‘Aw, go wipe your chin.’

  After the march to Wellington, they were paraded through the streets, bands playing and flags flying. At the wharves they were dismissed. Those who had wives and children were for the most part true, but the rest dived for taverns in the town. Here Starkie got into difficulties with the military police, and arrived at the ship under escort, which prevented him from saying good-bye to Mabel. Paddy Bridgeman, one of the best of the Irish nation, substituted for Starkie, and what he didn’t know about blarney with girls was but little, so Mabel wasn’t the loser.