Passport to Hell

by Hyde, Robin

  ‘Come on. I’ve got a new game.’

  ‘What’s its name?’

  ‘We call it raising the dead,’ said Fleshy grimly, and slid out of his corner in the trench. After a moment, Starkie passed a hand across a face dripping with sweat, and crept after him. They raised the dead.

  Wherever they put the gold from the dead man’s money-belt, on cards, or dice, it couldn’t go wrong. Even when chance gave them an hour or two to fleece the Australians, who as gamblers made the New Zealanders look like babes in swaddling-clothes, the twenty sovereigns and the half-sovereign came home bringing little friends with them. One day a Digger asked them where they got the gold, and they were injudicious enough to blab. After that their sovereigns were ruled out of the trench gambling-schools, the boys swearing that it was haunted gold. The Fourth Brigade of Australians barred their gold as well, and from lording it over the rest with their clink of sovereigns they were driven back to the same old sixpenny throws. Between them they had chalked up a profit score of sixty pounds.

  The men still used periscopes in the trenches, and it was squinting through the tube one day that Starkie spotted the Turk sniper camouflaged by the scrub in No Man’s Land. None of the New Zealanders loved a sniper; and Starkie, remembering Goliath and a few more—also the way the Turk had dusted the seat of his own pants the day he went hunting the Australian gold-mine—liked him a lot less than most. The Turk sniper had made a mistake this time. He was within easy range of the Otago trench.

  Starkie was cat now, and he enjoyed it. His first bullet just clipped the grass in front of the sniper’s head; but the second one, before the Turk had time to break for cover, got him in the leg. The man tried to crawl away. Starkie sent little jets of soil up around him. He remembered a story which his father had told to frighten him a long time ago. A story of the Delaware way of killing a man with a small fire. This fire doesn’t have to be more than six inches high, just twigs and grasses, but you light it over very close to one side of a man’s head. Then you build the pile on the other side. Then lower down….

  A man in the trenches cried, ‘Stop it, you dirty Hun!’ Other voices began to protest. Then a voice Starkie knew said from behind him. ‘Give me that gun.’ He slewed round to see Captain Dombey, and Captain Dombey wouldn’t take no for an answer. He got the gun and stepped up on the parapet to finish off the wounded Turk sniper. Everyone knew he was one of the best rifle-shots in New Zealand.

  Before his rifle had time to crack, he put a hand to his throat, said, ‘God, I’m hit; get me to the dressing-station!’ and tumbled back into the trench like a sack of beans.

  Starkie and Captain Dombey alike had forgotten that Turk snipers often went in couples, like snakes. In the scrub of No Man’s Land the sniper’s mate had been waiting his chance to get a shot in. The bullet had ripped through Captain Dombey’s armpit and shoulder muscles, tearing a good big hole, but not low enough to lay him out for good unless gangrene set in.

  He was fifteen stone if an ounce; and though Starkie and three others bore the stretcher that took him to the dressing-station on the beach, it was a rough passage, with the bearers stumbling as they scrambled down the scrubby hills, and Captain Dombey groaning about unlimited doses of C.B. The third time the stretcher was dropped he stopped promising rewards and fairies and kept up a thin blue line of curses. Starkie told him, with reminiscent sorrow, that it wasn’t as bad as C.B., or latrines, or a job in the prison barracks; but then conversation was held up where the track was blocked with a crowd of Gurkhas and Punjabis, bent on slaughtering a goat. The Gurkhas lived on the other side of Mule Gully, sweet-mannered little brown fiends who kept their faces free from whiskers by pulling every hair out of their chins with tiny tweezers.

  The Punjabis were fine, big-bearded fellows, and both the gamest fighters on Gallipoli. You couldn’t shove past them while they were killing meat, for if a soldier’s shadow fell on their food it became unclean, and on Gallipoli nobody wasted provisions. The stretcher was set down, and the corpse and stretcher-bearers both consoled themselves with a drink and a mess of blazing curry dished up with chupattis. Meanwhile, the goat, a gingery old Nanny bleating forlornly about her home and father, was led in to the circle of black watching faces and sacrificed like Iphigenia, the silver sweep of a Gurkha knife cutting her head off in a single blow.

  ‘Lovely ain’t it?’ Starkie said to Captain Dombey, his eyes fixed hungrily on the wicked curved blade of the kukri.

  ‘You get to hell, and hurry me down to the dressing-station!’ querulously responded the gallant captain, and the jolting progress was resumed.

  Down at the dressing-station Captain Dombey first cursed them roundly in several different languages, not all known to the secretariat of the League of Nations, then lifted himself up on his good elbow and grinned at them. ‘So long, boys; I’ll be back in three months—and then look out!’ He disappeared from their view, but kept his word. In three months to the day, the hole in his shoulder more or less satisfactorily plastered up, he was back on Gallipoli and seemed to think more of C.B. than ever.

  At the water-tanks they lapped up as much as their stomachs could hold of lime, benzine, and greyish water. There was never an adequate water-ration on Gallipoli. They thieved a tin of it and started on their way home.

  Captain Smythe met them with a scowl of ungenerous suspicion, Captain Dombey being his especial pal. ‘Been long enough, haven’t you?’ he growled.

  ‘So would you be,’ retorted an exasperated bearer, ‘if you was carrying an elephant on a stretcher six miles!’

  For carrying the elephant they got special rations—Fray Bentos —otherwise bully beef—and Blackwell’s marmalade for their bread issue, which was doled out, one loaf to eight men. The marmalade-tins were used everywhere in the trenches for making steps, walls, and floors, and some of the designs in the little earth dug-outs were really clever. Marmalade was more of a success than cheese. Such a thing as cheese that refrained from crawling was unknown in the trenches, like a pacifist louse, but they got used to it … used to anything.

  8 Bluecoat

  REST GULLY was the valley-cup where the men were sent every six months or so for a spell from the front lines. As far as Starkie could see, it was called Rest Gully because while Turk snipers didn’t try to pot you there, you were expected to do an amount of pick and shovel work which would have made the average navvy look pretty sick. There were also church parades, presided over by the most popular chaplain with the New Zealand forces—‘Tommy’ Taylor, who came home shot to bits and crippled with rheumatism after the War, settled down in the slummiest street in Wellington, and carried on his work for the boys.

  Tommy had a rough edge to his tongue, and didn’t mind taking it with him right into his improvised pulpit; as, for instance, when two soldiers—of whom Starkie was one—stole a parcel which Tommy had brought up from the beach for Captain Smythe. The thieves reasoned that two bottles of Scotch at one go would be altogether wrong for a man of the Captain’s temperament, so drank the Scotch and buried the bottles. On Sunday, Tommy Taylor preached a sermon on ‘That which was lost, and not yet found again’. ‘And,’ said he, leaning deliberately from his pulpit, ‘some of you hellions know where those bottles got to all right.’ Tommy spent a good deal of his time telling the troops the old, old story about how to take care of themselves in Egypt, but most of them hadn’t seen a petticoat for twelve months. Woman was a dream for them—a queer, hot, aching dream; and Tommy’s hygiene didn’t get much of a hearing. They liked his mot about the bacon better. ‘Look at it!’ he exclaimed derisively, holding out a slab a foot long and of leprous buff and purple colourings. ‘All hog-fat—Lance Corporal Bacon.’ It stayed lance corporal bacon till the end of the War.

  After the Rest Gully spell, Starkie got his first wound of any importance, a chipped posterior having been treated in the lines with a strip of sticking-plaster and the usual pair of number nines. Gentleman the Turk might be in private life, but he had no respect
for recreation; and when a score of Otago men lay sun-bathing among the scrub, their sole attire cocked hats made out of old newspapers, Johnny sent over a couple of shells. It was a sweet and salubrious day, and the dull thumping up in the gully wasn’t enough to disturb the basking men.

  ‘See who’s chucking those duck-eggs around, Starkie,’ lazily murmured Fleshy McLeod.

  ‘Ah, they’re well up,’ Starkie assured him, standing up to see. Then something hit him a violent blow just below the knees. He sat down, and found to his astonishment that he couldn’t get up. Still able to curse, though faintly, he saw Fleshy’s sunburnt nose poking down at him, bright scarlet, and then woke up to protest as the medical officer down at the dressing-station dug the anti-tetanus serum into an iodine-smeared patch of his flesh.

  In the same afternoon, half stupid from a shot of morphine, he was carried aboard the hospital ship Maheno, which put out for Malta with a full cargo of badly wounded men. Starkie was one of the minor casualties, and when he had had a look downstairs he dragged himself up to the Maheno’s deck and lay crouched on a coil of rope. The ship hadn’t bunk accommodation for half her wounded; and the men with holes in their arms, legs, or shoulders crept up from the reek of blood and antiseptics down below to sleep as best they could under the white stars. Starkie’s wound wasn’t bad for a beginner—in the left leg, a hole through which he could have put three fingers; in the right a pit in which the surgeon’s forceps had done some very unpleasant fishing. But his tough young body, hard-trained in prison, camp, and trench, shook off morphine and pain alike.

  Nobody paid much heed to the slightly wounded on the Maheno, but all night feet creaked solemnly up the companion-ways, and long, awkward shapes were piled together in the stern of the ship. In the early morning he could see them clearly enough—eight men dead overnight roughly stitched in canvas and with fire-irons weighting their feet. The bodies, stitched in their coarse white hiding-places, still kept the vague, lonely outlines of humanity. By and by a sailor came along and spread over them a huge, sprawling, cotton Union Jack. The blue in the sky grew deep and tender, and black from the stern of the Maheno stood out a long wooden plank.

  The burial rites began. A voice gabbled, ‘I commit to the deep …’ The bodies were dragged one at a time to the plank, covered for an instant with the great flag. Then the colours—scarlet, white, and azure—were snatched back and tossed for a moment in the morning wind. The shrouded bodies tipped downwards as the plank gave under their weight. But the sound when they hit the water wasn’t the ordinary splash. Starkie crept to the edge of the boat and saw what happened at the Maheno burials. As the corpse shot downwards, weighted by the irons so that the dead man seemed to have stepped of his own free will vertically into the green-and-crystal abyss, the sheath of the water showed the obscene grey shapes crowding beneath. Alongside and behind the ship, the great sharks thrust up the lines of their flat, hustling bodies, and as those canvas sacks took the downward plunge, snouts thrust up from the pale cover of the water. Before the body was out of sight the iron jaws clamped upon it, the rivals fought and tore.

  The forbidding doors of the naval hospital in Malta opened and swallowed up the protesting forms of Colonial soldiers, who would rather have gone to hell than join the navy—and didn’t want petticoat discipline, anyhow. St. David’s was no place for Starkie, being to his mind a good deal worse than the average gaol. You can at least, in gaol, when moved, tell a warder what he may do with himself, but you’re hampered when it’s a nurse. The whole place was like a battleship, and the nurses were armour-plated too. Everything was done on the sepulchral clang of a bell, and the soldiers found, to their horror, that they were only supposed to talk at specified times. Starkie stayed in bed a week, and then, in the blue coat of the incapacitated soldier, escaped into the old stone flagwork and apricot sunshine of Malta.

  It’s an old Maltese custom that you can take out any of the girls. When you asked one of the black-haired, black-eyed beauties to come along and see the pictures, she beams on you and agrees volubly. But when you turn up at the rendezvous you will notice with surprise and perhaps with concern that following her are Father—with a beard—Mother—with a bosom encased in black—and unlimited numbers of younger brothers and sisters, all shrieking, and all avid for expensive but low forms of entertainment. The relatives who arrived to show unsuspecting New Zealanders and Australians the town seemed almost unlimited, the Maltese women being unrestrainedly prolific, but within the bounds of lawful wedlock, which was no use at all to the soldiery. It was no worse than the old New England bundling or the Boer damsel’s oop-sitting, but the Diggers weren’t used to it, and so spent their money on oranges instead, or bought bits of lace and embroidery in the old town of many steps, and sent them home to lawful spouses in lands afar.

  The whole of Malta is a huge fort, and on the walls of its buildings and stairways thrust out cannon, wheeled around one at a time to face the main square, while swarthy, taciturn gunners rub up the grey muzzles and gleaming brass mountings.

  ‘Gee,’ said Starkie, fondling the snout of a lean grey beauty, ‘she’d do me for a rifle! I could make some impression with this over at 971.’

  ‘Yes,’ nodded a fellow Bluecoat, ‘I could do with a popgun like that myself. How does she work, Starkie?’

  ‘I suppose you pull this little string,’ said Starkie, jerking a cord which dangled from the beauty’s fittings.

  Nobody expected the cannon to make any comment; but instead, she leapt like a stag and roared like a lion, and the Bluecoats noticed, in panic, that large blocks of masonry in the square were playing an inspired round of tiddleywinks.

  ‘My God, she was loaded!’ quite superfluously remarked Starkie’s comrade.

  Starkie, a year’s growth frightened out of him and his complexion as near pale green as Red Indian blood will allow, turned to flee, but was instead arrested. Protests, prayers, and eyewitnesses to swear that it was an unfortunate accident got him off with a caution; and in the evening the Bluecoats went round en masse to inspect the damage.

  Starkie found that he had chipped the edges of four Maltese, none permanently spoiled or injured; he had blown a large hole in the wall of a café where a party of British officers had been breakfasting, but they had escaped without a scratch—thereby proving once again that the Devil looks after his own, and his own are, among others, British officers. The only total loss was a large marble statue of peace—a fat fair woman with an olive branch, a surprised expression, and a fig leaf. She still looked surprised, but her head was now divorced from her body, and she no longer possessed any middle. The Bluecoats averred that it was the proper end for women with fig leaves, and went on their way, rejoicing less than they might have done had not their lodgings for the night been within the dour confines of St. David’s.

  The Maltese considered, and rightly, that the Anzacs were tough. The Anzacs considered the Maltese respectability too much of a good thing. At the earliest possible moment as many of the Bluecoats as could walk departed for Alexandria.

  Starkie got word that his brother George was at Sidi Bish with the Veterinary Corps. How many years since they had seen each other at the flax-mill in the Wyndham hills? George had been gone from New Zealand already when they turned him loose from the Invercargill gaol. There was a queerness in knowing that he was so near again. Starkie applied for leave, got it, and turned up at Sidi Bish to be coldly received by his towering brother.

  ‘What did I tell you when I saw you last?’

  ‘To stop with Mum and Dad,’ meekly admitted the youngest of his house.

  ‘And you didn’t do it, eh? Thought yourself too clever? What the hell are you doing here?’

  ‘Wounded on Gallipoli.’ That ought to make the big tough sit up!

  It did. The big tough’s Red Indian face hardened like chilled steel. Starkie had seen wardens and sergeant-majors who looked a lot pleasanter. An arm like a piston shot out from a huge shoulder. When Starkie woke up, a milita
ry police officer was actually assisting him to rise from a gutter, whilst in the distance considerably more military policemen were attending to the immediate wants of George. These they summed up as a spell in gaol. Starkie next saw his brother when his mate, Smithy—a Vickers machine-gunner—turned up with an urgent message that Starkie should go at once to his brother’s skipper and explain that the fracas was his fault.

  ‘Tell him he’s about as popular with me as a pork chop in a synagogue,’ snarled Starkie. But he went.

  George’s skipper was a fat man with a grin. ‘Tell him to be a nice boy and behave,’ he advised.

  When George was released from the prison tent, Starkie looked at him, wondering how he could persuade such a one of the expediency of being nice. George stood six feet seven inches in his socks. In khaki his face looked the colour of mahogany, but harder. He weighed fifteen stone to Starkie’s twelve.

  Starkie, Smithy, and George got Alexandria leave. Starkie understood at the outset that he was tolerated—at a price.

  ‘Got any money?’ curtly inquired his brother.

  Starkie meekly handed over piastres to the number of four hundred, with four pounds ten shillings in Bradburys. He didn’t understand himself. Sadly he trotted at the heels of the lordly two, and when they got to a café George forbade him to drink spirits.

  ‘It’s no good to you, kid. I’ve got to think of the old lady, haven’t I?’ His massive paw tipped up a glass. He swallowed, gave a sigh presumably of satisfaction, and turned to discuss the day’s events with Smithy.

  Starkie sat by and watched.

  Presently George and Smithy departed on private business of their own, taking with them the four hundred piastres and the Bradburys, and advising Starkie to behave himself. Starkie, having taken the precaution to reserve a few piastres for himself—and retaining as well the whole of his English gold—did the best he could, and thus landed in Sisters Street.