Passport to Hell

by Hyde, Robin

  The feature of the tall old stone houses in Sisters Street, craning flat and narrow, one roof pressed against the next, is their internationality, which could teach Geneva a good bit even yet. On one floor you would find Maltese girls, on the next the French lingo would be spoken, and you could climb up and up by furtive twisting stairways through Spain, Germany, England, and the crowded rooms of the coloured women. There wasn’t the balcony-waving of the Wazza here. You walked in without knocking, and found your way as best you could to whatever you happened to be looking for—dark, lustrous eyes, scarlet heels, a queer finish to an inadequate costume, a listless girl who spoke your own language but whose English skin had grown etiolated here, with the stifling hours of daytime siesta, the hot, weary nights.

  He opened the heavy door which, on the French landing, was standing just slightly ajar, and looked inside. It was a blue room, and kneeling alone on a couch piled with the greenish-blue cushions was a girl in a silk dress, a dress as grey as a dove’s wing, and shot with little flares of rose. The girl’s eyes looked enormous, hazel in a dead-white face. And she was crying. When she saw Starkie she didn’t stop crying, neither did she send him away. Her lips curled upwards in a half-hearted fashion, but all the time they were quivering like the mouth of a child to whom somebody had been inexplicably unkind. The tears went on falling straight down her white cheeks, and her hands twisted a little sodden rope which once upon a time had quite possibly been a white pocket handkerchief.

  He shut the door softly behind him, too softly to have disturbed or frightened her. But he didn’t go straight up to the weeping girl. Her blue room started to talk to him. He wondered at first just what colour it was—that curious blue-green, like a deep lake—and then remembered a little heart of crushed turquoise which somebody had once given his sister Rose. Turquoise … there was a high lamp standing beside her, and a silken shade of the same colour dripped long, delicate fronds of tiny blue and silver beads, like the stalactites of a limestone cave.

  The long seat in the window was padded with silk, and there was a blue rug. Its ends were roughly tied as the weavers of camel’s hair do tie them in the East; it lay on an otherwise bare floor. Curtains fell down straight behind her—a blue waterfall. If she had been tall and stately, or English, the blue room might have been like a pantomime scene or a chocolate-box picture; but she didn’t seem more than a child. Still trying to smile, still twisting her handkerchief, she stood and stared at him, the dark hair taken back in two cool waves from a broad forehead. All the time the tears ran down her face. The room and this particular girl made Starkie feel like a clown. He had talked to so many girls, but not a word he had said to any of them would have fitted in here.

  Presently he was sitting beside her, and the smile grew more certain on her damp face. He discovered her name was Yvonne. She could talk English fairly well, though her gentle little voice gave the unmistakable French twist to vowel sounds. How she came there, how her room in a house in Sisters Street should be green and blue like the heart of crushed turquoise, why she was crying—those weren’t the things she talked about, and he couldn’t have asked her. Instead he found himself telling her a host of things—some true, some false; fables designed to amuse. The night came down, and she touched the lamp under the blue shade into a soft glow of light. They didn’t go to bed, but sat talking until very late. Starkie asked Yvonne to marry him. He didn’t know why; and he did know pretty well that she belonged to someone or something else—to this street, to a man, or to her destiny. She was nice about it, though. She kissed him in a friendly sort of way, and said, ‘After the War, soldier.’ But when he kissed her, her warm face was still wet with the tears that kept coming into her eyes; and it seemed so queer to think that it was all real, that they were two people touching each other—and what was likely to happen to each of them soon.

  He went away from the turquoise room before morning and didn’t stop at any other house in Sisters Street, though the place flared with a naphtha life from dusk to day. Beautiful and sweet and good, as good as anyone he had ever met … a girl who wasn’t good would never have tried to smile at him when the whole of her heart was taken up in crying for something unseen. But let any man of any race put down five piastres, and he could have Yvonne—as far as that sort of having her went. It hadn’t gone far as yet … white face, hazel eyes. But life is a damned long time.

  When the troopship touched at Lemnos on the way back to Gallipoli, the harbour was still swarming with men-of-war, craft of all shapes and sizes. One, with her five funnels sticking crookedly out of an ancient hull, was christened the Packet of Woodbines. Lemnos Harbour offered the ship-lover everything that ever left the slips, barring Chinese junks and coracles. Starkie’s first job was digging latrines with half Otago there to help, all swearing that in the next war they would be sanitary inspectors, and damn soldiering! The men’s limbs were loosened up by their days in Lemnos—drill broken by trials of prowess between the New Zealanders and the Second, First, and Fourth Australians. The Kiwis took the Kangaroos on at Rugby football, and routed them by 101 points to 3. Then the Australians came over yelling for vengeance at cricket, and cleaned up their national honour, for when the sun set on Lemnos their score was 3000, and the pride of the New Zealand bowlers went home heartbroken, swearing only an earthquake could get the stickers out. There was friendliness enough between them. The New Zealanders reckoned the Australians good gamblers, good soldiers, good pals, and superlatively good liars.

  The medical corps were getting a bit fussy about hygiene now, though at a late date for the Gallipoli campaign, and for a day or two the world was full of privates with their pants off stooping down for the anti-typhoid vaccine, after which they did as little sitting down as possible for a week.

  They had their first close-up view of a beautiful British general when three thousand of them were playing ‘two-up’ outside the Lemnos wells.

  ‘What about a spin, Alec?’ yelled one hardy trooper.

  The General, a superb figure, cantered away. Five minutes later, two dozen mounted police charged the two-up schools, involving a heavy loss of stakes as the men scattered from under the horses’ hoofs.

  ‘Not half living up to his reputation,’ the men grumbled.

  The General was tougher yet when the First Brigade of Australians, aided and abetted by the Third—who, technically speaking, were in quarantine with yellow fever, but who remained surprisingly omnipresent for ghosts—raided the Tommies’ beer-canteen and removed four barrels. This served the Tommies right—for when unpaid they would hang around the Anzac encampments with their tongues out, exhibiting painful symptoms of thirst and a hydrophobic horror of mere water; but when their own pay rattled in their pouches they never stood treat for the Colonials. The New Zealanders, being invited by the Australians to join in the festival, did themselves rather well. Came the dawn, and the thin red line of the New Zealanders swayed on its legs, while the air over the Tommy bivouacs was bluer than the ocean wave. Came also the General, thunder in his voice and forked lightning in his eye, a nasty sight altogether. Starkie had the misfortune to wobble somewhat as the General swung past, and was ordered out of line.

  ‘What name?’

  ‘Private J. D. Stark, sir.’

  ‘What battalion?’

  ‘Otago Fourth, sir.’

  ‘I thought so! I thought so!’ shouted the General, with a conviction which spoke ill for the fair name of Otago. Somewhat later, Starkie was taken on the mat, charged with being drunk in line and with the theft of fifty-three gallons of beer—a noble feat, but one of which, lone-handed, he had never been capable—and ordered continual drill parade, carried on by a justly indignant sergeant two hours after the others had knocked off forming fours. Lemnos sweltered. It was all too much for Starkie’s morale. He did three days, then went for a swim, dipped his shirt in water, and went to bed soaking. Two nights later he was choking with pleurisy, and escaped from the wrath of generals, sergeants, and thirsty Tommies al
ike in the Lemnos Hospital.

  Second General Hospital, Lemnos, was staffed by none but Australian doctors and nurses, and they were about as different from the battle-cruisers of Malta as the buttercup is from the thistle. The girls from Sydney and Melbourne—maybe no models as to discipline, but as game as girls are made—were nice enough to Starkie to make him mend his ways. None of them would at that time have taken a prize in a beauty contest. Some were bits of girls, but all were pale, big-eyed, thinned down. Dysentery had hit the nursing-staff as badly as the men they tended; but they kept on their feet, and spent their pay buying extra comforts for the wards. There wasn’t any Lady of the Lamp stuff in Lemnos, nor any clanging of bells. The soldiers talked when they liked—except when the delirious ones babbled themselves into the death-stupor; and pale girls ran about between the beds, cleaning, sponging, dressing wounds, cracking jokes in the dockside argot that the men understood.

  Starkie was right again, and somewhat repentant, in time to join his battalion when they left for Gallipoli. There was rumour in the troopship of a big attack pending. The men still wore their first issue of khaki shorts and singlets, frayed with a year or more of active service. A week after their arrival on Gallipoli, the weather went mad, and a burning day was followed by a hailstorm in which nuggets of ice as big as pigeon’s eggs pelted down over trenches and gullies. Twelve hours later it was snowing. Great white flakes sailed serenely down, and the underclad men shivered and froze in their earthen houses. But beyond the rim of the trenches, the world held a strange and fairy-like beauty. The little scrub-bushes became crystal Christmas-trees, such as the men remembered from the infinitely remote time of their childhood.

  Deep clefts of snow covered the pitiful unsightly dead of No Man’s Land. There was no war across that silent and crystal world. The white doves of the snow blotted out sight between the trenches. There might indeed have been an enemy, for British soldier or for Turkish sniper, above the white, woman-breasted hills. But how were they to see one another? Mule Gully was deep in snow, so that even the shouts of the muleteers were absent. They were isolated in a silent and lonely world. The men crept out into the hollow’s of the hills to gather snow in their tin dixies, and brewed vast quantities of scalding black tea. Until that snowfall, there had never been a day of clean and plentiful water on Gallipoli. For two days afterwards there was another strange difference in their existence. Their eyes, their faces, their rations, as soon as the day heightened, weren’t instantly covered and fouled by the swarms of great black flies.

  The men in the trenches were told that the Turks were bringing up the heavy artillery brought from Austria. For nine days they burrowed like moles, digging new trenches. Then they were told to pack their kits.

  ‘Slaughter at Suvla Bay, or over on Chocolate Hill,’ Fleshy McLeod stated in tones of vast authority.

  For an hour they sat in the trenches, their kits packed, nothing but the walls and steps lined with marmalade-tins and the kerosene-tin candles to mark the place of their dwelling. Rifles were tied, guns moved in fixed positions. Then they were marched down to the beach. Lined up above the water-tanks where the first man in the Division had fallen with that little blue slate-pencil dot between his eyes, they were told that they were evacuating Gallipoli.

  The place was as quiet as a Sunday in a New Zealand village. The men fell into line, and without laughter, almost without a word of comment, began to move down the beach. Then, as the New Zealanders who came to Gallipoli had first seen carved in the yellow cliffs the great Maori Pa, now crumbling to pieces in the wind and rain, their own country found its voice again, and bade its private good-bye to the hills of Gallipoli. A New Zealand captain, marching at the head of the Maori Pioneer Corps, started them off singing the Maori waiatas—the very sweet, very plaintive tribal songs that from one generation to another have been handed down among the people of the Maori race. The Maori girls sing them, weaving lithe arms and bodies in the canoe pois, the graceful dance of the womenfolk. The men, a long time ago, played them on little flutes which were carved from polished pieces of human thigh-bone.

  Even now, where on the banks of the Wanganui River lie hidden among bank-willows the canoes that were hollowed by the adze from a single log, and with a century’s slipping through river-waters are as smooth and shining as tubes of amber, you can hear the waiatas sung by the people of the river. The words have been translated, but the songs are not artificial, as is the steel guitar or thrumming ukulele of the South Seas. Where the hills and fern were alone with their own native people, the waiatas were first born, the voice of a country.

  Now … ees … the time

  When I … mus’ say … farewell,

  Soon … you’ll be sail-eeng

  Far away … from me….

  When you’re … away …

  Kindlee … remember me….

  When you return, you’ll find me

  Wait-eeng here.

  The Maori girls sing that, the warm and lovely red flushing up under the brown skin of their young breasts and high-boned delicate faces. Their hair, brushed out, falls below their waists, and although its wavy silk is black, it shows a dusting of light like tiny flecks of gold. They wear, to suit the conventions of civilization, bodices of scarlet cotton above their flaxen skirts. Their names are Rangi, Mere, Puhi-Huia, Hine-I-Arohia, Ritahia, Rata, all pronounced with an even inflexion on each syllable, and with the vowels soft, as in the Spanish tongue.

  O, listening dead upon the hillsides of Gallipoli and in the deep gullies of the little bitter-tasting bushes!—it is the voice of your country that is bidding you farewell.

  They are going now, with that music on their lips, to slay and to be slain, in other fields. Yet one day, man may truly dwell and act in that loveliness which haunts the hidden places of his mind.

  Listening dead, one day a man will come back to you and learn the answer to that song of farewell. He will not stumble away, blind and hopeless, into the deeper pools of blood and filth. For you, speaking out of the knowledge bought by travail, will tell him what paths he must take.

  9 Court Martial

  In which Starkie speaks for himself

  WHEN the boys got down as far as Mudros we started to look around. Very few were what you might call handsome to look at, most having gone in for scabies, which left big sores for the lice to burrow under. At Mudros we met up with the Aussies, and started to buy cake and cigarettes from them, for it looked as if the Aussie women remembered the troops better than the New Zealanders. None of our crowd had got any parcel mail for weeks. Then one of our lot who bought a cake from an Aussie sergeant, opened up the round tin it came in and found his own name on the top, with a note from his mother:

  Dear boy,

  Many happy returns for your nineteenth birthday.

  After that we said we all knew the Aussies were lousy, but we hadn’t guessed they were as lousy as that, and Captain Dombey said more fools we.

  We had a fortnight at Mudros in which to get back on the thieves, and we did the best we could. Some said we were posted for Salonika next, others were all for Mesopotamia. In the finish we were all shipped to Alexandria, but didn’t stop there. We went straight out to Ismailia, which is about ten miles from Cairo, and once there among the sandhills they had got us good and proper. It was drill and nothing but drill. In the morning we were taken out into the desert with full water-bottles and drilled in heat like a stokehold all day long. When we came back, the water in our bottles was measured, and if we’d drunk anything it meant C.B. We all figured this meant desert fighting ahead, and a gentle way of telling us there weren’t any beer-canteens where we were headed for next, so the boys did what they could to make up for it in their off hours.

  But when you got into Ismailia there was nothing much to spend your pay on. Nearly all the women were Arabs, with big heavy rings like curtain-rings in their ears and nostrils. Nothing in the streets but fat Arabs and big, skinny fowls, running about stark naked among the dung-hills
with not a feather to their backs, and the most horrible mottled colour. The women in the Ismailian brothels were worse than the ones you met in the streets, though when the troops first came in from the desert you’d see men lined up in dozens before the doors. There was nothing in town but dirty women and rotten whisky; and most of the boys were glad when we were shifted down to the Ferry Post on the Suez Canal, though here it was hot enough to melt the bars across a furnace; and we still kept on with the pleasant little game of drill.

  The big boats kept coming through the Suez Canal, and sometimes the people on them got big-hearted too, and used to chuck tobacco over to the soldiers. Whenever a boat was on her way through, our crowd lined up on the bank and cheered for all they were worth. Sometimes it worked, sometimes not. That was how I nearly got drowned one time. I was in the front line, and cheering too, and the fellows behind pushed me off the edge of the wharf. Then I saw one of those big waterproof tins of tobacco bobbing about a little way ahead of me and swam straight for it. I didn’t see another boat coming up behind me until the suction from her wash caught me and pulled me towards her propellers. I was about ready for a sticky death when the boys saw what was happening. Five of them formed a chain from the bank and grabbed me just as I was going under. They pulled me out; and when I got to the bank I shared out the tobacco among them. I’d never let go of the tin.

  Next day I was detailed for guard, but I wasn’t looking for the honour and glory of any tough jobs, not right then, in the Suez heat. By and by I went along to our M.O., and told him exactly what I felt like. He looked pretty serious, and said, ‘You’ve got the symptoms of sunstroke, old man. You lie down and keep quiet.’ He gives me a chit, and when I hand it over to the Colonel I’m excused fourteen days. I didn’t mention that I’d read up about sunstroke in a book the night before.