Passport to Hell

by Hyde, Robin

  I did the fourteen days in Ismailia. Nothing much happened except the Sugar Cane war. That was when some of the troops—Punjabis, New Zealanders, and Aussies—started a barney in a brothel, and the Arabs got their knives out. We’d been particularly warned we weren’t to shoot anyone in Ismailia, and there was nothing else to fight them with but the twelve-foot lengths of sugar-cane, piled up in barrels along the road. The troops got sugar-canes and thrashed the Gippos and Arabs with them. It took a bit of doing to make the Punjabis stop at that, but the war went off all right. After that I was arrested—so were plenty more—and got fourteen days’ field punishment.

  Then the troops were shifted back to Ismailia from Ferry Post, and stole two jars of rum from headquarters. In the lines everybody spent a quiet night drinking rum, plenty of the officers taking part as well as the men. At 11.30 Colonel Percy came along and told an orderly sergeant to stop the noise. The next thing was Captain Smythe and Captain Dombey came out of their tents and wandered along trying to find out who was making a noise. The boys could have told them. Captain Dombey had his arm around Captain Smythe’s waist and was singing, ‘I want to be a soldier’, and Captain Smythe was singing, ‘I want someone to love me’; and I thought, ‘A fat chance you’ve got, either of you, you fat old bastards.’ And then Captain Smythe ordered everyone out of my tent, where we were sitting quiet and behaving ourselves. I got up in too much of a hurry, so I fell out instead of walking, and I was put in the clink. I was annoyed at that, so I cursed Colonel Percy a long way back right past his ancestors to their ancestors, and when he came in I threw a tent mallet at him. Then I was locked up in the tent, taken to battalion headquarters next day and court-martialled.

  It was eleven days before the big show, the district court martial, came off, and while the rest were all out drilling in the desert, I lay and slept inside the tent, which was as near cool as any spot can be round about Ismailia. Then I was taken up for court martial in front of three officers. I forget their names. They read out the charge—using language to Colonel Percy and trying to brain him with a tent mallet. Colonel Percy said he was sorry but he couldn’t repeat the language I used to him, which was funny after what he said himself when I threw the tent mallet. Then they asked me to repeat it, and I said I was sorry, too, but I couldn’t remember anything.

  I was asked if anyone would speak for me, so I said, ‘Yes; send for Captain Dombey.’

  Captain Dombey was drilling his men eight miles out in the desert when he got word he was wanted at once at headquarters. So he came in at the double, thinking there was trouble ahead, and turned up at the court so red in the face I thought he was going to have a fit. When he was told he was wanted to speak for me, he didn’t say anything, he just stood there with his eyes popping out of his head, getting slowly redder and redder, like one of those penny balloons the kids blow up too high and then they burst.

  Presently he opened his mouth and said, ‘This man is the biggest, laziest, rottenest, most troublesome—’ He stopped dead again, and I could see he was having a lot of trouble to keep his language what they call Parliamentary. ‘In times like this he’s more trouble than half a battalion put together.’

  Colonel Percy looked at me with a pretty cold sort of glint in his eye, nasty as a fixed bayonet, and I began to wish I’d left Captain Dombey in the desert until he’d melted there.

  Then he said: ‘And in the trenches he’s one of the best soldiers I ever had.’ He said a lot more after that, which I should blush to repeat, the end of it was that I got off with fourteen days’ second field punishment, which meant I had to report myself night and morning, nine o’clock both ways. I did it in Ismailia.

  While I was there I used to swim in the Suez Canal, and took it out of the darkies for having such a dirty town you couldn’t get any fun out of it. I used to lie in ambush under a big sandbank. Presently a Gippo would come along riding in state on a little donkey, his wife trotting alongside him on foot, carrying a big load on her head. Women are like that in Ismailia. The Gippo donkey-riders always had bags of oranges across their knees to sell to the troops. I used to duck the Gippo and cut the orange-bags open, and when they were bobbing about in the Canal I’d go in after them and fish out as many as the boys needed. Sometimes they came along yelling, ‘Choclit! Choclit, gibbit backsheesh!’—and I gave them backsheesh all right, chasing them across the desert. By and by they used to call me ‘Le Brigand’, and whenever a couple of them saw me there’d be a yell of ‘Y’Allah!’ and they’d go as fast as their little mokes would take them.

  It wasn’t long before we all lined up in the desert again, our kits refilled and shortages made up.

  At Ismailia we were loaded on cattle-trucks, a few of the luckier ones getting a seat in ancient rattle-bone carriages. We left for Alexandria, everyone cheering, and a fair number pretty full. It was on this trip that a Gippo got shot. The train stopped for water about half-way to Alexandria and the Gippos ran alongside, same as they always did, yelling for backsheesh and offering baskets of oranges. A good many bought the oranges—big blood-red beauties, juicy enough to slake the cinders in our throats. Most of the boys were half canned by now on whisky smuggled aboard the train at Ismailia. One of the soldiers handed a Gippo a note for his oranges, and the Gippo, waiting till the train whistle blew, ducked and ran for it, omitting to remember the change. The soldier he bilked could see him plain from the carriage window, running and dodging like a rabbit. A hundred yards off and he crumpled up and lay face downwards with his white nightgown in the station dust. The rifle-crack hadn’t sounded loud enough for the officers to spot where the shot came from, and when they came dashing along, with the Gippos howling bloody murder alongside, none of us would give the show away. So with one dead backsheesh-merchant behind us we left again for Alexandria. Our kits were loaded aboard the troopship, the Franconia. Everyone who went aboard the Franconia that trip was a Gallipoli veteran, including Otago Fourth’s mascot, Jack Briggs’s monkey. They wouldn’t let the monkey land in France, which was a pity, because she was the best louser in the regiment, and she and Jack cried like a couple of kids when he left her behind. Jack said girls were all right, but he’d never get a girl to sort out the lice like that monkey used to do.

  Alexandria was clearer in outline when the Franconia left Egypt—it was April, 1916—than Cairo had been when the Maunganui had docked there over a year before. Some of the best were left behind, or in hospital at Lemnos and Malta, or behind the barbed wire. One of the chaps had a book about Egypt and read out bits about the different times when foreign troops had landed there before and gone shunting around the old Pyramids and the Sphinx—Julius Caesar, in the Year Dot, and a chap named Anthony that was sweet on that girl they named Cleopatra’s Needle after, in London; and old man Moses splitting the Red Sea in two to get his flock away from the land of Sergeants, Scabies and Syphilis. Say ‘Land of Three S’s’ to any New Zealander or Aussie and he’ll get you all right.

  Way back in the time before the Egyptians settled down to making a steady living on backsheesh and nothing else but, there was a king of their own—I forget his name now—that wanted to turn it into a pacifist show. He wrote a hymn that the soldier with the book read out, and it sounded pretty good with Alexandria growing dim in the east as the Franconia pulled out. But the Gippo generals decided after a bit that this king was lousy, and Egypt went back to her old habits. There was too much fighting altogether to be put into one book, but Napoleon Bonaparte got there and was pretty pleased with himself about it; thought of keeping a Gippo harem and ruling the East. Nobody rules the East, unless it’s that stone woman with no nose that they keep out in the desert beyond Cairo.

  But queer as the old days in Egypt may have been, I can’t think of anything queerer than that the troops from New Zealand and Australia should come there on their way to fight. Of all the places that wouldn’t be likely to interest a New Zealander, Egypt stands next in line to Greenland’s icy mountains and the North Pole. Most of
us had never heard of it, except that it put out a good line of cigarettes, and even that was a lie: those long yellow fags of theirs would turn your stomach. Even now I can’t help wondering at times—why, why, why? What did we get out of it, anyhow? It wasn’t even a good show. What’s Egypt got to do with New Zealanders? Why did Jacko have to stay behind the barbed wire when the rest of us pushed on? He had a girl of his own at home—but oh, hell, when there’s nothing to do but plough sand and count the flies and gamble, you can’t play saint all the time!

  I lost all my gold on the way over to France. The men got over the idea that it was haunted when they reckoned out how much they’d need to spend on a good time in Paris. But there’s a lot of exaggeration about Paris. I’ll tell you later.

  10 The Noah’s Ark Country

  ON THE grey-quilted satin of Marseilles Harbour black smoke from a destroyer’s funnels worked a pattern in cross-stitch. Lean and grey as a badger, she slipped past the Franconia, and tied up alongside the wharf they saw the fish she had brought up a day before from the ocean—the biggest Boche submarine caught in French waters since the beginning of the War, and the first to show the ugly snouts of guns mounted on her deck.

  Germany, with its blond hair and china-blue eyes, stared up at the Franconia’s troops and shouted to them as they marched down the gangways. Big gangs of Prussian prisoners, men from places where life has something of the white savour of newly chopped forest pine, were loading the boats, a sentry with fixed bayonet and a look of intolerable boredom on his face posted behind every squad. The Prussians were giants, every mother’s son of them, not one in sight tipping the scales for less than fourteen stone. As the troops marched past they yelled ‘Good luck, boys!’—and, with more emphasis, ‘It’s hell out there!’

  Prussia was sportsmanlike, but La Belle France hadn’t any colours flying. There wasn’t so much as a cup of coffee, let alone a glass of the bock they’d all heard so much about, to enliven the wait for the troop-trains. This was too much for Paddy Bridgeman’s morale, and when he slipped out of the lines, Starkie and two more followed him to take care of him and see he didn’t lose his pay-roll shenannigin in his Irish way with the mademoiselles. As it happened, they needn’t have worried, for the only inhabitant of the little side-street pub where they took refuge was an old man with an unshaven blue chin, who peered at them suspiciously over his glasses and wanted to see the colour of their money right away. Before they had time to express resentment of this, the French gendarmerie came in, all blue uniform, moustache, and swagger; and when they explained that they had somehow managed to miss their division, they were at once escorted to a train which was starting for Morbecque, and which appeared to be full up with Tommies.

  The wheels rattled, a whistle shrieked like a damned soul, and the train bounced its way out of Marseilles on the seven days’ trip to Morbecque. All the way the Tommies thieved as the New Zealanders had never suspected that any man could have the initiative, the perseverance, the agility, and the barefacedness to thieve. Everything was fish that came to the Tommies’ net—poultry from little farms lying along the railroad tracks, fruit, magazines, stationery, tobacco, and an occasional pocket handkerchief from friendly mademoiselles who brought them cups of coffee at the stations. The discouraging memory of the pub in Marseilles was blotted out for the New Zealanders by the huge stone wine-jars, encased in wickerwork, which were taken aboard at one station and put out, empty, at the next.

  The staple diet, apart from wine, was delicious French bread, served in long twisted loaves which seemed always hot and fragrant from the ovens. There were guards on the train, but at a conservative estimate the guards were twice as bad as the Tommies themselves. None the less, when they arrived at Hazebrouck and were escorted to their battalion, which was stationed at Morbecque, they learned that life still maintained a disciplinarian scowl. They were marched into the guard-room and were tried, put on fourteen days’ Royal Warrant. The implication of this was that for fourteen days apiece they would fight, drill, loaf, or perform route-marches for their King and Country, free, gratis, and for nothing.

  Having something to jingle in their pockets was a strict necessity among the New Zealanders, who had struck a very wet district indeed. Champagne went for five francs a litre; white wine was two francs, and the French would hand you over twelve beers—good beers—for a shilling. Malaga was two and a half francs, and the soldiers’ favourite tipple was a frightful brew, half malaga and half champagne, mixed together and carried along in kegs.

  In clear July weather the battalion started on route marches to Armentières. A sea voyage and a few weeks in a crisp, cool climate had so transformed the men that nobody would have recognized the yellow-faced, scabies-ridden veterans who had crept into Ismailia three months before. In three months of peace they had had time to forget the worst of it, as far as it could ever be forgotten. Then there was the chief glory of France—freedom from flies. Nobody who hadn’t eaten the festering, black-crusted filth of Gallipoli could understand what that meant. Spruce in their uniforms, their new rifles slung jauntily enough at their shoulders, Otago Fourth swung along.

  All the way from Morbecque they lost only one man, who got sore feet and threw his pack at a cow, which meant another little problem for the military police. The rest marched, laughing and singing. Every battalion was headed by pipe and brass bands, and the number of Scotties in the Otago crowd meant that its pipes could skirl to some purpose. The Dunedin brass band played under a tall chap named George, and swung along blowing ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning’ on its trumpets. After them tramped the brawny Scots, with Pat Johnston skirling ‘Cock o’ the North’ on his pipes, and a thousand strong young voices lifted up, in tune and out of tune, keeping him company.

  Between the pale hedgerows, brown autumn leaves pricking like goblin ears behind the thickset green, France was a Noah’s Ark country, all tiny farms, tiny horses, tiny cows, and barking dogs. Everything was a few centuries old … thatched cottages with their slated cow-byres leaning tumbledown and dark against one end of the dwelling-place; fields, chocolate and clear green, ploughed by hand with wooden ploughs and wooden harrows. Along the turned furrows, where birds screamed and fought over tit-bits, walked women in solemn, sombre colours—dark blue and earthen brown, sowing the seed by hand as their mothers had done for hundreds of years.

  Little Froggies, too young for blue uniform and swaggers, solemnly milked cows in full sight of the roads, and the soldiers broke ranks to beg for the new milk, steaming hot and sweet, in wooden pails. In dairies of brick, paled almost to apricot-colour, thickset dogs gravely turned the churn handles tied to their shoulders. Dogs, enormous or miniature, but all engrossed in their labours, pattered on the shallow steps of the great water-wheels turned by their running feet. The drops splashed down in little cascades, separate and gleaming. You could whistle and coax the dog, but though a tail might thump in an abstracted kindly way, you couldn’t beguile him away from the matter in hand. He was part of the ancient and diminutive sampler of the French country life, into whose pattern of toil everything and everyone—strawberry cows, little girls with flying black plaits, old men in smocks, snorting horses, and friendly dogs—had been stitched.

  The route marches covered from twenty to thirty miles a day, the men marching under full packs, with a ten minutes’ spell at the end of each hour. Here and there along the country roads they came upon wayside shrines—the Crucifix, white and simple, half hidden in its little grotto of brambles, the Mother holding her Child against a calm breast, with a tiny spring of water bubbling up, dark and limpid, in the worn stone basin set beneath her feet. Soldiers who had ducked the church parades since the beginning of the War fell out of the lines to pray there. There was a notion that it would bring them good luck.

  Where they came into contact with the people of Noah’s Ark country, they found that the women did all the work: ploughing, milking, sowing, harrowing. Young men, all but the hopelessly crippled, had been swept out of
the countryside. The old ones dreamed in the sunshine, rattling imaginary sabres, talking in their incomprehensible patois of Sedan, and of yet older days. The women, their breasts full and firm as winter pears under their blue print gowns, compressed their lips, flashed fierce eyes at the soldiers, had ready-made curses against the Boche, and a shrug of their shoulders for their own position. Half of them, in addition to working their farms and keeping their cottages speckless, worked in little estaminets at nights.

  Starkie had known New Zealand women who could rough it; but most of them would have lain down to die before taking on the burden that these square, blue-clad shoulders bore so inflexibly. Yes, the mademoiselles were wonderful—and their mothers too, for that matter. And it was always ‘Après la guerre, soldier’. They had an invincible belief, these women, in the animal nature of the soldiery. Even the heavy-moustached, stout old grandmothers, with behinds the size of a coach and four, patted you on the shoulder, winked at you, and said ‘Après la guerre, soldier’, as though when you’d finished cleaning up their Noah’s Ark, chucking the animals that didn’t belong in it back into the swirling waters of the Flood, you might as a great treat be permitted to seduce them.

  Starkie grinned. Après several guerres, as far as he was concerned.

  Nevertheless, you could never forget them—the solid-hipped, red-cheeked women who came into the estaminets, still smelling of the clean faint fragance of soil and cow-byre, and served out the heavy mugs of beer across the little table. Only on the surface their eyes flashed and sparkled. The big arms that girdled a New Zealand soldier’s shoulders were casual, really, thinking no more of it than of patting a useful dog who’d done his bit turning the water-wheel. Their eyes, when you really looked into them, were stern and proud. Their hands were strong as a man’s hands. Starkie wondered why the Frenchmen always seemed so much smaller than their women. Odd to think of one of these Hecubas surrendering herself to a gendarme with a waxed moustache and patent-leather hair.