by Hyde, Robin
He shovelled the soil back over his brother, sobbing as he worked—great noisy sobs like a child’s. Presently the mound was high enough. He stuck George’s rifle above, with his pay-book in the breech. He couldn’t wait any longer, the shells were shrieking like eagles gathering for the feast. One desperate glance he cast around him. The wounded man was squatting on his haunches, his body rocking slowly backwards and forwards. Starkie was sure that he had gone mad. He left them together, madman and fragmentary body of George. Then he took to his heels, sobs tearing at him in hiccoughing gusts. In half an hour he had rejoined his own battalion, but the men didn’t know him. When he tried to talk he stammered. An officer pulled out a flask and poured out a tin pannikin of rum, filling it to the brim. Starkie drank it down and started out to kill. It wasn’t so much vengeance as a desire to find George. Somewhere at the back of the sodden field, straining before him, George might be. He wanted to slash his way through.
The Somme attack was going well on the British side. The German prisoners were already pouring in, squads of a dozen at a time. The officer who had given Starkie the rum told him to stop where he was. Starkie smiled up at him.
‘I’m all right, just mad,’ he said, and started to run once more.
A little line of prisoners came in sight shepherded by their guard, a New Zealand officer. Starkie emptied his revolver into the field-grey. The guard yelled at him, and he swung his revolver round at the angry man in khaki and told him to shut his mouth or he’d put five rounds into it. Then that group was gone. He was stumbling over a dug-out, a big cave filled with wounded and exhausted Germans. A face stared up, white and young. He asked, ‘How many down there?’ and the German answered something—it sounded like sixty. Then Starkie drew the pin out of a Mills bomb and flung it into the dug-out. He didn’t wait to see what might crawl out of the cascade of mud and brushwood. Fragments of men … fragments of George….
He came to a wire blockade. Some of Otago’s survivors lay there on their bellies, waiting for the tanks to plough through. At last they came, leviathans heaving through the terrible red-and-yellow mud, and ploughed through the barbed wire as though the entanglements were a row of pea-sticks. Starkie recognized Arthur Kelliher suddenly at his side. The big Irishman was panting like a dog. Like Starkie, he didn’t seem cold or hungry, as most of the others were by now. The rain had never ceased to fall since the beginning of the attack. Starkie and Kelliher joined forces and came on to Flers. Here the German dug-outs were full of wine, schnapps, cigars, and chocolates—an officers’ line. A row of dug-outs had to be cleared of Germans before the New Zealanders could get to the liquor and tobacco. It was done, and all that night men crept up from No Man’s Land and burned the freezing death out of their veins with spirits.
They stayed for a few hours at the little ruined village of Flers, and next morning attacked again at eleven o’clock. The survivors of the New Zealand battalions moved up on the left of the Black Watch, who in company with the Royal Irish had attacked the night before. The Irishmen were driven back, leaving the Black Watch sandwiched between the two German flanks, a little spearhead of men pricking into the groin of a roaring enemy. Half the Scotsmen had been cut to pieces by enemy fire in their captured trenches, and word was passed along to the Otago bombers—recruited anew after the Armentières raid—to relieve the trapped men.
Starkie and Kelliher were among the bombers who crawled along the lines to relieve the Black Watch. When they got there they found it wasn’t so easy. The Scotties, game to the death, were down to a very few men, and their wounded lay helplessly exposed to fire on clay banks which could not be protected from the steel hail of the German grenades. Doggedly the Scotties stuck it out, the stick-bombs falling right among them—queer-shaped missiles like jam-tins stuck through with skewers of wood. Wounded men would start to crawl away. Then helplessly they would see that no part of the death-pit was under cover. Like snakes with broken backs, they would still contrive to hitch themselves along, looking for the corner of retreat that was not to be found. Then into the daze of the wounded man’s mind the crash of another stick-bomb. If he were lucky, the splinters struck a vital part.
The Scottish and Otago bombers were using Mills bombs, and the New Zealanders had brought up a large supply. The cockpit held by the Black Watch became so deadly a place that again and again the Germans were driven back. The earthen wall was low between attackers and attacked, and from their trench the defenders could see German officers driving their men along, red-faced and blind with fury. At four o’clock in the afternoon the thrust of German soldiers, whipped forward by the officers, came against them and was met with the fire of captured German machine-guns turned straight into the mass of field-grey.
Starkie had one machine-gun and clung to it as to a sweetheart. The machine-gun fire was unexpected; and the men, herded onward, seemed bewildered beyond the intiative of retreat. Still in the rear, those unable to see the sweep of the guns shouted and stormed. The Germans broke, like a mob of sheep driven to the abattoirs. Half of them made a desperate, gallant attempt to stamp down on the bombers’ post, and then the reaping of death began. The machine-guns swung their grey snouts, and bodies toppled over clumsily—corn whisked from the earth by an unseen scythe. By this time men of the Black Watch and the Otago reinforcements—those of them that were left—were standing on the parapets, red-eyed, watching the harvest. The desperate German stampede swirled backward, the men trampled over their officers in retreat. It was the final repulse. Not enough of the attacking party lived to come again.
A Colonel of the Black Watch walked into the cockpit, a trickle of blood running from his temple. In other parts of the line his regiment had suffered heavy losses. Here the Scotties had been twenty-one when Otago sent bombers to their relief. Now there were two of them left alive; and the wounded, unable to find a refuge, had died many deaths, hit again and again on the floor that was an evil porridge of blood and mud. About forty dead men lay there. The Colonel never spoke of them, but stood for a moment, the tears running down his face. Then he took the names of the survivors, among them Stark and Kelliher. ‘You won’t be forgotten, men,’ he said, and walked away. The next day they heard that he had been shot through the head on his way down the lines.
Under cover of night the Otago men went back to their own battalion, known now as the Otago First under the necessary reorganization. They had little enough rest. The first Somme offensive took up twenty-four days of fighting, twenty-four circles in an Inferno that no Dante ever dared to dream. On September 25th, at ten in the morning, orders were run up on the boards along the New Zealanders’ trenches. All money-belts were to be worn outside the men’s shirts. ‘Handy for the vultures,’ said Starkie. Then the battalion went into attack again, running on a steady grade downhill. The German fire was too hot, and in an all-day attack about three-quarters of a mile was the sum total of the advance.
There were about twelve thousand men all told in the attack. But at sunset a disorganized rabble wandered about in the field in little groups. Starkie and Kelliher found themselves in a shell-crater with Bill Howard, a young Lieutenant from Invercargill and a good boy. They were lost, and had no idea where to go or what to do. All night they lay in the shell-hole, drinking the brackish and filthy rain-water which had to be lapped from little hollows, and which dried the throat like brine. In the morning they managed to collect about sixteen men, wanderers like themselves, stunned with the concussion of a heavy bombardment, but none of them badly wounded. About a hundred yards on lay a little German trench.
‘Come on, boys,’ cried Lieutenant Howard, seizing on the first job he could find, ‘we’ll take that trench for our side!’
They started on the advance, and odd scarecrow figures in khaki, seeing them appear, popped out of shell-craters and from behind banks, and ran towards them, shouting and waving. The attack numbered about fifty strong; but they had woken up the enemy, and from their trench the Germans opened fire. Suddenly there was a
shout, and Starkie saw that Lieutenant Howard’s left eye had been shot out of its socket and hung hideously against his cheek. With one magnificent and terrible gesture, the young officer tore off the hanging eyeball and flung it on the ground. He shouted, ‘Come on!’—and a second later dropped on all fours, shot through the stomach.
Sergeant Mason, an old gold-miner from Kaitangata, took the lead and got the men out of the line of fire. They set to work and dug a strongpoint for themselves, a half-circle on the plains of the dead. They filled it with German machine-guns, dragged in under cover of night from the black gulf where no power but death held any sway. For two days they held the strongpoint, without officers and with nothing to eat but their iron rations. On the second night a New Zealand Colonel appeared from nowhere and ordered them to dig a communication trench back to their nearest lines. The men, still unfed, growled, sweated, and dug. The rabble had won another patch of French ground. The Colonel received a Military Cross. Big Sergeant Mason, wrestler, fighter, who had brought the men out of the enemy fire and held them together in their improvised strongpoint foodless and leaderless, never got a mention.
For two days the rabble from the Somme valley held their new trench. Then they were relieved and marched back to Mametz Wood.
For a while the wood was their home—a deathly place, its beech-stumps rising in thousands along the gentle swell of the road. On the roadside not a tree was left standing in its old grace and beauty. Hidden away among the stumps, that rose like decayed and blackened teeth against the brown curve of earth, were thousands of German bodies, carrion which not all the scavengers of earth and sky could bear off from the glades their insulted and mangled flesh now defiled. But if you came through the wood to the far side there was the strange sight of a little row of young larches still standing. In this darkness of winter they were stripped of their leafage and stood white, slender, and gleaming, tree-Phrynes, exquisite in their delicate nakedness.
Along twigs black and madder-rose depended the slight and softly tinted drops of dew, necklaces of clear moonstone. After a shower of rain the larches were in full regalia of jewels, swaying and trembling spider-patterns of drops, nature’s gift to her shyest and most secret trees. Occasionally sitting at their roots could be seen the brown little person of a rabbit—contemplative, perhaps, but apparently not worried at the strange change which had overtaken the edges of its private world. A step nearer, and the white scut would flick out of sight among the brown pools of the fallen leaves, which had become skimmed over with the frosts of last autumn, now frozen hard into mirror-patches of blue-grey translucent ice. At moments there was a fragile loveliness here. Then the wind would stir again, like some cowled leper creeping out of his ancient and accursed hiding-place among the trees; and to the soldier who lay in the woods would come the stench of the rotting corpses.
Besides the sodden shapes in their field-grey, there were dead Australians and Tommies to stumble on. ‘Any kangaroo feathers where youse come from, soldier?’ Strange and pitiful friendliness between armies from the ends of the earth; a laugh and a jest, by a sudden match-flare of light in some ruined town, and then the feet tramped on again, each keeping to their own leadership. At the last they were given grace to rot together; and the German corpses, as though no division could be for ever strong enough to hold apart the different kinds of flesh that had perished in the wood, might rot lying above or beneath them, hand touching the near skeleton of alien face. What did it matter? It was Death who had captured this wood, no other King or Kaiser was supreme there for any length of time.
Starkie’s company was moved back to Fricourt, and explored new territory. One day they were taken up and shown the hill where, according to legend, King George V had stood and watched his soldiers of many nations fight. Some ardent spirit had filled in the King’s alleged footprints with concrete, and there they remained sempiternal, a source of mingled curiosity and scoffing among the hard-boiled Colonial soldiers.
The two big hills had for a year been the centre of heavy fighting, and now that action was suspended for a while everyone went souvenir hunting. The only casualties for weeks were the boys who lit a fire in the woods, hanging their dixie of tea on an iron bar between two dud shells. The shells woke up, and the boys—their smoky tea still untasted in their tin mugs—were blown to glory.
One of the hills behind Fricourt had been mined and re-mined by German and British sappers, the British burrowing lower than the Germans. The soldiers used to explore in little parties, or prowling about, lone wolves on the hunt for Iron Crosses. One day Starkie crawled into the black gut of a deserted hillside tunnel, the grass already growing green and ragged over its raw-lipped gash in the clay. It was a long way down to the end of the tunnel, and there he saw a sight he never forgot.
From the other side of the hill the Germans had worked through by tunnels to make an underground field hospital. Timbers propped up its high roof, its walls were heavily stayed, it was better equipped and apparently safer than a great many of the field stations on the surface of the earth. Only the great cracks in the earthen floor showed how the safety of this place had been betrayed. From the mines the British sappers had exploded, the dense fumes of choking gases had poured upwards, splitting the earth in two. Perhaps in a few seconds the underground hospital had been filled with poison. And there on their stretchers and cots lay the German wounded, stifled in their narrow little white beds.
Beside them lay several crumpled bodies, and the death-trap held four men in white coats—surgeons whose knowledge had not availed them, or who had stayed at their posts with the dying until flight was impossible. Not a scratch on the bodies or faces of those men in white coats, nothing but the cracks in the floor to show how they had died.
He gathered up a few souvenirs and crept out of the place. Its silence seemed to stretch a long hand after him as he groped his way down the tunnel. He reported the hall of the dead to headquarters, and the entrance to the tunnel was filled in, boarded up, and then hidden under soil by a party of New Zealanders. There all of them lay, until the white coats of the surgeons were a long time dust, and the wounded men had ceased to show in their staring faces any surprise that the choking in their lungs should have distracted their attention from the torture of mangled flesh and splintered bone.
13 Passport to Hell
ANYHOW, that Canterbury corporal needn’t have saved up a grudge for ten months over a punch on the jaw. Starkie didn’t sock him with malice aforethought. Huie Goodyear had come by a jar of rum, and called the boys over to drink the health of his crowd, Second Otago. And it was easier to get drunk now than it was at the beginning of the War. At Sailly Sector, where they were pushed off from the Somme to relieve the Australians, there was nothing to think about but baby raids, fatigue duties, rats, lice, and colds. Trench boredom is something that gets into your bones, a deadly grey ache, and makes you feel you’d rather whoop it up with lemonade at a spinsters’ tea-party than sit at home and do nothing.
The boys hit on a pretty good way of getting liquor out of the estaminet when their pay was running low. Two or three of the big chaps who could keep their faces straight would tie puggarees round their hats, the distinguishing mark of the Military Police. Then they’d stalk into the estaminets and fine the frightened old Frenchmen for selling grog to soldiers after hours—which was a thing no estaminet-keeper in France ever refrained from doing. After that they’d go on to the next pub and spend the ‘fine’ on more liquor. Maybe that was the way Huie came by his jar of rum, maybe it wasn’t; but at all events he acted like a Christian about it and handed it out among the rest.
It was just luck that on the way back to the lines, Otago should mix it with the Canterbury crowd, and hard words lead on to a little trial of strength. Then again, when Starkie hit the Canterbury corporal, he hadn’t even noticed that the road was lined with those queer Froggy dykes—asphalt slopes stuck with pieces of broken glass and running down into ditches three feet deep, full of green slime that
didn’t look as though sanitary inspectors ever made much headway round about here. The corporal didn’t suffocate in the ditch, because two of his mates grabbed him by the ankles and pulled him out, but his face was as full of broken glass as a porcupine of quills, and the language he used warned Starkie that this was no place for a good woman’s son. So he took to his heels, and next morning, with Arthur Kelliher to keep him company, joined the volunteer squad who went off from the Otago lines to help the Canadians mine Messines Ridge.
Canadians are a queer crowd, and it seems they don’t mind living in dank green pools of water, working day long in the slimy tunnels where, listening through the ear-phones, you can hear the little tap-tap-tap of the frantic German picks, racing to finish their countermines. That tap-tap-tap isn’t so bad when you hear it on the wall of a prison cell. It means ‘I’m with you, boy, and to hell with the police!’ But when you hear it under the earth, tunnelling below Messines Ridge, it means, ‘I’ll get you, I’ll get you, I’ll get you!’—and it isn’t even just a threat—it’s a sort of crazy, clicking panic in case the other chap should touch off his mine first. All along the tunnel sentries with fixed bayonets were posted at a distance of four yards. For months and months it was nothing but yanking rotten sand-bags and clay out of the bowels of the earth, loading them along to the tunnel-mouths, where the huge spoil-dumps were camouflaged with green boughs and scrim so that the German fliers wouldn’t bomb the sappers in their tombs.