Passport to Hell

by Hyde, Robin

British headquarters was madder than the Germans; and though the little Chinks were locked up, they never took the grins off their tight mouths. I suppose that was the one time during the War they ever had a chance to hit back at the enemy who wiped out hundreds of them. All the same, one day I’d like to see a French Labour Corps sitting in a barbed-wire compound somewhere in the middle of China, playing tiddleywinks. Then it would be evens.

  There was some pretty stiff questioning as to where the Chinks learned to throw bombs, and though there was nothing actually known against me, I had the feeling that they were looking for me again. So I faded away to Bac St. Maur, and there ran into Colonel Hardy. Either he didn’t know I was supposed to be in Le Havre doing shot drill, or he’d forgotten. As soon as he saw me, he said, ‘Stark, isn’t it? Thirty men wanted for a raid tomorrow night, Stark.’ It was the first order I’d had in the ranks since the time they told me to forget about escape from the gaol.

  This time I saluted and said, ‘I’ll be with you, sir.’ So I was. I went back to the estaminet in town, first letting the boys know I wanted to join them when they went over. That night a young private dropped in at the estaminet and told me the time they were going over next evening. I sent back a message to my mates to say I’d be there when they wanted me. Next morning I went down to a little farm to visit two girls I’d met—Val and Blanche, their names were—and stopped there all day: milking cows, stooking oats, and turning a churn-handle with them like a farm boy, bossed about by their little old grandmother. Val and Blanche were just about the nicest girls I’d ever met, sweet and rose-cheeked as pippins. They fed me on new milk and dairy butter in pats and black bread in twisted loaves about a yard long. The French black bread looks pretty bad, but it’s got a nutty taste the boys took to once they were used to it.

  In the evening I said good-bye to the people at the farm and went along to the boys, keeping well out of the way of anyone with stripes on his sleeve. They handed me out white rags, same as they were wearing themselves to distinguish one another. All the others wore brass disks on their wrists, numbered from one to thirty. I hadn’t any disk, I was the orphan. At twenty minutes to twelve they started to file out of the trenches into No Man’s Land. The bombardment was on, and our side had been throwing trench-mortar shells at a tank and pillbox. The pillbox was what we had to raid. I was over in No Man’s Land before the thirty were out of the trench, because I didn’t know who was taking the lead with the raiding party—somebody, maybe, who’d tap me on the shoulder and say, ‘Back to the cooler for you, Stark.’

  When they got to the pillbox that part of it was all over: but Sergeant-Major Stevens grabbed me by the arm and said, ‘You son of a bitch, I’m going to send you up for killing a man in cold blood.’ I’d seen men killed myself in plenty dirtier ways than being knocked on the head with a rifle-butt as they came out of the pillbox. But I was trembling all over like a dog, and my head snapping, so I told him to dry up or I’d give give him the barrel. Then I saw a man start to crawl away over No Man’s Land. I didn’t know or care who he was, he was just somebody else to kill. Charlie Frane sings out, ‘Chuck it, he’s wounded’, and the same minute I harpooned him with my bayonet.

  Then I found myself walking along a trench with a little Hun, one of the seven prisoners. He wasn’t any more than up to my shoulder, and he kept wringing his hands and saying, ‘My poor brother! Oh, my poor brother!’—like those Bovril advertisements. It turned out his brother was the last man I’d hit on the head when he came out of the pillbox—and I knew he’d never get up again. The little chap pulled photographs out of his pocket and showed them to me when we got into the trench—howling all the time—pictures of a nice-looking young fellow sitting in front of his house quiet as anyone else, with two fat kiddies on his knees and a tall girl standing behind him looking proud as Punch.

  Oh God, of course I was sorry; wouldn’t anyone be sorry? But what was the use of it all by that time? Being sorry don’t bring people back to life. We were sent out there to kill; what in hell’s the use of pretending anything else? It turns my stomach when people bleat about cold-blooded killing. When did the Zepps stop slinging down their bombs because women and children weren’t expecting them? When did the poison-gas merchants act as warm-blooded as frogs? If you start you’ve got to go on with it.

  At Bac St. Maur I reported to Colonel Hardy. He wouldn’t take me back into the troops, but he gave me twenty francs and told me to go and get myself a uniform. I did that, and looked like a decent New Zealander again when I left the stores. By now it was after three in the morning, but I had a promise to keep, and I kept it. I went straight down to the little farm where I’d worked the day before. It was 3.30 when I got there, but the old lady was sitting up for me, as she’d told me she would. She had supper spread out on the kitchen table: a loaf of bread, thick-buttered, a funny sort of salad swimming in olive oil, those fat, pink sausages with bits of ham in them that the French use, and a bottle of vin blanc, which was a big touch for a lady old enough to be my grandmother. But I guess she knew what soldiers like.

  Val and Blanche were in bed, where they ought to be; but they heard Grannie talking to me in the kitchen, and by and by I saw their heads pop round the corner of the door, their eyes sleepy and their hair done up in braids. They wanted to hear about the raid, but I didn’t tell them anything much, especially not about ‘My poor brother, my poor brother!’ What’s the use? Then, when their blasted little ginger farm cockerels had begun to crow loud enough to bring the Boche fliers down on us, the old lady put me to bed. It was still dark, and she lighted me upstairs with her candle, walking in front of me and nodding as she counted the stairs. The passages upstairs were low and uneven, and I was sleepy enough to have broken my neck without her. She put me in a room with a pointed roof, the eaves sloping down so that there was just room enough to squeeze my bed in beneath them, and a diamond-shaped window was just opposite my nose. On the bed was one those quilts made out of scores and scores of coloured patches, and stuffed with goose-feathers. I guess lying in that bed was the same thing as lying on a cloud.

  The old lady acted as if I were about six; she just turned her back and hustled about while I got my things off, and when I was in bed, ready to sleep for a hundred years if I got the chance, she kissed me and said, ‘Bonne nuit, mon enfant’, which is ‘Good night, little one’ in the Froggy talk. From the smile on her withered old face as she lifted up the candle and went out you’d never have thought there was a war on a few miles away, or that I’d just come in dripping from it, as you might say … though my new clothes hid that.

  But the funniest thing about that peak-roofed room was the chamber—with great big pink roses around it in wreaths—which stood on top of the wash-stand as if they were terribly proud of it. At first when I saw that I just laughed, but then, as I was getting off to sleep, it began to look sort of familiar, and I remembered where I’d met nearly the same thing before. It was right back in the old Governor Grey Hotel days, when I was a kid…. I remembered they used to have some of those fancy devices in the best rooms for the guests, under wash-stands with marble tops. I used to think they were Christmas decorations, George and me being stuck with an old enamel jerry, and chipped at that. And I remember one day I sneaked into a guest-room and used one of those flowery affairs, and a maid we’d got—a Maori girl—saw me coming out and peached to my father … and how he lammed me. It was queer coming across the same thing here.

  The shells got too thick around that district, and the old lady and her grand-daughters packed up a little while later and went to Paris. I never saw them again.

  16 Rum for His Corpse

  LEFT, right, left, right, you motherless foals, you peelings off the muck-heap, you blooming fag-ends of soldiers! Lost your battalion, have you? Well, march along at the heels of your betters; men who’ve still got regiments. See that long white bridge ahead of you? Keep on going till you get to the other end. Halt! Get out your little pop-guns and fire ’em off till we�
��ve got the bridge mined and you’re told to come back again. What’s that moving white cloud of dust on the road? Yes, that’s the Huns, all right—the Uhlans leading the infantry; thousands of them coming up to make it hot for you. Oh yes, and they’ve got machine-guns for you, too! Want to get back to your own battalions? Should have thought of that before you left ’em. Got lost at the crossroads and came on to Albert, while the rest of New Zealand tramped by to Mailly-Malet, ten miles ahead! Well, there isn’t any cross-roads over that bridge, and now you’ve got to hold it till you’re told different, waifs and strays, as you are; otherwise the Hun’ll take Albert, that used to be a nice little town once upon a time, even if nowadays there’s nothing but starved pigs and fowls running loose about the streets, and not a bit o’ skirt to be seen within miles. Halt where you are. Eyes right! Now watch for the Hun coming. Yes, that’s him all right.

  Half-way over the bridge the wounded begin to drop in little bunches, knocked over by the machine-gun fire. They lay on the white planking, staring at the huge drop beneath through cracks in the sunbaked, worm-eaten wood. The word is given for the strays to retire—the bridge is mined. Those of the wounded who are still conscious know what is going to happen next. They writhe into sitting or kneeling positions, their eyes voice the old, speechless cry of the battlefields, ‘Don’t leave me behind, fellows! Hell, you can’t leave me here! They’re coming now!’ One minute before the mine explodes. The machine-guns play on the bridge as the Germans advance on Albert, and the men who live stumble over the bodies of the wounded and dying in their flight back to safety. Some of them are still on the bridge when its timbers thrust upwards in a great brown V, then snap in two, like pipe-stems. The Uhlans are blocked for the moment; the wounded men on the bridge—out of it, anyway.

  There’s a dead man in kilts lying on the outskirts of Albert Town. A big chap, he was, and dandy in his tartan and sporran and funny little forage cap. Wouldn’t look too bad on you, Starkie, and he don’t want it for himself any more. It’s all yours; help yourself. Maybe provost-marshals and military police won’t chivvy a man from place to place if he’s wearing the Scottie’s get-up. Got a big reputation, the Scotties have. Never heard of a Scottie with your sort of skin? Aw, hell! In times like these, who’s going to look at a man’s face? We’re moving back to the Somme, and they say this time it’s going to be a bigger show than the first. Just fancy that!

  The strays who can’t march with their battalions hang at the heels of the others as best they can, and feed on an army’s leavings. Three weeks, then, with the Black Watch and the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders to keep the half-dozen strays company—a great crowd, and tough as their own granite, with rawboned, high-coloured faces and grey eyes deeply sunken under their brows. They’re tough with a different kind of toughness from the New Zealand brand—talk less, move faster. The New Zealanders curse and spend a lot of time in the estaminets, so the Red Tabs say they haven’t any discipline; but when it comes to dying they’re as good as the rest.

  What’s wrong with the Scotties and a quiet life, anyhow? There’s usually bread, hash, black tea, and chocolate to be had if you hang about long enough. The height of Highland hospitality, except there aren’t any girls around here. Nothing much wrong with the Scotties, except that they aren’t my own crowd and I’m homesick. I want to get back. Say, soldier, where are the New Zealanders? Still at Mailly-Malet, camping in dugouts by a shell dump and waiting for the Hun to register a direct hit and blow them all to Kingdom Come? Good enough. Now we know where we’re going. Come on, boys, nobody don’t want us round these parts, we’re going to Mailly-Malet. Wait till you meet up with the New Zealanders. They’re a great crowd, they are. Better than these stiff-necks, with their porridge faces. Thank you, Mr Provost-Marshal. A letter to headquarters in wayside towns telling them for God’s sake to pass us along, all six of us, if they can’t break our necks in transit.

  It’s strange how all brewers turn out to be fat. But we get the better of them sometimes. When they had to run from the old brewery near Mailly-Malet, six miles off from the New Zealanders—who camp between a sugar refinery and a shell dump in musky, muddy dug-outs—they forgot to take their liquor along with them, or maybe they ran that fast from the Huns they just couldn’t carry the baby. Think of it, boys, a brewery for a billet. This is better than those pretty little sties at Neuve Eglise where Mr Something Something used to keep his pet porkers.

  The Yankees at Boulogne who used to turn up their noses at good beer and sing out for those pesky little thimblefuls of red-hot liqueurs, never imagined anything like this. No, sir, that they didn’t! If they’d imagined anything like this we’d have had the American Army right down on our tail this minute—instead of sitting here snug and comfortable, just the six of us, and as many mates as we care to call in. We can be the big men around here. Wouldn’t do to let the Yankees know we could bathe ourselves in champagne and chartreuse if we wanted to here; those Yanks don’t take so much interest in winning the War, anyhow. They’re disappointed in the French Maries. They say we’ve taken the bloom off them.

  Taps turn on from the great wine-vats, flooding the cellars that you reach by little twisting passages whose cold flagstones ring deep and hollow under your feet. The wine drips ruby out of its soaked red-brown wood. In some of the cellars where new wine has been stored you can hear the song of the bubbles by putting your ear to the cask—a little hissing, fizzing song that says: ‘Let me get inside your veins, soldier; I’ll soon brighten things up.’ But that new stuff isn’t worth drinking. What you want is the old wine that’s been rocked to sleep these fifty years or more and runs now, deep and slow, thick as blood, inches deep, feet deep, into the stone floors of the cellars. Roll up your pants, bend down, and you can drink like a dog from a stream. There used to be a Roman girl called Poppy something that took her bath in she-asses’ milk, and Nero kicked her to death for it. Quite right too. Milk never was any good; but wine’s a different matter, especially if you mix the red and the white. The air in the cellars is heavy as poppies. It smells as if all the grapes in the world, and all the sunshine, had curdled together here in the darkness.

  There’s one cellar at the far end that’d been flooded before we ever got to it; and by the stone corridors you reach a shallow bank of floor sloping down to the steps where the tide of red wine is slow, luscious, and thick against the edges. Pretty good bath-room for the troops, this one—and no law against drinking your bath-water, either. Say, who was it went and turned the bath-water into wine? Come along to the edge, boys! … God, there’s something pretty dark over there! Fetch a torch, one of you. That’s right…. Now hold it over the middle of the pool. Lend us your bayonet, Shorty. God, I can’t even begin to touch bottom in this place! I’m going mad, maybe. Whoever heard of wine six feet deep in a cellar? This place gives me the bloody creeps! Hold that torch higher! Wait … now I’ve got it! Hang on to me at the rear and I’ll fish it to the edge.

  God, you’d think he was leaning back in an arm-chair, wouldn’t you, floating in all that red, his head tipped backwards, his hands stretched out, so comfy and peaceable? He’s been here ten days or more, or he wouldn’t have floated up to us like that. He’s a Maori, poor devil; can’t you see his brown face pickled in the wine? I dare say he’ll stay like this till the end of the War! No, I’m not going to take him out and bury him. I don’t like corpses in my drink. This place gives me the creeps!

  Can’t you see what’s happened? He found this place by himself, and he wasn’t letting on. He got drunk in one of the higher cellars, maybe. Then he came down here without a light and turned the tap of the wine-vat on. It began to leak out, red and thick and heavy-scented, and presently he felt it splashing around him. He must have thought: ‘Lovely, that is…. Oh, Mother, home was never like this!’ So he drank some more—and more after that; and then he felt kind of queer, and went round in the darkness turning the taps on, pressing his ear against the wood to hear the song of the wine. But he never hear
d it, because the wine is old and sleepy and deadly, like a cobra.

  It waited for him till it was beginning to get deep. Then: ‘You son of a bitch,’ it says, ‘I’ll teach you to come wading in here with your muddy boots and your pants not even rolled up! Do you think I was put to sleep for the likes of you?’ He began to get stupid, and the air was a soft, dainty reek, hundreds of years old and wicked. He groped for the steps, missed them, pitched down on his face. Maybe he went to sleep then, with his face just out of the bath-water, or maybe he struggled and couldn’t find the way out. The wine went on running and running, emptying itself over him, over the whole War…. I’ll bet wine doesn’t like the War, it likes to be sipped in little fiddling drops, just like small rubies set in old crystal glasses. So it got back on him, covering him up. He looks peaceful enough, anyhow. Come along out of this and leave it alone with him. This place’s haunted.

  Living in a brewery with a corpse pickled down below and most of the good stuff drunk isn’t so good after a bit. Better to camp out on No Man’s Land and keep near the boys. That young Captain Frere, he’s a pretty good sort. He’d take a man back if he could. The strays need never go short of rations while they’re near the Otago dug-outs. One good turn deserves another. See that hillock out in No Man’s Land, Captain? I was lying on my stomach near there last night, and I’ve got pretty good reason to think it’s a Hun strongpoint. Very good, Stark. That’s a job for the bombers. Half a dozen to train at bombing, downstairs in a dug-out.

  But, oh God, these boys are dumb! If they’d seen the way the little Chinks picked up the knack of it, went ahead and cleaned up the enemy without a word of argument or a mother to guide them, these slowbellies down in the dug-out would blush yellow for shame. Not that way! Look, this!—look—see?

  Who was to know that Alec Suter, just as they were getting ready to file out, would say again: ‘Where do I go, Starkie?’ That was the twentieth time, and the boys all keyed up. Well, there was only one word said in reply to Alec; and if an automatic did happen to go off and leave a souvenir in the fleshy part of his thigh, it was only what the big gaby was looking for. But now there’s hell to pay. Captain Frere is white with rage—you’d think he actually loved that big mutt; and the raid’s all off.