by Hyde, Robin
This little Lark Hill, where the draft got held up overnight on their way from Sling Camp, just over four miles from the thousands and thousands of huts where soldiers from all over the Empire are parked, waiting their turn for a go at the Huns—it looks as if nothing much had ever happened there. Maybe one morning a lark got up and sang extra special, and that’s the big event it was named for. Might be worse at that. Anyhow, there never was a lark like the lark of Lark Hill that the New Zealanders gave birth to, stopping on their way from the camp.
It wasn’t that we didn’t intend to go quietly, having had about enough in England of Villains and Bobbies of every sort whatsoever. But what could the draft do, when half Sling Camp came along after them howling like mad dervishes, ‘Hey, soldiers, aren’t you going to give us no send-off nor nothing?’
So the send-off started at a hotel near Lark Hill; but all the same the window-frames and the blinds stayed whole, though eventually there wasn’t a single bottle in that pub that didn’t pass out of life by means of a broken neck. The boys were mad but sober. Presently bottles seemed too fiddling for them, so we got nine great hog’s-heads out of the cellar and smashed them in with axes. After that the boys drank out of hats, boots, anything else they could grab hold of. A roll-call wasn’t possible that night, the Fourth Company being so mixed with the Eighth that no soldier would have presumed to call his soul or his pants his own.
In the morning when the company marched to Southampton they were still mad drunk and singing all the way: songs I never suppose old England will hear the likes of any more. When they met the motor-transports they held them up and smashed all the head-lamps with their rifle butts. But when we landed in Southampton, one of England’s slow grey drizzles was there to dampen the boys’ spirits, as though the country was crying just a little because we were leaving her, but not very much.
We were shipped for Boulogne on Troopship 17; first to One Blanket Hill, near Boulogne—famous for snow, blizzards, hail, wind, sleet, frostbites, one blanket per man, and a Green Lamp district where you could get a lot of sympathy from long-haired friends if you wanted it. Then on to the New Zealand base camp at Etaples. It’s queer, but once you were back on French soil the rest all seemed like a dream. I couldn’t believe it had happened—Florrie Courtney, Sweet Alice, the Red-Headed Wonder, and the forty-two days’ A.W.O.L. Only Sunshine used to keep on sending me fifties of cigarettes, so I knew she’d really existed. We were going to Bapaume now for the second time—after that, maybe Ypres, maybe the Somme again. It was sure to be merry hell whatever else they called it.
19 Last Reveille
THE LINE of the second Somme could be told by the black smoke and towering flares of munition dumps, as the German army, rolling back in thousands, destroyed its munitions along the road of its retreat. The hunters that followed marched straight into death—death from the futile, blind, exasperated defiance of a terribly broken army; death that came billowing over them in the sickly green and yellow clouds of poison gas, in the stand made by hidden snipers and machine-gunners guarding the retreat of their main bodies, in the flesh-eating horror of the flammenwerfers. Sometimes the German line held, and the forces locked. Since the beginning of the world man had never of his own powers staged a drama of such destructive magnificence. Here was the very climax of hate and defiance turned into steel, flame, and powdery vapours, or marching on, flesh disguised from its humanity in uniforms of sodden khaki and field-grey.
Jack Benshaw was always talking to the other men about the girl he left behind him in London, and from what he said she must have been some girl. He had her photograph always with him. She was just a kid, her head tilted back from a long, slender throat, and a mist of chiffon hiding the sweet cleft of her breasts. The eyes laughed at you, and the frame of light hair about her little face was as misty as the chiffon.
‘She’s such a kid, it seems a shame she had to fall for a tough soldier,’ Jack Benshaw said; ‘but I’m marrying that kid as soon as we get back to England. I’d have done it before we left, but I didn’t want to turn a little kid who never knew a thing before I met her into a common soldier’s widow. Sometimes when I think of her I feel a dog for ever having come near her. She’s pretty enough to marry a duke if she felt like it, and now she’s nothing but a soldier’s sweetheart.’
About nine days after they got back to France, Jack Benshaw said, ‘Come along with me and bring your rifles’, to half a dozen of the boys.
‘Can’t you take it easy, Jack? Let a fellow rest till he has to go out and pot at the Huns.’
‘Come along and bring your rifles,’ repeated Jack.
They went with him over the top of a little hill, and there, nailed to a tree, was his much-prized photograph of the girl who didn’t know anything till Jack Benshaw met her. He’d nailed it up very carefully, so that the nails didn’t damage the young throat, laughing eyes, soft hair.
‘Get to a range of fifty yards,’ he ordered, ‘and shoot the ——to bits.’
Then the rifles cracked, one after another, and when they’d finished Jack Benshaw’s girl was nothing but a black, grinning hole against the tree. After that Jack went and gave himself up, but he might have done better to keep a bullet for himself, for he wasn’t one of those that got better.
Seventeen days before the Armistice they were marching in the German line of retreat through the battle area. The bombers were together, and Starkie had just landed his Iron Cross, having shot down the German who wouldn’t hand it over quietly. Then a shell landed beside the bombers, and only one man of them was left standing. He was Peter Macey, and for a little while, when he saw what had happened, he ran up and down tearing his hair and saying, ‘What’ll I do, Starkie, what’ll I do now?’
‘Go and win the bloody war yourself,’ advised Starkie, who was perfectly conscious, but tight-lipped with pain.
Four German prisoners jolted and bumped his stretcher back to the Second Otago lines. They dropped him as they reached the dressing-station, and from his stretcher he put a bullet through one man’s arm. Then his active service was all over for the time being.
At the casualty clearing station thousands of wounded men lay on their stretchers waiting their turn. It was just luck whether or no they bled to death before the M.O. could reach them. Somme was going down in a red sunset. Blood soaking through clumsy, inadequate bandages, Starkie lost himself in the vast conglomeration of groans, jolting ambulances, disinfectant reeks, that was Somme’s harvest, gathered and ripe for England.
When Starkie got to hospital he didn’t feel like a man any more. In some odd way his wounds, which had gone septic on the way over and blackened his clothes with poison, seemed to him a kind of disgrace. He couldn’t reason, he only knew that no woman was going to look at those wounds. The hospital was staffed with woman nurses. The doctors didn’t come, and it was no wonder, for the whole hospital was an insane kaleidoscope of men torn up and broken like trees in a storm—writhing limbs, terrified faces, open mouths and open eyes like great black caves in the surface of their flesh. He couldn’t stay there and let the women lay hands on him. He crept to a door at one end of the long room, caught a pair of crutches that had been abandoned by some cripple, and swung himself down the steps and into the beating blackness that was London. As he went laboriously, the blood from neglected wounds in arms and legs ran down his clothing. A blur of swimming lights, clanging street-sounds, and enormously high stone buildings, London led him to the one little alley. Like a dying dog, he crawled up the stairs into Florrie Courtney’s room. He could hear the gramophone playing the music of the Pink Lady Waltz. Lying in the hall outside, he thrust one end of a crutch against her door, and heard the gramophone needle run down as she listened—perhaps frightened—there inside her warm little room.
The door opened, and Florrie stood before him, her eyes wide and startled, her hair loose over a fleecy pink dressing-gown. There wasn’t any other man with her, as he might have feared if he’d had reason enough to be afraid
of anything but the touch of strangers.
‘It’s me, Florrie,’ he whispered.
She stared down at him, and he could tell she didn’t know who he was. Then suddenly she did know. She clapped her hands to her mouth and started shrieking, the abrupt, horrible little shrieks of a woman in hysterics. As abruptly she stopped and fell on her knees beside him, sobbing. ‘Oh, you poor old thing, you poor old thing!’ she moaned, pulling his head over so that it lay against her breast.
Very vaguely he remembered that strangers did get him after all. He heard Florrie’s voice, high and far away, crying, ‘For God’s sake, go easy with him on those stairs!’ He was lying on a flat, white bed, an ambulance stretcher. After that it became a matter of dreading the times for his dressings—thrice daily. The little tubes dug into his flesh, groin, right arm, right leg, draining the poison away and still the doctor shook his head whenever he came round. Outside his window, though he could not know it, stretched the green fields and little grey river of Walton-on-Thames.
Everyone was in league against him. They wanted to take his arm off and turn him out a cripple. Six times they operated on it, chipping off little bits of rotten bone, leaving new bluish-red slivers on his flesh where the surgeon’s knife opened it up.
There was a New Zealand doctor in the hospital, a Major from Taranaki. Starkie told him one day what the others were trying to do to him. At first the Major pursed up his mouth and shook his head like the rest. Then he said, ‘Well, we’ll have one more go at it, Starkie.’ And Starkie woke up to find himself lying in a very queer position, his arm and leg slung up so that they pointed at the ceiling. They still persecuted him with the fiendish little tubes, but the pain began to grow less. The Major said, ‘I think you’ll do now, Starkie.’ He was the inventor of ‘Bipp’, an intolerable stuff with a smell that was used all through the war hospitals. And everyone knew the Major was proud as a kid of his awful ‘Bipp’. You had only to say, ‘Great stuff, that ointment, Doc!’ to get a smile out of him.
Nine days after he came to the Walton-on-Thames hospital, the outside world went mad. Whistles and sirens shrieked in the distance. Near at hand a factory hooter kept up an enormous, incessant toot. The voices, the laughing, crying, crazy voices, hurled themselves by outside, out in the rain and the wind of an England suddenly lit up with delight, a black November cavern where they’d flicked on the electric button and everything went golden.
Nurses, doctors, all the patients who could hobble, they all deserted the ship and ran outside to cheer. ‘Back in a minute, soldiers, be good.’ Laughing faces, with the tears running down them. Clumsy hands, waving anything they could get hold of for a flag. You could imagine London’s face uplifted, that grim, blackened old face which has seen so many hard centuries; and into London’s stone eyes, into London’s stone tresses, into London’s stern-lipped stone mouth, floating and falling the rosy cloud of the confetti. All the young voices wreathing round and round London, a glorious branch of flowers twined round an old altar. Soldiers: the blind walking straight as if they saw, the lame standing erect, their faces shining, their wan eyes proud. Somebody patting the stone lions in Trafalgar Square. For another hundred years, maybe, old lions, for another hundred years. All’s well, Admiral.
Send him victorious,
Happy and glorious,
Long to reign over us,
God save our King.
Nothing florid about it, nothing to set the blood dancing in the veins, as does the air of the Marseillaise. But now, with millions on millions of faces lifted to sing it, faces with wet eyes and open, singing mouths, it has majesty. It is like a great wave booming against a rock, the rock of London. Still stand, rock, and the wave of a people’s soul pours over you. Send him victorious….
‘Oh, God, Paddy, we’ve got to do something about this. We can’t lie here like fishy-eyed, clammy-faced corpses in the bloody morgue.’
‘Well, you and I’ll celebrate too, Starkie.’
Paddy Mahoney, a Wellington soldier with one foot amputated, tore off his splints. In the ward the cripples ripped up their pillows, dug the flock out of mattresses, and had the air flying like a snowstorm with the only confetti their thwarted patriotism could lay claws on.
‘Ah, Mother of God, the throat on me dry as a politician’s heart!’ groaned Paddy. ‘Where would the little sisters be keeping the medical supplies of liquor, now, do you think?’
They found the medical supplies of liquor, including two bottles of Three Star brandy and one of stout. When the doctors and nurses returned the cripples were sleeping the sleep of the unjust. The only sequel was that in the morning Paddy woke up with the wrong sort of head on him, quarrelled bitterly with Starkie over the proportioning of the brandy, and tried to drown him in the bath.
On Christmas Eve they sailed from Southampton. Starkie was down in the hold with the Maori Pioneers, getting by as one of them and joining in their songs until somebody recognized him and dragged him aloft again. Nine out of ten among the Maoris had contracted Bright’s Disease, and their eyes were badly affected, but they sang better and laughed more than the rest of the hospital ship put together. Christmas Day broke in storm. The men were served out a beer ration at dinner, but with one tremendous roll the ship voted prohibition, sending beer-bottles and men crashing in heaps under their tables. The ship was loaded with unopened boxes of gifts for the wounded, travelling back to New Zealand. The men tricked the keys out of a sister, got into the store-room, rifled the boxes and strutted about in knitted socks, mufflers, and with pockets full of cigarettes and chocolates for the rest of the trip.
The Yankee authorities turned out a banquet for the hospital ship at Panama, and those able to get ashore found it very fruity. Replete with meat and drink, they lolled back in their chairs, gazing with brotherly love at America’s lean and hungry look. ‘Didn’t we win the War?’ demanded a Yankee. ‘Too bloody right you won the War,’ cooed a one-legged soldier. ‘Come over and win the next one for us too. We like it.’
The Yankees drank mostly a stuff called White Mule because it had the biggest kick in the United States. Some of the troops had a hang-over till they landed again at Colon, and there they got more White Mule from more Yankees. Then a fight developed between the Colon darkies and the wounded men, and four cripples—of whom Starkie was one—kept the pass by wielding their crutches like battle-axes till the Spanish police and a salvage party dashed down, cursing, to rescue them. Starkie landed back in New Zealand still wearing a black eye.
Last port out, one of the boys who’d lived like a hermit right through the War—he had a girl of his own in New Zealand—went on shore and celebrated on White Mule like the rest. He was late back, and everybody laughed at him, until three days later, when the ship was getting near port. Land was in sight, just a faint blue line along the horizon, above it floating the band of silver which made the old Maori canoe-explorers call New Zealand Aotearoa Land of the Long White Cloud.
St. Anthony stood at the deck-rail, watching till land was clear. Then he looked over his shoulder and smiled at the boys. ‘Well, good-bye,’ he said, and was over the rail before anyone could reach him. He must have weighted his pockets, too, for he sank like a stone.
There was a lot of cheering when the ship docked at Auckland, but what the men wanted for the most part, even the ones who were dying, was beer. The hospitals were full up. From Wellington some of them were sent down to the Dunedin hospital, and just five, an overflow, went back to the queer, desolate loneliness of old Trentham camp, its long burrows of trenches and little canteens still showing, but alive no longer with crowding men and shouted laughter.
Queer … queer …. Even big Jim McLeod, ‘Fleshy’, they used to call him, didn’t come back to New Zealand. He got right through Armentières and the Somme, with nothing but a comfortable Blighty wound. Then when he was wearing his blue coat, he went to a football game in England, and that wet climate of theirs slid like a snake into his shirt and coiled itself round his lungs.
He was dead in twenty-four hours of pneumonia, which, when you come to think of it, seems a damn’ silly way for a big man like Fleshy McLeod to die. Where was Tent Eight in that empty row where the moonlight scarcely showed how the ground had been scarred by tent-pegs, broken up into trenches, drill compounds, and little barbed-wire enclosures for the prisoners, so short a time ago? It seemed impossible to Starkie, looking down from the hospital window, that nobody was going to come along with a fixed bayonet and march him off behind the barbed wire of the clink. Dirty job, a guard’s. He’d been a guard just once himself at Trentham, and the day was hot, so when the poor beggars began to complain, ‘Ah, have a heart, Starkie! Can’t we just go over to the barber’s and get a smoke, under guard?’ he had done his best for them. Marched them all down to Wellington, and of course they’d come back soused, which meant field punishment for Starkie. (‘Come on, Starkie, be a good sport.’) But he didn’t worry a lot about that. Everything … life even … is field punishment, except for those rare moments when you’re in love with a nice girl, or having fun with the boys, and no shellfire to interrupt you.
You get back into peace, and the little chaps, the civvies—grown suddenly important—stick out their chests and their pocket-books, and hustle you worse than the Huns ever did. You have your mates, girl or boy. In time they forget you, or die, or are changed before your eyes, so that going to them isn’t going home anymore. But apart from your mates, the world just speaks to you in a series of orders: ‘Present arms!’ it shouts. ‘You black bastard, your rifle’s muddy and I don’t like the look of you, anyhow! Right about face! Mark time! Hats off in the orderly-room! Halt! Do you know your charge?’