Passport to Hell by Hyde Robin

Author:Hyde, Robin [Hyde, Robin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781869405243
Publisher: Auckland University Press
Published: 2011-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

11 Suicide Club

IT WAS all right in the front-line trenches until some fool of an officer with the Third Australians, who had followed along behind the New Zealanders to Armentières, got ambitious and woke the Germans up with a packet of shells. After that, just when two days of quiet had begun to make the boys fond of their new home, Brother Boche let them have it. The veterans of the Gallipoli campaign found out the difference between German and Turk when the minenwerfer shells started to land in the trenches. The concussion alone was enough to knock a man silly, and things were too busy for nervous breakdowns to be permitted round about Armentières. When the ground had stopped rocking you could crawl along and find great holes as big as houses torn out of the earth. If any man had chanced to occupy the spot the minenwerfers picked out for their landing-ground it wasn’t worth while trying to pick up the bits.

For a solid two hours hand-grenades, shells, and trench-mortar shots smacked into the New Zealand lines, and after that the Germans spent a happy night sending up flares, absinthe green and bright yellow, fifty at a time. Their parachute flares sailed grandly up into the sky and hung aloft, blazing for ten minutes, giving them plenty of time to attend to any of the boys who had happened to be out on No Man’s Land with the wiring-parties or on patrol duty.

Tent Eight broke up its old company for good the third day out from Armentières. Farmer Giles went off with a bullet through his shoulder; Ginger Sheeth was carried away writhing and groaning, both hips smashed; and Stuttering Bob Butts went down with a shattered ankle. All Blighty ones, and poor old Goliath dead long ago. Fleshy McLeod and Starkie came through unwounded with Paddy Bridgeman and Arthur Kelliher to keep them cheerful. Then Starkie picked up a new pal, Jackie MacKenzie, who made up in cheek what he lacked in weight.

Jackie was about knee-high to a duck, a thin little shaver with the merriest brown eyes in the lines, and the pertest tongue. He’d enlisted years under age in a false name—Williams, his correct and lawful title was—to get away from fond parents who would have held him back. It wasn’t only his youth—he was sixteen, not so much younger than Starkie—but the nerve of him and the speed with which his thin little body wriggled out of the dug-outs at night to join in any fun on No Man’s Land that happened to be going on.

Finally Paddy, Fleshy, Starkie, and Arthur Kelliher, who was as good as one of the boys, more especially if the party were headed for a raid on the estaminet, decided that something had to be done about Jackie. He was formally adopted as mascot, and told he’d get the tail lammed off him if he went sticking his nose into danger. Jackie accepted it all with a twinkle in his brown eyes.

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