Passport to Hell - The Story of James Douglas Stark, Bomber, Fifth Reinforcement, New Zealand Expeditionary Forces

Auckland University Press, 1986.

Passport to Hell is the story of James Douglas Stark - Starkie - and his war. Journalist and novelist Robin Hyde came across Starkie while reporting in Mt Eden Gaol in the 1930s and immediately knew she had to write his queer true terrible story. Born in Southland and finding himself in early trouble with the law, the young Starkie tricked his way into a draft in 1914 by means of a subterfuge involving whisky and tea. He had a subsequent checkered career in Egypt, Gallipoli, Armentieres, the Somme, and Ypres. Hyde took the raw horrors, respites, and reversals of Starkie's experiences and composed a work of literature much greater than a mere documentary of war. She portrays a man carousing in the brothels of Cairo and the estaminets of Flanders; looting a dead man's money-belt and filching beer from the Tommies; attempting to shoot a sergeant through a lavatory door in a haze of absinthe, yet carrying his wounded captain back across No Man's Land; a man recommended for the V.C. and honored for his bravery - but also subject to nine court martials. It is a portrait of a singular individual who has also been described as the quintessential New Zealand soldier. Robin Hyde was one of New Zealand's true literary trailblazers, and in this book she redefined the parameters of novel and memoir.