D. Stark was not born on July 4, 1898, as Robin Hyde believes; he was born on July 17, 1894. He was not a boy of 16 when he left this country but a young man of nearly 21.

In conclusion, I have taken every precaution which has suggested itself to me to verify the facts I have stated but unless those facts are challenged I do not propose to carry on a correspondence which might tend quite wrongly to suggest some animosity towards either Starkie or Robin Hyde. My protest is simply this. Let realism be truth, the whole truth if you will, but above all, nothing but the truth.31

The only response to such letters is the asking of those unanswerable questions, What is Realism? What is Truth? Robin Hyde’s concern was for the work’s effectiveness, as a portrait of Starkie and as an impression of war. She was outraged at the meanness of the attack, and replied to Tait’s first letter with a long defence of the book’s accuracy and a statement of her purpose as a writer:

I trust your columns may be open to a reply to Mr John Tait’s attack on my book ‘Passport to Hell’.

It is perfectly obvious that there may be minor (mostly very minor) inaccuracies of spelling or detail in a book written by an author who has never had opportunities to visit the scenes recorded, and whose material was gathered from a soldier (sixteen years old when he left this country) who never kept a diary. In addition, though Starkie attended several Invercargill schools before at twelve years of age, he was sent on to the Burnham Industrial School, and though I found him very far from unintelligent, his spelling does not seem to have been all it might. However, I don’t think the fact that the soldier’s spelling was here and there substituted for the schoolmaster’s is likely to trouble many people.

Starkie was unquestionably at what the soldiers called ‘the battle of the Wazza’, Mr John Tait ‘the battle of the Wasr’, and some other authorities ‘the battle of the Wazir’. May I quote what your paper says in an adjoining column, reviewing another book? ‘The detail is so precise, and the narrative concerned with the surrounding country all so exact, that the reader must accept it all.’ If any inexactitude of mine as to date or number of contingent has confused Mr Tait, I should think that by reading the chapter he might have convinced himself of its essential reality. At all events, the fifty or more English reviews I have had of ‘Passport to Hell’ nowhere seem to question the book’s authenticity as a broad record of war experiences—not a war history—and I suppose their staffs must contain a few men not unacquainted with Egypt, Gallipoli and France in 1914–1918.

It is curious that if my book is, as Mr Tait says, ‘worthless as a record of fact’, the most favourable reviews and comments should have come from returned soldiers. In addition to personal letters, (some confirming actual incidents), the Imperial War Museum, in writing to thank me for a copy of ‘Passport to Hell’, which was sent on request, refers to the book as one of the most interesting New Zealand war records in its possession. Mr John A. Lee, a returned soldier of distinction, said when interviewed by The Standard that ‘Passport to Hell’ was the most important New Zealand war book yet published, and made special mention of its realism. As Mr Tait has chosen to question my taste (though I did not know that war was ever in good taste), I may quote a sentence of Mr Lee’s: ‘Some people will be shocked because Robin Hyde sends a soldier to a brothel, but will cheer when the troops swing by to their death.’ Writing in the Otago Daily Times, the Hon. Downie Stewart, who for part of the war years was attached to the same battalion as Starkie, says that for this period ‘the authenticity of the book is such that nobody could cavil at it’, and later that ‘it is hard to believe the author was not at the front’. I quote in both cases from memory, but anyone who cares to look up the reviews will find that I have in no way exaggerated. Nor do I wish to advertise my own work, but Mr Tait’s suggestion that because of a few trivial errors Starkie’s record and my book are practically a work of the imagination, is so unfair and untrue that it cannot be left unanswered. Does he imagine that the experienced soldiers mentioned above would be taken in by any plausibility?

It is true that I could have written to Starkie’s schoolmasters in order to ‘correct’ my view of his character, though this is the first time I have ever heard that an author is supposed to take this course. I could also have written to every policeman, warder, prison superintendent, sergeant-major, military police official, and innocent if officious bystander with whom Starkie came into conflict. But I didn’t, and I would never be likely to do so. My object in writing the book was not to portray the outside world looking at Starkie, but to portray Starkie looking at the outside world. After all, that outside view, especially of any person estranged from society by lawlessness, sickness or poverty, means so little. If I have any ambition as a prose writer, it is to write from the inner centre of what people think, hope and feel, and of that Interpreter’s House, those set in authority over us know curiously little, because they have no humility ….32

However, she received support over the ‘Battle of the Wazza’ for ‘Tano Fama’ wrote in, explaining that there were two battles of the Wazza, ‘and the second one was in the early days after the arrival of the 5th Reinforcements. This is probably the one to which “Starkie” referred. In defence of Robin Hyde, may I say that far from exaggerating the exploits of this wild member of the New Zealand Expeditionary Force, there were many many vivid incidents which could be told, but were omitted by her. Is it not true that Douglas Stark carried in the Rt. Hon. Gordon Coates when he was wounded in the field of battle? I believe it was ….’33 But a glance through the notes to this edition will reveal that Tait’s general observations on Starkie’s inventions, distortions, and slips of memory, are not inaccurate. Hyde followed Stark closely, expanding from time to time from the merest of hints but making very few changes. She darkens the portrait a little by having Starkie steal where her notes indicate he did not, and she insists on his youth throughout, even, in the first version, making him almost absurdly younger than he had claimed to be.