But the charge of not checking her sources sufficiently haunted her and we find her defending herself to Eric Ramsden in similar vein over Check to Your King, her account of the life of Charles, Baron de Thierry. She had had neither the opportunity nor the money to travel, she argues, and thus could not consult the archives in Sydney. ‘However, Charles kept copies of most of his more important documents and treasured up hoards of newspaper remarks—kindly and otherwise—and I felt at the end of my work that I understood his own point of view pretty well, which was the only thing pretended for “Check to Your King”. I am not a historian, and don’t want to be one. It is the individual and the mind moving behind queer, unreasonable actions which seem to me to produce a good deal of the fun of this old world; and I think that any writer has the right to interpret this as best he can ….’34 Both John A. Lee and Downie Stewart were well aware that Passport to Hell contained a number of errors, indeed Stewart took trouble to point out some of them and to consider the question of how far Passport was ‘a true record of the events recorded’. He concluded that for the period of his knowledge of the events ‘they are told with such substantial accuracy that any minor corrections of fact would not alter the main tenor of the story’. Stewart was, moreover, conscious of the imaginative resources needed to make a person live in literature: ‘The average normal citizen is in the habit of regarding any strange or unusual individual as what is called a “Character”, and of saying that “some one ought to write him up”. But people who are given to this line of thought often fail to realise what a difficult task it is to make such “characters” live in a book with such vividness that the reader feels that they are real persons and that he must have met them at some time.’35 Robin Hyde he thought had done that most successfully. While Lee wrote to her in 1938 of ‘your “Passport to Hell” which was so amazingly correct psychologically if the graphic side was out of joint occasionally; and, of course, to get the experience true and vital rather than the mere geography was the greater achievement’.36

Perhaps the most interesting thing about Starkie was that although a seemingly unique figure, he was also in some senses the quintessential colonial soldier. The troops from the Dominions were noted both for their magnificent fighting qualities and their casual attitude toward discipline. The two aspects were not unconnected. As Denis Winter points out the British Old Army endeavoured to turn men into cyphers, breaking them down by endless drill and repetitive burdensome trivial tasks so that they obeyed without question: ‘As long as a soldier could be guaranteed to obey all orders, he could be considered “trained”.’37 The brilliant Australian general Monash knew what was appropriate for his men: ‘very stupid comment has been made on the discipline of the Australian soldier. That was because the very purpose and conception of discipline have been misunderstood. It is after all only a means to an end, and that end is to secure the co-ordinated action among a large number of individuals for achieving a definite purpose. It does not mean obsequious homage to superiors nor servile observance of forms and customs nor a suppression of the individuality.’38 The colonials had proportionately nine times the number of men in military prison than had the British and man for man they ‘fought better, were better adapted to the longueurs of trench fighting and supplied the storm troops of the B.E.F. to the end’.39 This is a point made nicely by Hyde’s editor J. G. McLean in his review of Passport for the New Zealand Observer:

Stark was a private from beginning to end. Anything which marked him out for promotion or a decoration was as quickly cancelled by some breach of discipline. He was one of the light-hearted roystering crew of Diggers who formed the backbone of the N.Z.E.F., who lent the sharp edge of valour to its attacks, but chafed under restraint when out of the line. There were thousands more like Starkie; not so wild and lawless, perhaps, but sharing with him a rooted distaste for formal authority as represented by brass hats, military police, and other martial phenomena who could stop a soldier’s leave, prevent him from drinking beer when he was thirsty, and march him across the desert in seemingly unnecessary parades.40

In his article ‘In Parenthesis among the War Books’, William Blissett outlines the two poles of war literature—the spare narrative simplicity and symbolic starkness of Henry Williamson’s Patriot’s Progress on one hand and the self-conscious In Parenthesis of David Jones with its extraordinary density of literary and liturgical allusions on the other.41 Hyde’s portrait of the outlaw from New Zealand is much closer to the powerful simplicity of Patriot’s Progress though she is not unaware of that larger context of war, literature, and religion which almost overwhelms Jones. Passport has greater intensity and immediacy than the two other New Zealand books from World War I with which it may be compared: Aitken’s Gallipoli to the Somme (1963) and O. E. Burton’s The Silent Division (1935). Burton’s book (which Hyde admired, terming it ‘one of the greatest testimonies against war that I have read’42) endeavours to ‘place’ the almost unimaginable experience of war by providing epigraphs to each chapter (he follows Frederic Manning in this) from a whole range of war literature from Kingsley’s The Heroes to Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front. But the decision not to give names removes personalities and diminishes the necessary specificity of the work. In Gallipoli to the Somme, the events waited forty-seven years for publication, having been recollected through youthful notes. The result is a beautiful and humane perspective on the horrors of that campaign.

Why did Robin Hyde write Passport to Hell? Initially no doubt from her sense of the need for social justice. Her journalism shows her defending the Maoris at Orakei, returned servicemen, discharged prisoners, prison reform, indeed all those pushed aside, oppressed, wounded, or ignored by Society, and Starkie provides a perfect focus for these interests. In addition, as a child she had been fascinated by the War (her father was a sapper in the N.Z.E.F., 13th Reinforcements and her mother’s brother was killed at Gallipoli) and wrote of having been torn apart by ‘our weekly “war lessons”’ and as one ‘who gave to that grim uniform the unthinking hero worship which may have helped all modern men to despise all modern women’.43 In Starkie she may have perceived her ‘mask’, the polar opposite, both an element of herself and an image of New Zealand.