Cupid in Africa

by Percival Christopher Wren

  CHAPTER XI_Food and Feeders_

  Rightly or wrongly, Bertram gathered the impression, as he strolled aboutthe Camp, that this was not a confident and high-spirited army, drunkwith the heady fumes of a debauch of victory. The demeanour of theIndian Sepoys led him to the conclusion, just or unjust, that they had“got their tails down.” They appeared weary, apprehensive, evendespondent, when not merely apathetic, and seemed to him to be distinctlywhat they themselves would call _mugra_—pessimistic and depressed.

  The place alone was sufficient to depress anybody, he freely admitted, ashe gazed around at the dreary grey environs of this little British_pied-à-terre_—grey thorn bush; grey grass; grey baobab trees (likehideous grey carrots with whiskerish roots, pulled up from the ground andstood on end); grey shell-strewn mud; grey bushwood; grey mangroves; greysky. Yes, an inimical minatory landscape; a brooding, unwholesome,sinister landscape; the home of fever, dysentery, disease and suddendeath. And over all hung a horrible sickening stench of decay, an evilsmell that seemed to settle at the pit of the stomach as a heavy weight.

  No wonder if Indians from the hills, deserts, plains and towns of theDeccan, the Punjab, Rajputana, and Nepal, found this terrible place ofmost terrific heat, foul odour, bad water and worse mud, enervating anddepressing. . . . Poor beggars—it wasn’t _their_ war either. . . . Thefaces of the negroes of the King’s African Rifles were inscrutable, and,being entirely ignorant of their ways, manners, and customs, he could nottell whether they were exhibiting signs of discouragement and depression,or whether their bearing and demeanour were entirely normal. Certainlythey seemed a stolid and reserved folk, with a kind of dignity andself-respecting aloofness that he had somehow not expected. In theirtall tarbooshes, jerseys, shorts and puttees, they looked mostworkman-like and competent soldiers. . . . Certainly they did not tallywith his preconceived idea of them as a merry, care-free, irresponsiblefolk who grinned all over their faces for sheer light-heartedness, andspent their leisure time in twanging the banjo, clacking the bones,singing rag-time songs and doing the cake-walk. On duty, they stood likeebon statues and opened not their mouths. Off duty they squatted likeebon statuettes and shut them. Perhaps they did not know that Englandexpects every nigger to do his duty as a sort of born music-hall, musicalminstrel—or perhaps they _were_ depressed, like the Sepoys, and had laidaside their banjoes, bones, coon-songs and double-shuffle-flap-dancingboots until brighter days? . . . Anyhow, decided Bertram, he would muchrather be with these stalwarts than against them, when they charged withtheir triangular bayonets on their Martini rifles; and if the German_askaris_ were of similar type, he cared not how long his first personalencounter with them might be postponed. . . . Nor did the Englishmen ofthe Army Service Corps, the Royal Engineers, the Signallers and otherdetails, strike him as light-hearted and bubbling with the _joie devivre_. Frankly they looked ill, and they looked anxious. . . .

  Strolling past the brushwood-and-grass hut which was the R.A.M.C.Officers’ Mess, he heard the remark:

  “They’ve only got to leave us here in peace a little while for us all todie natural deaths of malaria or dysentery. The wily Hun knows _that_all right. . . . No fear—we shan’t be attacked here. No such luck.”

  “Not unless we make ourselves too much of a nuisance to him,” saidanother voice. “’Course, if we go barging about and capturing histrading posts and ‘factories,’ and raiding his _shambas_, he’ll come downon us all right. . . .”

  “I dunno what we’re doing here at all,” put in a third speaker. “Youcan’t invade a blooming _continent_ like German East with a weak brigadeof sick Sepoys. . . . Sort of bloomin’ Jameson’s Raid. . . . Why—theycould come down the railway from Tabora or Kilimanjaro way with enoughEuropean troops alone to eat us alive. What are we here, irritating ’emat all for, _I_ want to know? . . .”

  “Why, to maintain Britain’s glorious traditions—of sending far too weak aforce in the first place,” put in the first speaker. “They’ll send anadequate army later on, all right, and do the job in style. We’ve got todemonstrate the necessity for the adequate army first, though. . . .”

  “Sort of bait, like,” said another, and yawned. “Well, we’ve all fished,I expect. . . . Know how the worm feels now. . . .”

  “I’ve only fished with flies,” observed a languid and euphuistic voice.

  “_What_ an honour for the ’appy fly!” replied the worm-fisherman, andthere was a guffaw of laughter.

  Bertram realised that he was loitering to the point of eavesdropping, andstrolled on, pondering many things in his heart. . . .

  In one corner of the great square of mud which was the Camp, Bertram cameupon a battery consisting of four tiny guns. Grouped about them stoodtheir Sepoy gunners, evidently at drill of some kind, for, at a suddenword from a British officer standing near, they leapt upon them, labouredfrantically for five seconds, stood clear again, and, behold, each gunlay dismembered and prone upon the ground—the wheels off, the traildetached, the barrel of the gun itself in two parts, so that the breechhalf was separate from the muzzle half. At another word from the officerthe statuesque Sepoys again sprang to life, seized each man a piece ofthe dismembered gun, lifted it above his head, raised it up and down,replaced it on the ground and once more stood at attention. Anotherorder, and, in five seconds, the guns were reassembled and ready to fire.

  “A mountain-battery of screw guns, so called because they screw andunscrew in the middle of the barrel,” said Bertram to himself, andconcluded that the drill he had just witnessed was that required forputting the dissected guns on the backs of mules for mountain transport,and rebuilding them for use. Certainly they were wonderfully nippy,these Sepoys, and seemed, perhaps, rather more cheery than the others.One old gentleman who had a chestful of medal-ribbons raised and lowereda gun-wheel above his head as though it had been of cardboard, in spiteof his long grey beard and pensioner-like appearance.

  Bertram envied the subaltern in command of this battery. How splendid itmust be to know exactly what to do and to be able to do it; to beconscious that you are adequate and competent, equal to any demand thatcan be made upon you. Probably this youth was enjoying this campaign inthe mud and stench and heat as much as he had ever enjoyed a picnic ortramping or boating holiday in England. . . . Lucky dog. . . .

  At about seven o’clock that evening, Bertram “dined” in the Officers’Mess of the Hundred and Ninety-Eighth. The rickety hut, through thewalls of which the fires of the Camp could be seen, and through the roofof which the great stars were visible, was lighted, or left in darkness,by a hurricane-lamp which dangled from the ridge-pole. The officers ofthe corps sat on boxes, cane-stools, shooting-seats, or patent“weight-less” contrivances of aluminium and canvas. The vacant-facedyouth, whose name was Grayne, had a bicycle-saddle which could be raisedand lowered on a metal rod. He was very proud of it and fell overbackwards twice during dinner. Bertram would have had nothing whateverto sit on had not the excellent and foresighted Ali discovered the factin time to nail the two sides of a box in the shape of the letter T bymeans of a stone and the nails still adhering to the derelict wood. Onthis Bertram balanced himself with less danger and discomfort than mighthave been expected, the while he viewed with mixed feelings Ali’sapologies and promise that he would steal a really nice stool or chair bythe morrow.

  On the mosaic of box-sides that formed the undulating, uneven, andfissured table-top, the Mess servant places tin plates containing a thinand nasty soup, tasting, Bertram thought, of cooking-pot, dish-cloth,wood-smoke, tin plate and the thumb of the gentleman who had borne itfrom the cook-house, or rather the cook-hole-in-the-ground, to the Messhut. The flourish with which Ali placed it before his “beloved olemarstah” as he ejaculated “Soop, sah, thick an’ clear thank-you please”went some way to make it interesting, but failed to make it palatable.

  Although sick and faint for want of food, Bertram was not hungry or in acondition to appreciate disgraceful cooking disgustingly
served.

  As he sat awaiting the next course, after rejecting the thick-an’-clear“soup,” Bertram took stock of the gentlemen whom, in his heart, heproudly, if shyly, called his brother-officers.

  At the head of the table sat the Colonel, looking gloomy and distrait.Bertram wondered if he were thinking of the friends and comrades-in-armshe had left in the vile jungle round Tanga—his second-in-command and halfa dozen more of his officers—and a third of his men. Was he thinking ofhis School—and Sandhurst—and life-long friend and trusted colleague,Major Brett-Boyce, slain by the German _askaris_ as he lay wounded,propped against a tree by the brave and faithful dresser of thesubordinate medical service, who was murdered with him in the very midstof his noble work, by those savage and brutal disciples of a more savageand brutal _kultur_?

  Behind him stood his servant, a tall Mussulman in fairly clean whitegarments, and a big white turban round which was fastened a broad ribbonof the regimental colours adorned with the regimental crest in silver.

  “Tell the cook that he and I will have a quiet chat in the morning, ifhe’ll be good enough to come to my tent after breakfast—and then theprovost-marshal shall show him a new game, perhaps,” said the Colonel tothis man as he finished his soup.

  With the ghost of a smile the servant bowed, removed the Colonel’s plateand departed to gloat over the cook, who, as a Goanese, despised“natives” heartily and without concealment, albeit himself as black as anegro.

  Returning, the Colonel’s servant bore a huge metal dish on which reposeda mound of most repulsive-looking meat in lumps, rags, shreds, strings,tendrils and fibres, surrounded by a brownish clear water. This was aseven-pound tin of bully-beef heated and turned out in all its nativeugliness, naked and unadorned, on to the dish. Like everyone else,Bertram took a portion on his plate, and, like everyone else, left it onhis plate, and, like everyone else, left it after tasting a morsel—orattempting to taste, for bully-beef under such conditions has no tastewhatever. To chew it is merely as though one dipped a ball of rag andstring into dirty water, warmed it, put it in one’s mouth, and attemptedto masticate it. To swallow it is moreover to attain the sameresults—nutrient, metabolic and sensational—as would follow upon theswallowing of the said ball of rags and string.

  The morsel of bully-beef that Bertram put in his mouth abode with him.Though of the West it was like the unchanging East, for it changed not.He chewed and chewed, rested from his labours, and chewed again, in anhonest and earnest endeavour to take nourishment and work out his owninsalivation, but was at last forced to acknowledge himself defeated bythe stout and tough resistance of the indomitable lump. It did not knowwhen it was beaten and it did not know when it was eaten; nor, had hebeen able to swallow it, would the “juices” of his interior havesucceeded where those of his mouth, aided by his excellent teeth, hadfailed. In course of time it became a problem—another of those small butnumerous and worrying problems that were fast bringing wrinkles to hisforehead, hollows to his cheeks, a look of care and anxiety to his eyes,and nightmares to his sleep. He could not reduce it, he could notswallow it, he could not publicly reject it. What _could_ he do? . . .A bright idea. . . . Tactics. . . . He dropped his handkerchief—andwhen he arose from stooping to retrieve it, he was a free man again. Afew minutes later a lump of bully-beef undiminished, unaffected andunfrayed, travelled across the mud floor of the hut in the mandibles ofan army of big black ants, to provide them also with a disappointment anda problem, and, perchance, with a bombproof shelter for their young in asubterranean dug-out of the ant-hill. . . .

  Bertram again looked around at his fellow-officers. Not one of themappeared to have reduced the evil-looking mass of fibrous tissue andgristle that lay upon his plate—nor, indeed, did Bertram, throughout thecampaign, ever see anyone actually eat and swallow the disgusting andrepulsive muck served out to the officers and European units of theExpeditionary Force—hungry as they often were.

  To his foolish civilian mind it seemed that if the money which this foulfilth cost (for even bully-beef costs money—ask the contractors) had beenspent on a half or a quarter or a tithe of the quantity of _edible_meat—such as tinned ox-tongue—sick and weary soldiers labouring andsuffering for their country in a terrible climate, might have had asufficiency of food which they could have eaten with pleasure anddigested with benefit, without costing their grateful country a pennymore. . . . Which is an absurd and ridiculous notion expressed in a longand involved sentence. . . .

  Next, to the Colonel, eyeing his plate of bully-beef through his monocleand with patent disgust, sat Major Manton, a tall, aristocratic personwho looked extraordinarily smart and dapper. Hair, moustache,finger-nails and hands showed signs of obvious care, and he wore tunic,tie and, in fact, complete uniform, in an assembly wherein open shirts,bare arms, white tennis shoes, slacks, shorts, and even flannel trouserswere not unknown. Evidently the Major put correctness before comfort—or,perhaps, found his chief comfort in being correct. He spoke to no one,but replied suavely when addressed. He looked to Bertram like a man wholoathed a rough and rude environment having the honour or pleasure orsatisfaction of knowing that he noticed its existence, much less that hetroubled to loathe it. Bertram imagined that in the rough and tumble ofhand-to-hand fighting, the Major’s weapon would be the revolver, his aimquick and clean, his demeanour unhurried and unflurried, the expressionof his face cold and unemotional.

  Beside him sat a Captain Tollward in strong contrast, a great burly manwith the physiognomy and bull-neck of a prize-fighter, the hands and armsof a navvy, and the figure of a brewer’s dray-man. Frankly, he lookedrather a brute, and Bertram pictured him in a fight—using a fixed bayonetor clubbed rifle with tremendous vigour and effect. He would be purpleof face and wild of eye, would grunt like a bull with every blow, roar tohis men like a charging lion, and swear like a bargee between whiles. . . .“Thank God for all England’s Captain Tollwards this day,” thoughtBertram as he watched the powerful-looking man, and thought of thegladiators of ancient Rome.

  Stanner was keeping him in roars of Homeric laughter with his jests andstories, no word of any one of which brought the shadow of a smile to theexpressionless strong face of Major Manton, who could hear every one ofthe jokes that convulsed Tollward and threatened him with apoplexy. Nextto Stanner sat Hall, who gave Bertram, his left-hand neighbour, suchinformation and advice as he could, anent his taking of the convoy toButindi, should such be his fate.

  “You’ll see some fighting up there, if you ever get there,” said he.“They’re always having little ‘affairs of out-posts’ and patrol scraps.You may be cut up on the way, of course. . . . If the Germans lay foryou they’re bound to get you, s’ far as I can see. . . . How _can_ youdefend a convoy of a thousand porters going in single file throughimpenetrable jungle along a narrow path that it’s practically impossibleto leave? . . . You can have an advance-guard and a rear-guard, ofcourse, and much good may they do you when your _safari_ covers anythingfrom a couple of miles to three or four. . . . What are you going to doif it’s attacked in the middle, a mile or so away from where you areyourself? . . . What are you going to do if they ambush youradvance-guard and mop the lot up, as they perfectly easily could do, atany point on the track, if they know you’re coming—as of course they willdo, as soon as we know it ourselves. . . .”

  “You fill me with despondency and alarm,” said Bertram, with a lightnessthat he was far from feeling, and a sinking sensation that was not whollydue to emptiness of stomach.

  Suddenly he was aware that a new stench was contending with the familiarone of decaying vegetation, rotting shell-fish, and the slime that wasneither land nor water, but seemed a foul grease formed by thedecomposition of leaves, grasses, trees, fish, molluscs and animals in aninky, oily fluid that the tides but churned up for the freer exhalationof poisonous miasma, and had not washed away since the rest of the worldarose out of chaos and darkness, that man might breathe and thrive. . . .The new smell was akin to the old one but
more penetrating, more subtlyvile, more _vulgar_, than that ancient essence of decay and death anddissolution, and—awaking from a brown study in which he saw visions ofhimself writhing beneath the bayonets of a dozen gigantic savages, as hefell at the head of his convoy—he perceived that the new and conqueringodour proceeded from the cheese. On a piece of tin, that had been thelid of a box, it lay and defied competition, while, with the unfalteringstep of a strong man doing right, because it is his duty, Ali Suleimanbore it from _bwana_ to _bwana_ with the booming murmur: “Cheese, pleaseGod, sah, thank you.” To the observant and thoughtful Bertram itsreception by each member of the Mess was interesting and instructive, asindicative of his character, breeding, and personality.

  The Colonel eyed it with a cold smile.

  “Yes. Please God it _is_ only cheese,” he remarked, “but take itaway—quick.”

  Major Manton glanced at it and heaved a very gentle sigh. “No, thankyou, Boy,” he said.

  Captain Tollward sniffed hard, turned to Stanner, and roared withlaughter.

  “What ho, the High Explosive!” he shouted, and “What ho, the Forty RodGorgonzola—so called because it put the battery-mules out of action atthat distance. . . . Who unchained it, I say? Boy, where’s its muzzle?”and he cut himself a generous slice.

  Stanner buried his nose in his handkerchief and waved Ali away as hethrust the nutritious if over-prevalent delicacy upon his notice.

  “Take it to Bascombe _Bwana_ and ask him to fire it from his guns,” saidhe. “Serve the Germans right for using poison-gas and liquid fire. . . .Teach ’em a lesson, what, Tollward?”

  “Don’t be dev’lish-minded,” replied that officer when laughter permittedhim to speak. “You’re as bad as the bally Huns yourself to suggest suchan atrocity. . . .”

  “Seems kinder radio-active,” said Hall, eyeing it with curiosity.“Menacing . . .” and he also drove it from him.

  Bertram, as one who, being at war, faces the horrors of war as they come,took a piece of the cheese and found that its bite, though it skinned theroof of his mouth, was not as bad as its bark. Grayne affected to faintwhen the cheese reached him, and the others did according to their kind.

  Following in the tracks of Ali came another servant, bearing a woodenbox, which he tendered to each diner, but as one who goeth through anempty ritual, and without hope that his offering will be accepted. Inthe box Bertram saw large thick biscuits exceedingly reminiscent of thedog-biscuit of commerce, but paler in hue and less attractive ofappearance. He took one, and the well-trained servant only dropped thebox in his surprise.

  “What are you going to do with _that_?” enquired Hall.

  “Why!—eat it, I suppose,” said Bertram.

  “People don’t eat _those_,” replied Hall.

  “Why not?” asked Bertram.

  “Try it and see,” was the response.

  Bertram did, and desisted not until his teeth ached and he feared tobreak them. There was certainly no fear of breaking the biscuit. Was ita sort of practical joke biscuit—a rather clever imitation of a biscuitin concrete, hardwood, or pottery-ware of some kind?

  “I understand why people do not eat them,” he admitted.

  “Can’t be done,” said Hall. “Why, even the Kavirondo who eat live slugs,dead snakes, uncooked rice, raw flesh or rotten flesh and any part of anyanimal there is, do not regard those things as food. . . . They makeornaments of them, tools, weapons, missiles, all sorts of things. . . .”

  “I suppose if one were really starving one could live on them for atime,” said the honest and serious-minded Bertram, ever a seeker aftertruth.

  “Not unless one could get them into one’s stomach, I suppose,” was thereply; “and I don’t see how one would do it. . . . I was reduced totrying once, and I tried hard. I put one in a basin and poured boilingwater on it. . . . No result whatever. . . . I left it to soak for anhour while I chewed and chewed a piece of bully-beef. . . . Result? . . .It was slightly darker in colour, but I could no more bite into itthan I could into a tile or a book. . . .”

  “Suppose you boiled one,” suggested Bertram.

  “Precisely what I did,” said Hall, “for my blood was up, apart from thefact that I was starving. It was a case of Hall _versus_ a Biscuit. Iboiled it—or rather watched the cook boil it in a _chattie_. . . . Igave it an hour. At the end of the hour it was of a slightly stilldarker colour—and showed signs of splitting through the middle. Butnever a bit could I get off it. . . . ‘Boil the dam’ thing all day andall night, and give it me hot for breakfast,’ said I to the cook. . . .As one who patiently humours the headstrong, wilful White Man, he wentaway to carry on the foolish struggle. . . .”

  “What was it like in the morning?” enquired Bertram, as Hall pausedreminiscent, and chewed the cud of bitter memory.

  “Have you seen a long-sodden boot-sole that is resolving itself into itsoriginal layers and laminæ?” asked Hall. “Where there should be onesolid sole, you see a dozen, and the thing gapes, as it were, showingserried rows of teeth in the shape of rusty nails and littleprotuberances of leather and thread?”

  “Yes,” smiled Bertram.

  “That was my biscuit,” continued Hall. “At the corners it gasped andsplit. Between the layers little lumps and points stood up, where theoriginal biscuit holes had been made when the dreadful thing was withoutform, and void, in the process of evolution from cement-like dough tobrick-like biscuit. . . .”

  “Could you eat it?” asked Bertram.

  “Could _you_ eat a boiled boot-sole?” was the reply. “The thing hadturned from dry concrete to wet leather. . . . It had exchanged theextreme of brittle durability for that of pliant toughness. . . . _Eat_it!” and Hall laughed sardonically.

  “What becomes of them all, then, if no one eats them?” asked Bertram.

  “Oh—they have their uses, y’ know. Boxes of them make a jolly goodbreastwork. . . The Army Service Corps are provided with work—takingthem by the ton from place to place and fetching them back again. . . .I reveted a trench with biscuits once. . . . Looked very neat. . . .Lonely soldiers, in lonely outposts, do _GOD BLESS OUR HOME_ and otherdevices with them—and you can make really attractive little photo-framesfor ‘midgets’ and miniature with them if you have a centre-bit andcarving tools. . . The handy-men of the R.E. make awf’ly nice boxes ofchildren’s toy-building-bricks with them, besides carved _plaques_ andall sorts of little models. . . . I heard of a prisoner who made acomplete steam-engine out of biscuits, but I never saw it myself. . . .Oh, yes, the Army would miss its biscuits—but I certainly never sawanybody eat one. . . .”

  Nor did Bertram, throughout the campaign. And here again it occurred tohis foolish civilian mind that if the thousands of pounds spent on whollyand utterly inedible dog-biscuit had been spent on the ordinary biscuitsof civilisation and the grocer’s shop, sick and weary soldiers, workingand suffering for their country in a terrible climate, might have had asufficiency of food that they could have eaten with pleasure and digestedwith benefit, without costing their grateful country a penny more.

  “Which would be the better,” asked Bertram of himself—“to send an armyten tons of ‘biscuit’ that it cannot eat, or one ton of real biscuit thatit can eat and enjoy?”

  But, as an ignorant, simple, and silly civilian, he must be excused. . . .

  Dessert followed, in the shape of unripe bananas, and Bertram left thetable with a cupful of thin soup, a small piece of cheese, and half acrisp, but pithy and acidulous banana beneath his belt. As the Colonelleft the hut he hurried after him.

  “If you please, sir,” said he, “may I go out with the force that is toattack the German post to-morrow?”

  Having acted on impulse and uttered the fatal words, he regretted thefact. Why should he be such a silly fool as to seek sorrow like this?Wasn’t there danger and risk and hardship enough—without going out tolook for it?

  “In what capacity?” asked Colonel Rock, and added: “Hall is in comm
and,and Stanner is his subaltern.”

  “As a spectator, sir,” said Bertram, “and I might—er—be usefulperhaps—er—if—”

  “Spectator!” mused the Colonel. “Bright idea! We might _all_ go, ofcourse. . . . Two hundred men go out on the job, and a couple ofthousand go with ’em to whoop ’em on and clap, what? Excellent notion. . . .Wonder if we could arrange a ‘gate,’ and give the gate-money to theRed Cross, or start a Goose Club or something. . .” and he turned to gointo his tent.

  Bertram was not certain as to whether this reply was in the nature of arefusal of his request. He hoped it was.

  “May I go, sir?” he said.

  “You may not,” replied the Colonel, and Bertram felt very disappointed.