by William Boyd
“Sorry, old chap,” Henry Hyams said when Felix asked for a transfer. “No can do.” The brigade was just being formed, Hyams said. It was the only unit in the East African theatre that wanted English officers and NCOs.
“Don’t look so glum, Felix,” Henry Hyams said, looking a little hurt. “At least you’ll be in East Africa. It’s a damn tricky job swinging these things, you know. They’re crying out for men in France.”
Felix peered out of the carriage window at the African night. What was it like out there, he wondered? The train moved with frustrating slowness, reducing speed to five miles per hour every time it came to the gentlest of bends. The Indian Army officers had all fallen asleep, one of them was snoring quietly. The oil lamp in the compartment had been turned down too low to read. Felix rubbed his eyes. Somewhere in his kit he had an inflatable rubber cushion which would have eased his stiff and aching buttocks, sore from the slatted wooden bench seats, but he would have woken the entire compartment searching for it.
The train moved sluggishly but inexorably on. Sometimes it stopped in the darkness for no apparent reason. The mono-tony was briefly relieved when they pulled into tiny stations with names like ‘Pugu’, ‘Kisamine’ and ‘Soga’ where it took on more fuel and water.
At Soga Felix managed to get out of the compartment and jumped to the ground to stretch his legs. The night was warm and very dark, clouds seemed to be covering the moon and stars. All around him Felix could hear the relentless ‘creek-creek’ of the crickets, shrill and mechanical. He gave a slight shiver. There was a curious smell in the air, strangely intoxicating, a damp earthy smell of the sort sometimes encountered in old potting sheds or undisturbed dusty attics. Felix filled his lungs with it. He felt seized by a sudden nervous excitement. Up ahead the squat little locomotive was being filled up with water, a faint hiss of blundering escaping steam was carried down the line. He watched other men jumping from the carriages and the cattle trucks that carried the native soldiers. He saw some men relieving themselves and took a few steps away from the train to do likewise. He found himself standing in a sort of coarse kneelength grass. Ahead of him he could just make out a dark line of trees and bushes. He urinated, the patter of his stream silencing the crickets at his feet. He shivered again, the excitement gone, replaced by an apprehensive fearfulness. As he did up his fly buttons the thought crossed his mind that the foaming trembling darkness around him might be harbouring all manner of wild beasts. Lions, leopards, snakes, anything. Hurriedly he clambered back into the compartment. He was not in some country lane, he reminded himself, he was in Africa.
It was almost midday when the troop train crawled into Mikesse. The Indian Army officers obligingly threw down his kit to him and he stacked it beside the rails. To his vague worry he was the only person to get off. The train didn’t stay long. Morogoro, General Smuts’ headquarters, was another thirty miles up the line. Everyone, it seemed, was going there. Felix looked about him. A featureless railway station with no platforms, the tracks laid across packed-down red earth. In the distance a thickly wooded range of high mountainous hills. Under large, shady trees dotted here and there motor vehicles were parked and porters slept or lounged. It was very humid. Solid continents of grey clouds loomed to the north. Felix was about to go in search of some assistance when a small white man in khaki uniform emerged from the station building. The man caught sight of him and marched over. He had a spruce, fit-looking body, but his head looked as if it belonged to a man twice his size. Felix saw he had a sergeant’s stripes on his sleeve. The man had a poor, crude-looking face, as if it were an early prototype whose features hadn’t yet been properly refined. It was utterly expressionless, as if this too were a faculty reserved for later, more sophisticated models. He had one of the heaviest beards Felix had ever seen. Although he had obviously shaved recently his entire jaw was a metallic blue-black, indeed the bristles seemed to need shaving up to within half an inch of his lower eyelids.
“Lieutenant Cobb, sir?” he said. He had a very strong but clear Scottish accent. Felix supposed him to be from Aberdeen or Inverness.
“That’s right. Are you from the 5th battalion?”
“Aye, sir. I’m Sergeant Gilzean.”
He then said something Felix didn’t understand.
“I beg your pardon?” Felix said.
“I said ‘Fegs it’s a bauch day’, sir,” Gilzean repeated patiently, as if this was an activity he was accustomed to. “I’ll just make siccar they beanswaup porters look snippert with your gear.”
“Oh. Yes, fine.”
Men were called from beneath the trees and Felix’s kit was taken round the station building and stacked in the back of a dusty Ford motor car.
“Where are we going?”
“Kibongo, sir. South bank of the Rufiji.”
“How far away is it?”
“About one hundred and twenty miles.”
“Good Lord!”
They bumped down a track that led from the station and drove past a sizeable native village and a huge transport camp. Crates and sacks were piled twenty feet high. Motor lorries and dozens of Ford motor cars of the sort they were driving were parked in long rows. Beneath palm leaf shelters were makeshift engineering and repair workshops. On a hill was a large stone building flying a red cross. A lengthy column of bootless African soldiers in green felt fezzes and flapping khaki shorts were passed.
“Are there no English troops out here?”
“A few,” Gilzean said. “But they’re all sick. Peely-wally lot the English, ye ken. And they Sooth-Africans. You’ll find we’re unco fremt haufins out here.”
“Ah,” Felix said. “I think so.” The man might as well be talking ancient Greek, Felix thought.
They drove on, a cloud of red dust in their wake. They passed a large tented camp and overtook a straggling train of potters, all with loads on their heads. Mikesse, Felix managed to discover from Gilzean, was the only supply centre for the troops on the Rufiji river front, a hundred and twenty miles to the south. They drove out of the hills around the town and motored through beautiful highland country, dense with trees, native villages on every slope, before they began to descend slowly towards what looked like a huge, rather tatty forest. The trees were of all types and grew fairly widely apart. The ground between the trunks was thick with tangled thorn bush. The road had been enlarged recently, judging from the piles of freshly cut vegetation and the occasional groups of pioneers and sappers that they passed, engaged in levelling out deep ruts or strengthening the many small bridges they had to drive across.
The clouds that Felix had noticed at the station had spread out to cover the sky and the light was dull and gloomy.
“Looks like rain,” Felix observed.
“We’ll get drookit the night,” Gilzean said, then added, “It’s the rainy season. We stop fighting when the rains come.”
“Have you seen any action?” Felix asked in what he hoped was a casual way.
“Och aye. We’ve been dottling about the jungle for a month. Fankled here, fankled there. Fair scunnert, but, eh, neither buff nor stye, ye ken.”
“Oh, about two months,” Felix said.
After five hours of bumping along through the scrubby forest they came to another camp. Felix supposed he’d been travelling along what he’d come to know as ‘lines of communication’, not that he and Gilzean had established many. At this new camp Felix was provided with a hot meal in the transport officers’ mess and was allotted a camp bed in the corner of a large empty tent. Here too he found someone who could explain the current situation in comprehensible language.
Since the invasion of German East at Kilimanjaro in March 1916, the Germans had steadily been driven south so that they now occupied only the southern third of their colony. They had been pushed south across the Rufiji river. At their backs was another river, the Rovuma, which marked the border with Portuguese East Africa. The Rufiji, Felix’s informant told him, was a huge sprawling river that roughly divided the
colony in half. Von Lettow-Vorbeck, after he had been driven from the Northern Railway, had withdrawn by degrees, but with fierce rearguard actions, to the Central Railway (along which Felix had been travelling the night before). Threatened by Smuts on this front he had again avoided a decisive battle and had withdrawn beyond his next natural defensive line, the Rufiji. Here was where matters had come to a halt, because of the imminent onset of the rains. There would be no more campaigning until March or April. Then the British army would drive the Germans into the Rovuma.
Felix walked from the officers’ mess back to his tent. Once again he smelt the musty earthy smell and wondered what it was. Behind him the cooking fires of the vast porters’ camp twinkled in the dark. He could hear strange whoopings coming from the trees beyond the perimeter fence. He wondered where Gilzean was, how the curious little man was occupying his time. Probably having a shave, Felix thought. He must need to shave about every five hours. He had wanted to ask Gilzean how far they had come, and what distance there was left to go, but couldn’t face another incomprehensible reply. He hoped he hadn’t appeared standoffish.
He arrived at his tent. He felt that he had been travelling for months. First the tedious and depressing voyage to South Africa in a hospital ship full of broken South African infantry from the Western Front, with a gloomy, solitary Christmas spent at sea. Then two weeks in Durban waiting for the mountain battery to arrive from Nigeria. Afterwards the protracted voyage up the coast to Dar in the squalid Hong Wang II. Then the train journey through the night, Gilzean’s jarring drive through the forest…And he still didn’t know where he was.
He undressed standing on his camp bed, as he’d been instructed to do—something about a burrowing flea one had to avoid. Then he untied his mosquito net and suspended it from hooks set in the canvas roof above the bed. He lay down and shut his eyes. This endless journeying, he thought to himself, where would it end? He made a rueful face in the dark. With Gabriel, he hoped. He allowed himself to imagine their meeting. Gabriel wouldn’t believe it was him. “Felix!” he’d cry. “You!”
Felix grimaced. An unfortunate choice of words. With a slight change of emphasis they could be altered from incredulous delight to vengeful accusation. For a moment he felt paralysed with remorse, and the horrible sub-aquatic images of Charis came creeping back into his mind. He must remember—he forced himself to concentrate—to ask about POW camps the next day. Surely as they pushed deeper and deeper into German territory the advancing troops should begin to encounter some. This brought some comfort, as did the reflection that—if the conditions he had experienced today were typical—it was inconceivable that any mail for English prisoners of war would get through.
He heard something hit the roof of the tent sharply. An insect? A bat? Then he heard another and another. Rain, he realized with a smile of relief, as the drops began to patter against the canvas. Big, fat drops of rain.
It was still raining in the morning when Felix was woken up by a black servant with an enamel mug of tea. A basin of hot water had been set on a folding table and he was able to have a refreshing wash and a shave. The basin was cleared away and replaced with a plate of hot chicken, two fried eggs and a type of savoury flour cake. Gilzean stuck his head through the tent flap and said only, to Felix’s relief, “Time to be off, sir.” Felix pulled on his waterproof cape and went outside. Grey clouds hung low over the trees, blending with the early morning mist and the smoke rising from hundreds of breakfast fires. Huge brown puddles had gathered in depressions in the ground and were pimpled with the constant drip, drip of water from the overhanging branches.
Gilzean was sitting on a small grey mule and holding the bridle of another which was obviously meant for Felix. Half a dozen bearers queued up behind.
Felix mounted up.
“Morning, Gilzean,” he said cheerily. “How are you feeling?”
“Oh, not so good, sir.” Gilzean looked mournful. “I’ve got the ripples again, and—begging your pardon—an awful angry rumple fyke.”
“Yes.”
They joined the end of a meandering string of porters taking supplies to Felix’s battalion. The road was already ankle deep in thick mud and, from here on, passable only by men or pack animals. The jungle or forest through which they passed was monotonously familiar. Occasionally there was a ridge to ascend and descend and there were two wide, shallow rivers to ford. Transport officers rode up and down the column, checking on the uncomplaining porters with their enormous head loads. They stopped every two hours for a twenty-minute rest.
At one point the road disappeared beneath the surface of a swamp which apparently had come into being overnight. The way was marked with poles and the water came up to the middle of the bearers’ thighs. It stopped raining for a couple of hours and then started again about noon. Despite the protection of his waterproof cape and the wide brim of his sun helmet, Felix felt wet through. It was quite unlike any rain he had ever encountered in England. For a start it was warm, but there was also something thoroughgoing and uncompromising about African rain. It came down with real force, each drop weighty and loaded with full wetting potential, drumming down at speed as if falling from a prodigious height. He rode in a cocoon of constant battering sounds as it hit his cape and topee with hefty smacks. He could see, up ahead, the drops rebounding a good six inches from Gilzean’s sodden helmet.
It was the middle of the afternoon when they arrived at battalion headquarters. Felix saw what looked like small clearings of cultivated vegetable and maize plots. Then they passed a sandbagged picket and some very miserable sentries. Felix and Gilzean left the column of porters and rode into what had once been a native village. They moved through neat rows of bell tents and dismounted outside a large straw-roofed building with a bent-looking flagpole outside.
“Thank God,” Felix groaned. “At last.”
“We’ve got a wee way to go yet,” Gilzean said impassively.
Felix reported to the adjutant, who welcomed him to the Rufiji front. Felix was to be attached to Twelve company, under Captain Frearson, which was across the Rufiji, on the south bank. He and Gilzean did not delay long, however, as it was considered advisable to cross the river before dark.
Even in the dry season the Rufiji was, at this point, over three hundred and fifty yards across. Felix had never seen such an enormous river. It was a muddy brown, like milky coffee. Its lethargic flow was interrupted at many points by shiny sandbanks and the occasional small, rocky islands. On the north bank Indian sappers had constructed a wooden jetty that led out to a crude flat ferry—heavy planks of wood lashed across two pontoons—which was attached to wire cables that stretched across the sluggish river. It had stopped raining but thick grey flannel clouds still covered the sky. Behind the clouds the sun was setting and the scène was bathed in a jaundiced sepia light. Felix looked in awe at the Rufiji. The vegetation on either side was lush, trees and bushes growing densely right up to the banks. Felix suddenly noticed that crocodiles were basking on some of the sand bars. The dull light, the torpid river and the oppressive steaminess gave the view a pestilential, malevolent atmosphere.
Felix and Gilzean led their mules onto the ferry and tethered them to the guard rails. When it was full of porters and their loads a flag was waved and a large steam engine coughed into life, winding in the cables and tugging the cumbersome ferry out into the stream.
Felix leant on the guard rail and stared in fascination at four hippopotami which were wallowing not far from the ferry’s route. He turned round and looked at the crowded mob of porters who seemed edgy and apprehensive. They wore singlets and loose pyjama-style trousers cut off below the knee. They all had canvas bags slung around their shoulders. Some carried calabash gourds, others saucepans and kettles. Felix noted that his once smart uniform was creased and grimy. He felt oddly proud. He wondered what Holland would think of him now, in the middle of Africa, crossing this powerful brown river, surrounded by jungle and wild beasts.
By the time they re
ached the far bank it had started to rain again. Gilzean and Felix remounted and set off up a wide path recently cut through the undergrowth. The rain poured down, battering the leaves of the trees, turning the path into a trickling rivulet. Hemmed in by the undergrowth, the gloom was more intense. Felix glanced upward. The setting sun had turned the clouds a sulphurous yellow-grey. His earlier feelings of awe and excitement were replaced by a mysterious depression and disgruntled impatience. When was this wretched journey going to end?
Just then he smelt a curious smell. They emerged from the trees into a clearing of sorts. Before them the pathway was flanked by an avenue of long smouldering bonfires, like huge middens or rubbish heaps that had been burning for days. Here the reek was at its most intense, a rich, choking, putrefying smell that caused Felix’s stomach to heave in protest. A thick bluey smoke curled from the heaps and stung his eyes, and he could hear the hiss as the falling rain extinguished a few pale flickering flames that were visible.
Unperturbed, Gilzean entered the infernal avenue. Felix kicked his mule to follow him. Then, peering through the smoke and sheets of rain, Felix saw what they were burning. Horses, donkeys and mules, dozens and dozens of them. Great heaps of blackened rotting carcases piled six or eight feet high, their stiff legs jutting out at all angles. As he rode between the fires he saw native soldiers sloshing parafin over the carcasses in an attempt to get them to burn. When this happened a great sheet of flame would roar up and there would be a sound of popping and cracking as the gases inside expanded and distended bellies swelled and burst, sending rank vile smells across the path between.
“What’s happening?” Felix shouted to Gilzean.