by William Boyd
“They’re all deed,” Gilzean replied.
“I can see that,” Felix said impatiently. “But how?”
“Tsetse fly,” Gilzean said philosophically. “Gets every horse and mule sooner or later. We burn the bodies once a week.” They moved away from the smoke. Felix could see they were approaching a village; the ground had at some time been cleared for maize and millet fields. Flimsy straw and grass shelters had been erected under the trees for the potters and some more substantial tarpaulin covered lean-tos had been put up to protect the piles of stores. Everywhere were empty boxes and crates and what looked like large wicker baskets of the sort used to carry laundry. Rows of tents indicated the presence of soldiers; the native carriers, it seemed, had to make the best of whatever materials came to hand.
They went through a gap in a high thorn barrier. Felix saw larger tents, some straw huts and a mud-walled rectangular building with a new corrugated iron roof.
“Here we are,” Gilzean announced despondently. “Kibongo.”
Chapter 2
15 April 1917,
Kibongo, German East Africa
Felix stared listlessly at the rain falling outside. It had been raining continuously for three months. He wouldn’t have believed it possible if he hadn’t been under it himself. Twelve company of the 5th battalion were still at Kibongo. Felix’s platoon was on picket duty. He had spent a damp and uncomfortable night beneath a straw shelter. He sat now on a folding canvas chair, watching the dawn light filter through the dripping trees in front of him. Twenty yards away were the perimeter trenches and a machine-gun post. The ground in front of the trenches had been cleared to a distance of fifty yards.
Gilzean was meant to be out there checking that everyone was alert.
It had been a quiet night, as had all his nights on duty. In his three months of active service there had only been one alarm. He had been sitting in the mess with Captain Frearson and two of his fellow lieutenants—Loveday and Gent—when there had been a ragged volley of shots from the perimeter trenches. At once the entire camp was in pandemonium. When they got to the scène of the action they found the body of the fourth officer, Lieutenant Parrott, with a neat bullet hole in his temple. Parrott, going through a bad spell of dysentery, had wandered off in search of a convenient bush in which to relieve himself. A jumpy sentry had heard him rustling about, and without a word of warning had emptied the magazine of his rifle in the general direction of the noise. His equally nervous companions had joined in. Parrott was extremely unfortunate to have been hit.
The next day an auction of his kit was held. Felix bought half a bottle of South African brandy for £10 and also purchased Parrott’s toothbrush for £1. 13s. 6d. He had an inch of the brandy left and was wondering now whether to drink it. He decided to wait until after breakfast. The extravagantly high prices were due to the fact that scarcely any supplies had got through to Kibongo since the rains had begun. The Rufiji was now six hundred yards wide, a surging, foaming mill-race which was impossible to cross. Of the entire line of supply back to the railhead almost half the road had been washed away or else was under six feet of water. For the last month officers had been on one-eighth rations. The day before Felix had been issued with one rasher of bacon, a tablespoonful of apricot jam, half an onion and a handful of flour. The men were living on a cupful of rice and nothing more. Everyone was frantic with a debilitating, gnawing hunger. All anyone could think of was food.
Urgent requests for more supplies merely prompted the retort that the lines of communication no longer existed and that everyone was in more or less the same state. However, the exposed position of Twelve company at the southernmost tip of the army’s advance made them suspect that if any unit was going to be hard done by it would be theirs. The mood in the officers’ mess was one of unrelieved fractious irritability. Felix thought that if the Germans ever got round to attacking, Twelve company would have surrendered without demur at the prospect of a square meal.
The Nigerian soldiers, Felix had to admit, bore the deprivations with stoical good humour, setting a far better example than the English officers and NCOs. When he had arrived at Kibongo in January there had been a more or less full complement of soldiers in the company—some one hundred and twenty—plus about three hundred porters. Since then over a hundred porters and thirty soldiers had died from various diseases, the most common being malaria and dysentery. But lately many more of the porters were dying through eating poisonous roots and fruit in a desperate search for nourishment.
A week before, one of Felix’s men had shot a monkey. The animal had been divided equally among the platoon, Felix being presented with the head in token of his seniority. His cook and servant, Human, had scraped as much flesh from the skull as possible and had been seasoning Felix’s meagre rations with slivers of monkey’s cheek, monkey’s lips and the like.
The thought of food sent Felix’s gastric juices into a pro-longed gurgle. Felix leant out of his grass shelter. The rain seemed to have slackened a bit. Under a tree he saw Human crouched over a small fire.
“Human,” Felix called, and his servant squelched over. Human, Felix believed, was in his thirties. He had won a medal in the Cameroon campaign against the Germans in West Africa. He had proudly informed Felix that he had personally shot three ‘Europes’, as he called them. He had been wounded himself, though, in the process and, no longer fit enough to be a front line soldier, the regiment had kept him on as an officer’s servant. For all the fact that he was fifteen years older than Felix, Human looked remarkably young and boyish. This was partly due to his diminutive size—even smaller now due to the recent privations—and his smooth unlined face.
“Yes, sar,” Human said.
“Food, Human. I need my breakfast quickly.”
Human dashed back to his fire and fiddled around with his cooking utensils. He brought Felix his breakfast. On his tin plate was something that looked like a bluey-grey fishcake spread with apricot jam. Despite the evidence Felix’s saliva glands filled his mouth in anticipation. With a fork Felix broke off a piece and tasted it. There was a strong flavour of charcoal, bland pasty warm flour, a hint of onion, the sweet jam and something else he couldn’t identify. Felix chewed it up slowly while Human watched.
“Not bad,” Felix said. “What’s in it?”
“Everything, sar,” Human said. “And monkey.”
“Monkey? I thought we’d finished the monkey.”
“No, sar. There is more.”
Felix wolfed down the rest.
“What?”
“Monkey brain, sar.”
“Brain.” That was the other flavour…
“Yes, sar. I put monkey brain inside.”
At eight o’clock Felix and his men were relieved on the perimeter by Gent and his platoon. Gent was the most innocuous of Felix’s fellow officers. Gent was always whistling to himself, tunelessly, and when he wasn’t he seemed to breathe through his mouth all the time, his mouth hanging open like an idiot’s.
Felix heard his mindless fluting coming up the path from Kibongo a good two minutes before the man actually appeared.
“Hello, Cobb,” Gent said. “Quiet night?” Gent had been quite portly in January. Now he looked like a sick man, skinny, with a clammy sweat on his face.
“Have you got something, Gent?” Felix said. “If so, keep away.”
“Touch of fever,” Gent said, seemingly unaware of Felix’s hostility. “Should shake it off before too long.”
Gent’s ragged platoon occupied the perimeter trenches. Felix and Gilzean marched their men away, up the gentle slope that led to the village. Once there the men were dismissed, and Felix went into the officers’ mess. The mess, as they grandly called it, was the mud hut with the corrugated iron roof. It had no amenities whatsoever and was only valued as being the driest place in the camp.
Inside were four folding canvas chairs and a trestle table. Captain Frearson was sitting in one of the chairs writing up the company diary. Felix
told him it had been a quiet night. Frearson had a plump soft face, like Philip II of Spain. He was a timid, indecisive man whose endless dithering, Felix believed, had needlessly caused them to be isolated in Kibongo. As the Rufiji had risen it became increasingly obvious that they would be cut off yet Frearson refused to request to be withdrawn, thinking it would look like ‘bad show’. He was seeming to be giving way under the combined pressure of Felix, Parrott, Gent and Loveday when the rising waters washed away the ferry and the matter was forcibly closed.
“Any news?” Felix asked automatically. Semaphore and—on the rare occasions when there was a break in the cloud—heliograph, were the only means of communication that existed between Twelve company and the rest of the battalion on the other side of the Rufiji.
“Battalion’s pulling back to the railway at Mikesse,” Frearson said.
“Good God! What about us?”
“We’ll have to wait, I’m afraid. It seems the river’s falling. They say they’ll try to rig up a ferry again.”
It was the first indication that their ordeal might soon be over. Felix Felt an irrational lightening of his heart.
“That’s marvellous,” he said. “Absolutely marvellous.”
Frearson looked at him suspiciously. At that point Loveday came in. Loveday was the biggest irritant in the camp but today Felix’s benevolence could extend even to him.
“Sacré bleu,” Loveday said. “Three more porters dead in the night. Seems they’ve been digging up the mule carcasses again. Can’t seem to make them understand.” He shrugged. “Pauvres idiots.”
Loveday was a brash young man with a thin moustache who regarded himself as a sophisticate, a fact he felt was made manifest through his constant use of French exclamations. In pre-war days he would have been known as a ‘masher’ or a ‘knut’.
“Have you heard the news?” Felix said. “We’re going back to the railway.”
“Yes,” Loveday said. “Not before time, I say.”
The three of them remained silent for a while, taking this in. No bond exists between us, Felix thought. This experience had only driven them apart. Frearson took out his pipe and sucked at it noisily. The pipe was empty, everyone had run out of tobacco weeks ago. This was Frearson’s particular habit which tormented Felix to a near homicidal degree, like Gent’s whistling or Loveday’s schoolboy French. Felix realized, with something of a shock, that during his three-month spell in the ‘front line’ he’d never seen a single enemy soldier. His animosities were all claimed by his colleagues. He found it hard to think about home, about Charis or Gabriel. His ludicrous ‘quest’ had fizzled out in the mud of Kibongo, his high ideals and passionate aspirations replaced by grumbles about the damp and endless speculation about what to eat.
The mess was silent, filled only with the sound of Frearson’s spittly sucking. Felix felt a powerful desire to ram the pipe down Frearson’s throat. His mood of elation hadn’t lasted long.
“I’ll be off,” he said, trying to keep his voice under control.
“Cheer-ho,” Frearson said.
“A bientót,” said Loveday.
Felix squelched through the mud towards his tent, suddenly feeling very tired. He smiled cynically to himself thinking about the ‘great quest’ again. He seldom thought of Gabriel; his musings, such as they were, seemed petty and wholly self-centred. He knew nothing of the war in Africa, had forgotten about the war in Europe. Gabriel might even have been released and repatriated by now. What kind of a war was this? he demanded angrily to himself. No enemy in sight, your men slowly being starved to death, guarding a huddle of grass huts in the middle of a sodden jungle?
He was surprised to see Gilzean standing outside his tent. Gilzean reported that Loveday had ordered him to take a burial detail and remove the bodies of the three dead potters. For a moment Felix thought of going back to the mess and making an issue out of it but decided to let it pass.
“Very well, Gilzean,” he said wearily. “Let’s get on with it.”
Gilzean collected half a dozen men from the platoon and they set off to the carrier camp. The three dead men had been dragged from their shelters and left for the burial party. The men were naked, their scraps of clothing and few possessions already appropriated. Their eyes were screwed tightly shut and their huge swollen tongues, strangely white and chalky, protruded inches beyond their lips.
“Poisoned,” Gilzean said flatly.
The dead bodies were carried down a narrow path to the Rufiji. Unceremoniously they were pitched into the turbulent brown water. Felix and Gilzean stood and watched their bodies being swirled away.
“They’re for the kelpies,” Gilzean said. He seemed unusually depressed, Felix thought, far more so than normal.
“What a way to go,” Felix said, wondering if he should ask what kelpies were. Fish? Crocodiles?
“It could be us yet,” Gilzean added, doomily. They walked back up the dripping path. “Aye, and to think I asked to come out here.”
“Did you?” Felix said, keen to capitalize on a moment’s lucidity. “So did I.”
“Twae brothers deed in France. I thought, don’t go there, Angus. Thought it would be easy out here, ye ken? Look at us noo.”
Gilzean had never been so forthcoming. Felix looked at his dark, troubled face with sympathy.
“I came out here to find my brother,” Felix confided. “He’s a prisoner somewhere.”
“We get our lawins, sure enough,” Gilzean said bitterly.
Felix sensed meaning beginning to edge away. He tried one more time.
“If I find him,” he said, feeling a twinge of guilt at his kek of commitment, “I’ll die happy.”
“This cackit place,” Gilzean growled in hate, not listening. “They poor darkies. A greeshie way to go.” He clenched his fists. “I’m a snool, a glaikit sumph. Nocht but rain, howdumdied all day o’boot. I’ve lost my noddle. Camsteerie bloody country.” He gave a harsh laugh. “No strunt. Any haughmagandie? Never. Dunged into the ground…I could greet, I tell you.” He flashed a glance of scowling malevolence at Felix. “Aye, and those primsie Suthrons—you apart, sir—I’d no tarrow to clack their fuds…”
Felix let him ramble on as they plodded through the mud back to Kibongo. Gilzean’s Complaint—it seemed powerful enough to warrant a capital letter—would do for all the men in Twelve company, the dead porters too. He only understood one word in three, but this time he thought he knew how the little man felt.
Chapter 3
15 July 1917,
Nanda, German East Africa
“Look what I’ve got for you here,” Liesl said placing a straw basket on the dispensary table. Gabriel looked, wondering if she could hear his heart beating. He hadn’t seen Liesl for three days. She had travelled the seventy miles to Lindi to meet her husband. Gabriel had missed her intolerably. She took off her sun helmet and adjusted the pins and combs in her frizzy ginger hair, stretching the material of her blouse across her breasts. Gabriel swallowed and gripped the edge of the table. A nervous tremor had started in his left hand some weeks ago. It quivered constantly, as if possessed of some ghostly life of its own.
Liesl took out a cloth bundle, a knife and a jar of syrupy fluid. She unwrapped the cloth revealing a dark brown loaf the size of a brick.
“Banana bread,” she told him delightedly. “Made with coconut too. No butter, but,” she held up the jar, “plenty of honey.”
Gabriel smiled, his heart cartwheeling. “How amazing. Where did you get it?”
“Erich has friends. He is an important man now. Staff officer with von Lettow himself.”
“Any news?” he said as casually as possible. He needn’t have worried, he knew: Liesl told him everything.
“Bad news,” she said unconcernedly. “The English have landed at Kilwa. Everywhere we are retreating.” She frowned. “There has been a lot of fighting.”
“So we are winning.”
“Oh yes. Some of the wounded are coming here. They’ve evacuated th
e hospital at Lukuledi. So,” she shrugged. “We shall be busy again.”
Gabriel shifted uneasily in his seat. For the last six months Nanda had been almost deserted, the ward never more than half full, the town populated by the remains of its native population and about thirty German women and children. Deppe had gone—for good they were promised—to establish a new base hospital at Chitawa some fifty miles to the south-west. Nanda hospital had belonged to Liesl again. They sat out the rainy season with little to disturb their routine. This now consisted mainly of distilling the quinine substitute that the German forces used, a vile-tasting potion made from Peruvian chinchona bark of which, surprisingly, there were considerable supplies, stockpiled before the war began. Every fortnight freshly filled bottles and containers were sent out to the Schutztruppe companies. Liesl handed over the administration of this to two other women, Frau Ledebur and Frau Muller. Gabriel was employed in the actual distilling process, a simple but delicate job relying on perfect timing in order for the quinine distillate to be potable. Gabriel spent most of the time supervising the process out at the back of the hospital where the two huge boiling vats were set over open fires. He filled the bottles and passed them over to Frau Ledebur who organized their despatch to the varying Schutztruppe bases. It hadn’t been difficult to ascertain the positions of these, and he now had a good idea of the state of the fighting. Hidden in a niche in the wall of his hut he kept a tattered dossier which he annotated and altered as fresh information came in. The news of the landings at Kilwa would have to be added tonight. By his calculations that meant the British army was now only a hundred and fifty miles or so away from Nanda. It was true that the Portuguese had occupied Lindi some months previously but they didn’t count.
This new awareness of the proximity of the British forces brought with it a succession of conflicting emotions. His leg wound had been healed for many weeks now. Deppe’s posting had made the need to be regarded as injured no longer necessary. Liesl was quite unworried by his presence and their friendship made it unlikely that she would ever insist on his being transferred to another POW camp. Indeed, she had saved him from being re-incarcerated in the Nanda camp just three weeks previously. The stockade had been re-opened for captured European NCO’s. There were now ten British, four Rhodesians and two Portuguese behind the barbed wire, supervised by a grotesquely fat Dutchman called Deeg and a gang of fierce looking native auxiliaries known as ruga-ruga. These men were armed with old rifles but wore no uniforms apart from the odd scavenged pair of trousers or forage cap. It was rumoured among the prisoners that the ruga-ruga were recruited from a tribe of cannibals. Certainly some of the men had filed teeth and this was taken to be sufficient proof of their taste for human flesh.