1982 - An Ice-Cream War

by William Boyd

  “Thank you,” he said. “How come you speak such good English?”

  “My husband’s father was English. He lived in Leamington Spa, near Stratford-on-Avon. Have you been there?”

  “No, I can’t say I have. Where’s your husband now?”

  “He’s fighting.”

  “Against the Germans?” A puzzled but sympathetic look crossed his face.

  “No no. He’s a German now. For many years. He’s fighting against you.” Liesl made no attempt to excuse his embarrassment.

  “Perhaps you could teach me German?” he suggested in an attempt to regain his composure.

  Liesl looked down the ward. In the morning it was quite cool. Later in the day it became unbearably hot.

  “Why do you want to learn German?” she asked. But she had already lost interest in his reply. She thought about the ‘bath’ waiting for her in an hour when she went off duty. Every day she got her maid, Kimi, to pour buckets of cold water over her while she stood in a tin bath. Then she would eat. Then she would sleep.

  “Well,” Cobb said. “I might as well make some use”—he waved his hands about—“of all this. Get something out of it, at least.”

  Liesl wearily climbed up the wooden steps that led on to the rickety stoop of her bungalow. It was small with two rooms—a bedroom and a sitting room—and had belonged to one of the bachelor managers of one of the plantations. It was sparsely furnished. The manager had been called up by the Schutztruppe and was now in the Kilimanjaro region, billeted, for all Liesl knew, in her own large and spacious farmhouse.

  For ten months now the war had been little more than stalemate but this, according to Erich, was exactly what von Lettow wanted. He knew that the Schutztruppe could never finally defeat the British but at the same time a well-fought and protracted campaign could ensure that more and more men and materials would have to be supplied, diverting them from the more crucial battlefields of the Western Front.

  Now the German army at Moshi and Taveta faced the British at Voi. There had been skirmishes at Jasin on the coast, the Belgians were advancing tentatively from the Congo, but little more. Since the debacle at the battle of Tanga in November of 1914 the British had done nothing. Nothing that is, Liesl corrected herself, apart from sinking the Königsberg in the Rufiji delta.

  She remembered the Königsberg. It had been moored in Dar-es-Salaam harbour, bright with flags on the day she had arrived back from Germany. She tried to imagine it scuttled in some jungle tributary and an image of rusting steel, river weeds and creepers slid obligingly into her head. She thought of their farmhouse, the neat garden and the banana groves all destroyed, razed and blackened by war and gunfire…She shrugged and went over to a rear window. She saw her maid Kimi lounging against the kitchen shack chatting to the cook.

  “Kimi,” she shouted. “Bring the water.”

  She went into her bedroom and sat on the bed while Kimi and the cook staggered in with four buckets of water. Outside the African dusk was nearing the end of its brief life. A red sun, just below the tree line, a smell of woodsmoke and charcoal fires, the first crickets beginning to trill and hum.

  Kimi stood obediently in silence as Liesl undressed. As her clothes came off Liesl began to feel pleasantly relaxed. Kimi stepped behind her and unlaced the worn cotton corset. Liesl told her to wash it. She needed new clothes but they were becoming impossible to buy. She stood there for a moment, quite naked, slumped in an archetypal pose of tiredness and resignation. Ten hours in the hospital. She weighed her heavy breasts with a forearm and holding them out from her body wiped beneath them with the corset, then used it to rub her armpits. She did nothing but sweat in this country. She looked down at her creamy freckled body. Freckled all over. Pale as an abbess, Erich had once said a long time ago. Only now the paleness was marred by red rashes of prickly heat; a belt beneath her navel, smears at her sides too, where her clothes chafed. She arched her back, stretched and stepped into the galvanized iron bath that lay in the middle of the floor. Kimi climbed onto a chair that stood beside it. Liesl reached down and, with a grunt of effort, passed her one of the brimming buckets.

  “Where’s the soap?” Liesl demanded.

  “No soap left,” Kimi said.

  Liesl sighed. She would bring some over from the hospital tomorrow. Never mind, it was the water that mattered. A few seconds of delight.

  “Go on,” she said.

  Slowly Kimi emptied the pail over Liesl’s broad white shoulders. The coolness of the water made her gasp but the shock wore off disappointingly quickly. The water slid down her body. Absentmindedly Liesl went through the motions of washing herself, her hands guiding the trickling water to every nook and crevice, passing over her arms and belly, raising one leg and then the other. Kimi’s face was locked in a frown with the effort of keeping the heavy buckets aloft. As one emptied, Liesl would pass her another.

  Finally clean, Liesl dried herself with a thick cotton towel, very patched and frayed, and put on fresh clothes. Then she ate and went to bed. Unless she was being visited by one of the other women in Nanda, with whom she had made casual acquaintance, for a game of cards, some coffee or speculation about the course and consequences of the war, she always went to bed early.

  This routine had been quickly established and had not changed for the five months she had been in Nanda. It had altered only on Erich’s two brief leaves, when he set his camp bed up in the narrow bedroom, and was always there on the stoop to greet her when she came home from work.

  Chapter 12

  21 November 1915,

  Voi, British East Africa

  Temple stood outside the post office at Voi, checking and rechecking his uniform. He felt slightly ashamed at the way his gleaming new Sam Browne belt defined rather than restrained his paunch. Another hole had been pierced at the very end of the belt and the short tip now refused to stay beneath the buckle. The slightest movement caused it to flip out.

  Patiently Temple waited for his summons to meet Brigadier-General Pughe, commanding officer of the brigade currently massed at Voi in preparation for the impending attack on the German army, just a few miles across the plains at Taveta.

  Temple pulled at his moustache and looked at the ceaseless procession of troops, donkeys, mules, and motor vehicles, carts and wagons of every shape and size, that passed up and down the main street of Voi in front of the post office, now acting as forward HQ for Pughe’s brigade. Temple thought back to the time a year before when he and his family had arrived here as refugees, early victims of this ‘war’. Mentally he added the quotation marks. He’d done nothing since he’d joined the East African Mounted Rifles after Essanjee’s tragic death. Nothing except gradually acquire, over the months, separate pieces of his uniform, and endlessly drill and canter across the countryside around Nairobi. From time to time small units went out on scouting parties and sneaked across the border with German East but they rarely encountered any Germans.

  In Temple’s case even this surrogate form of action had been denied him as he’d been cross-posted to the 3rd Battalion of the King’s African Rifles as a scout, where his local knowledge of the ground in the vicinity of Taveta was held to be of considerable use.

  Arriving at Voi six months ago he had been astonished to find the tiny railway junction and administrative centre transformed into a massive army camp. Neat rows of tents stretched out in every direction as huge contingents of troops from South Africa arrived to swell the battered remnants of Indian Expeditionary Force ‘B’. Indian sepoys, local Africans, South African Cape Coloureds and Whites and British troops only just maintained cordial relations in the makeshift garrison town.

  Temple had watched the army assemble first with fevered anticipation, then with wild hope, followed by deepening disappointment, culminating in utter boredom. They waited and waited, as the vast motor pool grew, mountains of stores piled high, cavalry regiments wheeled and manoeuvred, mountain batteries drilled and fired blank shells and the men grumbled and bickered at
each other.

  The thought of Smithville just an hour or two’s ride away made Temple want to weep with frustration. Many times he’d been out along the road he’d taken with Essanjee and Wheech-Browning until he came in sight of Salaita Hill, and many times he’d peered through his binoculars at the rise of ground that obscured his home and the farm buildings.

  He wondered what condition the farm was in, whether the Germans had demolished everything he’d worked so hard to build up. The house, the barns, the drying racks, the crops, the Decorticator…But somehow his imagination refused to picture the Decorticator as a wreck: a rusted, broken-down shell. It seemed too large and potent, too massy and fixed to be destroyed. Perhaps the webbing drive-belts would need replacing, the steam engine decaulking and overhauling, but somehow the Decorticator itself, the mighty iron wheels, the grinding teeth, the threshing chains seemed as permanent as any man-made object could be.

  It was a source of some pain to him that his family seemed not to share his anguish and concern. They were happily ensconced in a bungalow at the Reverend Norman Espie’s mission. Matilda had been delivered of a healthy baby girl and even the other children, to Temple’s disgust, referred to the mission as home.

  “Smithville’s your home,” he had rebuked them angrily one day in Nairobi when they had been tired and said they wanted to go ‘home’ to the mission. He had been astonished at their blank looks. “Smithville. The Farm. The Decorticator.”

  “There, there,” Matilda had said. “Don’t confuse them, dear.”

  “Home is where the heart is,” intoned the Reverend Norman Espie piously.

  “Yes,” Temple agreed. “You bet. Exactly.” Espie looked hurt for a second but then hastily assured Temple that he understood precisely how he felt.

  Temple rubbed the toe of his boot on his neatly wound gaiters. Pughe had kept him waiting outside now for over half an hour. His stomach was beginning to rumble in anticipation of lunch. He took off his sun helmet and inspected the brim. He flicked away some specks of dust.

  An orderly appeared at the door. “Mr Smith? You can go in now.”

  Temple was led through into what had been the post master’s office. Pughe and his brigade major stood in front of a table on which was laid a large map. Pughe had an empty glass in his hand and, as he turned to greet Temple, Temple saw the marginally unfocused gaze of someone in a well-advanced stage of intoxication.

  “Ah, Smith, isn’t it?” Pughe said. “Want”—he swallowed air—“benefit of your local knowledge. Expertise, what have you. Take a gander at the map.”

  Temple stood beside him. Pughe was a small man, bald, with a round, rosy, cherubic face which made his little toothbrush moustache seem wholly inappropriate. Brandy fumes exuded from him as if he’d been marinated in alcohol.

  Temple looked at the map. Voi, then the blank space until Taveta. The long line of the Usambara Hills running west from the coast ending at the magnificent full stop of Kilimanjaro.

  “Broadly, it’s going to go something like this,” Pughe said. “We attack south and north of Kili-whatsit. Meet up on the other side then trundle down the Northern Railway to Tanga pushing the Germans in front of us. That should just about do it. Now General Stewart with the 1st Division is taking the northern attack, while we want to move through the pass behind Taveta.” He drained his glass. “Splash a touch more in that, would you?” Pughe said to the brigade major.

  “Colonel Youell of the KAR told me you’d farmed around Taveta. He thought it might be useful if we could get through the Usambara Huls a bit further down. He seemed to think we could cut through from Lake Jipe to Kahe directly. What d’you say? Oh, thanks,” he accepted his drink from the brigade major.

  “Can’t be done, sir,” Temple said, suddenly consumed with homesickness on hearing Lake Jipe mentioned. He pointed to the map, at the pass between the end of the Usambara Hills and Mount Kilimanjaro.

  “On this area here, sir, there are several small hills. There’s Salaita in front of Taveta; behind the town the road goes between two hills called Latema and Reata. They command the ground completely. It would be very hard to move people off those hills.”

  “Oh.” Pughe looked surprised. “Are you sure? Are you expecting any problems there, Charles? What do our people say?”

  “I doubt it very much,” the brigade major said. “Remember we’ve got Stewart and the 1st Division coming down behind Kilimanjaro. They won’t want to make a stand at Latema—Reata. No, we’re pretty sure they’ll pull back down the railway to Tanga.”

  “Well, Smith,” Pughe said cheerfully. “Looks like you’re wrong. Thanks anyway.”

  “Yes, sir,” Temple said. He put on his sun helmet and saluted.

  “By the way,” Pughe said. “Curious accent you’ve got. Where are you from? Devon? Cornwall?”

  “No sir. I’m from New York City. United States of America.”

  “I see,” Pughe looked at his drink. “Smith. Seems an unusual name for an American. Long way from home, eh?”

  “No, sir,” Temple said pointing to Smithville on the map. “My home’s there.”

  Pughe shot a glance at his brigade major. “Yes. Mmmm. Right you are. Well, jolly good to have you chaps alongside us. Good luck.”

  Temple stepped out from the porch into the sun, adjusted his sun helmet and sighed audibly. The British. He shook his head in a mixture of rage and admiration. A general who was an alcoholic, an army resembling the tribes of Babel, and everyone milling around on this and plain without the slightest idea of what they were meant to be doing…

  He walked slowly up the road towards the area of the huge camp where his tent was pitched. He undid the top buttons of his tunic and, with a gasp of relief, unbuckled his Sam Browne. Happily, uniform regulations in this theatre of war were lax, to say the least. Shirtsleeves and shorts had become the order of the day.

  Temple skirted a company of drilling sepoys and moved down behind an immense open stable of mules and donkeys. The rich smell of manure was carried to him on a slight breeze. The air above the tethered animals juddered with a million flies. He watched some sweating, half-naked syces drag away a dead pony. The death toll among the horses and mules was staggering, tsetse fly claiming dozens of victims each day, but there seemed to be an inexhaustible source of pack animals; fresh trainloads were constantly arriving.

  Beyond the lines of tethered mules lay the sprawling, tatter-demalion encampment of what were euphemistically called support troops, meaning all the thousands of bearers, coolies and servants and their wives and families required to keep this swelling army in anything like working order. Temple imagined that this must have been how the Israelites appeared after wandering around the Sinai desert for forty years. A huge, heterodox mass of people, a sizeable township, without houses, institutions or sanitation but with all the mundane dramas—births, deaths, marriages, adulteries—that any town contained. He had never been into the bearer camp. Initially some soldier had attempted to impose a semblance of militaristic neatness and order on the mob, making them erect their shambas, shanties, thorn shelters and rag tents in neat rows, but it disappeared without trace in days. Looking down on the bearer camp from a slight rise the original grid plan could just be made out, like medieval strip fields since covered by a layer of scrubby vegetation. But from ground level it merely appeared a swarming, pestilential mess.

  Temple crossed a flimsy wooden bridge that had been laid across a wide gully. Facing him was a sizeable open space, recently cleared of its thorn bushes and boulders and trampled flat by the feet of thousands of coolies, which now did duty as Voi’s aerodrome. On a spindly varicose pole a windsock hung like an empty sleeve. Over to the right were temporary hangars, little more than canvas awnings, that provided some shade for the two frail biplanes—BE2 Cs—which at the moment constituted the presence of the Royal Flying Corps in East Africa.

  As he watched Temple saw one of the machines being pushed out onto the strip. Curious, he walked over to get a better
look. He had seen aeroplanes twice before. Once in Nairobi and once—a seaplane—at Dar-es-Salaam. It wasn’t the fact that such machines could fly that astonished him so much as their fragile delicate construction. He-was an engineer and the mechanical contraptions he had dealt with—locomotives, Bessemer converters, threshers, the Decorticator—were robust powerful artefacts, somehow asserting their right to function well through the very strength and size of their components. Forged iron, steel plate, gliding pistons. When you saw the Decorticator at full steam, you saw a symbol of the potential in human ingenuity. No task, however fantastical, seemed impossible when this kind of strength could be created, this kind of energy generated, harnessed and controlled. But the aeroplanes…? Patched canvas, broken struts, loose rigging wires. Temple felt he could pull one apart with his bare hands, punch it into rags and kindling.

  As he approached Temple recognized, to his dismay, a familiar lanky figure. Wheech-Browning. He wore a faded khaki shirt, loose knee length shorts and plimsolls without socks. On his head he had a tweed cap—reversed—and aviator’s goggles pulled down over his eyes. Wheech-Browning was the last person Temple wanted to see. He couldn’t stand the man. It was Wheech-Browning who had recommended his posting to the 3rd KAR at Voi, for which action Temple bore him a potent grudge. But the sad demise of Mr Essanjee had, as far as Wheech-Browning was concerned, established a bond between them which Wheech-Browning felt was now impossible to sunder. He treated Temple as a dear friend, a comrade-in-arms whose shared exposure to enemy fire had brought about an indissoluble union. This amity might just have been tolerable if Wheech-Browning had not at the same time pursued the matter of the unpaid duty on his coffee seedlings with the same vigour as he sought Temple’s friendship. Temporarily relieved of his duties through military service, Wheech-Browning had put the matter in the hands of the District Commissioner—one Mulberry-at Voi. The latest meeting with Mulberry had ended with Temple being threatened with prosecution for non-payment of debts. Temple turned on his heel and began walking in the other direction.