Dust Clouds of War

by John Wilcox

  He nodded to Jenkins and Mzingeli and the three picked up their rifles and followed the large figure of Driscoll, who had already begun the climb up the ridge, the edge of which was now becoming more sharply defined in the early morning light. Simon sniffed the air. Jenkins nodded.

  ‘Yes, it’s goin’ to bloody rain,’ grunted the Welshman. ‘Just as me bleedin’ wet sock was beginnin’ to dry out, we’re goin’ to get soaked, look you.’

  ‘Good thing, though. If the Germans are coming from the town to face us, they could get literally bogged down in that damned marsh. Come on, keep up. We must get to the top of the ridge before the Hun does.’

  They did so, for it was an easy climb. The ridge stretched from just above the shoreline inland towards the north and Fonthill realised that it was a perfect position from which to cover the troops still landing on the beach behind them. Ahead of them, however, stretched an even higher ridge with the matoke plantation and swampland to cross before it would have to be scaled. He looked behind him. Troops were pouring ashore from lighters and forming up on the beach.

  He called up to Driscoll. ‘It looks as though most of the men have been landed on the beach, Colonel.’

  ‘Good. Can’t see any sign of us being attacked yet. I’ll give it another ten minutes and then advance on that next ridge.’

  ‘Very well. It’s difficult ground between the two. Marshland and a plantation.’

  ‘So I understand. But we’d better get on with it before the Hun comes up. They will surely know we have landed by now.’

  A runner came up and reported to the colonel, who turned his head and shouted back to Fonthill. ‘Everyone’s ashore quite safely, thank God. Now I am ordered to push on. Do stay with me.’

  ‘Of course.’

  The whole battalion now moved slowly down the hillside and immediately descended into swampland. As they did so, desultory fire began to open up on them from the hill ahead. It was thin and poorly directed and Simon guessed that the main defending force had not yet been able to reach the hill in sufficient numbers to pose a definitive threat to the Fusiliers. Nevertheless, it was unpleasant to have to wade through the swamp, thigh and sometimes chest high, holding rifles at shoulder level to keep them dry, while the odd bullet hissed into the mud around them.

  Driscoll shouted an order and several weather-beaten Frontiersmen stopped wading, carefully sighted their rifles and began to reply to the snipers up on the hill.

  Predictably, it now began to rain, and at this point, Jenkins missed his footing and slipped neck high into the murky, brown water, before he could regain his balance. ‘Oh shit!’ he called. ‘Now I’m bloody well soaked all over, look you. I ’ave to tell you, bach sir, that I’m gettin’ really fed up with this postin’, so I am.’ His misery suddenly turned to fear as a thought struck him. ‘Eh,’ he shouted. ‘They don’t ’ave crocodiles in this wet muck, do they?’

  Simon recalled that his old comrade, although a fighter as courageous as a lion and as skilled in battle as a gladiator, held three terrors: fear of heights, water (he had never learnt to swim) and, most of all, of crocodiles and alligators.

  ‘Only little ones,’ shouted Fonthill. ‘Mzingeli, see what you can do to help the big baby.’

  A grinning Mzingeli turned and waded back to the Welshman, offering the end of his rifle to pull him clear. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘follow me. I find better ground, I think. Step where I step, both of you.’

  ‘Thanks, Mzingeli,’ called Fonthill, marvelling yet again at the tribesman’s instinctive ability to become familiar with new country, though far from home, and to sense its perils and discomforts and avoid them. ‘Lead on, we’ll follow.’

  Soon they came to firmer ground and, stamping their feet to remove the mud, they began to enter the matoke plantation, which on their reconnaissance Fonthill had noted as a possibly strong defensive position for the Germans. The banana-like plant grew from trees, thick as palms, which could provide cover for good marksmen – which the German askaris were noted to be.

  Simon looked to either side and realised that the Fusiliers had inevitably bunched together as they had waded through the swamp and they continued to do so as they picked their way between the trees. Fonthill opened his mouth to issue orders to spread out but bit his lip and refrained from doing so. He was not in command here.

  Suddenly, there was a burst of firing from up ahead and Fonthill caught a glimpse of conical caps, as worn by the German askari, appearing around the side of trees some three hundred yards into the plantation. Puffs of smoke came from their long rifles. At the same time, two Fusiliers to his right staggered and fell.

  He heard Driscoll’s stentorian voice shout, ‘Stretcher-bearers!’ and then, ‘Advance at the double. Fire as you go, from tree to tree. Push the bastards back.’

  The plantation had now become a chaotic battlefield, with the rain settling on the mud underfoot, causing it to cling and suck at everyone’s boots, as they slipped and slid from tree to tree. It was difficult now to define the enemy up ahead, but it was clear that the German askaris were living up to their reputation for bravery and musketry, for bullets thudded into the trees behind which Fonthill and his three comrades were trying to find flimsy shelter.

  The crackle of rifle fire now seemed to merge with the thunder of the tropical rain as it bounced from the palm leaves high above. Shouted orders, both in German and English, could be heard from up ahead but it was hard to distinguish between friend and foe in the semi-darkness of the plantation.

  ‘Can’t see the buggers,’ muttered Jenkins as he wiped the rain from his forehead – he had, of course, lost his pith helmet somewhere in the swamp. But he pushed his rifle around the side of the tree, took careful aim and fired. A cry from the depths of the plantation showed that his bullet had struck home.

  Fonthill had now lost sight of the colonel but, with lowered head, he ran as best he could from tree to tree, occasionally stopping to fire ahead when he caught a glimpse of a black face peering from the foliage. Jenkins and Mzingeli remained at his side, firing whenever they had the opportunity.

  ‘Keep going,’ gasped Simon. ‘We can’t afford to stop. We must push them out of this plantation, because it’s their best cover for miles. Once we get them out into the open we shall have a better chance because, by the look of it, we are outnumbering them.’

  ‘Blimey,’ muttered Jenkins. ‘Can’t see much evidence of that.’

  Eventually, however, they found the density of the plantation was thinning and at last they plunged from its edge into more open country, the beginning of the climb up to the next ridge. Nevertheless, the vista ahead was hardly clearer than it had been among the matoke trees, for the hillside ahead of them was covered in scrub and long grass, from which the flashes of rifle fire could be seen, as the askaris disputed every inch of territory.

  The sky above them had turned a dull yellow but it still bulged with rain clouds and the atmosphere seemed even more humid in the open than it did in the plantation. What was clear was that the Germans’ famed colonial troops were fighting a splendid rearguard action, stoically firing from their limited cover, reloading, retreating a few yards and then firing again.

  Suddenly, the boom of a distant, heavy artillery piece cut through the cacophony of the rifle fire. It sounded far away, but a great flash of flame erupted from the ground ahead of Simon and his three comrades, sending sand, grit and scrubs rising in a great v-shape.

  ‘Damn,’ hissed Fonthill. ‘I didn’t know the Germans had heavy artillery. Where the hell could it have come from?’

  Jenkins puffed out his cheeks. ‘I don’t know and I don’t much care, see, as long as the bloody thing fires at somebody else.’

  Only two more shells exploded on the hillside, however, because a distant booming from the lake showed that the British warships were now engaging in an artillery battle with the solitary German big gun. It quickly fell silent – either because of a direct hit or, more likely, because the enemy had moved th
e gun out of range.

  Its removal, however, did nothing to accelerate the dogged retreat of the askaris and their white officers, a glimpse of whose pith helmets and cloth neck protectors could occasionally be caught through the brush. The enemy’s fire remained accurate and consistent and the climb to the top of the hill continued to be contested by them, inch by inch, bush by bush.

  Eventually, Driscoll and his men reached the top of the ridge and Fonthill crawled forward and slumped by his side. ‘Have you lost many men, Colonel?’ he asked.

  The big man took a draught from his water bottle, wiped the dribble from his chin in a great swipe and wedged the cork back into the canteen with a savage thump. It seemed that everything he did was larger than life.

  ‘Surprisingly few, old chap,’ he grinned. ‘Rather amazing, really, because they’ve kept up a pretty fierce firing and I thought they had us on toast coming through that blasted plantation. But we’ve cleared this damned ridge. Trouble is,’ he nodded ahead, ‘there’s another one to get up and down before we get anywhere near the town itself. And at the bottom of this hill there’s more bloody bogland. Lordy, what a country! And it looks as though the Germans are going to contest every bit of the way.’

  Simon nodded to his right. ‘Any news about our advance further inland?’

  ‘Not yet. But the askaris haven’t tried to outflank us from that direction so I hope that means our line is holding.’ He turned and shouted to his adjutant. ‘George, get the men moving again. Can’t hang about.’

  All through that wet and humid day, the Fusiliers advanced doggedly, wading through more swamp despite strong resistance and, eventually, taking the third ridge – soon to be known as ‘Fusiliers’ Knoll’. Fonthill and his two companions fought with them, acting as riflemen in the front of the line and, occasionally, whenever Driscoll queried the terrain ahead, giving directions as to the best route to follow.

  By late afternoon, contact was established with Stewart’s force to the north, where the Loyal North Lancs and the 29th Punjabis had climbed and occupied Arab Ridge. Now the whole line advanced so that, by dusk, the British had taken all the heights commanding the town.

  As Fonthill, Jenkins and Mzingeli bivouacked under a bush in a desperate attempt to keep dry, Simon’s thoughts turned, for the first time in that fraught and busy day, to Alice. He knew that she would be with the journalistic contingent close to General Stewart, the commanding officer – a comforting thought, for he doubted if Stewart could allow himself to advance too far into danger without compromising his grasp of the strategic situation. Yet would his wife stay so confined? In battle she hated to be anywhere called ‘safe’.

  In fact, he was completely right to be concerned, for Alice had been prevented from leaving the little group of correspondents who were gathered around the general and his staff. Twice, she had attempted to slip away to move towards the gunfire ahead and twice she had been brought back by the young subaltern who was shepherding the newspapermen.

  ‘Please, madam,’ he scolded her the second time. ‘I am already feeling extremely frustrated myself at not being allowed to go towards the firing, so don’t make it worse for me by having to keep both eyes on you throughout the day. The general will kill me if you make a nuisance of yourself in the front line.’

  Alice forced herself to grin pleasantly. ‘Young man,’ she said, ‘I haven’t been placed on earth to make your job easy, nor, for that matter, to make myself a nuisance when an action is being fought. No,’ she found herself fluttering her eyelashes and despised herself for doing so, ‘I am here to do a job and to report on the action being fought here so that the great British public can understand what is going on. And, dear boy, I can’t do that if you prevent me from seeing what the bloody hell is actually going on. Now, be a splendid fellow and just turn your back for a second and let me get to the front. I shall not be a nuisance, I promise. I just want to make a note or two from nearer the action.’

  The subaltern sighed. ‘It is more than my commission is worth, madam. Please return to where the others are sitting. We will brief you all as the day goes on.’

  ‘Oh, well. Bugger it. On your head be it if the readers of the Morning Post are misinformed. Very well, I promise not to stray. But can you tell me one thing?’

  A frown puckered the young man’s forehead. ‘Probably not, madam. But ask me anyway.’

  ‘Very well. Now tell me – and I promise I won’t quote you, so you can speak off the record – why do you think that German field gun fired at our ships before we landed? Is there a possibility that they were warned we were coming?’

  ‘Oh, I really don’t know that. You must ask the general.’

  ‘Very well, I shall. But I don’t want to do it with all my competitors listening.’ She laid a hand on his arm. ‘Do you think you could be an angel and, perhaps, get your colleagues’ views on this point? Just their opinions, you understand. I cannot understand why the gun was mounted there if no one was expecting some sort of invasion.’

  ‘Well, I’ll try, Miss Griffith. But I can’t make any promises. Now do come back to the journalists’ enclosure, there’s a good lady.’

  ‘Very well. But try really hard, Lieutenant, won’t you?’

  He did indeed try, for later in the day he sought out Alice.

  ‘The general view amongst the staff, Miss Griffith,’ he confided, ‘is that someone must have alerted the Germans.’ The lieutenant looked uncomfortable, even as he spoke. ‘Now, please don’t take that as gospel because it’s … it’s … only gossip, really, madam. The gun, it seemed, was very recently moved to its position and the word is … ah … that a spy in the British camp somehow gave a last-minute warning that we were crossing the lake in force and, as a result, the gun was ready and loaded.’

  Alice nodded slowly. She had refrained from making a note in case it daunted the officer. ‘How very interesting,’ she murmured. ‘But if that were true, surely the Germans would have had troops ready and waiting by the beach to dispute the landing, don’t you think?’

  The young man shook his head. ‘We have captured a German officer and he tells us that the general’s feint by two of our warships towards the river crossing worked and that the Germans sent a large part of their defensive force to the south to protect the crossing. Realising their mistake, they have rushed their troops back and this explains why their resistance has been so strong later in the day.’

  He looked uneasily over his shoulder. ‘Now please, Miss Griffith, do not quote me on this or I will get into trouble. May I have your word on that?’

  Alice smiled. ‘You certainly do, Lieutenant, you certainly do. I shall treat all you have told me with the utmost discretion and I am most grateful.’

  She planted a quick kiss on the young man’s cheek, turned and walked away frowning. A spy? In the British camp. Who on earth could that be?

  Troops on both sides endured a miserable night in the rain and it was a relief for the British to be able to move forward down the slopes the next day – still in pouring rain – to advance on Bukoba. If they thought that their commanding position on the heights would deter the enemy, they were wrong, for the German askaris and their officers fought with the same obduracy they had shown since the return of their troops from their false errand to the south.

  Inevitably, however, the defenders were forced back to the outskirts of the town and then, abruptly, they melted away over the hills to the west, leaving Bukoba at the mercy of the British. The troops surged into the seemingly deserted town and it was an Australian Frontiersman from the Fusiliers, Lieutenant Dartnell, who was given the honour of lowering the German flag in the centre of the town.

  In what remained of the daylight that evening, Bukoba’s radio mast was dismantled and destroyed by British sappers and a German field gun was removed, only to fall into the lake from the lighter taking it to the waiting British fleet.

  Alice was reunited with her husband and she immediately sat down and interrogated him, begging
him for details about the Fusiliers’ advance and the heavy fighting they had encountered in the swamps and plantation, on their way to capture the ridges.

  The four were sitting companionably on a rise above town, by a spluttering campfire after the rain had ceased with the rising of the moon, emptying Simon’s whisky bottle (milk, of course, for Mzingeli), when there were explosions from the centre of Bokuba and the sky was lit by a succession of bonfires.

  ‘What the hell’s going on?’ demanded Fonthill, rising to his feet.

  ‘Looks to me, as though our League of Whatd’yercall’em is ’avin’ a bit of fun down there,’ grunted Jenkins. ‘They was already startin’ to do a bit of lootin’ when I left the town to come up ’ere.’

  Alice climbed up onto a knoll the better to see. ‘Yes,’ she gasped. ‘Those bloody Fusiliers – the ones you nearly commanded, Simon – are sacking the town. I’m going down to see what’s happening.’

  ‘No, Alice,’ shouted Fonthill, ‘don’t do that.’ But she had already gone.

  The three hurried after her and caught her up as she stood, notebook in hand, scribbling away. She noted a Fusilier officer, glass of champagne in hand, laughing as he watched a trooper emerge from the German governor’s house with a ladies’ toilet set in ivory. Another carried the governor’s ceremonial helmet. Everwhere, houses were being looted and then torched, until the very sky seemed to be alight.

  ‘Where the hell is Driscoll?’ demanded Fonthill. ‘This is disgusting.’

  ‘Colonel is over there,’ said Mzingeli pointing. A faint smile played on his lips. He had not forgotten being called ‘boy’.

  ‘Simon,’ shouted Alice above the crack of the burning timbers. ‘For God’s sake go and tell him to restrain his men. This is not how British troops should behave.’