Dust Clouds of War

by John Wilcox

  He shrugged his shoulders. Only time would tell. But at least they now had a few days’ rest. Would there be a letter from Alice, he wondered? He had not heard from her for nearly three weeks or more, mainly, of course, because they were miles from military post offices. Good! There might be more than one. He walked back to find Mzingeli and 352.

  They had pitched their bivouac tents near to the lines of the British cavalry, had seen to the horses and were now, predictably, fast asleep under canvas. Fonthill left them to their slumbers and went to find the mail officer. To his delight, there were three letters waiting for him. He also picked up an envelope addressed to Jenkins, in rounded, immature handwriting, posted from South Africa.

  He decided to open his letters in postmarked date order and lay back on the freshly cut wood branches that Jenkins had thoughtfully thrust under his sleeping bag as a makeshift mattress and indulged himself, the odour of the cavalry lines – a mixture of horse manure, urine, and oats – reaching his nostrils in warm, comforting waves.

  Alice’s first letter was short and to the point: complaining predictably about being held ‘as though by damned curfew’ in Mombasa, and being forced to pick and choose between formal army press releases to report on the progress of the war and wishing – oh how she wished! – to be with him out in the bush. The next, written quite quickly after the first, was apologetic for being so winsome and assuring him that she had found ways of busying herself usefully (all would be revealed on his return …!). She still yearned, though, to be with him. She was worried, she confessed, because she had not received a letter from Sunil now for some three weeks. She well understood that she could not hear from Simon, but no news from the Western Front disturbed her.

  The last letter was quite thick and it became immediately apparent why. It contained a joyful letter from Alice and enclosed one from Sunil, serving in France. Simon turned to it quickly. It informed them both that he had been promoted to captain and made adjutant of his battalion. He confided that this was probably because of the casualties his regiment had received rather than his competence as a soldier, but he had been patted on the back quite effulgently, he added, by his CO. He worried about his ‘dear mother and father’ – particularly Simon (he had rarely called him ‘father’ and had taken to using his Christian name in addressing him since he had joined the army) and said that they were both probably in far worse danger than himself. He sent his warmest love to them both and deep affection for 352, with the admonition ‘not to drink too much’.

  Simon lay back and read it again with a warm smile – a smile that turned to a frown when he read the reference to danger. Of course the boy was in danger! The life of a front line infantry officer in the trenches of France and Flanders, he knew, was likely to be short. How long before dear Sunil, the smiling lad they had recruited to serve with the three of them (Mzingeli had been spared the snows of the Himalayas) in Tibet and then schooled and adopted, joined the casualties that were mounting day by day in Europe? Both he and Alice had grown to regard their adopted son as a gift from God in their middle age. It was unthinkable that he should be taken away from them before they had time to live together as a proper family. He grunted and turned to Alice’s joyful covering note.

  It was clear that she was vastly relieved to have heard from Sunil and her own news was happier, almost jaunty, as a result. She was, she said, ‘very busy now’ but wished so much that she could be out covering the skirmishes that were going on now throughout German East Africa. Even the Portuguese and Belgians, she wrote, had joined in on the side of the Allies. Writing at arm’s length from Mombasa was not her idea of being a war correspondent and she was about to write directly to General Smuts to alter ‘this state of affairs’.

  Simon put down her letter with a smile. Pool old Smuts. About to be lambasted on two sides now from the Fonthills! Then he looked at his watch and crawled out into the sunshine. It was time for a cup of tea. And he wanted to share Sunil’s good news with his two comrades.

  Jenkins nodded sombrely. ‘Always said the boy would make a splendid soldier,’ he said. ‘I taught him to shoot, you may remember, bach sir. In fact, the little blighter saved your life right at the end of the Tibetan business, did he not?’

  ‘He certainly did. Made a change from you and Alice doing the same. I felt quite happy about it, I can assure you.’

  ‘Ah, bach sir. Got a bit of news for you, now. Picked it up from one of the sergeants working on the boss’s staff. Old Smuts has sacked Malleson, which we all expected, I suppose. But Tighe’s bein’ sent to India and Stewart ’as got the old ’eave-oh, too. All a bit unfair on the last two, it seems to me.’

  Fonthill frowned. ‘I quite agree. This man is certainly ruthless. Have you heard who is taking Tighe’s place?’

  ‘A bloke from the East African Rifles called Hoskins. Never ’eard of ’im.’

  ‘Ah yes, Reginald Hoskins. I know of him, I think. A respected officer, if I remember him properly.’

  ‘Yes, well, I’m also told that old Smutty is bringin’ in a lot of South African mates of ’is from the Boer War onto senior positions. P’raps ’e don’t trust the British, look you.’

  ‘Well, with the exception of Tighe, he hasn’t had much reason to so far, I must say.’ They were silent for a moment, then Simon struck his forehead with his hand. ‘Oh, 352, forgive me. You have a letter. I have left it in my tent. I’ll get it.’

  Jenkins’s jaw dropped. ‘It’ll be from the girls,’ he said, his face splitting into a great grin. ‘I’m so glad they’ve remembered to write.’ He quickly brushed away a reluctant tear. ‘I’m not used to receivin’ letters, like. Nice change. Thank you, bach sir. Thank you very much.

  ‘Blimey,’ Jenkins’s favourite exclamation was more a howl of delight. He looked up from his letter – he had been studiously following each word with his forefinger – this time with tears unashamedly streaming down his cheeks. ‘I’ve become a grandfather, TWICE!’ He wiped the tears away with the back of a grubby hand. ‘Well, I suppose, not an actual grandfather. A sort of step-grandfather. But it’ll do me. Two more little girls, one each. Lovely!’

  ‘Grandad,’ Fonthill leant across and shook the hand of his old comrade. ‘Warmest congratulations.’

  Mzingeli did the same in his own style: with a smile but unspokenly.

  ‘As a matter of fact,’ said Simon, ‘we all have reason to be pleased. You, Mzingeli, have been awarded an ex-gratia payment of £50 by General Smuts, on the recommendation of General Tighe for your scouting work, particularly at Longido.’

  The Matabele’s grin widened. ‘Nkosi, like the rest of us, I am getting old for this work. But it is good to be rewarded.’

  Jenkins slapped him on his back so that the tracker was nearly knocked to the earth. ‘It certainly is, old Jelly. Well, bach sir, I think this calls for a glass of milk for you an’ me, an’ a bloody great big pint for Jelly here. What d’yer say?’

  ‘Quite agree, 352. Let’s get cleaned up. You light a fire and I’ll go and raid the officer’s mess, if they let me in without a shave, that is.’

  ‘Good idea, bach sir.’

  It turned into a most convivial evening around the campfire, with Jenkins cooking stew, Simon providing wine and, later, a bottle of good Scotch whisky, and Mzingeli doing his best to down a small glass of whisky and water but being forced to spit it out and resort to milk, much to Jenkins’s disgust.

  Just before they scattered the ashes of the fire and retired to their sleeping bags, Jenkins raised a pensive and rather bloodshot eye and asked, ‘What did you shay Miss Alice was up to, bach shir?’

  ‘As a matter of fact, I haven’t the faintest idea, old chap. As long as she keeps out of trouble I shall be happy. I must say, though,’ he mused, ‘I do miss her terribly at the moment.’

  ‘We all do, bach. We all do.’

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Alice, in fact, was busily writing her report on Smuts’s staff changes when Simon’s letter in reply to he
r previous three arrived. She sighed with relief when she saw the familiar handwriting on the envelope and tore it open quickly. It was posted from the north-eastern front, which did not surprise her, for, as the most active in the vast territory over which the war was now being fought, she had always felt that that was where he and his two companions would be operating.

  Simon had deliberately included some juicy details of the attack on the nek, which he knew she would appreciate and would liven up her cables which, perforce, had to be based on the anodyne army HQ briefings. He told of the inferred incompetence of Malleson, in contrast to the feisty aggression and eventual success of Tighe. But what, he asked, had she actually been up to? What was the nature of the ‘quite busy’ work she was doing in boring old Mombasa?

  Alice smiled and quickly put aside her story on the staff appointments and added a rider to her previous cable on the action near Taveta. ‘Information has just been received on the story behind General Smuts’s success in the north-east …’

  Good old Simon! He knew she would appreciate these discreetly dropped crumbs from the battlefront. She finished writing the piece – carefully concealing the source of her information, of course, and wrapping in diplomatic language Malleson’s leaving of the field when the battle was at its height – and took the cable to the censor’s office. As a very experienced correspondent and an old hand at not incurring the censor’s displeasure, she was sure that his blue pencil would not be used on her copy. But she had other, additional, fish to fry that day.

  She turned on her most bewitching smile for the benefit of the staff sergeant on duty. ‘Staff,’ she said. ‘Could you leave your desk for a minute, do you think?’

  He returned her smile, looked round at the empty office and tugged at his moustache. ‘Of course, Miss Griffith. I will see you at the usual place in about five minutes, if that is convenient? But I must be quick.’

  ‘Of course, that will be most convenient, thank you.’

  She had less than that to wait in the narrow alleyway round the corner from the censor’s office, before the staff sergeant came furtively to her side.

  ‘I could be shot for this, you know, Miss,’ he said.

  Alice pressed a golden guinea into his hand. ‘Now, as I explained before, you are not betraying the army, Staff,’ she said. ‘I just want to check that this man is not scooping me with his stories, that’s all. It’s just commercial competition, you see. We correspondents are all in competition with each other. Dog eat dog and all that. You and the staff captain see everything that I write, so you will know that I am not robbing him of his exclusives. I just want to keep an eye on him, that’s all.’

  ‘Very well, Miss.’ He gave her a copy of a long cable. ‘It’s in Boer language, as usual. We have to get a South African army bloke to censor them, ’cos neither the captain nor I can understand a word … Hasn’t been censored yet, though, so I shall need this back pretty smartly, please.’

  He sniffed. ‘I have to say that I haven’t got much time for the bloke. He’s a surly so-and-so, never passes the time of day. He’s still fighting the Boer War, if you ask me. I’d better have this back within a couple of hours, Miss, please.’ He pocketed the coin, touched the brim of his cap with his forefinger and marched away, ramrod tall.

  Alice hurriedly put the cable in her handbag and walked back quickly to her hotel. Back in her room, she drew down the blind, for her bedroom looked across the street directly into a busy office whose window faced hers. Then she locked the door and smoothed out the cable on her dressing table. It was in Afrikaans, of course. Addressed to the office of the Boer newspaper Die Burger in Pretoria, it was signed Herman de Villiers and seemed innocuous enough.

  Alice had only picked up a smattering of Afrikaans in her many sojourns in South Africa and so she found it extremely difficult to decipher the cable. Brow furrowed, however, she did her best to wade through the story, tracking through the place names and comparing it to her own story, and realised that it was a fairly straightforward account of the battle of the nek. However … she stiffened. There was something strange about the middle of the story, which seemed to be a distinctly discrete section, even, perhaps, written in a different language and with a signature at the bottom – Lowe. Some kind of story within the story. No more than – what? – two hundred and fifty words, perhaps.

  She looked up at the ceiling and sucked hard on her pencil. Why a story within the story? She looked down again at the text. Ah, of course. The umlaut over the ‘o’ of Lowe. The insert was in German! And Lowe was probably a code name.

  Alice stood and opened the top drawer of her dressing table and sorted through her underwear. She had studied German in a perfunctory way at finishing school in Switzerland and she had kept her German dictionary and grammar somewhere … but where? Eventually, with a cry of joy, she found it and began to work, her tongue poking out in concentration.

  Within the half-hour, she had finished. She could not accurately translate the message slipped so innocuously into the copy but the meaning was more or less clear. And Lowe was the German word for lion, certainly a code name. The German section stated that Smuts intended forthwith to attack the German defences at Kahe and that when von Lettow-Vorbeck was forced to retreat Smuts would aim south-east for the Central Railway to cut him off.

  Alice licked her lips. This meant that, in addition to de Villiers, there were probably two or even three more spies working with the British Army HQ – certainly the South African interpreter in the censor’s office and someone out in the field with the army command. Perhaps there was a whole network of them? No wonder von Lettow-Vorbeck always seemed one jump ahead of the British and South Africans in the field!

  She must act quickly. But what to do? Alice frowned. Smuts, of course, was not at his Mombasa HQ so she could not turn to him. But who to approach? Whoever was feeding de Villiers with information was reasonably senior in the army hierarchy, or at least very much involved with communications between the general in the field and his HQ.

  She snapped her dictionary tightly shut. Obviously, she must warn the head of Smuts’s staff here at Mombasa that the general’s plans were being relayed back to a pro-German source in the Boer capital of Pretoria, presumably for onward transmission to von Lettow-Vorbeck out there in the wilds of German East Africa. Alice frowned. She would like to set her own trap for Mr Herman de Villiers, if she could think of a way. She had a personal score to settle with him, and Alice Griffith was not one to let a score settle and fester. It was now perfectly clear that he had spied on her when she employed the Calipha to take her into the delta. She had begun to suspect him recently when she saw him slip money into the hands of that obsequious clerk at the hotel desk. Unnoticed, she had observed them whispering in conclave for some time and referring to the hotel register. Yes, before delivering him up to the army, she must first devise a plan to trap him, to ensure that, when he was caught, he would be caught for good!

  But first, she must ensure that no more of the general’s plans were passed to the enemy. She pinned up her hair, which had become a little bedraggled while she was attempting the translation, placed her smartest straw hat on top of it and left her room, carefully putting the cable in her handbag and locking the door behind her. She left the hotel by the back entrance and made sure she was not being followed before hailing a cab.

  Once at Army HQ she asked to see the brigadier who was Smuts’s chief of staff in Mombasa. Brigadier Lawrence had served under Alice’s father as a young subaltern and, although she had not traded on the acquaintance before, she decided it was time to play this card.

  Lawrence sat, jaw in hand, listening to her as she told her story. Then, without speaking, he held out his hand to read the original of the German cable from ‘The Lion’, then her translation of it.

  ‘You translated well, my dear Miss Griffith,’ he said. ‘Luckily, I learnt German myself some years ago when I was on secondment to the Kaiser’s staff in Berlin …’ Then, seeing the alarm mate
rialise in Alice’s eyes, he held up his hand. ‘No, madam, I am not your spy at headquarters, and I think my record in the army, particularly in the Anglo–Boer war, will prove that. But,’ he tapped the German letter with his forefinger, ‘I might just have an idea who it might be.’

  He sniffed. ‘Certainly, a rocket has to be administered to the captain in charge of the censor’s office for letting this cleverly inserted stuff slip through. And, of course, we shall arrest the South African interpreter pretty damned quickly now. But first …’ he pondered. ‘I think we might just alter one or two key phrases about Smuts’s intentions so as to misdirect our German friends in the field.’

  Lawrence looked up quickly. ‘You obviously have to return this cable?’

  ‘Yes, I have only “borrowed it” so to speak.’

  ‘Good. Leave it with me while I get this central bit retyped, so that it can be passed on. Then we can certainly arrest the interpreter. And, presumably, this de Villiers chap. He is undoubtedly a traitor.’

  ‘Indeed, sir. But may I suggest you leave him be for the moment? I would like to make sure that we catch him red-handed, so to speak. I have a personal score to settle with him.’

  ‘Very well. But don’t leave it long. The man must hang before he can do any further damage.’

  ‘Of course. I will be back within the hour for the rewritten piece and I hope to have a suggestion for you then.’

  ‘Splendid. Thank you, Miss Griffith. Your father would have been proud of you.’

  She smiled. ‘How kind of you.’

  Back in the hotel, she perched on the bed and thought hard. There was probably enough circumstantial evidence of de Villiers’s guilt already to hang him, but the final nail in his coffin would be, somehow, to catch him in the act of betrayal. And she wanted, very much, to be involved in that. How to trap him?

  The newly installed electric fan whirled slowly above her head but did little to stir the heat within the room. Somewhere, in the distance, a command was barked and boots slammed onto sandy ground – a reminder that this picturesque, previously peaceful port was now also an army town. Slowly, a plan began to form within Alice’s brain. She slowly nodded and smiled. Yes. That would do.