Owen Sheers - The Dust Diaries

Captain Richard Meinertzhagen angled the point of his sheath knife under the little toenail of his left foot and worked the blade in tiny movements, left and right; he brought the foot nearer with his left hand, bent to the toe and tried again. There was a jigger flea buried in there, a dark dot beneath the opaque nail, and he wanted to dislodge her before he embarked on one of the four steamers sitting low in the lake under their loads of artillery, supplies and braying mules. This harvest of jiggers had become something of a daily ritual since his arrival back in Africa. He’d already extracted more than twenty today, working the sore red spots out from under the skin like stubborn winkles from their shells. A couple of the officers had lost most of their toes to the parasites and hundreds of the soldiers, European and askari, hobbled about on raw, infected feet.

With a sharp prick of pain the flea came free, bringing with it a little pus from the hollow it had made in his toe. He examined it briefly on the point of his knife, just able to make out its hinged legs and its bloated body, spots of his own blood on its underside. Flicking it away, he wiped the knife on his shorts and looked up at the scene on the shore below.

From where he sat on a raised patch of ground above the lake, the small port town at his back, the embarkation process was mapped out beneath him. Immediately in front of the squat steamers the 28th Mountain Battery had lined up their two 75mm field guns ready for loading. Further along the shore the depleted 29th Punjabs and the worn-looking Loyal North Lanes were both preparing for battle, assembling their packs and cleaning their rifles. Nearer to where he sat, set back from the shore, the bizarre collection of men that made up the 25th Royal Fusiliers were also moving about their camp, noticeably older and larger than the other soldiers, even from this distance.

Beyond these regiment camps the open stables cut two straight lines into the tall blond grass, black quivering patches of flies shuddering above the heads of the mules and packhorses. Past these, order finally gave way to chaos with the tattered sprawl of the carriers’ encampment spreading out along the shore, tapering northwards into the distance. Here, the hundreds of porters and their families carried on their daily lives in their temporary homes and shacks, a squalling, littered tag of civilian life attached to the military camp. Closer to where he was sitting on the hill, stacks of ammunition and food supplies lay in piles, cooks’ fires smoked into the still evening air and a sullen heap of sandbags was being passed along a chain of askaris to the nearest steamer, where a pair of British officers packed them around a Vickers machine-gun positioned on the foredeck. To the left of where the steamers were docked, beyond the train track and its stalled wooden carriages, the field hospital tent was overflowing with sick cases, rows of men lain out on the ground on canvas stretchers. More than half the force in the hospital and hardly a bullet or a bayonet wound among them. Disease had wiped them out, not the enemy. Blackwater fever, dysentery and guinea worms, not bullets, shrapnel or shells.

♦

As a professional soldier who had served in British uniform since 1899 Meinertzhagen had found this particular war displeasing. The conflict was just over ten months old, and as yet, all he had experienced was failure, incompetence and frustration. Not his own personal failure, which he would never have allowed, but failure by association. The British army in Africa had spent seven months at war with the much smaller, less well equipped German Schütztruppe led by General Von Lettow, and yet Von Lettow and his troops remained undefeated and German East Africa remained just that — German.

This was Meinertzhagen’s second time in Africa. Thirteen years ago he had served as an officer with the 3rd King’s African Rifles, during which time he’d distinguished himself as a vicious bush fighter against two particularly stubborn native tribes. In 1906 he transferred back to India and he was at the Staff College in Quetta when this war was announced. A few weeks later when the War Office in London decided to send the Indian Army to deal with the German colonies, Meinertzhagen, as the only member of the Indian Force with previous African experience, became the Expeditionary Force’s Intelligence Officer. He was thirty-six years old, experienced, still fit and at the height of his military powers. He could, he felt, look forward to a challenging and rewarding campaign. Seven months on, he thought as he sheathed his knife, pulled his woollen socks up his calves and reached for his boots and puttees, he could not have been more wrong.

It started with the selection of the troops in India. Perhaps unsurprisingly the cream of the Indian Army had been despatched to France and the Western Front, and when Meinertzhagen saw the regiments collected on the docks at Bombay he realised that they, Indian Expeditionary Force B, had been left with the detritus. The ten regiments, battalions and detachments that boarded the ancient troop ships swaying drunkenly on the swell of the harbour were a rag-tag bunch, a rush job thrown together by desk clerks who he suspected had never seen an Indian soldier, let alone fought with one. On the two-week voyage across the Indian Ocean to East Africa, Meinertzhagen, writing from the relative comfort of a converted P&O liner, noted in his diary that the sepoys lying and retching in the holds of the other transports were ‘ theworst in India ’ and that their ‘ seniorofficers are nearer to fossils than active leaders of men ’. He tried to bolster his hopes by admitting to himself that at least some of the other regiments in Force B had a degree of military spine. The Loyal North Lanes were as good a British fighting regiment as any, the Kashmir Rifles and the loist Bombay Grenadiers had both seen good service, and he hoped that the KAR regiments they were joining in Africa had drilled their askaris to a decent level. These native soldiers would at least, he thought, have knowledge of the bush and the country.

On arrival in Africa Meinertzhagen’s dismay at the quality of Force B’s troops was soon matched by his frustration with their ineffective commanders, including General Stewart, who was in command here at the lake. The general was a tall man with a gentle face, an ineffective chin and a habit of clearing his throat before he spoke that reminded Meinertzhagen more of a scholar than a soldier. Meinertzhagen reached for his diary, a battered leather-bound book lying beside him which he kept on his person at all times. Pulling a pencil from his shirt pocket he added a note to today’s entry:

Throughout my service I have always regarded a war with Germany as a certainty and as the climax of all training.

He paused, looked up at the preparations below him, at Stewart’s well-meaning, charming but ineffectual manner, and bent his head to the book again. Licking the pencil, he finished the note:

And here I am in the rottenest side-show imaginable, rotten troops and rotten leaders and in a colony where from the Governor downwards there is no feeling of patriotism.

With a short sigh he pocketed the pencil and the diary, buckled on his Sam Browne and stood up. Standing with one hand on his hip and the other scratching the stubble on his chin, he gathered a glob of phlegm at the back of Ins throat, brought it up into his mouth with a growl and spat heavily onto the grass before making his way down the slope to make his own preparations for the activities of the coming night.

♦

Meinertzhagen’s early misgivings about Force B’s prospects proved to be well-founded. The combination of poorly prepared soldiers and equally poor commanders had provided the perfect overture to the disaster that was the battle of Tanga last November. The battle was the first decisive British attack in the African theatre, and, Meinertzhagen thought as he strolled clown towards the lake and his tent, would very possibly go down in history as their most embarrassing failure too. From the outset he thought it was bound for catastrophe. The confident clinking of brandy and whisky glasses in the smoky saloon of the command ship following General Aitken’s eve-of-battle speech had done little to cheer him. Neither was he convinced by the officers’ shared assurances to each other that the Hun wouldn’t put up much of a fight, that the town might be won without a single shot fired and the whole thing over before Christmas.