Owen Sheers - The Dust Diaries

Drought brought fifteen of his Skin Corps with him on Meinertzhagen’s raid across the frontier that Christmas Day. Padding through the bush next to these lean warriors, stripped of all his gear except a small rucksack, his rifle and ammunition, Meinertzhagen had at last felt he was at war. He revelled in how silently all seventeen of them crept through the grass and the thorn trees, his own breath barely audible in his ear, and he marvelled at the easy control Drought had over these wild Africans. The unsuspecting German outpost they found was unguarded. Open fires smoked between a loose gathering of tents, and Meinertzhagen could see, through the blades of grass that covered him, the Germans’ rifles propped together in neat groups of three at the centre of the camp. Close to where the British raiding party lay in the grass a Schütztruppe officer crouched over a hole in the ground behind a green canvas screen, his breeches around his ankles and his shirt tucked up under his armpits, showing his white, freckled lower back. Two others were playing cards on an upturned crate outside their tent, while a group of askaris sat around a fire talking and drinking from clay mugs.

Meinertzhagen led the way, moving silently to within a few paces of the card-playing officers, then rushing them with fixed bayonets. Everyone got his man, and Drought excelled himself, stabbing three. Hearing a noise from one of the adjoining tents, Meinertzhagen pulled his bayonet from between the ribs of an officer at the card crate and rushed in through its canvas flaps. A large man was sitting up in a bed beside a table laid with the full trappings of a Christmas dinner. Meinertzhagen covered the officer with his rifle and told him to put up his hands. The German, an older man with greying hair, looked astonished and fumbled with one hand under his blanket. Meinertzhagen fired immediately, the only shot of the raid, and the German dropped back on the bed, a patch of blood spreading above his pyjama pocket like a carnation growing at his breast. On inspection Meinertzhagen found the man had been reaching for his spectacles, not his gun. Hearing the gunshot, Drought joined Meinertzhagen in the tent and the two of them sat down to the Christmas dinner while the Skin Corps outside guarded the nine prisoners and fifteen dead. They were finishing the Christmas pudding as the first flies began to gather on the dead man behind them, multiplying in black over the spreading stain of red like the black seeds of a growing poppy.

That Christmas Day raid had the been the last piece of positive action that Meinertzhagen had seen. Since then the War Office had reiterated its position that the British troops in East Africa must remain on the defensive. And so for seven months the soldiers of Force B had done little more than endure the flies, the heat, the camp food, and collectively lick their wounds while their leaders came to accept that this war was not the game they had thought it might be.

Until tonight. Tonight, Meinertzhagen thought as he strode on down towards the body of the camp, his war was starting again. Kitchener had been persuaded to let them off the leash, and they were heading out for the hunt again. Their prey, the German port town of Bukoba and its wireless tower, lay on the western shore of the lake, just 200 miles away. Tonight they would no longer be defending. Tonight they would attack. Tonight, they would be an army again, and this thought alone lent Meinertzhagen’s stride a revived energy that he hadn’t felt for months.

As he came into camp Meinertzhagen spotted the chaplain, Father Cripps, walking in from the direction of the Fusilier tents. From this distance he looked like a regular soldier, khaki shorts and a khaki jacket. Only the faint gleam of the bronze crosses on his lapels and his dog collar gave him away for what he was. Seeing him now unsettled Meinertzhagen; he didn’t like it when the vultures flapped about on the masts of the steamers, stretching their raw necks, and he didn’t like seeing priests before battle for the same reason. Both were too portentous in times of war.

Reaching his tent, Meinertzhagen bowed into its dark interior, sat heavily on his folding canvas stool and shouted out to his askari batman to bring him his dinner. He leaned back and breathed in. Canvas, leather and steel. The smells of war. He felt his battle excitement rising in him, a dipping in his stomach and a tingling sensation running along the nerves of his limbs. Reaching onto his bed he picked up his revolver, black and heavy in his hand. Taking a cloth from a hook in the centre pole he laid it on his knee and began to clean it, rubbing his thumb and forefinger hard through its curves and hollows.

♦

Arthur had been looking for Tendai in the carriers’ camp for over an hour. Passing between the shambas, shacks, torn tents and open fires with pots of sadza and pans of tremoring peanuts propped over their flames, he scanned the faces. There were so many his mind had trouble keeping up with his eyes. Women, children, babies swaddled to their mother’s backs, Indian coolies, gaunt men and boys of every African tribe. He looked at them all, but recognised none of them as Tendai. A few he had seen before, Christian converts who had been to some of his services, but most were new to him. The ranks of the carrier corps seemed to be filled as quickly as overwork and disease depleted them.

Tendai had been recruited into the carrier corps late in 1914. The British Army did not consider the Mashona one of the ‘martial races’ suitable for combat so the Enkeldoorn area had been saved the recruiting officers of the KAR. Porters, however, could come from any tribe or creed and Arthur had soon noticed that large numbers of young men were absent from the villages and his church services. And now, with the help of Reverend Liebenberg, Tendai’s mother had written to Arthur to say that he too had been recruited and she had not heard from him for several months. She thought he was at the lake but as yet Arthur hadn’t found him or heard mention of his name.

Ever since that night when he’d softly translated Gufa’s speech to him, Arthur had noticed that Tendai was a child of rare intelligence. Over the years he’d been a regular attendee at his school and although farming his mother’s land had taken up much of his time Arthur had fostered real hopes of recommending him to the Bishop for ordination. But then the war came and now it looked as if like himself, Tendai had been drawn into its vacuum.

Reaching the far end of the carriers’ camp he looked closely at one more young man struggling back from the shore with a bucket of water. He studied his features but like all the others, he wasn’t Tendai, so turning back towards the main camp he began to make his return, aware that he should hold a communion before the steamers were boarded for the journey across the water to Bukoba.

Coming out of the carriers’ camp he walked down the long line of open stables where a group of men were dragging another dead mule from its box. Its slack muscles hung off its bones like half-empty sacks of grain and its open eyes stared through a film of green fluid. Another victim of the tsetse fly. Arthur walked on, hearing the intermittent drag and slump of its hooves across the ground as the men heaved it away from the stables. As he got nearer the main camp he passed the orderly tents of the 25th Royal Fusiliers, where he heard a man shouting. He carried on walking, shouting being common enough in these camps. But then, as the shouting continued, he realised the man was shouting at him. He stopped and turned towards the voice.

‘Hello there! It’s Father, er…Father…isn’t!?’

A short man with balding, greying hair and a salt-and-pepper moustache was striding out towards him from the Fusiliers’ tents, his hand outstretched in greeting. Arthur didn’t think he recognised him, but there was something in his voice that loosened a memory. The man, who wore the uniform of a Fusiliers officer, reached Arthur where he stood on the edge of the camp. He was red in the face from running to catch up with him. He looked up at Arthur, as if checking for something on his face, and then, apparently at a loss as to what else to do in the absence of his name, he smiled. Arthur smiled back down at him.