Owen Sheers - The Dust Diaries

Closer to home there were a few families and individuals with whom he had reached a deeper understanding. The Nashes often fed him and provided him with a bed when he trekked over to Umvuma, and the Tullys, farmers outside Enkeldoorn, had even asked him to be godfather to their son, William. When he had been at Wreningham he had campaigned for women missionaries to join the station, and eventually his requests had been granted in the shape of Mary Prior and Agnes Saunders. The women were fiercely independent and he and Agnes in particular did not always agree on methods of pastoral care. He knew she found him awkward to deal with, stubborn, but a shared bias towards the African provided the foundation for a mutual respect. He’d frequently found Agnes asleep in a rondavel, the brown legs and arms of several sleeping children wrapped around her neck and her body.

But he had also lost friends. The drain of recurring malaria and the TB he had recognised finally defeated Bishop Gaul. He stood down from his position and sailed from Beira Bay for England in 1907, embarking at the same dock where he had stood waiting for Arthur seven years earlier. Then in 1913 his mother died. He received the news from his brother William, reading the letter in his rondavel at Maron-da Mashanu, sitting on his bed beneath the only picture in the bare hut: a portrait of his mother, Charlotte Cripps. Early in 1914 he returned to England on furlough to conduct a memorial service for her and to settle his affairs in the wake of her going. He’d stayed with his brother at The Lawn in Tunbridge Wells, but England and her countryside which he had missed so much when in Africa now felt alien to him, as did his brother’s way of life. William went shooting in Chase Woods, clouds of pheasants beaten into his line of sight, made regular trips up to the Spread Eagle pub and worked long hours in his study that looked out over a manicured lawn to the town below. Like the country itself, his life seemed crowded, rich, its destiny long settled, so unlike the sense of new beginning he felt with each morning he woke in Mashonaland.

He did not visit Ada. He dreamed about her, as if just being nearer her unlocked his memories, and he often woke early in the morning, listening to the racket of the rooks outside his window, imagining how seeing her again might be. But he did not see her. He could not bear to make the journey, take the risk. And it was not just for him. Theresa would be seventeen now. No longer a child. The same age Ada was when he’d met her. So he did not see either of them, and it was on that voyage back to Africa that he’d recognised how his mother’s death had cut his last tie with England. Standing on the deck of the ship, listening to the sea part and gather behind it, he’d watched the lights of Southampton slip beneath the water, and known he was not leaving, but returning to his home.

Arthur sat against the handrail of the foredeck, one arm hooked through it, looking down the steep side of the steamer, listening to the sound of the water parting about the hull. It was a clear night, star-dusted, lit by a luminous full moon. He watched the water catch the white light, peeling away from the prow in a frill of foam-headed wavelets as the boat ploughed steadily through the mercury surface of the lake. Minutes before, word had passed up the ship, whispered from officer to officer, that they had crossed the border with German East Africa. Arthur studied the water below him again. He had seen no border interrupt its continuity. He had seen nothing but the moonlight, mineral across its supple surface. He thought to himself how ridiculous it was to take a ruler and a pencil and dash a border through a lake. Like portioning the sky or claiming the stars. And how childlike to label one side of the lake German and the other British. Childlike and futile. The imbricated obsession to own, to possess. And yet that ruler and pencil laid over the lake was enough to send two thousand of them across her waters tonight, weighed down with ammunition and intent. Two thousand of them, steaming towards the land on the other side, the land labelled German. It was all they needed to consider killing and being killed. Words on a map.

In his heart, after his fourteen years in Africa, he was increasingly sure that the futility of those words was not just in their idea, but in their conclusiveness too. They looked so final, stencilled in black against the pink and yellow of the map. But they may as well have been written in dust. The land they covered with their capital letters could not be labelled. It did not belong to anyone, it could not belong to anyone. Even the African who farmed the soil his ancestors farmed was no more than a tenant. As Bishop Gaul had pointed out to him all those years before when he first looked out over the plains of blond grass, even the name Africa was futile, manufactured, unrecognised by millions who lived on her. In time that label would slip too, as words will, until it has travelled so far from meaning that it is no longer a word at all. Once again only the land it had tried to describe will remain. Un-named, un-owned and the only victor of all the bitter battles fought across her soil.

He looked back down the steamer across the huddled mass of men crowded on her deck. Their dark shadows were bulky and strangely inhuman, made awkward by the webbing, packs and weapons strapped about their bodies. The unhindered moon caught the gun-metal of the boat, softening edges, lighting the top of the handrail in a clean white strip; magnesium on the point of ignition. It illuminated details of the men too. The flash of a watch face tilted into the light, the tightly wrapped turbans of the 28th Mountain Battery, the still expression of an askari’s face looking out across the water. It lit the tools they had brought with them as well: the corrugated barrel of the Vickers machine-gun; the flat blade of a shovel protruding from a rucksack; the sharper blade of a bayonet, light running down its blood channel like a single drop of iridescent liquid. The moon’s impassive luminosity clothed them all, a benison of light despite their dreadful purpose.

The familiar smell of old and new sweat infused in cotton and serge reached him on a gust of wind, and he thought how little the labels of countries applied to these men too. This was not Britain going to war with Germany. Nor was it Indians, Africans, Rhodesians, boys from Lancashire fighting against Rhinelanders, Bavarians, Masi, Zulus and East Africans. It was men that went to war, not countries. Men that went to war and brought other men with them, as if it were a force that pulled at a peculiarly masculine substance, a rare ore woven in the marrow of the sex. A force that attracted them like flies to a flame, again and again into its terrible vacuum.

Arthur’s drifting thoughts were disturbed by a movement behind him. The deck of the ship had been quiet for the last hour, the men either asleep or lost in anxious thought about what lay ahead. Looking up he saw the Company’s intelligence officer, Captain Mein-ertzhagen, picking his way through the prone bodies and the piles of cargo. He was heading towards the foredeck where a Vickers machine-gun perched on its tripod like an insect among the banks of sandbags. As he passed Arthur the Captain looked down and acknowledged him with a curt nod of his head and a quiet ‘Father’. Arthur watched him as he went on, past the machine-gun nest, right up to the prow of the steamer. He stopped, put one foot up on the rail and leant forward, staring unblinking into the night, as if he was trying to catch a scent on the warm wind, the faintest aroma of the enemy.

Arthur was unsure what to make of the Captain. Their paths had only crossed in the most cursory of ways at Lake Command. He knew he was respected by the men, both askaris and Europeans. And when Arthur had trekked back with the walking wounded from the capture of Mwanza he’d greeted them all into the camp like a perfect host. But there was another side to him too. Before they’d embarked tonight Arthur had held a brief Communion on an altar of oil drums and ammunition cases. The congregation was small, a scattering of European privates and officers and a few askaris, most of the Sudanese, Swahili and Somali soldiers being either Muslim or pagan in their beliefs. He’d preached hopefully on the text of loving your enemies, doing well to those that do spitefully to you. When he had finished, the Captain had stood up and thanked him, then sent out two runners to gather together a larger group around the congregation. Once these men had arrived, he’d given his own brief sermon. His subject was the bayonet. He reminded the men they were there to be used, of the technique of upward thrust and twist, and of the most effective method of removing a lodged blade. Place a foot on the enemy’s chest and discharge a round while pulling back on the stock of the rifle. It was, he informed them, a method that also guaranteed a kill.