Owen Sheers - The Dust Diaries

Watching him now, standing at the steamer’s prow like a macabre figurehead, Arthur contemplated this man who could be so genial, and yet kill so easily. He took out his notebook and pencil from the top pocket of his khaki tunic and began to make some notes towards a poem. The war may have disrupted everything else in his life, but it had not stopped him writing. He had been writing poems throughout his time on the lake and now, as they steamed towards the German shore, he wrote again by the light of the moon, trying to sketch a portrait of the man standing before him, staring into the night as if daring it to break its silence.

The Watcher on Our Theshold

(Intelligence Department)

As in a bad dream I may see you now

Lank, flusht, chin-tufted, eyes as black as coal

Kindling like live coals, in that mood you well

Might pose for him who mortgage held of old

On Faustus damn’d — calling his mortgage in.

Those iron lips will no refusals own,

Forbidden witch-smoke curls in rings of blue

About your head, and your hand sinister

Fondles a swarthy lash of hippo-hide.

Upon your shoulder-straps, beneath your stars

Brass letters spell your errand—

OUT FOR BLOOD

When Meinertzhagen burst the lock on the door to the communications room beneath the wireless tower, it was the flies that hit him first. A manic buzzing and swelling as the rush of air from the opened door disturbed them. Black clouds filling the room as if the day was transforming into particles of night. Thousands of them, coming at him in their stream towards the light, tapping against his face, catching in his beard and in his lips. After the flies, the smell. With the force of heat from an opened oven door the stink fumed into his nostrils and down into his throat, making him gag and bring his hand to his face as a mask.

Looking over his fingers around the room at the desks, files, telegraph and radio equipment the thought flashed across his mind that the Germans had discovered his ‘dirty paper method’ and that this was their ironic revenge. A couple of askaris from the 3rd KAR and a North Lanes sapper sergeant came through the door behind him. He heard them all gag and choke and then the sergeant’s Lancashire accent, ‘Fuckin’ hell, Sir! Oh, Christ, fuckin’ hell!’ Then their retreating footsteps as they ran back out of the door. Meinertzhagen followed them, equally appalled by the sight of that room.

Every surface, every document, every piece of equipment was covered, daubed and dripping in brown and mustard-coloured human excrement. The room had been the scene of a bizarre act of mass defecation, and leaning against a tree outside Meinertzhagen knew why. They must have known they were outnumbered, that the town would fall sooner or later and this was how they would keep the equipment and documents from falling into enemy hands. Judging by the flies they must have defiled the room at least twenty-four hours earlier. Meinertzhagen tried to imagine it. The British field guns battering the town, the patter of small arms fire in the distance and in here a Schütztruppe officer in his white, braided uniform calling out the command to a company of askaris who stood, waiting, the belts of their breeches undone in anticipation.

He turned to the team of sappers waiting behind him. The Sergeant still looked pale from his brief glimpse of the room. ‘Go ahead,’ he said. ‘We won’t get anything out of there.’

The team gathered their equipment, long coils of copper wire, tight bundles of dynamite, and began to climb onto the roof of the communications room to set their charges on the concrete base of the 2oo-foot wireless tower. Beneath them the burst door still swung open, its gap in the wall filled with the low, menacing hum of the flies.

♦

Arthur looked up from the eight shallow graves the porters were trying to dig from the hard earth. Below him thin columns of smoke still drifted up from the white-washed houses of the town and a scattering of huts had been reduced to charred embers. In the town itself, he could just make out a group of men clambering onto the lower struts of the wireless tower.

The scrape and slump of the spadework brought him back to his own job and he looked back down at the eight bodies before him, each covered with a grey standard-issue blanket. Over the last hour he’d knelt beside each one, carefully noting each man’s identity in his notebook, their names forming a list after the last line of the poem he had written on the steamer two nights ago: OUT FOR BLOOD. He would write to the families himself, and he had taken the liberty to remove what he could from the bodies to send along with his letters: photographs of wives and children, wedding rings, even a bitten pencil with the dead man’s tooth marks imprinted in its wood. Then he’d performed the last rites over each man individually, and now it was just the graves that were left. He sat back on a rock, feeling the weight of the dead men’s possessions in his pocket, the watches, the glasses, the half-written letters, and watched as the eight holes grew deeper with every shovel and swing, the deposits of earth and dust mounting up at their sides.

The battle that led to these deaths had begun two days ago, when, at one o’clock on the morning of the 22nd, the four steamers had reached their landing positions. The boats bobbed in the shallow water off a gently sloping beach three miles south of Bukoba as the men waited for Stewart’s torch signal from the leading steamer. But instead of a torch flash, another light lit up the sky and Arthur had watched as a burning white point with a long tail described an arc above them, then levelled off and exploded like a giant thunderflash. Two more rockets followed its trajectory. He heard Captain Mein-ertzhagen curse to himself as he pushed through the men to get to the side of the boat where he could get a clean signal to Stewart. As the second rocket lit up the sky Arthur had looked down the deck and seen that the steamers were completely illuminated in the flare’s light: the staring faces of the men looking up, the field guns, even the details of the bridge were all cast in a white brightness that threw shadows in all the wrong places, like a photographic negative. The Germans had seen them and the element of surprise was lost. He thought of Tanga and waited for the guns to start harassing them where they were, but nothing happened. The last flare fizzled out on the night’s black, then silence. Eventually Stewart’s signal came: withdraw, it said, and steam further north.

Five hours later they disembarked three miles north of the town at the base of a cliff that rose almost vertically three hundred feet above the beach to a scrappy line of thorn trees at the top. A steep path ran diagonally up the cliff face, broken in places by landslides and the roots of plants. Arthur had watched from the shore as the strike force of the North Lanes and the Fusiliers began to tackle the climb, roping up machine-guns and field guns and even managing to coax up a heavily laden mule, its hooves scrabbling and slipping on the fragile path. He saw Pruen among the Fusiliers, directing equipment up the cliff, checking knots and bindings, emitting an energy that belied his age. The Fusiliers were much older and less well trained than the other regiments. An eclectic mix of adventurers, drifters and old soldiers, they had given themselves the moniker ‘The Frontiersmen’, although around the lake they were more commonly known as the ‘Old and the Bold’. Some had seen action before, in the Boer War, the ‘86 uprising or further afield in their home territories, and as Arthur joined them on the path up the cliff he heard the medals of past campaigns clinking against the buttons of their tunics. Most of them, however, had never fired a gun in anger and Arthur watched as a succession of exiled Russians, a troop of ex-circus clowns and acrobats, a bartender, a lighthouse-keeper, an opera singer, a Buckingham Palace footman and a Texas cowboy all scrambled up onto the lip of the cliff behind him, their rifles strapped to their backs and sweat already gathering at their temples.