Owen Sheers - The Dust Diaries

The skirmishing had begun as the force marched over a lip at the top of the cliff and down towards a hill that overlooked the town. It was scrappy fighting and hard going. They were covering open ground of bush and swamp while the Germans fired at them from the higher cover of thick banana plantations, rocks, inselbergs and clumps of thorn trees. Arthur had advanced with a company of Fusiliers. Puffs of smoke drifting up from behind tree trunks and boulders was all he could see of the enemy and he’d spent much of his time on the ground as fusillades of bullets spat up flurries of dust around them. He’d been under fire before, on the decks of steamers patrolling the lake and at the attack on Mwanza, but he’d never experienced anything as intense as what they met that day. Lying there, his cheek pressed against the earth, he experienced the same sensation he’d felt all those years ago lying on the deck of the Hertzog on the morning of his arrival in Africa. A desire for the firing to stop, for the fingers to freeze on the triggers, and beneath that desire a deeper fault-line of frustration and pity, fracturing him to the core.

They were half-way across a swamp when the German 755 started throwing down shells, and Arthur had had to submerge himself almost completely in a deep stagnant pool to escape the shrapnel that whizzed around him, fizzling and spitting as it hit the water. But then the field guns of their own 28th Mountain Battery had answered, and as the shells landed on the slope before them, throwing up brief flowerings of rock, earth and tree, the Fusilier company had taken the opportunity to advance at speed. Arthur jogged forward with them, bent double alongside the Fusiliers’ Sergeant-Major Bottomly. Bot-tomly was an older man and Arthur could hear the effort of his grunting pant with each step he took. A sudden spray of machine-gun fire sent them both sprawling to the ground again, but as soon as it had passed Arthur got to his feet and carried on, only realising after a few yards that Bottomly was no longer with him. He’d turned to see the Sergeant-Major still kneeling behind him, staring back at him, a wild expression on his face. As Arthur went back to him Bottomly opened his mouth to speak, but he got no further than a rasping gasp before the blood frothed up on his lips and ran down his chin, matting in his beard. It was then that Arthur saw the bullet holes, three of them in neat diagonal formation across his chest, like buttons across his tunic. Another burst of machine-gun fire erupted behind him and Arthur had thrown himself down again, shutting his eyes tightly against the spraying dirt. He opened them to find his face inches from where Bottomly had been kneeling and he noticed briefly how the imprint of the man’s cord breeches had made a corrugated pattern in the dust, like a fingerprint pressed in the earth. Then he’d raised his head further and seen Bottomly himself, on his back now, his left eye and cheek missing.

Bottomly was a father. His family were back in West London now, and just days before he’d told Arthur how he felt they’d be safer there, ‘back home’. As he’d lain in the dirt, listening to the whizz and whine of the bullets and shells finding their invisible courses through the air, Arthur had imagined the resonance of the death he had just witnessed. The arrival of the telegram on the doormat. His wife reading the official sympathies, and then reading them again. Then his own letter, with the photographs and mementos. The silence after the crying. Her attempts to explain to the children. The erosion of grief over the years and the never-changing strangeness of that name: Bukoba, where their father had left them, staring at the sky through his one remaining eye.

♦

By nightfall the Germans had retreated from their positions on the hill, but they’d still managed to hold the British a mile off from the town itself. With the failing light the firing died down to the odd nervous shot ringing off a boulder, and then nothing, just the dusk chorus of insects and hyenas meeting the moon. The men were exhausted. They had fought all day and for many it was the first action they’d ever experienced. As the adrenalin subsided, tiredness had overwhelmed them. Rations were scheduled to arrive from the shore, but they never came, so both the Fusiliers and the North Lanes had bivouacked down for the night with whatever rations had survived the day. Sharing a biscu it and a lump of cheese with one of the ex-circus clowns from the Fusiliers, Arthur watched the deepening blue of the sky above the hill turn the thorn trees into sharp silhouettes hung with stars.

Not far from where they camped they’d found the shattered remains of one of the German 755, flanked by her two gunners, an askari and a Schütztruppe officer, arranged on either side, their limbs at impossible angles. Captain Meinertzhagen had looked through the officer’s pockets before Arthur performed the last rites over the dead men: a chain watch with a smashed face, the fine hands buckled; a silver cigarette case; a soiled handkerchief, and in the top pocket of his shirt a crude hand-drawn map of Africa. The continent had been dotted across with an upside-down T and the three portions labelled: German South Africa, Austrian Africa, Turkish Africa. Perhaps he had been explaining to the askari how the country would look after the war, or maybe it was a personal proposal he planned to show the Kaiser one day. Whatever, it didn’t mean much to him any more and now he would never own any part of Africa. But she would own him, if not with her soil, then with her hyenas, her rats, her flies and, come that morning, her vultures.

The night was freezing. After the heat of the day the cold had been a shock and sleep seemed out of the question. Captain Meinertzhagen and Lieutenant Selous had retired to the shelter of an inselberg, where they swapped hunting stories and naturalist notes while a group of the North Lanes had set fire to a couple of grass huts and dried their uniforms by the flames. It was by the light of this fire that Arthur prepared a simple communion service. He was as exhausted as the rest of the men and as he’d lain a piece of cloth over a flat rock and placed a chalice and a paten on it, he’d felt every movement as an effort of will. After he’d taken off his jacket and covered his khaki shirt with a preaching stole, a couple of askaris and a handful of Europeans had emerged from the darkness and knelt on the ground before his makeshift altar, bowing their heads as if in tiredness or shame.

With the morning, they’d advanced again, down the hill overlooking the scattered town of Bukoba. The wireless mast, their main target, stood to the south, a mini-Eiffel Tower rising above the simple whitewashed brick buildings. The shells of the Mountain Battery’s 755 landed in puffs of grey-white smoke among these buildings, the sound of their explosions strangely delayed across the bowl of land in which the town sat. A single German sniper, positioned waist-deep in a swamp, had them pinned down outside the town for most of the morning. A machine-gun on the hill kept up a steady rattle as it tried to hit him, but its bullets failed to find anything other than the twigs and branches of the swamp plants. After two men had been killed by his sharp-shooting, Captain Meinertzhagen had lost patience with the delay and waded into the swamp himself, shirtless, carrying his rifle above his head. Arthur had watched him disappear into the dark tangle of branches, and as his white back slipped out of sight, the eye of his imagination had taken over instead. The Captain, circling around a thick clump of mangroves, seeing the sniper standing in the water with his back to him. A Schütztruppe officer, young, fair-skinned, with a red, sun-burnt neck showing over his collar. His ammunition case tied up to a branch at his side from which he picks out a bullet to slide into the chamber of his rifle. Meinertzhagen respecting his bravery and thinking how in another situation he may have taken him prisoner, let him live. But then the heat of the day, the thought of his two dead colleagues, the stink of the swamp. Aiming at the sun-burnt neck, he fires, and the officer’s head jerks backwards, then slumps forward as he slides down beneath the surface of the swamp. His rifle follows him until there is nothing where he had stood. Just some slow-popping bubbles on the water’s surface, and the ammunition case, swinging on the branch.