Owen Sheers - The Dust Diaries

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That was all just this morning, the swamp, the final push on the town, but already it feels like a lifetime away. And now it is over and the porters have finished their work. The graves, a young private tells him, are ready. Arthur stands up and thanks the soldier, then reaches for his Bible in his jacket pocket and makes his way over to the holes in the ground: deep, root-fringed and waiting for the eight men lying beside them to fill them again.

But then from down the hill, in the town, an echoing roll of thunder. Arthur looks up and sees a plume of black-grey smoke about the foot of the wireless tower, then watches as it leans, wavers, then succumbs to the arc of its fall, like a giant giving into sleep after years of silent vigil.

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The whirring sound of uncoiling wire signalled the arrival of the sapper sergeant, buttocks first, to where Meinertzhagen sat behind a thick stone wall. Meinertzhagen handed him the plunger, which he connected to the two copper wires, then placed his hands over his ears and his head down on his knees, eyes tightly shut. He heard the brief travel of the plunger as the sergeant pressed it down. Then nothing. Then everything. The sound of the explosions rang down the street, followed by a billowing wave of dust and debris flecked with excrement. Then the metallic creaking and rush of air as the tower began its collapse. Meinertzhagen heard it come crashing to the ground behind him, then a faint cheer go up from lower in the town. He opened his eyes to see the sergeant signalling to another sapper on the other side of the street. Again a plunger was compressed, and again there was a brief silence, an expectant second when everything was paused. Then the second explosion. But this time it was deeper, sharper, a fissure in the air followed by more detonations and cracks as the German arsenal went up in a cloud of thick black and orange smoke.

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It was as Meinertzhagen was walking back into the town from examining the remains of the tower that he realised something was wrong. The men had broken ranks. He could see them further down the hill, running into buildings, breaking down doors. As he passed a house on his right he heard the smash of broken glass and the moving of heavy furniture. The door to the house swung drunkenly off one hinge and looking in he saw a group of soldiers turning the place over. They were men of all ages, European and African, but they all looked like children, smiles on their faces as they ransacked drawers, swept trophies into kitbags and rifled through cupboards and desks. A loud report came from an inner room and Meinertzhagen reached for the revolver at his side, but then a Fusilier, one of the circus troop, entered with a foaming bottle of champagne in each hand and a ceremonial pickelhaube on his head. The other men cheered and rushed the room from where the Fusilier had entered, in search of more champagne, while a young North Lanes lad, still smeared from the day’s fighting approached Meinertzhagen with a large photo album held out before him. He looked genuinely disgusted.

‘Look, sir, filthy Boche perverts,’ he said as he handed Meinertzhagen the opened album. It was bound in leather, with a brass spine and clasp, heavy in the hand. Meinertzhagen took the book from the young soldier and flicked back the transparent paper to look at the photograph beneath. It was a large black-and-white portrait of the town’s German commandant standing beside his wife. He was in full dress uniform, crisp white, a parade of medals at his chest, a thick braid looping from his shoulder and a decorated picklehaube under his arm. His wife sat at his elbow, completely naked, her hair undone across her white shoulders and her hands neatly crossed in her lap. Meinertzhagen could just make out where the wicker chair had imprinted its pattern in the flesh of her thighs.

The young soldier was still standing by Meinertzhagen, looking seriously at him as if he had handed him an important piece of intelligence. ‘Turn over, sir, there’s more.’ Meinertzhagen turned the stiff page to reveal an almost identical photograph. The positions and the expressions of the commandant and his wife were exactly the same. He staring from over his thick moustache into the camera’s lens, and she looking just past it, into the distance. Except in this version it was she who wore the formal dress, a long evening gown melting over the chair to the floor, and he who stood naked. It was a strange effect. His stern, angular face giving way to a surprisingly pale, flaccid body, a thinly haired chest and the fold of a paunch above thin legs, his penis a stub of white in the black of his pubic hair as he stood there, staring out of the photograph, his picklehaube under his arm and the world under his eye.

Meinertzhagen handed back the album without a word, looked about at the ruined room, the soldiers swigging champagne from the bottle, then turned away and left the house to go and find out what was going on.

The street was bright after the dim interior, the afternoon sun reflecting off the whitewash of the houses, and Meinertzhagen had to stop for a moment to let his eyes adjust. When they did he still wasn’t sure he was seeing properly. Further down the hill a group of African porters were strutting about the street dressed in women’s underwear, a group of askari and European soldiers cheering and encouraging them in their pantomime. Meinertzhagen broke into a jog. As he got nearer he saw that the porters were drunk. Fat Henry Clay cigars wagged at their mouths as they paraded in front of the soldiers, their hips swaying extravagantly in imitation of a woman’s. The lingerie they wore over their own greasy scraps of clothing shone out among the dull khaki of the uniforms. Camisoles and knickers in pastel blues and pinks, an emerald slip, white corsets and a black basque with deep red lace and stitching, the straps hanging loose down a pair of thin dark thighs.

Meinertzhagen pushed past the group. A soldier called out to him, ‘Don’t fancy the local produce, sir?’ But he didn’t stop. He was looking for General Stewart and for a reason why this was happening.

He was almost at the quayside when he heard the woman’s scream. He stopped. The sounds of the looting soldiers up the hill travelled down to him. A dim rumble of shouting and cheering. The clatter of stones thrown against a portrait of the Kaiser. Then a scream again: wild, terrified, suddenly cut short.

When he reached the house he couldn’t see the woman, just a chaotic bundle of men. But as he stood on the lip of the doorway, looking down at them, the grim order of the situation revealed itself. She was lying on the floor, two askaris holding her arms. One of these also held her head, his clenched knuckles showing pale through the black of her hair. Another pair held a leg each, gripped by the ankle and pulled wide apart. The line between the black skin of her foot and the pale skin of her soles was so neat it looked as though she had dipped both feet in a fine chalk dust. The broad back of a white soldier heaved and dropped between her legs with hard, rhythmical thrusts. He was still wearing his jacket and Meinertzhagen could make out the officer pips on the cuff of his sleeve. He caught glimpses of the woman’s face too, between the rise and fall of the man’s shoulders. A young black girl. Her mouth was open but she was not screaming anymore. Her lower jaw was tensed and her eyes screwed shut, as if she might squeeze herself back into the darkness behind her eyelids. With each thrust from the officer a tremor passed through her small breasts to her head which rocked back, gave, then rocked back, again and again. One of her eyes was swollen and bruised, like an overripe damson resting on the curve of her cheek.

Meinertzhagen found General Stewart down at the dock, standing next to the four grey steamers, overseeing the boarding of the wounded. He strode towards him, trying to swallow the anger in his voice.