Owen Sheers - The Dust Diaries

‘Do you pray before a battle?’ Her voice was still quiet, careful.

‘Yes, I do.’

‘What do you pray for?’

‘Well, not for what I’m meant to, I’m sure. Not for victory.’ He paused. ‘In fact I don’t even pray to St George. I pray to St Michael instead. I ask him to cover our heads in battle.’ He looked out across the lake. ‘And I’m sure that over there, there is a German padre praying to St George to cover his soldiers’ heads.’ He turned to look at her. ‘Because I think that is the only way to pray before battle, Mrs Cole. For its failure, I mean. To pray any other way isn’t a prayer at all, but a petition for murder.’

She sat back and looked at him, then down at her feet, shaking her head, as if she was still unsure. As if she couldn’t be sure of anything any more. Eventually she looked up again, towards the tent. ‘I should get back. They’ll be waking soon.’

Withdrawing her hand from under his, she stood and picked up her bucket. Arthur noticed the seam of her evening dress had split. As she bent down it gaped, an opening eye, showing a blink of pale flesh beneath.

‘I’m glad we met again, Father,’ she said.

‘Well, I’m certainly glad you’re here,’ he replied. ‘If St Michael doesn’t hear me, then at least I know I’ll be in good hands.’

Arthur watched her walk back towards the hospital tent. Another flock of flamingos took flight from the shore. He turned to follow them, feeling tiredness wash through his body, and thought about what Mrs Cole had said. Had God been there at Bukoba? He thought about the fresh graves outside the town, the body of the girl, the whine of the shells, the eyes of the Captain, burning, and then of Jack, flying high in his plane looking down over no-maa’s-land. The butterfly wings of men spreading out from their shared body of mud.

Tendai was trying to keep still: as still as a stone in moving grass, as a lizard paused on a rock in the sun. But as the sun rose higher flies began landing on his face and his neck, making him twitch. He kept his eyes closed and willed himself to ignore the tickling hair-touch of their legs, around his lips, over his eyelids. The sound of their wings buzzing loud in his ear.

He had been lying in the tall grass since late last night, hiding from the German ruga-ruga who were still pursuing him. They’d spotted him the day before when he approached a bush settlement in search of food. Tendai had thought he was still in British East Africa. He hadn’t known the collection of rondavels and one square brick hut was a Schütztruppe outpost. An African was hoeing a patch of ground behind the brick hut, and Tendai had called out to him in English. But as soon as he spoke he knew something was wrong. The man looked up at him with wide eyes, then turned away and called out in Swahili. An askari came out of the closest rondavel. The man pointed towards Tendai and the soldier levelled his rifle at him, shouting at him in German. Then a Schütztruppe officer rushed out of another rondavel and put his hand on the askari’s arm. He also shouted to Tendai, but in English, ‘Halt, stay there!’ But Tendai had heard what happened to prisoners caught by the Germans. So he ran. He heard the askari fire and waited for the bullet to hit him, but it whined past over his head, cracking through the branches of a tree. He ran on as the askari fired again, pushing his way into a thicket of bush as the bullet hit the ground. He kept running, wildly smashing through the foliage, his arms over his face. But he knew it was too late and he could already hear the deep chest grunting of the ruga-ruga streaming out of the camp, making chase behind him.

That had been yesterday evening. Since then they had chased and tracked him through the night, deep into the veld, down the valley of a shrunken river to a lower plain, dotted with kopjes. His body ached and hurt from the night-long pursuit. He had cut his foot on a piece of wire, his limbs were weak with hunger and his head was full of questions. He didn’t understand how he had wandered into German territory or why the Germans were so anxious to capture him. He wasn’t wearing uniform and wasn’t armed. He couldn’t have posed a threat to them or the people of the area. But what Tendai didn’t know was that the Schütztruppe had recently broken a network of British spies, Africans working for British Intelligence. Von Lettow was said to be furious and the order had come down from the General himself as a matter of urgency: all suspects were to be caught and interrogated or killed. The porters who cleaned the officers’ latrines were already dead.

The ruga-ruga were Masi warriors recruited as German irregulars. Tendai knew they could track and hunt any animal on the veld. He’d caught a glimpse of one of them the day before as he hid behind a rock by the river. A tall, lean man, about his own age. His hair was shaved into a tuft at the front of his head, a water gourd was slung across his chest and he wore a simple limbo cloth and a blanket, also tied across his chest. He carried an old German musket. As the man had stopped to drink from his gourd, Tendai saw that the stories were true: both his lower and upper teeth had been sharpened. Another porter at the lake once told him the Masi ate the flesh of their enemies. Tendai hadn’t believed him, but now, lying in the tall grass, listening to the ruga-ruga work their way nearer and nearer to his hiding place, he couldn’t help but remember both the porters tale and that flash of sharpened teeth.

♦

More flies were gathering on his back, drawn to the unhealed scars that criss-crossed his spine; long wheals of thickened skin like stout white string. His shirt was thin and torn, and the blood seeped through the cotton in long, dark patches. Worried the flies would attract the attention of the ruga-ruga , he carefully rolled from his side onto his back. Every rustle of the grass against his skin seemed loud in his ears. His breath felt clumsy and his heartbeat so strong he was sure its echo through the ground would be enough for the Masi to find him.

The scars on his back were from a niboko , a hippo-hide whip. He had left the lake camp shortly after receiving them but his troubles had begun long before that whipping. Lying in the grass, his eyes tightly shut, his body aching and his throat dust-dry, he knew exactly the moment all his pain could be traced back to: one minute on a trek several months before. The minute when they killed the rhino.

They had been coming back from a patrol. Tendai was with a party of porters bearing for a company of the 3rd KAR. He was used to the assumed superiority of white men. He had grown up expecting the Europeans in and around Enkeldoorn to treat him and his mother as if they were hardly there. To shout orders at them, to hoot their cars to clear them off the road. It was the way of things. But bearing for askaris, other Africans, was something he had been finding hard to understand, to adjust to. They treated him like the white men did, as if their uniforms changed the colour of their skin.

He remembered that trek as one of the worst, not just because of the askaris, but also because several porters had died, leaving the remaining carriers loaded with more than their usual baggage. And of course because of what happened later. As they marched two abreast in a long line through the veld, his arms ached as if they would fall off his body, and his legs felt as if they were rooted in the earth. Every step was an effort, a tearing of these roots from the dry soil. But then perhaps that is why the rhino had come then. Because he was so unhappy, and the rhino knew he was, because the rhino was his animal.