William Boyd - An Ice-Cream War

It was a source of some pain to him that his family seemed not to share his anguish and concern. They were happily ensconced in a bungalow at the Reverend Norman Espie’s mission. Matilda had been delivered of a healthy baby girl and even the other children, to Temple’s disgust, referred to the mission as home.

“Smithville’s your home,” he had rebuked them angrily one day in Nairobi when they had been tired and said they wanted to go ‘home’ to the mission. He had been astonished at their blank looks. “Smithville. The Farm. The Decorticator.”

“There, there,” Matilda had said. “Don’t confuse them, dear.”

“Home is where the heart is,” intoned the Reverend Norman Espie piously.

“Yes,” Temple agreed. “You bet. Exactly .” Espie looked hurt for a second but then hastily assured Temple that he understood precisely how he felt.

Temple rubbed the toe of his boot on his neatly wound gaiters. Pughe had kept him waiting outside now for over half an hour. His stomach was beginning to rumble in anticipation of lunch. He took off his sun helmet and inspected the brim. He flicked away some specks of dust.

An orderly appeared at the door. “Mr Smith? You can go in now.”

Temple was led through into what had been the post master’s office. Pughe and his brigade major stood in front of a table on which was laid a large map. Pughe had an empty glass in his hand and, as he turned to greet Temple, Temple saw the marginally unfocused gaze of someone in a well-advanced stage of intoxication.

“Ah, Smith, isn’t it?” Pughe said. “Want”—he swallowed air—“benefit of your local knowledge. Expertise, what have you. Take a gander at the map.”

Temple stood beside him. Pughe was a small man, bald, with a round, rosy, cherubic face which made his little toothbrush moustache seem wholly inappropriate. Brandy fumes exuded from him as if he’d been marinated in alcohol.

Temple looked at the map. Voi, then the blank space until Taveta. The long line of the Usambara Hills running west from the coast ending at the magnificent full stop of Kilimanjaro.

“Broadly, it’s going to go something like this,” Pughe said. “We attack south and north of Kili-whatsit. Meet up on the other side then trundle down the Northern Railway to Tanga pushing the Germans in front of us. That should just about do it. Now General Stewart with the 1 stDivision is taking the northern attack, while we want to move through the pass behind Taveta.” He drained his glass. “Splash a touch more in that, would you?” Pughe said to the brigade major.

“Colonel Youell of the KAR told me you’d farmed around Taveta. He thought it might be useful if we could get through the Usambara Huls a bit further down. He seemed to think we could cut through from Lake Jipe to Kahe directly. What d’you say? Oh, thanks,” he accepted his drink from the brigade major.

“Can’t be done, sir,” Temple said, suddenly consumed with homesickness on hearing Lake Jipe mentioned. He pointed to the map, at the pass between the end of the Usambara Hills and Mount Kilimanjaro.

“On this area here, sir, there are several small hills. There’s Salaita in front of Taveta; behind the town the road goes between two hills called Latema and Reata. They command the ground completely. It would be very hard to move people off those hills.”

“Oh.” Pughe looked surprised. “Are you sure? Are you expecting any problems there, Charles? What do our people say?”

“I doubt it very much,” the brigade major said. “Remember we’ve got Stewart and the 1 stDivision coming down behind Kilimanjaro. They won’t want to make a stand at Latema — Reata. No, we’re pretty sure they’ll pull back down the railway to Tanga.”

“Well, Smith,” Pughe said cheerfully. “Looks like you’re wrong. Thanks anyway.”

“Yes, sir,” Temple said. He put on his sun helmet and saluted.

“By the way,” Pughe said. “Curious accent you’ve got. Where are you from? Devon? Cornwall?”

“No sir. I’m from New York City. United States of America.”

“I see,” Pughe looked at his drink. “Smith. Seems an unusual name for an American. Long way from home, eh?”

“No, sir,” Temple said pointing to Smithville on the map. “My home’s there.”

Pughe shot a glance at his brigade major. “Yes. Mmmm. Right you are. Well, jolly good to have you chaps alongside us. Good luck.”

Temple stepped out from the porch into the sun, adjusted his sun helmet and sighed audibly. The British. He shook his head in a mixture of rage and admiration. A general who was an alcoholic, an army resembling the tribes of Babel, and everyone milling around on this and plain without the slightest idea of what they were meant to be doing…

He walked slowly up the road towards the area of the huge camp where his tent was pitched. He undid the top buttons of his tunic and, with a gasp of relief, unbuckled his Sam Browne. Happily, uniform regulations in this theatre of war were lax, to say the least. Shirtsleeves and shorts had become the order of the day.

Temple skirted a company of drilling sepoys and moved down behind an immense open stable of mules and donkeys. The rich smell of manure was carried to him on a slight breeze. The air above the tethered animals juddered with a million flies. He watched some sweating, half-naked syces drag away a dead pony. The death toll among the horses and mules was staggering, tsetse fly claiming dozens of victims each day, but there seemed to be an inexhaustible source of pack animals; fresh trainloads were constantly arriving.

Beyond the lines of tethered mules lay the sprawling, tatter-demalion encampment of what were euphemistically called support troops, meaning all the thousands of bearers, coolies and servants and their wives and families required to keep this swelling army in anything like working order. Temple imagined that this must have been how the Israelites appeared after wandering around the Sinai desert for forty years. A huge, heterodox mass of people, a sizeable township, without houses, institutions or sanitation but with all the mundane dramas — births, deaths, marriages, adulteries — that any town contained. He had never been into the bearer camp. Initially some soldier had attempted to impose a semblance of militaristic neatness and order on the mob, making them erect their shambas, shanties, thorn shelters and rag tents in neat rows, but it disappeared without trace in days. Looking down on the bearer camp from a slight rise the original grid plan could just be made out, like medieval strip fields since covered by a layer of scrubby vegetation. But from ground level it merely appeared a swarming, pestilential mess.

Temple crossed a flimsy wooden bridge that had been laid across a wide gully. Facing him was a sizeable open space, recently cleared of its thorn bushes and boulders and trampled flat by the feet of thousands of coolies, which now did duty as Voi’s aerodrome. On a spindly varicose pole a windsock hung like an empty sleeve. Over to the right were temporary hangars, little more than canvas awnings, that provided some shade for the two frail biplanes — BE2 Cs — which at the moment constituted the presence of the Royal Flying Corps in East Africa.

As he watched Temple saw one of the machines being pushed out onto the strip. Curious, he walked over to get a better look. He had seen aeroplanes twice before. Once in Nairobi and once — a seaplane — at Dar-es-Salaam. It wasn’t the fact that such machines could fly that astonished him so much as their fragile delicate construction. He-was an engineer and the mechanical contraptions he had dealt with — locomotives, Bessemer converters, threshers, the Decorticator — were robust powerful artefacts, somehow asserting their right to function well through the very strength and size of their components. Forged iron, steel plate, gliding pistons. When you saw the Decorticator at full steam, you saw a symbol of the potential in human ingenuity. No task, however fantastical, seemed impossible when this kind of strength could be created, this kind of energy generated, harnessed and controlled. But the aeroplanes…? Patched canvas, broken struts, loose rigging wires. Temple felt he could pull one apart with his bare hands, punch it into rags and kindling.