William Boyd - An Ice-Cream War

“Somebody’s happy anyway,” Dr Venables said with a sad smile. “Not that many of us have got much to be happy about in this day and age.” He held out his hand. “Well, Felix. Remember what I said.”

Felix shook his hand. “I shall.”

“And if you ever feel in the need of a talk, come and see me. I used to enjoy our discussions.”

“Of course,” Felix said. Dr Venables still held his hand firmly.

“What are you going to do now, Felix?” The question seemed to be innocent, but Felix realized you could be sure of nothing with Venables.

He decided to be innocent too. “I shall get the train straight back.”

“No. I meant with your future. What are you going to do with yourself?”

Felix had been wondering the same thing. He had come to some sort of decision.

“I’ve been thinking about that myself, Dr Venables.” He knew, but he was not going to tell Venables. “I’m afraid I don’t have an answer at the moment.”

Felix looked out over the guard-rails of the Hong Wang II , a Chinese-crewed tramp steamer that had brought him slowly up the coast from Durban to the entrancing waterfront at Dar-es-Salaam. The widening sweep of the bay, the white buildings set in groves of mango and palm trees, and the cloudless African sky presented a scène of great beauty. Only the ruined shell of the Governor’s Palace on the headland and the wreck of a scuttled German freighter on a sandbank marred the general effect of peace and tranquillity.

Felix looked down at his knee-length shorts, khaki puttees and polished brown boots. He still felt a fool in this uniform. It was extremely odd, moreover, to be a second lieutenant in a native regiment, which he had yet to encounter. This was not entirely true, as one unit of the regiment was on board the Hong Wang II with him. On the fore deck a four-gun mountain battery of the Nigerian Brigade prepared to disembark. These were the stragglers in a large West African contingent that had arrived in East Africa a month or so previously. Felix’s own battalion in this brigade, the 5th, was already entrenched in the front line at a place on the upper reaches of the Rufiji river, wherever that might be.

The Hong Wang II dropped anchor in the middle of the bay. Soon Felix and his kit and the English officers and NCO’s of the mountain battery were being carried in a launch to one of the many wooden jetties that stuck out from the shore.

His kit was disembarked and laid in a pile on the ground. Felix stretched and stamped his feet. All around him was the bustle of the port, the cries of the rickshaw boys, the grinding and clamour of the steam cranes. The air was filled with smells of dust and fruit, dead fish and manure. The sun was lowering in the afternoon sky but still burned with a force that made his new uniform chafe. He felt a sense of exhilaration fill his chest. Gabriel was incarcerated somewhere in this country. They might only be separated from each other by a few hundred miles. The war could be over, by all accounts, in a matter of months now that the Germans were well and truly on the run. Soon, he felt sure, he and Gabriel would be reunited and somehow everything would be resolved. For a moment he felt intoxicated by a sense of his own self-importance, the glamour of the role in which he had cast himself. Now that he was here in Africa he felt he could say that his quest had truly begun.

An Executive Service officer, a captain, approached the officers from the mountain battery and gave them instructions. Felix showed him the sheet of paper that contained his orders.

“Kibongo,” the ESO captain said. “Umm.” He paused. “5th battalion, Nigerian Brigade…Ah-ha. Mmm.” He sounded like a schoolboy who didn’t know the answers to a classroom quiz.

“Tell you what,” he said. “There’s a Movement Control officer at the railway station. He’ll know. I think the head-quarters of the Nigerian Brigade is at Morogoro. I’ll get a boy to bring your kit. Yes, Morogoro, that’s where you’ll be going.”

♦

“No, it’s Soga you want,” the Movement Control officer said. Then added, “I think. Get off at Soga, anyway. They’ll probably send someone to meet you there. Hang on, I’ll get a boy to sling your gear on the train. Soga, remember.”

Felix found a compartment and watched the boy stow his kit. Steadily the other seats were taken up by officers from an Indian regiment. Some of them knew about the Nigerian Brigade, but had no idea where Kibongo was. They told him to get off at Mikesse, not Soga.

Felix sat back and told himself to relax. He was sufficiently used to army ways by now not to worry unduly about such vagueness. In fact he was amazed at the way the organization worked at all. He had received written orders, that was sufficient: at some point in the future he and his battalion would meet.

In the stifling heat of the small compartment he watched the sun turn orange and sink behind the railway workshops. There was a further hour’s delay before the train pulled off with a lurch. In the brief dusk Felix saw the acres of coconut trees behind the town, and splendid, solid-looking stone houses set among them.

The twenty-fifth of January 1917: it had been nearly six months before that he had set this particular chain of events in motion that had resulted in him sitting now in a troop train chugging slowly across conquered German East Africa.

♦

A week after Charis’s funeral — a taut, stressful affair — Felix had gone up to London to seek out his brother-in-law, Lt Colonel Henry Hyams, at the Committee of Imperial Defence.

Hyams was surprised to see him and commiserated briefly about Charis’s suicide.

“Bad business, Felix. Terrible shame. Poor girl.” He frowned. “It all got too much for her, I suppose. Gabriel and all that.”

After some more awkward conversation on the topic Felix stated that he wished to obtain a commission in any unit of the British Army that was currently fighting in East Africa. Henry Hyams didn’t ask him why, it must have seemed to him a logical request, Felix thought, based on logical and commendable motives of duty and honourable revenge. Hyams considered that his earlier failure with the recruiting office would present no problems now. That was 1914, he reminded Felix, when — no offence implied — they were only taking the very best. Now that there was conscription they couldn’t afford to be so choosy. He made some notes on a pad and checked a file.

“East Africa, East Africa. British regiments. You have no desire to go soldiering with the mild gentoo, I take it?”

“No, it must be a British regiment,” Felix affirmed.

“Well we’ve got the 2nd Battalion Loyal North Lancs and the 25th Battalion of the Royal Fusiliers. The ‘Legion of Frontiersmen’. Sound like a fine body of men.”

“Yes. They sound ideal.”

“That’s the ticket then,” Hyams beamed confidently. “I’ll arrange everything. Leave it all up to me.”

Two weeks later Felix was informed by telegram which Officer Training Corps he was to attend. He looked disbelievingly at the address: Keble College, Oxford. For the next three months he was back in Oxford, living in Keble’s sorry red-brick splendour in the company of two hundred other young men seeking commissions. Throughout the end of the summer of 1916, while the battle of the Somme ground itself into a state of inertia, he received instructions on how to command men, drilled endlessly in the University Parks, fired rifles at the butts in Wolvercote and undertook text-book manoeuvres on the level expanses of Port Meadow. He assailed all these distasteful duties in a spirit of unreflecting determination, resolving to acquit himself adequately so there could be no impediment offered to the task he had set himself. In fact, he wasn’t exactly clear what precisely the nature of this task was. It was born out of a mixture of near-intolerable guilt, unfocused motives of purgation and a simple but powerful need to be doing something. The notion of the ‘quest’, of somehow finding Gabriel, took a slower hold on his imagination. It was the most apt penance he could think of; he forced himself to concentrate on Gabriel and their eventual reunion and tried his hardest not to dwell on Charis.