William Boyd - An Ice-Cream War

And so the months of training — hurried and not particularly efficient — had gone past and Felix found that instead of regret and melancholy his moods had been primarily ones of deep boredom, loneliness and discomfort. On the day their postings were announced he had clustered round the noticeboard outside the college lodge with the other cadets searching for his name. “Cobb. F. R…”—his eyes flicked across—“5th btn, Nigerian bde, German East Africa.” The Nigerian Brigade? Who or what were they? He received commiserations from his fellow officers. Where was Nigeria? someone asked. Felix had to go and look it up in an atlas.

“Sorry, old chap,” Henry Hyams said when Felix asked for a transfer. “No can do.” The brigade was just being formed, Hyams said. It was the only unit in the East African theatre that wanted English officers and NCOs.

“Don’t look so glum, Felix,” Henry Hyams said, looking a little hurt. “At least you’ll be in East Africa. It’s a damn tricky job swinging these things, you know. They’re crying out for men in France.”

♦

Felix peered out of the carriage window at the African night. What was it like out there, he wondered? The train moved with frustrating slowness, reducing speed to five miles per hour every time it came to the gentlest of bends. The Indian Army officers had all fallen asleep, one of them was snoring quietly. The oil lamp in the compartment had been turned down too low to read. Felix rubbed his eyes. Somewhere in his kit he had an inflatable rubber cushion which would have eased his stiff and aching buttocks, sore from the slatted wooden bench seats, but he would have woken the entire compartment searching for it.

The train moved sluggishly but inexorably on. Sometimes it stopped in the darkness for no apparent reason. The mono-tony was briefly relieved when they pulled into tiny stations with names like ‘Pugu’, ‘Kisamine’ and ‘Soga’ where it took on more fuel and water.

At Soga Felix managed to get out of the compartment and jumped to the ground to stretch his legs. The night was warm and very dark, clouds seemed to be covering the moon and stars. All around him Felix could hear the relentless ‘creek-creek’ of the crickets, shrill and mechanical. He gave a slight shiver. There was a curious smell in the air, strangely intoxicating, a damp earthy smell of the sort sometimes encountered in old potting sheds or undisturbed dusty attics. Felix filled his lungs with it. He felt seized by a sudden nervous excitement. Up ahead the squat little locomotive was being filled up with water, a faint hiss of blundering escaping steam was carried down the line. He watched other men jumping from the carriages and the cattle trucks that carried the native soldiers. He saw some men relieving themselves and took a few steps away from the train to do likewise. He found himself standing in a sort of coarse kneelength grass. Ahead of him he could just make out a dark line of trees and bushes. He urinated, the patter of his stream silencing the crickets at his feet. He shivered again, the excitement gone, replaced by an apprehensive fearfulness. As he did up his fly buttons the thought crossed his mind that the foaming trembling darkness around him might be harbouring all manner of wild beasts. Lions, leopards, snakes, anything. Hurriedly he clambered back into the compartment. He was not in some country lane, he reminded himself, he was in Africa.

♦

It was almost midday when the troop train crawled into Mikesse. The Indian Army officers obligingly threw down his kit to him and he stacked it beside the rails. To his vague worry he was the only person to get off. The train didn’t stay long. Morogoro, General Smuts’ headquarters, was another thirty miles up the line. Everyone, it seemed, was going there. Felix looked about him. A featureless railway station with no platforms, the tracks laid across packed-down red earth. In the distance a thickly wooded range of high mountainous hills. Under large, shady trees dotted here and there motor vehicles were parked and porters slept or lounged. It was very humid. Solid continents of grey clouds loomed to the north. Felix was about to go in search of some assistance when a small white man in khaki uniform emerged from the station building. The man caught sight of him and marched over. He had a spruce, fit-looking body, but his head looked as if it belonged to a man twice his size. Felix saw he had a sergeant’s stripes on his sleeve. The man had a poor, crude-looking face, as if it were an early prototype whose features hadn’t yet been properly refined. It was utterly expressionless, as if this too were a faculty reserved for later, more sophisticated models. He had one of the heaviest beards Felix had ever seen. Although he had obviously shaved recently his entire jaw was a metallic blue-black, indeed the bristles seemed to need shaving up to within half an inch of his lower eyelids.

“Lieutenant Cobb, sir?” he said. He had a very strong but clear Scottish accent. Felix supposed him to be from Aberdeen or Inverness.

“That’s right. Are you from the 5th battalion?”

“Aye, sir. I’m Sergeant Gilzean.”

He then said something Felix didn’t understand.

“I beg your pardon?” Felix said.

“I said ‘Fegs it’s a bauch day’, sir,” Gilzean repeated patiently, as if this was an activity he was accustomed to. “I’ll just make siccar they beanswaup porters look snippert with your gear.”

“Oh. Yes, fine.”

Men were called from beneath the trees and Felix’s kit was taken round the station building and stacked in the back of a dusty Ford motor car.

“Where are we going?”

“Kibongo, sir. South bank of the Rufiji.”

“How far away is it?”

“About one hundred and twenty miles.”

“Good Lord!”

They bumped down a track that led from the station and drove past a sizeable native village and a huge transport camp. Crates and sacks were piled twenty feet high. Motor lorries and dozens of Ford motor cars of the sort they were driving were parked in long rows. Beneath palm leaf shelters were makeshift engineering and repair workshops. On a hill was a large stone building flying a red cross. A lengthy column of bootless African soldiers in green felt fezzes and flapping khaki shorts were passed.

“Are there no English troops out here?”

“A few,” Gilzean said. “But they’re all sick. Peely-wally lot the English, ye ken. And they Sooth-Africans. You’ll find we’re unco fremt haufins out here.”

“Ah,” Felix said. “I think so.” The man might as well be talking ancient Greek, Felix thought.

They drove on, a cloud of red dust in their wake. They passed a large tented camp and overtook a straggling train of potters, all with loads on their heads. Mikesse, Felix managed to discover from Gilzean, was the only supply centre for the troops on the Rufiji river front, a hundred and twenty miles to the south. They drove out of the hills around the town and motored through beautiful highland country, dense with trees, native villages on every slope, before they began to descend slowly towards what looked like a huge, rather tatty forest. The trees were of all types and grew fairly widely apart. The ground between the trunks was thick with tangled thorn bush. The road had been enlarged recently, judging from the piles of freshly cut vegetation and the occasional groups of pioneers and sappers that they passed, engaged in levelling out deep ruts or strengthening the many small bridges they had to drive across.

The clouds that Felix had noticed at the station had spread out to cover the sky and the light was dull and gloomy.

“Looks like rain,” Felix observed.

“We’ll get drookit the night,” Gilzean said, then added, “It’s the rainy season. We stop fighting when the rains come.”