William Boyd - An Ice-Cream War

“Have you seen any action?” Felix asked in what he hoped was a casual way.

“Och aye. We’ve been dottling about the jungle for a month. Fankled here, fankled there. Fair scunnert, but, eh, neither buff nor stye, ye ken.”

“Oh, about two months,” Felix said.

♦

After five hours of bumping along through the scrubby forest they came to another camp. Felix supposed he’d been travelling along what he’d come to know as ‘lines of communication’, not that he and Gilzean had established many. At this new camp Felix was provided with a hot meal in the transport officers’ mess and was allotted a camp bed in the corner of a large empty tent. Here too he found someone who could explain the current situation in comprehensible language.

Since the invasion of German East at Kilimanjaro in March 1916, the Germans had steadily been driven south so that they now occupied only the southern third of their colony. They had been pushed south across the Rufiji river. At their backs was another river, the Rovuma, which marked the border with Portuguese East Africa. The Rufiji, Felix’s informant told him, was a huge sprawling river that roughly divided the colony in half. Von Lettow-Vorbeck, after he had been driven from the Northern Railway, had withdrawn by degrees, but with fierce rearguard actions, to the Central Railway (along which Felix had been travelling the night before). Threatened by Smuts on this front he had again avoided a decisive battle and had withdrawn beyond his next natural defensive line, the Rufiji. Here was where matters had come to a halt, because of the imminent onset of the rains. There would be no more campaigning until March or April. Then the British army would drive the Germans into the Rovuma.

Felix walked from the officers’ mess back to his tent. Once again he smelt the musty earthy smell and wondered what it was. Behind him the cooking fires of the vast porters’ camp twinkled in the dark. He could hear strange whoopings coming from the trees beyond the perimeter fence. He wondered where Gilzean was, how the curious little man was occupying his time. Probably having a shave, Felix thought. He must need to shave about every five hours. He had wanted to ask Gilzean how far they had come, and what distance there was left to go, but couldn’t face another incomprehensible reply. He hoped he hadn’t appeared standoffish.

He arrived at his tent. He felt that he had been travelling for months. First the tedious and depressing voyage to South Africa in a hospital ship full of broken South African infantry from the Western Front, with a gloomy, solitary Christmas spent at sea. Then two weeks in Durban waiting for the mountain battery to arrive from Nigeria. Afterwards the protracted voyage up the coast to Dar in the squalid Hong Wang II . Then the train journey through the night, Gilzean’s jarring drive through the forest…And he still didn’t know where he was.

He undressed standing on his camp bed, as he’d been instructed to do — something about a burrowing flea one had to avoid. Then he untied his mosquito net and suspended it from hooks set in the canvas roof above the bed. He lay down and shut his eyes. This endless journeying, he thought to himself, where would it end? He made a rueful face in the dark. With Gabriel, he hoped. He allowed himself to imagine their meeting. Gabriel wouldn’t believe it was him. “Felix!” he’d cry. “You!”

Felix grimaced. An unfortunate choice of words. With a slight change of emphasis they could be altered from incredulous delight to vengeful accusation. For a moment he felt paralysed with remorse, and the horrible sub-aquatic images of Charis came creeping back into his mind. He must remember — he forced himself to concentrate — to ask about POW camps the next day. Surely as they pushed deeper and deeper into German territory the advancing troops should begin to encounter some. This brought some comfort, as did the reflection that — if the conditions he had experienced today were typical — it was inconceivable that any mail for English prisoners of war would get through.

He heard something hit the roof of the tent sharply. An insect? A bat? Then he heard another and another. Rain, he realized with a smile of relief, as the drops began to patter against the canvas. Big, fat drops of rain.

It was still raining in the morning when Felix was woken up by a black servant with an enamel mug of tea. A basin of hot water had been set on a folding table and he was able to have a refreshing wash and a shave. The basin was cleared away and replaced with a plate of hot chicken, two fried eggs and a type of savoury flour cake. Gilzean stuck his head through the tent flap and said only, to Felix’s relief, “Time to be off, sir.” Felix pulled on his waterproof cape and went outside. Grey clouds hung low over the trees, blending with the early morning mist and the smoke rising from hundreds of breakfast fires. Huge brown puddles had gathered in depressions in the ground and were pimpled with the constant drip, drip of water from the overhanging branches.

Gilzean was sitting on a small grey mule and holding the bridle of another which was obviously meant for Felix. Half a dozen bearers queued up behind.

Felix mounted up.

“Morning, Gilzean,” he said cheerily. “How are you feeling?”

“Oh, not so good, sir.” Gilzean looked mournful. “I’ve got the ripples again, and — begging your pardon — an awful angry rumple fyke.”

“Yes.”

♦

They joined the end of a meandering string of porters taking supplies to Felix’s battalion. The road was already ankle deep in thick mud and, from here on, passable only by men or pack animals. The jungle or forest through which they passed was monotonously familiar. Occasionally there was a ridge to ascend and descend and there were two wide, shallow rivers to ford. Transport officers rode up and down the column, checking on the uncomplaining porters with their enormous head loads. They stopped every two hours for a twenty-minute rest.

At one point the road disappeared beneath the surface of a swamp which apparently had come into being overnight. The way was marked with poles and the water came up to the middle of the bearers’ thighs. It stopped raining for a couple of hours and then started again about noon. Despite the protection of his waterproof cape and the wide brim of his sun helmet, Felix felt wet through. It was quite unlike any rain he had ever encountered in England. For a start it was warm, but there was also something thoroughgoing and uncompromising about African rain. It came down with real force, each drop weighty and loaded with full wetting potential, drumming down at speed as if falling from a prodigious height. He rode in a cocoon of constant battering sounds as it hit his cape and topee with hefty smacks. He could see, up ahead, the drops rebounding a good six inches from Gilzean’s sodden helmet.

It was the middle of the afternoon when they arrived at battalion headquarters. Felix saw what looked like small clearings of cultivated vegetable and maize plots. Then they passed a sandbagged picket and some very miserable sentries. Felix and Gilzean left the column of porters and rode into what had once been a native village. They moved through neat rows of bell tents and dismounted outside a large straw-roofed building with a bent-looking flagpole outside.

“Thank God,” Felix groaned. “At last.”

“We’ve got a wee way to go yet,” Gilzean said impassively.

Felix reported to the adjutant, who welcomed him to the Rufiji front. Felix was to be attached to Twelve company, under Captain Frearson, which was across the Rufiji, on the south bank. He and Gilzean did not delay long, however, as it was considered advisable to cross the river before dark.

Even in the dry season the Rufiji was, at this point, over three hundred and fifty yards across. Felix had never seen such an enormous river. It was a muddy brown, like milky coffee. Its lethargic flow was interrupted at many points by shiny sandbanks and the occasional small, rocky islands. On the north bank Indian sappers had constructed a wooden jetty that led out to a crude flat ferry — heavy planks of wood lashed across two pontoons — which was attached to wire cables that stretched across the sluggish river. It had stopped raining but thick grey flannel clouds still covered the sky. Behind the clouds the sun was setting and the scène was bathed in a jaundiced sepia light. Felix looked in awe at the Rufiji. The vegetation on either side was lush, trees and bushes growing densely right up to the banks. Felix suddenly noticed that crocodiles were basking on some of the sand bars. The dull light, the torpid river and the oppressive steaminess gave the view a pestilential, malevolent atmosphere.