William Boyd - An Ice-Cream War

The dead bodies were carried down a narrow path to the Rufiji. Unceremoniously they were pitched into the turbulent brown water. Felix and Gilzean stood and watched their bodies being swirled away.

“They’re for the kelpies,” Gilzean said. He seemed unusually depressed, Felix thought, far more so than normal.

“What a way to go,” Felix said, wondering if he should ask what kelpies were. Fish? Crocodiles?

“It could be us yet,” Gilzean added, doomily. They walked back up the dripping path. “Aye, and to think I asked to come out here.”

“Did you?” Felix said, keen to capitalize on a moment’s lucidity. “So did I.”

“Twae brothers deed in France. I thought, don’t go there, Angus. Thought it would be easy out here, ye ken? Look at us noo.”

Gilzean had never been so forthcoming. Felix looked at his dark, troubled face with sympathy.

“I came out here to find my brother,” Felix confided. “He’s a prisoner somewhere.”

“We get our lawins, sure enough,” Gilzean said bitterly.

Felix sensed meaning beginning to edge away. He tried one more time.

“If I find him,” he said, feeling a twinge of guilt at his kek of commitment, “I’ll die happy.”

“This cackit place,” Gilzean growled in hate, not listening. “They poor darkies. A greeshie way to go.” He clenched his fists. “I’m a snool, a glaikit sumph. Nocht but rain, howdumdied all day o’boot. I’ve lost my noddle. Camsteerie bloody country.” He gave a harsh laugh. “No strunt. Any haughmagandie? Never. Dunged into the ground…I could greet, I tell you.” He flashed a glance of scowling malevolence at Felix. “Aye, and those primsie Suthrons — you apart, sir — I’d no tarrow to clack their fuds…”

Felix let him ramble on as they plodded through the mud back to Kibongo. Gilzean’s Complaint — it seemed powerful enough to warrant a capital letter — would do for all the men in Twelve company, the dead porters too. He only understood one word in three, but this time he thought he knew how the little man felt.

“Look what I’ve got for you here,” Liesl said placing a straw basket on the dispensary table. Gabriel looked, wondering if she could hear his heart beating. He hadn’t seen Liesl for three days. She had travelled the seventy miles to Lindi to meet her husband. Gabriel had missed her intolerably. She took off her sun helmet and adjusted the pins and combs in her frizzy ginger hair, stretching the material of her blouse across her breasts. Gabriel swallowed and gripped the edge of the table. A nervous tremor had started in his left hand some weeks ago. It quivered constantly, as if possessed of some ghostly life of its own.

Liesl took out a cloth bundle, a knife and a jar of syrupy fluid. She unwrapped the cloth revealing a dark brown loaf the size of a brick.

“Banana bread,” she told him delightedly. “Made with coconut too. No butter, but,” she held up the jar, “plenty of honey.”

Gabriel smiled, his heart cartwheeling. “How amazing. Where did you get it?”

“Erich has friends. He is an important man now. Staff officer with von Lettow himself.”

“Any news?” he said as casually as possible. He needn’t have worried, he knew: Liesl told him everything.

“Bad news,” she said unconcernedly. “The English have landed at Kilwa. Everywhere we are retreating.” She frowned. “There has been a lot of fighting.”

“So we are winning.”

“Oh yes. Some of the wounded are coming here. They’ve evacuated the hospital at Lukuledi. So,” she shrugged. “We shall be busy again.”

Gabriel shifted uneasily in his seat. For the last six months Nanda had been almost deserted, the ward never more than half full, the town populated by the remains of its native population and about thirty German women and children. Deppe had gone — for good they were promised — to establish a new base hospital at Chitawa some fifty miles to the south-west. Nanda hospital had belonged to Liesl again. They sat out the rainy season with little to disturb their routine. This now consisted mainly of distilling the quinine substitute that the German forces used, a vile-tasting potion made from Peruvian chinchona bark of which, surprisingly, there were considerable supplies, stockpiled before the war began. Every fortnight freshly filled bottles and containers were sent out to the Schütztruppe companies. Liesl handed over the administration of this to two other women, Frau Ledebur and Frau Muller. Gabriel was employed in the actual distilling process, a simple but delicate job relying on perfect timing in order for the quinine distillate to be potable. Gabriel spent most of the time supervising the process out at the back of the hospital where the two huge boiling vats were set over open fires. He filled the bottles and passed them over to Frau Ledebur who organized their despatch to the varying Schütztruppe bases. It hadn’t been difficult to ascertain the positions of these, and he now had a good idea of the state of the fighting. Hidden in a niche in the wall of his hut he kept a tattered dossier which he annotated and altered as fresh information came in. The news of the landings at Kilwa would have to be added tonight. By his calculations that meant the British army was now only a hundred and fifty miles or so away from Nanda. It was true that the Portuguese had occupied Lindi some months previously but they didn’t count.

This new awareness of the proximity of the British forces brought with it a succession of conflicting emotions. His leg wound had been healed for many weeks now. Deppe’s posting had made the need to be regarded as injured no longer necessary. Liesl was quite unworried by his presence and their friendship made it unlikely that she would ever insist on his being transferred to another POW camp. Indeed, she had saved him from being re-incarcerated in the Nanda camp just three weeks previously. The stockade had been re-opened for captured European NCO’s. There were now ten British, four Rhodesians and two Portuguese behind the barbed wire, supervised by a grotesquely fat Dutchman called Deeg and a gang of fierce looking native auxiliaries known as ruga-ruga. These men were armed with old rifles but wore no uniforms apart from the odd scavenged pair of trousers or forage cap. It was rumoured among the prisoners that the ruga-ruga were recruited from a tribe of cannibals. Certainly some of the men had filed teeth and this was taken to be sufficient proof of their taste for human flesh.

One of Deeg’s first moves had been to imprison Gabriel but Liesl had refused him permission, saying that not only was Gabriel an officer and couldn’t be billeted with NCOs but also that he was still under medical observation and, besides, had given his parole. Deeg had been forced to accept her instructions, but he insisted that Gabriel be confined to the hospital and its grounds and that he was not allowed to wander freely around Nanda. This restriction had to be accepted but Deeg let it be known that he was lodging an official protest. Nothing further, however, was heard of this. Presumably the military authorities had more pressing matters on their hands.

Liesl sat down opposite Gabriel, her eyes bright with pleasure as she prepared to cut the banana bread. Gabriel released his grip on the table and rested his trembling hand on his knee. He looked at Liesl’s plump freckly face, her curious upper lip, the way she seemed constantly to be either on the point of speaking or biting back words. She had three distinct horizontal creases in her soft neck. AU her clothes seemed several sizes too small for her and were consequently always patched by sweat stains. She tucked a wisp of her hair behind an ear. Gabriel felt the blood pulse in his head. He felt dull and thick-tongued with hopeless love. Since Deeg’s arrival and the restrictions on his movement he had not dared to creep round to her bungalow at nights. But somehow feeding on his memories made the experience almost more intense. He knew every inch of that beautiful large body. The long hanging breasts, the almost invisible salmon-pink nipples, the creamy freckled belly, the ginger-gold hair in her groin and armpits…