The Dust Diaries (28 page)

Watching him now, standing at the steamer’s prow like a macabre figurehead, Arthur contemplated this man who could be so genial, and yet kill so easily. He took out his notebook and pencil from the top pocket of his khaki tunic and began to make some notes towards a poem. The war may have disrupted everything else in his life, but it had not stopped him writing. He had been writing poems throughout his time on the lake and now, as they steamed towards the German shore, he wrote again by the light of the moon, trying to sketch a portrait of the man standing before him, staring into the night as if daring it to break its silence.

The Watcher on Our Theshold

(Intelligence Department)

As in a bad dream I may see you now

Lank, flusht, chin-tufted, eyes as black as coal

Kindling like live coals, in that mood you well

Might pose for him who mortgage held of old

On Faustus damn’d—calling his mortgage in.

Those iron lips will no refusals own,

Forbidden witch-smoke curls in rings of blue

About your head, and your hand sinister

Fondles a swarthy lash of hippo-hide.

Upon your shoulder-straps, beneath your stars

Brass letters spell your errand—

OUT FOR BLOOD

Bukoba, Lake Victoria, German East Africa

When Meinertzhagen burst the lock on the door to the communications room beneath the wireless tower, it was the flies that hit him first. A manic buzzing and swelling as the rush of air from the opened door disturbed them. Black clouds filling the room as if the day was transforming into particles of night. Thousands of them, coming at him in their stream towards the light, tapping against his face, catching in his beard and in his lips. After the flies, the smell. With the force of heat from an opened oven door the stink fumed into his nostrils and down into his throat, making him gag and bring his hand to his face as a mask.

Looking over his fingers around the room at the desks, files, telegraph and radio equipment the thought flashed across his mind that the Germans had discovered his ‘dirty paper method’ and that this was their ironic revenge. A couple of askaris from the 3
rd
KAR and a North Lanes sapper sergeant came through the door behind him. He heard them all gag and choke and then the sergeant’s Lancashire accent, ‘Fuckin’ hell, Sir! Oh, Christ, fuckin’ hell!’ Then their retreating footsteps as they ran back out of the door. Meinertzhagen followed them, equally appalled by the sight of that room.

Every surface, every document, every piece of equipment was covered, daubed and dripping in brown and mustard-coloured human excrement. The room had been the scene of a bizarre act of mass defecation, and leaning against a tree outside Meinertzhagen knew why. They must have known they were outnumbered, that the town would fall sooner or later and this was how they would keep the equipment and documents from falling into enemy hands. Judging by the flies they must have defiled the room at least twenty-four hours earlier. Meinertzhagen tried to imagine it. The British field guns battering the town, the patter of small arms fire in the distance and in here a
Schütztruppe
officer in his white, braided uniform calling out the command to a company of askaris who stood, waiting, the belts of their breeches undone in anticipation.

He turned to the team of sappers waiting behind him. The Sergeant still looked pale from his brief glimpse of the room. ‘Go ahead,’ he said. ‘We won’t get anything out of there.’

The team gathered their equipment, long coils of copper wire, tight bundles of dynamite, and began to climb onto the roof of the communications room to set their charges on the concrete base of the 2oo-foot wireless tower. Beneath them the burst door still swung open, its gap in the wall filled with the low, menacing hum of the flies.

Arthur looked up from the eight shallow graves the porters were trying to dig from the hard earth. Below him thin columns of smoke still drifted up from the white-washed houses of the town and a scattering of huts had been reduced to charred embers. In the town itself, he could just make out a group of men clambering onto the lower struts of the wireless tower.

The scrape and slump of the spadework brought him back to his own job and he looked back down at the eight bodies before him, each covered with a grey standard-issue blanket. Over the last hour he’d knelt beside each one, carefully noting each man’s identity in his notebook, their names forming a list after the last line of the poem he had written on the steamer two nights ago: OUT FOR BLOOD. He would write to the families himself, and he had taken the liberty to remove what he could from the bodies to send along with his letters: photographs of wives and children, wedding rings, even a bitten pencil with the dead man’s tooth marks imprinted in its wood. Then he’d performed the last rites over each man individually, and now it was just the graves that were left. He sat back on a rock, feeling the weight of the dead men’s possessions in his pocket, the watches, the glasses, the half-written letters, and watched as the eight holes grew deeper with every shovel and swing, the deposits of earth and dust mounting up at their sides.

The battle that led to these deaths had begun two days ago, when, at one o’clock on the morning of the 22
nd
, the four steamers had reached their landing positions. The boats bobbed in the shallow water off a gently sloping beach three miles south of Bukoba as the men waited for Stewart’s torch signal from the leading steamer. But instead of a torch flash, another light lit up the sky and Arthur had watched as a burning white point with a long tail described an arc above them, then levelled off and exploded like a giant thunderflash. Two more rockets followed its trajectory. He heard Captain Mein-ertzhagen curse to himself as he pushed through the men to get to the side of the boat where he could get a clean signal to Stewart. As the second rocket lit up the sky Arthur had looked down the deck and seen that the steamers were completely illuminated in the flare’s light: the staring faces of the men looking up, the field guns, even the details of the bridge were all cast in a white brightness that threw shadows in all the wrong places, like a photographic negative. The Germans had seen them and the element of surprise was lost. He thought of Tanga and waited for the guns to start harassing them where they were, but nothing happened. The last flare fizzled out on the night’s black, then silence. Eventually Stewart’s signal came: withdraw, it said, and steam further north.

Five hours later they disembarked three miles north of the town at the base of a cliff that rose almost vertically three hundred feet above the beach to a scrappy line of thorn trees at the top. A steep path ran diagonally up the cliff face, broken in places by landslides and the roots of plants. Arthur had watched from the shore as the strike force of the North Lanes and the Fusiliers began to tackle the climb, roping up machine-guns and field guns and even managing to coax up a heavily laden mule, its hooves scrabbling and slipping on the fragile path. He saw Pruen among the Fusiliers, directing equipment up the cliff, checking knots and bindings, emitting an energy that belied his age. The Fusiliers were much older and less well trained than the other regiments. An eclectic mix of adventurers, drifters and old soldiers, they had given themselves the moniker ‘The Frontiersmen’, although around the lake they were more commonly known as the ‘Old and the Bold’. Some had seen action before, in the Boer War, the ‘86 uprising or further afield in their home territories, and as Arthur joined them on the path up the cliff he heard the medals of past campaigns clinking against the buttons of their tunics. Most of them, however, had never fired a gun in anger and Arthur watched as a succession of exiled Russians, a troop of ex-circus clowns and acrobats, a bartender, a lighthouse-keeper, an opera singer, a Buckingham Palace footman and a Texas cowboy all scrambled up onto the lip of the cliff behind him, their rifles strapped to their backs and sweat already gathering at their temples.

The skirmishing had begun as the force marched over a lip at the top of the cliff and down towards a hill that overlooked the town. It was scrappy fighting and hard going. They were covering open ground of bush and swamp while the Germans fired at them from the higher cover of thick banana plantations, rocks, inselbergs and clumps of thorn trees. Arthur had advanced with a company of Fusiliers. Puffs of smoke drifting up from behind tree trunks and boulders was all he could see of the enemy and he’d spent much of his time on the ground as fusillades of bullets spat up flurries of dust around them. He’d been under fire before, on the decks of steamers patrolling the lake and at the attack on Mwanza, but he’d never experienced anything as intense as what they met that day. Lying there, his cheek pressed against the earth, he experienced the same sensation he’d felt all those years ago lying on the deck of the
Hertzog
on the morning of his arrival in Africa. A desire for the firing to stop, for the fingers to freeze on the triggers, and beneath that desire a deeper fault-line of frustration and pity, fracturing him to the core.

They were half-way across a swamp when the German 755 started throwing down shells, and Arthur had had to submerge himself almost completely in a deep stagnant pool to escape the shrapnel that whizzed around him, fizzling and spitting as it hit the water. But then the field guns of their own 28
th
Mountain Battery had answered, and as the shells landed on the slope before them, throwing up brief flowerings of rock, earth and tree, the Fusilier company had taken the opportunity to advance at speed. Arthur jogged forward with them, bent double alongside the Fusiliers’ Sergeant-Major Bottomly. Bot-tomly was an older man and Arthur could hear the effort of his grunting pant with each step he took. A sudden spray of machine-gun fire sent them both sprawling to the ground again, but as soon as it had passed Arthur got to his feet and carried on, only realising after a few yards that Bottomly was no longer with him. He’d turned to see the Sergeant-Major still kneeling behind him, staring back at him, a wild expression on his face. As Arthur went back to him Bottomly opened his mouth to speak, but he got no further than a rasping gasp before the blood frothed up on his lips and ran down his chin, matting in his beard. It was then that Arthur saw the bullet holes, three of them in neat diagonal formation across his chest, like buttons across his tunic. Another burst of machine-gun fire erupted behind him and Arthur had thrown himself down again, shutting his eyes tightly against the spraying dirt. He opened them to find his face inches from where Bottomly had been kneeling and he noticed briefly how the imprint of the man’s cord breeches had made a corrugated pattern in the dust, like a fingerprint pressed in the earth. Then he’d raised his head further and seen Bottomly himself, on his back now, his left eye and cheek missing.

Bottomly was a father. His family were back in West London now, and just days before he’d told Arthur how he felt they’d be safer there, ‘back home’. As he’d lain in the dirt, listening to the whizz and whine of the bullets and shells finding their invisible courses through the air, Arthur had imagined the resonance of the death he had just witnessed. The arrival of the telegram on the doormat. His wife reading the official sympathies, and then reading them again. Then his own letter, with the photographs and mementos. The silence after the crying. Her attempts to explain to the children. The erosion of grief over the years and the never-changing strangeness of that name: Bukoba, where their father had left them, staring at the sky through his one remaining eye.

By nightfall the Germans had retreated from their positions on the hill, but they’d still managed to hold the British a mile off from the town itself. With the failing light the firing died down to the odd nervous shot ringing off a boulder, and then nothing, just the dusk chorus of insects and hyenas meeting the moon. The men were exhausted. They had fought all day and for many it was the first action they’d ever experienced. As the adrenalin subsided, tiredness had overwhelmed them. Rations were scheduled to arrive from the shore, but they never came, so both the Fusiliers and the North Lanes had bivouacked down for the night with whatever rations had survived the day. Sharing a biscu it and a lump of cheese with one of the ex-circus clowns from the Fusiliers, Arthur watched the deepening blue of the sky above the hill turn the thorn trees into sharp silhouettes hung with stars.

Not far from where they camped they’d found the shattered remains of one of the German 755, flanked by her two gunners, an askari and a
Schütztruppe
officer, arranged on either side, their limbs at impossible angles. Captain Meinertzhagen had looked through the officer’s pockets before Arthur performed the last rites over the dead men: a chain watch with a smashed face, the fine hands buckled; a silver cigarette case; a soiled handkerchief, and in the top pocket of his shirt a crude hand-drawn map of Africa. The continent had been dotted across with an upside-down T and the three portions labelled: German South Africa, Austrian Africa, Turkish Africa. Perhaps he had been explaining to the askari how the country would look after the war, or maybe it was a personal proposal he planned to show the Kaiser one day. Whatever, it didn’t mean much to him any more and now he would never own any part of Africa. But she would own him, if not with her soil, then with her hyenas, her rats, her flies and, come that morning, her vultures.

The night was freezing. After the heat of the day the cold had been a shock and sleep seemed out of the question. Captain Meinertzhagen and Lieutenant Selous had retired to the shelter of an inselberg, where they swapped hunting stories and naturalist notes while a group of the North Lanes had set fire to a couple of grass huts and dried their uniforms by the flames. It was by the light of this fire that Arthur prepared a simple communion service. He was as exhausted as the rest of the men and as he’d lain a piece of cloth over a flat rock and placed a chalice and a paten on it, he’d felt every movement as an effort of will. After he’d taken off his jacket and covered his khaki shirt with a preaching stole, a couple of askaris and a handful of Europeans had emerged from the darkness and knelt on the ground before his makeshift altar, bowing their heads as if in tiredness or shame.