1982 - An Ice-Cream War

by William Boyd

  “Pipe?” he said.

  “No thanks.” Gabriel took out his cigarette case and lit a cigarette while Bilderbeck got his pipe going.

  “We’ll be attacking tomorrow, then,” Gabriel said, aware of a slight hollow feeling in his chest. “Are the North Lancs ashore?”

  “Oh yes. They’ll be on the left.”

  “Good,” Gabriel said. He felt that a battalion of British troops would make all the difference.

  “But what about the right?” Bilderbeck asked, voicing Gabriel’s fears. “Who in God’s name will be on the right? A crowd of bloody catch-me-quicks, that’s who.”

  Chapter 6

  3 November 1914,

  Tanga, German East Africa

  The next morning, the bald staff captain sauntered over and told Gabriel that his company was to be attached to the 13th Rajputs in the centre of the attack on Tanga. Gabriel formed his men up and checked their equipment. He asked subadar Rahman to do his best to instil some fighting spirit into the listless troop. At approximately ten-thirty they were told where to take up their preliminary position. This was the first time Gabriel had moved away from the red house and he was amazed to see thousands of men standing about in rough columns in the assembly area which was between the white house and the red house.

  Dirt tracks led away from the beach-head and disappeared into the coconut groves.

  ‘A’ company took up their position. Looking back at the white house Gabriel could see the three generals and their aides clustered in a group. Orders were clearly being issued and staff officers were running around checking on the placings of different units.

  After standing for an hour in mounting heat, Gabriel’s company and the Rajputs in front of them were ordered to advance three hundred yards into the bush. Gabriel followed the backs of the Rajputs and they left the open ground and moved into the welcome shade of the coconut plantations.

  As they marched off Gabriel looked back and saw what looked like an entire battalion of the North Lancs wheeling round behind them to take up position on the Rajputs’ left. The British soldiers were in shirtsleeves and looked very red-faced and sunburnt, but Gabriel found it an immense comfort to see them. His own men still seemed taciturn and nervous. Subadar Rahman’s pep talk had done little good. Gleeson seemed quite jaunty, though, to Gabriel’s surprise. He was whistling quietly to himself through his yellow teeth.

  As they moved into the trees and the denser undergrowth that grew between the pale grey trunks Gabriel lost sight of everyone except his own men and the tail-enders of the company in front. Somebody called halt and they all stopped. It was a genuine relief to be in the forest and out of the sun. At the Rajput briefing, which he had attended, their instructions had been to offer support to the Kashmir Rifles (who, Gabriel supposed, were somewhere in the trees up ahead) and capture and secure the jetty and customs sheds on the dockside. Tanga town, so they had been informed, was about two thousand yards ahead of them. Between them and the town were the coconut and rubber plantations, a native cemetery, a ditch and a deep railway cutting. Yesterday’s attack suggested that the far side of the cutting was the enemy’s first line of defence.

  Gabriel looked at his wristwatch. Twenty to twelve. The advance was ordered for midday. Over to his right and left he could hear orders being shouted and whistles and bugles blowing as the two brigades were cumbersomely formed up. Announced by a cracking of vegetation, a young staff officer thrashed his way out of a thicket and walked up to Gabriel. His tunic was covered in sweat and dust. He consulted a small notebook.

  “Are you the 101st Grenadiers?” he asked.

  Gabriel said no and told him who they were. The man looked at his notebook again.

  “Lord,” he muttered. Then, “I don’t suppose you’ve seen the North Lancs?”

  Gabriel said he thought they were somewhere to his left. The Rajputs were ahead and, as far as he knew, the Kashmir Rifles were in the vanguard.

  “Oh good,” the staff officer said. “That seems about right.”

  “Have you any idea where the Palamcottahs are?” Gabriel asked.

  “Beyond the North Lancs, I think,” he said without much confidence. “By the way, could you form up in line rather than column? We’ve decided to advance in line.” He plunged off into the bush as Gabriel and Gleeson effortfully ushered their hot and bothered men into line abreast.

  At ten past twelve the bugles sounded the advance. Gabriel waved his men forward and almost immediately the line began to undulate and break up as the men encountered denser vegetation and had to skirt impenetrable thorn thickets and clumps of bamboo. Gabriel and Gleeson, in the centre, found a rough path which took them in the right direction but this soon petered out. After a strenuous half hour they broke into the clearer ground of a rubber plantation. Up ahead Gabriel could just make out the disappearing backs of the Rajputs. “Come on,” he shouted to his men. “Faster.” A perspiring native runner panted up and handed him a note. It was from a captain in the North Lancs who said a gap was opening between them and the Rajputs and he would be obliged if the Rajputs could wheel slightly to the left. Gabriel sent the runner ahead to the Rajput columns and wondered if he and his men should alter course too. He looked about him as they made faster progress through the rubber trees. He couldn’t even see either wing of his own company. He sent Gleeson off to check it was all in order. He realized he was striding along as if he were on a country hike instead of marching into battle. A little self-consciously he unholstered his revolver and held it at the ready.

  After the rubber plantation came more thick forest with high grass, creepers and bushes at ground level and their progress slowed again. Gabriel tried to visualize the advance as if from a bird’s-eye view—three thousand men moving on Tanga—but found it impossible. By now he was dripping with sweat. His leggings and trousers were thick with dust and torn from the many thorn hearing plants he’d had to push his way through. He took off his sun helmet and wiped his forehead with a palm. His hair was wet through: as if he’d just plunged it in a basin of warm salty water.

  The thought of a basin of water, even warm and salty, reminded him that he was extremely thirsty. He was about to call for a water-chaggal when he realized the company didn’t have any, as the water-carriers had not been landed with them. He looked at his watch. Two o’clock. They’d been struggling through the bush for nearly two hours. He had no idea how far away they were from Tanga. It struck him that ordering the attack during the hottest time of the day wasn’t the brightest of ideas. Gleeson came up to report that the company was maintaining some sort of order. Five men had collapsed from heat exhaustion and he’d sent them back. He saw Gabriel had his revolver in his hand and took out his own.

  “Think it’ll go off all right?” he asked with a nervous smile. “The attack, I mean, not my gun.”

  Gabriel realized that Gleeson, like himself, had never seen active service. This was their first fight. He was pleased to note in himself no sensations of fear. He glanced at the men on either side of him. They looked tense, but that was scarcely surprising. They held their rifles loosely across their chests, the fixed bayonets flashing in the odd beam of sun that came through the canopy of leaves.

  Suddenly they heard the sound of firing from up ahead and a confused shouting and cheering broke out. At this point Gabriel’s company was forcing its way through particularly dense bush and no view of what was going on could be gained.

  He could hear sniggering bursts of fire from machine guns, more regular and controlled than the indiscriminate popping sound of the rifles.

  “Over here,” Gleeson shouted. “There’s a sort of track.”

  “This way,” Gabriel called to the native officers. He waded through thick grass to the track. As he stepped on to it he heard a crashing and trampling noise, the sound of men running. Suddenly, round the corner came a great mob of Indian soldiers, dozens it seemed, running at full speed away from the firing. Gabriel spun round. All at once, everywhere, he could mak
e out figures struggling to escape through the under-growth, darting beneath the trees, flashing through the clearings of sunlight and dappled patches of shade. To his horror he saw some of his own men join the stampede, pausing only to ding away their rifles.

  He crouched down behind a tree and aimed his revolver up the track expecting a charge of German askaris to be hard on the fleeing men’s heels. The firing up ahead continued with the same intensity but there seemed to be no pursuit. He stood up. He and Gleeson exchanged mystified glances. What was going on? They gathered the remaining men together and advanced on up the track. Soon the trees began to thin. The track ended at a large field of fully-grown maize which looked as if it had been smashed and trampled on by a giant pair of feet. Here they saw their first dead bodies, which set up a chatter of alarm amongst ‘A’ company’s remaining sepoys.

  Enough of the maize stalks were still standing to obscure their view. Gabriel looked to his right. The Kashmir Rifles should be there. On the left were the Loyal North Lancs. Where were the Rajputs? Surely they couldn’t all have run away? He wondered if they’d wandered off course in the coconut plantations. But what lay beyond the maize field? Gabriel waved his men down into a crouch and got out his map. It made no sense at all. He looked aimlessly about him, trying not to let his gaze rest on the numerous dead bodies. Firing was continuing to his right and left but all seemed quiet up ahead.

  Gleeson crawled up behind him. “Runner from head-quarters,” he said. Gabriel thought Gleeson didn’t look very well. The runner handed over the note. It was from Brigadier-General Wapshore. It said, “Your men should bring their left shoulders up and march towards this point so as to envelop the enemy’s right.” What point? Gabriel asked himself. He raised his left shoulder experimentally but it seemed no clearer. He turned the note over and saw a crude map with a bold arrow on it. There was no addressee. Surely the note couldn’t be meant for him? He turned round to question the runner but found that the man had gone.

  There was nothing for it but to advance. Waving the men forward, Gabriel, followed by ‘A’ company, moved cautiously through the maize field. It seemed to be well provided with a harvest of corpses and the thought crossed Gabriel’s mind that machine guns must have been previously sighted and fixed on this point. At the edge of the field he fell flat on his belly and peered out at the view ahead. The land was clear: dried grass dotted with a few acacia trees and completely flat. Fifty yards ahead he could see the ditch, fringed with greener grass and straggling bushes, and beyond that the railway cutting. To his right was a slight rise and he saw some British troops there, and a machine-gun section firing short bursts in the direction of the town. Beyond the railway cutting the neat white buildings of the town were visible between trees. He could see the sea, away to the right, and two of the transports standing offshore. His view to the left was obscured by a plantation of young rubber trees. But a great deal of firing was coming from that direction. The North Lancs, he guessed, in the thick of things.

  “What do you think?” he said to Gleeson who’d snaked up to join him.

  “The Rajputs seem to have cleared out completely,” Gleeson said. “Bad show.”

  “Yes,” Gabriel agreed. He wondered what they should do. “I suppose we should press on into the town. They must have fired on the Rajputs. Why aren’t they firing on us?”

  “Good question,” said Gleeson with a shaky smile.

  “Let’s go,” Gabriel said and stood up. He gave a long single blast on his whistle. “Come on!” he shouted to his men.

  He set off running in a half crouch towards the ditch, not making the best of progress through the knee-high grass. He dodged round a spindly acacia tree. He thought he saw puffs of smoke beyond the railway cutting. He was being shot at! Suddenly to his utter astonishment the air was ‘thick with bullets’. Unconsciously the expression leapt into his mind. It was a cliché, he was aware, but he never expected it to be literally true: black dots and specks, whizzing erratically through the air. He felt a sudden burning pain in his neck. He was hit! Oh God, he thought, not in the neck. He stumbled, but ran on, clapping a hand to his wound to staunch the blood, bullets buzzing and darting past. But wait, he thought, they weren’t bullets, they were bees! He stopped and turned round. His men were leaping about or writhing on the ground like epileptics as the swarming myriads of bees attacked. He saw Gleeson frantically swatting the air with his sun helmet. The atmosphere shimmered and danced with the irate black objects. With dismay he saw the demoralized remnants of his troops pick themselves up and run hell for leather back to the maize field. Gabriel inflated his lungs and blew the longest shrillest blasts he could on his whistle, in an attempt to check the rout, but they were gone, pursued by the furious bees.

  “My God,” Gleeson whimpered as he staggered over. “I’ve been practically stung to death!” The backs of his hands looked lumpy and swollen, his cheeks and neck seemed thickened with incipient carbuncles making him look stupid and loutish. “Look,” Gleeson pointed up. In the acacia tree Gabriel saw what looked like several slim elongated barrels. A few bees still hovered around them. “Bloody native beehives,” Gleeson wept, holding his puffy hands in front of him like a lap dog. They were swelling up at an alarming rate.

  Gabriel suddenly realized they were standing in what was meant to be the middle of a battlefield. He looked over to the mound and saw the troops who had been manning the machine gun wildly striking out as if they had been attacked by invisible assailants. Across the railway cutting he could just make out a few German askaris fleeing for shelter in the railway workshops. He looked back at Gleeson who was whimpering in agony over his ravaged hands which now resembled a pair of well-padded cricket gloves. Then little clouds of dust began to kick up out of the grass.

  “Come on, Gleeson,” Gabriel said. “Into the ditch.” They rushed the remaining few yards and leapt into the ditch, which was about four feet deep. Gabriel sank up to his ankles into the brackish slimy water which lay in its bottom. With a moan of relief Gleeson plunged his boiling hands deep into the mud. “Put mud on my neck!” he cried, and Gabriel slapped handfuls of the foul-smelling stuff on his cheeks and neck. His own sting was throbbing painfully but he seemed to have escaped lightly.

  While Gleeson soothed his hands Gabriel inched up the wall of the ditch and peered back to the maize field. Not a sign of his men. He noticed that the machine gun on the mound had started firing again.

  “No trace of them,” he said to Gleeson.

  “The swine,” Gleeson swore bitterly. “The cowardly swine!”

  “Feel you can move on?” Gabriel asked. “Let’s go on down the ditch. We’ll never cross the cutting here.”

  Gleeson nodded his assent, his eyes shut, his bottom lip caught between his yellow teeth.

  Bent double, they made their way along the ditch in the direction of the sea, stepping gingerly over the few dead bodies they encountered or rolling them out of the way. Gleeson held his mud caked hands in front of him as if he’d just made them out of clay and they were still fragile. Soon they came to a place where bushes and thorn trees lined the parapet of the ditch and Gabriel took the chance to peer out and get their hearings.

  Cautiously, he raised his head. From this position he had a better view of the town. He saw a large stone building with steep tiled roofs and the words ‘Deutscher Kaiser Hotel’ written on it. As he watched, the German flag which was flying from the flagpole was lowered.

  “We’re in the town, I think,” he called to Gleeson. “What time do you make it?” Somehow, somewhere, he’d lost his watch.

  “Almost four, I think,” Gleeson said. “I can’t see my watch face. It’s covered in mud.”

  Gabriel scraped it off. Gleeson’s watch had stopped at ten past three. “I’m afraid your watch has stopped,” he said.

  Gabriel looked to his left. He saw white troops moving beyond the railway cutting, dashing from house to house. “The North Lancs are across the cutting,” he reported. Gleeson elbowed hims
elf up to join him.

  “What should we do?” Gleeson said. He held his enormous hands before his face, like some grotesque surgeon waiting for his rubber gloves.

  “Let’s go on in,” Gabriel said. He couldn’t think of anything else.

  “Right.”

  They scurried across the patch of ground to the railway cutting and slithered down one side, then stepped across the rails and toiled up the opposite thirty-foot incline, Gabriel with an arm locked in Gleeson’s elbow. Once at the top they ran on through some vegetable plots and fell to the ground heavily in the shelter of a mud-brick house.

  “Hoi!” they heard someone shout. “You!” They looked up.

  Crouched behind a stone wall up ahead were half a dozen men of the North Lancs.

  “You speak Indian?” a corporal was shouting in a thick Lancashire accent. Gabriel and Gleeson crawled over to join them.

  “Oh. Sorry, sir. It’s, er, them fooking niggers in t’ Kashmir Rifles. Just down road there. Every time we shows our faces they bloody shoot at us.”

  “I speak Hindi,” Gleeson offered. He looked most odd, Gabriel thought, with half his face covered in mud. Gleeson crawled into a nearby house with the corporal and soon Gabriel heard him shouting instructions. Gabriel peered over the wall. He found he was looking up a pleasant street of single-storey, white mud and stone houses. Dead bodies, with their already familiar indecent splay-legged posture, lay in the middle of the road. He couldn’t tell if they were friend or foe.

  “Quite a fight here,” he said.

  “Yes, sir. We had the signal to fall back. They got jerries in every bloody house. But those daft monkeys keep shootin’ at us. They’re guarding the bridge back across the cutting. None of them speaks English,” he paused. “What happened to the lieutenant, sir? If you’ll excuse me asking.”

  “He was stung by bees. My whole company was attacked and driven off.”