Dust Clouds of War

by John Wilcox

  It became Fonthill’s turn to look embarrassed. ‘Well, my two chaps will be appreciative of the payments but I need nothing. As you know, I have ample private means and, as you say,’ he smiled, ‘enough gongs to sound dinner in a thousand private hotels throughout the south of England. I want nothing more. Except, perhaps, another interesting job. I don’t want to sit this war out down here, Admiral. I know I can still be useful.’

  ‘I am sure you can. Thank you again, my dear fellow, and my best wishes to your wife.’

  Fonthill, Alice, Jenkins and Mzingeli were given the honour of being conveyed to the shore in the admiral’s barge and they all repaired to the hotel for stiff whiskies and, in Mzingeli’s case, a large glass of milk. What was more, there was a letter awaiting Simon and Alice from their adopted son, Sunil, sent from France and assuring them that he was well and fit.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Simon immediately sought an interview with General Tighe to plead for more work but also to report on Alice’s suspicion that there was a German spy somewhere in the British ranks in Mombasa. It was clear that the land war was going badly – put into vivid relief by the success in German South West Africa of the South African prime minister, Louis Botha, one of the Afrikaner heroes of the Anglo–Boer war, who had personally led South African troops in invading and defeating the Germans in that colony. He had also put down a rebellion by diehard Boers in South Africa.

  In contrast, Tighe’s men in the north had received several setbacks. An attempt by the British to eject German troops from Mbuyuni, twenty miles east of Taveta, had failed miserably with the loss of 100 British troops. Soon afterwards, an attempt to retake Longido with a force 450 strong was beaten off with heavy casualties.

  It was not surprising, then, that Simon found Tighe to be in an untypically depressed mood and comparatively uninterested in the task of flushing out spies in Mombasa.

  ‘Ah, Fonthill,’ he said, ‘we know that the bloody place is steaming with them,’ he said. ‘But our intelligence is doing its best and I am not convinced that anything of value gets out to the Germans.’ He gestured to Simon to take a chair and resumed his own seat behind his desk, drawing heavily on his cigarette.

  ‘I’ve got bigger fish to fry than a touch of espionage back here,’ he went on, leaning back in his chair. ‘My intelligence wallahs tell me that von Lettow-Vorbeck has been conducting a pretty successful recruiting campaign in his colony and that an extra 2,000 Europeans – Europeans, mind you, Fonthill, reservists he’s called up – have joined his ranks and that he can now put 20,000 troops into the field.’

  Tighe frowned as he watched the blue smoke from his cigarette rise to the ceiling. ‘What’s more, do yer know, he’s got sixty-six machine guns and sixty field guns at his disposal which means that he has superior fire power to me. It’s true that the ration strength of my force rose to 15,000 in the summer, but of that lot only 4,000 British and Indian troops and 3,600 of the King’s African Rifles were fit for duty. In other words, I have a fighting force now no bigger than the army we started with a year ago, mainly thanks to malaria and dysentery. At this very moment, the greatest force I could put into the field in British East Africa is 2,500 infantry with eighteen field guns and thirty-five machine guns. I hope to God von Lettow-Vorbeck doesn’t come at me in force.’

  A silence fell on the room, broken only by a shouted command and stamp of feet in the distance as a troop was drilled.

  Fonthill shook his head. ‘Sounds pretty bad, General. But presumably you will get reinforcements?’

  ‘Indeed. The best news I’ve had so far is that the South Africans, bless ’em, have offered to send troops from the south. Botha and his deputy Smuts – you’ll remember them from eleven years ago, no doubt?’

  Simon nodded. ‘Only too well. Chased ’em both. Superb soldiers.’

  ‘Quite so. Well, they’re proving to be superb politicians now, as well. It’s only a few years ago the Kaiser was supporting old man Kruger in his fight against the British and half of the Afrikaners in South Africa still blame us and hate us for that war. Yet Botha has assured the government back home that, now that he has cleaned up German South West Africa, he can send a considerable force to fight von Lettow-Vorbeck up here.’

  Tighe tapped the ash from his cigarette. ‘It means that I shall probably be superseded in command here by a South African – the Boer population would never stand for their troops being commanded by an Englishman – but I don’t mind that at all, as long as they leave me here to carry on fighting the Germans. I have the greatest respect for those Boer chaps.

  ‘In any case,’ he continued, ‘I have requested that the War Office ask Cape Town for 10,000 men as soon as possible, so that I can clear all enemy troops from the border between German and British East Africa and give us a clean start for a possible offensive. I hope we’ll get them soon.’

  ‘Glad to hear it, General. In the meantime, is there any sort of job I can do, do you think? I am anxious to be of service.’

  ‘Well, you have been of great service already, Fonthill. Your role in knocking out the Königsberg has been splashed all over the papers back home and you are even more famous than you were before.’ Tighe smiled. ‘No doubt thanks, to a large extent, to that remarkable wife of yours, Fonthill. Please do give her my regards.’

  ‘Of course I will.’ Despite his age, Fonthill felt himself flushing. He always hated the inference that his so-called fame was due to Alice. ‘I don’t know about being famous – I doubt if I am – but I am seeking another job. Is there anything you might have for me, General?’

  Tighe stubbed out his cigarette. ‘I am afraid not at the moment, Fonthill, but leave it with me. As I have explained, things are about to change here at the top, so I am not really in a position to be of use to you. But let’s see who comes in and I will certainly try to put you forward. Now, my dear fellow, if you will excuse me, I have much to do.’

  The next few months were a difficult time for Simon Fonthill and his wife and comrades. Alice was denied permission to go out into the field – as were the other correspondents – and once again was trying to write strategic appreciations of the war from Mombasa, without much real idea of what was going on out in that vast bush. Accordingly, she was short-tempered and began to conduct her own, abortive, search for whoever might be spying on her from within the British camp. Jenkins, with little to do, was drinking too much and on one occasion came back to the hotel with the blackest of eyes and bleeding knuckles. He had, he said, walked into a door. Mzingeli made a formal submission to Simon for permission to return to the farm in Northern Rhodesia, as a response to which Fonthill stalled awkwardly, asking for time to think about it.

  For himself, Simon took to going for long, rather slow runs out into the countryside surrounding Mombasa, to get himself, he told Alice, into condition for whatever might be asked of him next. Both he and his wife took to watching out for the afternoon post in the hope of a letter from Sunil in France.

  None came – he had explained that he was being trained for a big new push that was in the offing and that he would be too busy to write for a while – and so the weeks dragged by for the strangely ill-sorted quartet staying in the Empire Hotel; a quartet because Simon and Alice had insisted that they would immediately end their stay if Mzingeli was not accepted as a guest there. In the end the management conceded, but with ill grace.

  Rumours abounded that a South African contingent was due to arrive soon and indeed they did in December: 2,500 men forming the 1st South African Mounted Brigade, led by Colonel Jakobus van Deventer, a giant of a man, who had been Jan Smuts’s second in command during the latter’s famous drive into the Union of South Africa.

  Alice soon buzzed around her contacts in Tighe’s staff and found that by no means all of Deventer’s men were Boers. For instance, a squadron of the 1st South African Horse were British, as were the majority of the troopers in the 4th South African Horse.

  ‘Do you know Deventer, Simon?’ she a
sked.

  Fonthill shook his head. ‘Don’t think I ever met him or crossed swords with him at all. Knew of him, of course. He and Smuts scared the life out of Sir John French in South Africa. French thought it was a full-blown invasion. It wasn’t, but Smuts and Deventer caused a hell of a lot of trouble down in the south before the armistice.’

  The arrival of the first of the South Africans lifted Fonthill’s spirits and raised his hopes of gainful employment to the point where he begged Mzingeli to stay with him and Jenkins, for, if he was given some kind of ‘freelance’ scouting job, he knew that the tracker would be invaluable. In fact, Mzingeli – a man of very few words – confessed that he enjoyed what he called ‘the soldiering’ more than farming and was quite happy to stay, with the promise of action soon. As for Jenkins, after a wigging from Simon, he undertook to stop his drinking for a full month to prove that he could do it. The promise held for a full week, but Fonthill was glad that some effort, at least, had been made by his old comrade.

  Their patience, however, was tried when reports came in that the South African Brigade, backing up a large British force, had been well and truly blooded when Tighe’s attempt to retake Salaita had completely failed. It seemed that the British General Malleson, whom Tighe had entrusted with command, had ignored all advice and blundered in every way.

  There was general relief all round, then, when Jan Smuts arrived in Mombasa in February 1916 to become commander-in-chief of all South African and British forces in British East Africa.

  ‘But he’s more of a politician than a general, surely?’ Alice asked of Simon. ‘He was mainly Attorney General to Kruger during the Boer War and, since then, he’s been deputy prime minister. Botha did all the fighting in the South West, didn’t he?’

  Fonthill nodded. ‘Yes. But don’t underestimate Smuts. He was the best lawyer I’ve ever known on horseback commanding troops. He invaded South Africa with a handful of horsemen and was never captured, knocking back our chaps all the time. He’s a first-class fighter. I hope to God he will have something for me.’

  It was a delighted Simon, then, who received a hand-scribbled note from Smuts himself, asking him to attend his office in Mombasa the following day.

  Although Fonthill had attended the armistice meetings that ended the Boer War in 1902, meeting and talking with Generals Botha and de Wet, he had somehow missed encountering the little man with the Van Dyke beard, who had so loyally supported Botha’s premiership during the last decade in South Africa. Nevertheless, his welcome from the lawyer-general was warm in the extreme when they met now.

  Smuts had somehow acquired a small, airless office with only a solitary fan leisurely stirring the leaden air that hung over the place. The heat and humidity were high but they did not deter the slim, erect figure that bounced up from behind his desk and bounded towards Fonthill, his hand outstretched.

  ‘My dear Fonthill,’ said Smuts. ‘I have long wished to meet you.’ He spoke in a high-pitched voice with only a trace of an Afrikaans accent and Fonthill remembered that he had been called to the bar in London before the war. ‘In fact,’ Smuts went on, ‘when we could have met but didn’t, I remember you were a Brigadier General. Why didn’t you stay in the British army? You could have been commander-in-chief here now, instead of me, just a humble pen-pusher.’

  ‘I think you flatter me, sir. I was a regular soldier, in fact, years ago and fought against the Zulus back in ’78, but I am afraid I got disillusioned with the British army and resigned my commission. I managed, however, to carry on serving here and there in the Empire afterwards in … what shall I say … a more irregular role. It was Kitchener who talked me into coming back into the regular ranks for our scrap with you fellows fourteen years ago.’

  ‘Yes, de Wet and Botha have both told me that you gave them a particularly hard time of it.’

  ‘Well that’s kind of them, but I never caught either of them, you know. Wonderful horsemen and tremendous guerrilla fighters.’

  ‘In fact, it’s what they told me about you – plus Paddy Tighe’s strong recommendation – that made me ask you to call in.’

  Fonthill’s heart leapt. A job at last! Perhaps …

  ‘Really, sir? I am really very anxious to try and do something useful again. I have been kicking my heels here, waiting for some sort of call since the Königsberg some months ago now.’

  ‘Yes, well you certainly did wonders there.’ A wry smile crept over the thin lips under the grey moustache. ‘It seems you managed to kick poor old King-Hall into some sort of life. Oh, by the way. Have you heard that he is to be recalled and put in command of the Scapa Flow base, up there on the cold North Sea?’

  ‘No, I hadn’t. That seems a trifle harsh, if I may say so.’

  ‘I rather tend to agree with you. But he’s lost his protector in Winston Churchill, who has been forced to resign over the Dardanelles disaster. And someone had to be blamed for all the time it took to knock over one German cruiser, given that it was hugely outnumbered.’

  ‘Hmm. So heads are falling all over the place.’

  The cold blue eyes staring into Fonthill’s seemed to harden for a moment. And Simon remembered that Smuts had a reputation for possessing a brilliant, legally honed mind, which could be completely ruthless if it had to be.

  ‘Yes, when war breaks out there is often no time to be, what shall I say? – completely fair, perhaps, in attributing blame.’ The little man, looking cool and crisp in his light-grey general’s uniform, despite the heat in the room, leant forward.

  ‘It was your reputation for being, now what was your word, ah yes: “irregular” that interested me about you. You made your mark during the Boxer Rebellion in China and you impressed my colleagues who fought against you in the South African war for the way you operated like the Boers. Unlike the other soldiers of your rank and experience in the British army, you did not fight by the book. You behaved, in fact, like a Boer guerrilla, living with your men out on the veldt, travelling light with little, if any, baggage train, and attacking at dawn, out of the darkness.’

  The enthusiasm in Smuts’s voice was unmistakable. It sounded, felt Fonthill, as though he was being made an honorary Boer. But the general was continuing.

  ‘You did something similar, I understand, in Tibet during that,’ the faint smile came back, ‘rather strange and regrettable adventure of Lord Curzon’s. I am told that you formed a force of cavalry that did immense service while the main British force plodded behind you over the passes.’

  Fonthill shifted uncomfortably in his chair. ‘Not quite, sir. The nucleus of our cavalry arm was formed before I took command. I merely knocked it into shape.’

  Smuts’s smile broadened, now lightening his whole, rather austere countenance. ‘That may be so, Fonthill, but now we find you popping up here in East Africa, organising the defence of a border town, taking a raiding party across Lake Victoria and now, with your equally amazing little team, turning native and showing the fleet how to sink the Königsberg. I have to say, my dear fellow, that you seem to be a man of many parts – and just the man I am looking for.’

  Ah, thought Simon. At last he was getting to the point, after all the compliments.

  ‘And what sort of man would that be, General?’ he asked.

  ‘Intelligence. Good intelligence. As far as I can see, that – and more reactive, quick-thinking generalship – is what has been missing in this campaign so far. Von Lettow-Vorbek has both. It’s my job to improve the second, but I want you and your small team to get out into the bush, behind enemy lines if necessary, to provide the first. I will give you a roving commission’ – he held up his hand – ‘No, don’t protest, I know you don’t want to rejoin the army, I use the term loosely, I don’t propose to give you a formal rank. I want you to be as irregular as you can.’

  Fonthill frowned, belying the joy he felt in his heart. ‘This war in East Africa,’ he said, ‘is being fought over a huge area, on several fronts. I will need direction on where you wish me to
operate.’

  For the first time, Smuts gave a sign of impatience. ‘Bah,’ he snorted. ‘Of course I don’t expect you to wander over half of Africa, trying to pin down these,’ the smile returned, ‘Boer-like Germans who seem to be proving so elusive. No. I am now making plans to launch a substantial attack. I can’t tell you where at the moment, but I want you to be ready with your two chaps to leave at a moment’s notice and get out into the bush, where I direct, and sniff out German positions.’

  ‘That sounds fine, sir.’

  ‘Good. Now you will answer to me on all matters of – how shall I put this? – a disciplinary nature. But, of necessity you must provide your information to whoever I appoint to lead the attack. The general commanding in the field. Understood?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I understand, Fonthill, that you are lucky enough to have private means and that you have not been paid so far for any of the work you and your people have done.’

  ‘That is correct, sir.’

  ‘Well, that seems to me to be quite unfair. So I propose that you will be paid at the level of a substantive full colonel and your man Jenkins similarly at the rank of warrant officer grade one. Your tracker will be paid according to our wages for black fellers working for us.’

  ‘Ah.’ Fonthill thought for a moment. ‘That is very kind of you, sir, and although I would have been prepared to have funded the party myself, perhaps this time I must accede, since we will need some rather more expensive equipment, like modern rifles, horses etc. But my man Mzingeli is not just a black servant, you see. He is, in fact, my farm manager in Rhodesia and I value him highly. I would prefer to keep him in my employ at his present salary, if this causes you no problems.’

  Smuts waved a hand. ‘As you wish.’ The blue eyes hardened again. ‘However, you must realise, Fonthill, that what you will undertake will be dangerous in the extreme. I will expect you and your chaps to live out in the bush, travel light and be concealed at all times. If the Germans catch you, it is quite likely that they will flog your black feller to death and shoot you and Jenkins out of hand.’