by John Wilcox
He turned to Jenkins. ‘352, I presume you will go back to South Africa to see your girls and your grandchildren now?’
‘Bach, sir,’ began Jenkins, his eyes moist, ‘I just wanted to say …’
‘For God’s sake, man, I’ve just asked you a question.’
The Welshman nodded. ‘I suppose so, yes.’
‘Good. When you’ve done that, why don’t you bring them all over to Norfolk and stay for a while? Alice and I will be terribly lonely after we get home. That would help us adjust.’ He handed a small envelope to Jenkins. ‘I know you are a rich man now, but this could be expensive, so this is a cheque to help pay the cost.’
As he spoke, Simon took his watch from his pocket. ‘Good lord,’ he said, before anyone could interrupt. ‘It’s late. We shall never make the farm before nightfall if we don’t get on. Come on. Up-saddle.’
The four of them mounted slowly – as befitted their ages – and rode away, Simon and Alice hand in hand and Jenkins and Mzingeli, briefly saddle to saddle, arms around each other’s shoulders.
Somewhere ahead of them a hyena laughed. Could it be, wondered Fonthill momentarily, sounding the death knell of the British Empire? He shook his head. What a ridiculous idea! They rode on.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
This story is a work of fiction but based on actual happenings and, as always, I owe it to the reader to explain which is which. The war in German East Africa ranged far and wide across this part of Africa and it became quite as hard fought and in conditions different to but quite as arduous as those on the Western Front. The battles I describe are as accurate as a study of respected accounts allow. The exception is the attack through the swamp outside Narungombe. The swamp existed but the British chose not to brave the crocodiles. I felt it right and proper for Jenkins to have one last brush with them.
As for the cast list, von Lettow-Vorbeck very much existed, as did all of the British generals mentioned, as well as Geoffrey Pocock, Lt Commander Evans, Admiral King-Hall, Colonel Driscoll, Captain Max Looff of the Königsberg, Captain Lieberman, the scout Piet Nieuwenhuizen, General Van Deventer, the Boer leaders Botha and de Wet, as well as, of course, Smuts and Winston Churchill.
Fictional characters, in addition to Fonthill, Jenkins, Alice and Mzingeli, include Lt Daniels, Mustapha the boat captain, Herman de Villiers (although a Boer spy was caught helping the Germans and hanged), Brigadier Lawrence, Mizango the fisherman and the cocky little Lt John Jones.
I should add that I based some of the exploits of Simon and his comrades in the search for the Königsberg on the real life work of the intrepid Boer scout Piet Pretorius, who spent days in the delta measuring tidal flows and channel depths.
The war rambled across such a huge territory and took so long that I have only in my comparatively short narrative been able to include some of the actions or to describe some of the strategies and tactics employed. There is no doubt that von Lettow-Vorbeck was a brilliant leader (only a colonel for much of his time in desert and swamp) and he became a hero in Germany during and after the war. In fact, in 1939, Hitler gave him the honorary rank of General der Infantrie. He lived on into his nineties.
There were those, later, who said that it would have been better just to have left von Lettow-Vorbeck to stew in his own juice in his remote colony until he would have been forced to surrender from lack of food and other support from his distant homeland. As it was, the British lost 11,189 soldiers and sustained total casualties of nearly 22,000 chasing him. Nothing like the losses on the Western Front, of course, but if the deaths of the native carriers are included, then the bill rises to far more than 100,000. Nevertheless, that figure represents double the number of Canadian, Australian and Indian troops who perished in Europe.
At the Versailles Peace Conference the new ‘scramble for Africa’ – the apportioning of Germany’s colonial possessions – to the victors began. After months of haggling, German East Africa became British Tanganyika, South Africa inherited German South West Africa, Belgium (until comparatively recently regarded as a pariah for its treatment of the natives of the Congo) picked up Ruanda–Urundi, and Portugal – whose humiliating incompetence in the struggle was regarded by the Allies as a minus factor – received the scraps of the Kionga Triangle.
It was not quite as cynical a carve-up as that sounds, however, for – at America’s insistence – the territories were declared to be ‘mandates’, to be administered by their new colonial masters under the auspices of the League of Nations. The difference between colony and mandated territory, however, never became clear and, in the interwar years, little capital was invested in the lands that once represented the Kaiser’s dream of empire.
In these present, post-colonial years that sombre picture has changed little. The ‘other 1914–18 war’ did little, in the event, to stamp its mark on the formidable terrain of swamp, mountains and desert of this part of Africa, except to drown it in blood.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Once again I acknowledge my debts of gratitude to my agent, Jane Conway-Gordon and to Susie Dunlop, my publisher at Allison & Busby, for their ever-present support. It was rewarding, too, to know that the staff of the London Library was always there to point me to the appropriate shelves to find books on the period.
Alas, my wife Betty, my much-loved research assistant and critic, became ill during the writing of the book and was unable to help this time. As I write, she remains ill and is constantly in my thoughts as in those of our daughter, Alison, other members of the family and our friends.
I am particularly grateful to my friend, Simon Thompsett, for lending me a precious family heirloom: a bound book of sepia photographs, taken during the campaign, and beautifully captioned in a copperplate hand by his grandfather, Harry Thompsett, who fought throughout it. They were a most useful graphic reference for me.
For what was inevitably termed ‘the forgotten war’ a remarkably large number of books was written about it. The ones I found most useful were:
Tip and Run, Edward Paice (London, 2007), a magisterial history of the whole war, and which I gratefully acknowledge as the source of many of the facts and figures I used in my novel.
An Ice-Cream War, William Boyd (London, 1982), the novel, loosely based on fact, which first made me interested in the war.
The Legion of Frontiersmen, Geoffrey Pocock (Chichester, 2004).
African Crossroads, Sir Charles Dundas (London, 1955).
Jan Christian Smuts, Kenneth Ingham (London, 1986).
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About the Author
According to author JOHN WILCOX, an inability to do sums and a nascent talent to string words together steered him towards journalism – that and the desire to wear a trench coat, belted with a knot, just like Bogart. After a number of years working as a journalist, he was lured into industry. In the mid-nineties he sold his company in order to devote himself to his first love, writing. He has now published, to high acclaim, twelve Simon Fonthill books, one Fonthill short story, a WWI novel and two works of non-fiction, including an autobiography.
johnwilcoxauthor.co.uk
Copyright
Allison & Busby Limited
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First published in Great Britain by Allison & Busby in 2015.
This ebook edition first published in 2015.
Copyright © 2015 by JOHN WILCOX
The m
oral right of the author is hereby asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All characters and events in this publication other than those clearly in the public domain are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent buyer.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978–0–7490–1719–4
