And yet I loved it, while hating it that morning. What did I own? All of it lay on the sand in front of me. A set of infantry web equipment, fraying now at the edges, unblancoed, thank God, for over two years. Its water bottle was Italian, my issue bottle cast away long ago to be replaced by this much better Italian one. Two blankets. A bedroll. A very accurate cut down 303 rifle. Two P.36 hand grenades. An Italian ammunition chest containing a dozen tins of meat and vegetable, bully beef, biscuits, a hurricane lamp, about five hundred Crown Bird cigarettes, some gin and whisky, matches, pepper, and the strange useless rock salt we had to use, and a few books, one of which was still unread, called Engineering Problems in Paraguay, and which I knew that one night, under some thorn tree, I would be forced to try and read. That was the lot.
I remember the chest from the Carnegie Library of America, which, by some slip made thousands of miles away in an army office, had been allowed to travel to Somalia. I stood around with other officers and dipped into this box of treasure, and we went at it in the same excited, ridiculous way as the infantry, who, when looting among stuff in a captured ruined town, cannot carry the loot anyway, and must leave it for the rear troops who have the transport, flinging the stuff right and left just for the sheer thrill of knowing it is there to have. Book after book I hauled out and dropped. Some old woman with a blue rinse in America, good hearted, anxious to do her part in some scheme for the Allied soldiers across the oceans, had unloaded her grandfather’s useless library and here was some of it after its thousands of miles of journey across oceans in convoy, and across deserts to this grey fort where we ransacked the chest with cries of laughter and disbelief. The Bower of Poetry, in blue leather, 1863, with grey pen drawings of long tressed girls languishing on window seats and gazing out at fallow deer above each sickening poem, The Chronicles of Penelope Porchinghurst, or Nailed to the Masthead, 1881, and in browned careful handwriting in the front, ‘To Hester, lovingly from Mother’, (that sudden gust of pity one feels for the vanished unknown dead who have left this fragment of handwriting), volume after volume, until Engineering Problems in Paraguay began to look like possible reading for the wilderness. I took The Bower of Poetry, sprinkled talcum powder throughout its pages, pressed sprigs of thorn tree among the glistening pages, and inscribed it in front, ‘To Bobsy and all the chaps of Bogol Manyo, from Auntie Geraldine and all the girls at Galkayu Hall’, and sent it off in a truck convoy to Bob who was desiccating on another frontier. He sent us back a large sack full of rocks and dried camel dung, a Christmas present from Bogol Manyo.
I never read Engineering Problems in Paraguay, though I tried many times.
Looking down at the small collection of kit that morning at Donkukok, and realising that it was all I possessed, and had possessed for years, and would possess for what threatened to be years to come, I felt that powerful nausea which must come to all soldiers far from what were called amenities, stripped down to what you could carry on your back in the end. A desert within and a desert without, and miles to go. I hated the war and the desert and the army and the world in general, and then sat down and had breakfast, black tea and a cigarette as the sun rolled above and poured down on us. To hell with it all. Why move? Why walk? For what? To where? For how many times again and again?
I knew I had had all the ‘adventure’ I could ever want. I would be far happier in a prison cell with a few books and no useless responsibility. I had only one ambition, to write, and I could not write. It took all the will I had to stay interested in this military wandering of which I was now weary. I wrote book after book in my head while walking on that bitter sand, but the only actual creative writing I could do was arms and ammunition returns, official reports, because I had to. One day, though, when this treadmill stopped, I would write something – but it might be too late then, I used to fear. A first novel should be published at twenty-five, and I was twenty-seven, and time was racing away from me, etcetera. My God!
At Donkukok that morning, while the askaris waited, I wrote some more controlledly hysterical demands for transfer, to the Italian front, the Burma front, to the new special unit said to be forming in Egypt, to anywhere at all where there was what one thought of as action, but which really meant a nearness to regular drinking and eating, books, white women, fruit, and all that went with it far from Donkukok and its surroundings.
‘Can we load the camels, Effendi?’
‘Yes.’
It was no use sending these applications for transfer on the truck that would roll south next month to the headquarters in the gin belt. They would only anger the good and patient colonel who had had enough of all our applications. I knew it gave him pain to read them, for we were splendidly trapped here, officers he could not replace, and another set of applications would take him beyond pain into anger. For we were devoted to this elderly colonel who did all he could for us, and of all the commanders I served under during seven years I never was to find one whom I would serve so gladly and fully. His name was Patrick Mundy, and he knew all about soldiering and campaigning and isolation, and it was with a special and knowing eye he watched us all succeed, or fail, or commit suicide, or go mad, and he tried to get onions and cheese and drink for us, for our particular wilderness came last in a world of finely graded priorities. He could look at you with his experienced blue eyes and know how far you could go, and how far you were never going to get too. He read books and he was witty. He was an unforgettable person.
So that evening, a long way from Donkukok I tore up the applications and watched them blow across the shale and disappear among the rocks.
I had developed a neurosis about spirillum ticks at that time. Africa finds all your fearful areas eventually, and develops them to the full, as you slowly fray in the sun.
One day, slumping down under a thorn tree, I had told the askaris to pitch camp, and then I saw one of the forgotten spirillum ticks wriggling about on the hot red sand towards my sandalled, sockless foot. I turned it over and yes, there it was, the strange white violin shape on the underbody which marked this disease laden blood-sucker. I would not have recognised it for what it was had it not been for Hankson, an officer who had stayed with me to hunt lion before the war above Isiolo in Kenya. The lion were killing the cattle and Hankson had heard about them, and being on leave he came to join me in pursuit of them. He was still in the early blood-lust stage of East African shooting, which all newcomers go through, a kind of fever, like looting, caused by living in a world swarming with herds of game.
He told me he was scared of spirillum fever down in the frontier region where he was serving, and one day he showed me a spirillum tick. Months later I got the news that he had been bitten by a spirillum tick and had been invalided out with the resulting fever. The disease can kill you, or ruin your heart if you live.
When I saw that first spirillum tick under the thorn tree in Somalia, I remembered Hankson, and after that I always looked for spirillum ticks when camping at night, and always seemed to find them.
As always, one had to give this kind of thing up, or you would drift slowly into the fretful, querulous obsession peculiar to Africa. We all developed these manias after some months alone in the rocks and sand, a sort of hobby with which to fill the emptiness, but a dangerous hobby.
To live in isolation requires training and experience. It is astonishing, the first discovery that one is unable, or afraid, or so mentally unfurnished that isolation becomes loneliness and that one cannot live with oneself and learn to screw down the wings so anxiously beating for flight. It is a very different thing when one has decided to ‘do a safari’, for pleasure or study, because one has chosen to, and which will end at a certain time. But to not know how many years the unchosen safari will go on soon gnaws at the edges of the will, especially when it is young and anxious to do a million other exciting things. Learning to wait was the good thing we of that small scattered unit learned best, I think, though on the whole the years I spent on that silent burning moon did me more harm th
an good. Harm that is in relation to other people, for though I could live with myself I did not learn to live with other people for years, and even now find, to my regret, that I can live without other people if necessary. Always gregarious, one had become a gregarious solitary. If people were there, splendid. If they were not, it was just a pity, and that is not a good thing in the long run. One had learned to live alone within one’s head; after much anguish it had had to be learned. I noticed this in my companions, especially those with the tendency to absorption into the bush life of the tribes among whom we were sunk. I say sunk because there is nothing fine or noble about savagery and illiteracy and superstition, no matter how splendid looking the warriors and the women. After a good long dose of savagery it is interesting how much one has learned to prefer the gentle and the sophisticated. Primitivism is a very much overrated way of life, and is merely pitiful in essence, no matter how fascinating the carvings and the masks and the quiet zoomorphic ravings on stone and wood, those endless circles in which the tribe has wandered and lost itself, waiting for the stranger to come with the message, even when it leads to the atom bomb. It doesn’t matter how you kill your brother, with a wooden spear or an atom bomb, it is a bore and a waste, but you can’t do very much with the energy behind a spear, at least. I suppose Hitler’s willing druids with their runic stones and their collections of skulls, and their gas ovens, were proof enough that it is easy to be primitive again, even after any number of centuries.
After the enormous orgy of torture and massacre in Europe and Asia, I felt it was impossible for any white man to preach again, self-righteously, about goodness and peace, to any non-white man. And that shame may have been the reason, bigger than African and Eastern restlessness, which caused the white man to pack his kit and go home after the second world war. We must have all felt something of that shame, I think, and acted upon it without really knowing why. That was why, in 1945, I stood at the back of an army cinema and watched with a sort of sly, ashamed fascination when African soldiers were watching the film of the liberation of Belsen, and the other film showing the bulldozed hills of corpses. I watched the African soldiers when the lights went up and I am certain that many of them were looking at us, the white men, with a strange, new kind of eye. They were as appalled as the rest of us by the scenes in Germany, but they had an extra reason for puzzlement, and perhaps they knew that until the white man could manage his own anthropoid passions he should stop feeling superior to blacks merely because he was a white man. There was no doubt that the African recognised, by 1945, that it had long been agreed that the white man was a very special and superior sort of person who had been sent into this world by a sort of guardsman–public-school-educated God to rescue the non-white world from its savagery and dirt. They agreed no longer with that. Mau Mau itself was a scream of anthropological rage, a puzzled and bloody turning upon the Christian varieties of religion which the white men themselves did not bother with. It was not enough for the Kikuyu that God should be a good chap with the right background, a gentleman who lived in a church reserved for white men.
Despite this I have never subscribed to the school of worship of the African primitive, or any other primitive, Nazi or Stalinist. The whole world, it seemed to me during those long nights on the sand under the thorn trees, was in need of rescue, as one world of people. I have never believed that any race of people is better than another race. They are all splendid when allowed to be, and brutes too when the chains break, and they need a government now, and in about a century or two they will have it, if they can resist the longing to smash it all up when boredom sets in. For men will be bored without war for some time to come, that oldest way out and pastime of all, an historic habit.
‘What do you want most?’ I once asked an old Somali.
‘To be well governed, but to be left alone,’ he told me.
I often thought of that and found that I agreed with it, but how to get it?
Chapter 12
IT WAS VERY STRANGE to be walking alongside Ali in the white glare of the sun, feeling the surge of memories certain places in the town aroused; memories of a time which seem bruised with all the violence and tragedy of the period, violence which had thinned in the memory in the years away from the scene. As usual the memory had held hard to the good and amusing things of that time, the friendships which had been so precious in those conditions, the comical happenings which had learned to overlay the horrific and the brutal. Here on the left was the spot in which an Italian, a Somali dagger locked in his bones, had bled to death so that his skin was snow white when he was found, and over there was the restaurant, its wooden lattice-work the same faded yellow, in which poor doomed H had fallen face first into the enormous plate of piled spaghetti.
Of all the suicides H was the most unlikely person, I thought, to take that lonely, despairing way out, though what was in character was the way he used an automatic weapon to do it, firing a burst into himself, for he was always thorough, painstaking in everything he did. Perhaps he was too painstaking, too thorough, too scrupulous. He was in a far off place when he killed himself and I often wondered if he ever wanted his body to be found, if he did not wish to vanish altogether so that nobody would ever know what had happened to him.
I looked into the restaurant after twenty years, and it had not changed, except that the customers were now all Somalis, and I could remember the manager being delighted when I used to ask him to play records of Carlo Buti singing those troppo dolce, troppo triste songs he specialised in. It was here that H had got into his trouble, when, frayed after many months with us on operations up in the Shag, and well filled with whisky he had gone into this restaurant for the thing he had craved for during those months in the bush – a large plate of spaghetti con sugo di pomodoro. None of us in that group of officers which had just left for Mogadishu, were in our right minds, I feel, looking back now. Yet you do not know when you are near the end of your resilience, when your nervous structure is too tattered to last out, and H had had a few months too long in hopeless places, and when he once found himself walking through a shower of poisoned arrows, while pursuing some raiders, he felt, as he told me back in the fort, that he was ‘due for a change of scene, even a lousier scene than this one’. He was physically tough and could walk as far as his Somalis, but he was more bitter than most of us because he could not get a transfer out of our particular purgatory of frustration. After the operations I recommended him for a captaincy, which he got.
He was not able to cope with the piatto abbondante of spaghetti when it came, and weary after his long journey across the Shag to Mogadishu, battered inside his head by those miserable months behind him, and made sleepy by whisky, he fell face forward into the piled tomato-sauce covered spaghetti. Conduct Unbecoming and all that regimental, but it was a very long way from here back to the world of the whitewashed coal dumps, the Mess dinners, the glittering quarter guard, and the lively climate of the drilled battalion, a whole desert away. When he awoke to the Italian manager’s gentle prodding he stared up at that fat, kindly Italian who knew a sand-happy officer when he saw one. H’s face was covered with spaghetti and tomato sauce, and it hung from his big moustache in strings.
‘It’s a bad show, isn’t it, signor,’ H said sadly. ‘It looks as if you’ll have to feed me with a spoon yourself. I can’t manage it,’ and then fell asleep again, until the military police arrived. He lost his new captaincy.
Soon he found himself in another moon landscape among armed bands of savages again, alone, and when we heard of this reward, after his long dose of desert with us, we felt it might have been better had he been given a desk job for a few months instead, nearer to ice-boxes, a plentiful supply of cold beer, somewhere in Mogadishu where the going could be so good when you knew your way around. He must have thought it over one night among the rocks of his new parish and perhaps saw no end to this procession of days and nights in isolation, and, used up, he had fired half a sub-machine-gun magazine into himself. Died lon
ging for more Active Service, with a little more civilisation to hand than had been obtainable during the past three years. I often think of him and wish that some accident by some headquarters clerk had sent him mistakenly to a unit far from that country which had finally eaten him up.
As Ali and I strolled through Mogadishu he asked me about communism, looking searchingly into my eyes as he spoke, and I told him I had never heard of it, did not know what it was, which did not seem to satisfy him. Once, in a certain country during a time of tension, I had a police agent pounce on a radio I had in my station wagon. He was going to confiscate it as a transmitter, and ever since then I have hated police agents, out of a sort of boredom with their pipe dreams of reporting in to the boss with the big news about the spy. He asked me if I would like to see the Russian Embassy and I told him I had seen a couple of them in other places and that would satisfy me for a few years to come. I got him talking about the Arabs and as we walked I went on with my awakened memories of this place which seemed now so much less handsome, so much more shabby than it had appeared to us in the Shag when we looked to it as the fountainhead of drink, rations and mail.
Warriors: Life and death among the Somalis Page 7
