The Dust Diaries

by Owen Sheers

  She was beautiful. Seventeen years old. He can’t see her young face now, but he knows she was beautiful. Blue eyes like his and blond hair; skin the colour of the ivory she kept her fingers on, as if to let go of those keys would mean disaster.

  He’d left her to her practise that morning. Gone and busied himself in the vestry. But in the end he had just sat there, in the darkness, listening to her play and sing to herself, trying to decide whether to go out and speak to her again. He hadn’t; there had been no need.

  Falling in love with her had been so easy. It happened over that summer, and again he can’t remember how: the words, the expressions, even their first kiss. All he knows is that there were words, expressions and kisses. He knows they happened but not how. He knows he had been happy, but not how. Perhaps it is always this way. Perhaps to be able to recall happiness in all its sensation would be too painful, even at the distance of fifty years. But it frustrates him that he cannot recall, relive, just remember. Vaguely, softly: a dull ache rather than the sharp stab he desires.

  He had been lonely in Icklesham. It was his first posting, deacon at the town’s stocky Norman church. He liked the country, the low thorn hedges, the patchwork of arable land, the off-set roofs of the oast houses. The pearl-white sky that bore the light of the sea and the way the gulls came squalling in to the freshly ploughed fields, spattering the brown with their white like dashes of milk spilt across a table.

  He had done some good walking there. To the hospital in Rye, along country lanes stumbling upon obscure peasants’ cottages, stone boxes with straw lids (not unlike his own rondavel, he realises). And he had enjoyed the work too. But he had been lonely, he remembers that. And that is why she had been so perfect, penetrating his solitude with her beauty and her smile.

  To her, he supposed, he must have appeared quite exotic. Educated, a Trinity man. But to him, it was she who was exotic. And to think he had accepted so easily the matching of her love with his! As if it would always be that way. Only the young can meet such fortune with casual ease, he knows that now. Only the young can be unsurprised by love. If he had known then, when he was young, what he knows now, old, then maybe it would have been different. Maybe it would have happened differently and maybe his remembering would not be so painful, a dull ache, throbbing behind his blind eyes and beating in time with his heart.

  She liked him to read to her, he remembers that.

  ‘Beauty is truth and truth beauty—that is allye know on earth, and all ye need to know’

  A book’s shadow across his face which he takes away, letting the sun into his eyes which he shuts. Flashes of orange motes on the inside of his eyelids, the sound of a river beyond his feet and her hairpins, digging into his skin beneath his shirt as she rolls her head to look at the sky.

  He lies on his back, the grass tickling the back of his neck with his arms out, palms up. The heat of the day collects in his hands until he feels as though he is holding two glowing balls of sunlight, an orb of warmth in each, tingling in the bowls of his fingers.

  ♦

  They talked about his grave, Keats’ grave. How they would visit it together one day. She’d said she would be able to tell it was a poet’s grave, she’d sense the words in the soil. Then his hand on her head, stroking down towards her temple, the heat of the sun in her hair. His other hand, free of the book now, on her chest. Her skin beneath her blouse and her heartbeat beneath her skin, distant, as if arriving in her body from deep in the ground.

  ♦

  The sun is lower, the light less dazzling in his eyes. The buzz, stop, buzz of bluebottles over the picnic and the sound of her tearing blades of grass, scattering them in the wind. Rooks, cawing in the branches of a tree. Then a watch, his watch, opening the silver case, opening the day to time which runs on and on like the river below them.

  ♦

  And then she is by the river and he is watching her bend to its water, washing her hands. It divides about her wrists and she lets out a sigh of shock at its coldness. Then she is shaking her hands above the water, the droplets catching the last of the sun as they fall.

  And his happiness is fragile inside him, humming, laced with a fear of its ending; a thin ice of joy grown across the cavity of his ribs.

  She dwells with beauty—beauty that must die;

  And joy, whose hand is ever at his lips

  Bidding adieu; and aching pleasure nigh.

  And as she turns from the river, the sun’s light corposant about her shadowed body, he decides he will take joy’s hand from his lips and he will ask her to marry him.

  She walks back towards him and holds out her hand. He speaks and she replies. Her mouth moves, the lips move, but he hears nothing. Already the image is fading. He cannot remember what he said or what she said; the sounds have gone and now the vision has too. Only feeling remains, the memory of sensation: the cooling of the breeze, the imprint of the grass on his arms, the river’s coldness resonating in her hands, lapidary, like marble over her skin.

  ∨ The Dust Diaries ∧

  21 JUNE 1915

  British Lake Force Camp, Kisumu, British East Africa

  Captain Richard Meinertzhagen angled the point of his sheath knife under the little toenail of his left foot and worked the blade in tiny movements, left and right; he brought the foot nearer with his left hand, bent to the toe and tried again. There was a jigger flea buried in there, a dark dot beneath the opaque nail, and he wanted to dislodge her before he embarked on one of the four steamers sitting low in the lake under their loads of artillery, supplies and braying mules. This harvest of jiggers had become something of a daily ritual since his arrival back in Africa. He’d already extracted more than twenty today, working the sore red spots out from under the skin like stubborn winkles from their shells. A couple of the officers had lost most of their toes to the parasites and hundreds of the soldiers, European and askari, hobbled about on raw, infected feet.

  With a sharp prick of pain the flea came free, bringing with it a little pus from the hollow it had made in his toe. He examined it briefly on the point of his knife, just able to make out its hinged legs and its bloated body, spots of his own blood on its underside. Flicking it away, he wiped the knife on his shorts and looked up at the scene on the shore below.

  From where he sat on a raised patch of ground above the lake, the small port town at his back, the embarkation process was mapped out beneath him. Immediately in front of the squat steamers the 28th Mountain Battery had lined up their two 75mm field guns ready for loading. Further along the shore the depleted 29th Punjabs and the worn-looking Loyal North Lanes were both preparing for battle, assembling their packs and cleaning their rifles. Nearer to where he sat, set back from the shore, the bizarre collection of men that made up the 25th Royal Fusiliers were also moving about their camp, noticeably older and larger than the other soldiers, even from this distance.

  Beyond these regiment camps the open stables cut two straight lines into the tall blond grass, black quivering patches of flies shuddering above the heads of the mules and packhorses. Past these, order finally gave way to chaos with the tattered sprawl of the carriers’ encampment spreading out along the shore, tapering northwards into the distance. Here, the hundreds of porters and their families carried on their daily lives in their temporary homes and shacks, a squalling, littered tag of civilian life attached to the military camp. Closer to where he was sitting on the hill, stacks of ammunition and food supplies lay in piles, cooks’ fires smoked into the still evening air and a sullen heap of sandbags was being passed along a chain of askaris to the nearest steamer, where a pair of British officers packed them around a Vickers machine-gun positioned on the foredeck. To the left of where the steamers were docked, beyond the train track and its stalled wooden carriages, the field hospital tent was overflowing with sick cases, rows of men lain out on the ground on canvas stretchers. More than half the force in the hospital and hardly a bullet or a bayonet wound among them. Disease had wiped them out, not
the enemy. Blackwater fever, dysentery and guinea worms, not bullets, shrapnel or shells.

  ♦

  As a professional soldier who had served in British uniform since 1899 Meinertzhagen had found this particular war displeasing. The conflict was just over ten months old, and as yet, all he had experienced was failure, incompetence and frustration. Not his own personal failure, which he would never have allowed, but failure by association. The British army in Africa had spent seven months at war with the much smaller, less well equipped German Schütztruppe led by General Von Lettow, and yet Von Lettow and his troops remained undefeated and German East Africa remained just that—German.

  This was Meinertzhagen’s second time in Africa. Thirteen years ago he had served as an officer with the 3rd King’s African Rifles, during which time he’d distinguished himself as a vicious bush fighter against two particularly stubborn native tribes. In 1906 he transferred back to India and he was at the Staff College in Quetta when this war was announced. A few weeks later when the War Office in London decided to send the Indian Army to deal with the German colonies, Meinertzhagen, as the only member of the Indian Force with previous African experience, became the Expeditionary Force’s Intelligence Officer. He was thirty-six years old, experienced, still fit and at the height of his military powers. He could, he felt, look forward to a challenging and rewarding campaign. Seven months on, he thought as he sheathed his knife, pulled his woollen socks up his calves and reached for his boots and puttees, he could not have been more wrong.

  It started with the selection of the troops in India. Perhaps unsurprisingly the cream of the Indian Army had been despatched to France and the Western Front, and when Meinertzhagen saw the regiments collected on the docks at Bombay he realised that they, Indian Expeditionary Force B, had been left with the detritus. The ten regiments, battalions and detachments that boarded the ancient troop ships swaying drunkenly on the swell of the harbour were a rag-tag bunch, a rush job thrown together by desk clerks who he suspected had never seen an Indian soldier, let alone fought with one. On the two-week voyage across the Indian Ocean to East Africa, Meinertzhagen, writing from the relative comfort of a converted P&O liner, noted in his diary that the sepoys lying and retching in the holds of the other transports were ‘theworst in India’ and that their ‘seniorofficers are nearer to fossils than active leaders of men’. He tried to bolster his hopes by admitting to himself that at least some of the other regiments in Force B had a degree of military spine. The Loyal North Lanes were as good a British fighting regiment as any, the Kashmir Rifles and the loist Bombay Grenadiers had both seen good service, and he hoped that the KAR regiments they were joining in Africa had drilled their askaris to a decent level. These native soldiers would at least, he thought, have knowledge of the bush and the country.

  On arrival in Africa Meinertzhagen’s dismay at the quality of Force B’s troops was soon matched by his frustration with their ineffective commanders, including General Stewart, who was in command here at the lake. The general was a tall man with a gentle face, an ineffective chin and a habit of clearing his throat before he spoke that reminded Meinertzhagen more of a scholar than a soldier. Meinertzhagen reached for his diary, a battered leather-bound book lying beside him which he kept on his person at all times. Pulling a pencil from his shirt pocket he added a note to today’s entry:

  Throughout my service I have always regarded a war with Germany as a certainty and as the climax of all training.

  He paused, looked up at the preparations below him, at Stewart’s well-meaning, charming but ineffectual manner, and bent his head to the book again. Licking the pencil, he finished the note:

  And here I am in the rottenest side-show imaginable, rotten troops and rotten leaders and in a colony where from the Governor downwards there is no feeling of patriotism.

  With a short sigh he pocketed the pencil and the diary, buckled on his Sam Browne and stood up. Standing with one hand on his hip and the other scratching the stubble on his chin, he gathered a glob of phlegm at the back of Ins throat, brought it up into his mouth with a growl and spat heavily onto the grass before making his way down the slope to make his own preparations for the activities of the coming night.

  ♦

  Meinertzhagen’s early misgivings about Force B’s prospects proved to be well-founded. The combination of poorly prepared soldiers and equally poor commanders had provided the perfect overture to the disaster that was the battle of Tanga last November. The battle was the first decisive British attack in the African theatre, and, Meinertzhagen thought as he strolled clown towards the lake and his tent, would very possibly go down in history as their most embarrassing failure too. From the outset he thought it was bound for catastrophe. The confident clinking of brandy and whisky glasses in the smoky saloon of the command ship following General Aitken’s eve-of-battle speech had done little to cheer him. Neither was he convinced by the officers’ shared assurances to each other that the Hun wouldn’t put up much of a fight, that the town might be won without a single shot fired and the whole thing over before Christmas.

  Having failed to convince Aitken of the need to scout out the deep mangroves on the landing beach, and having listened to him refuse the help of his old company, the experienced 3rd KAR, Meinertzhagen had retired to his cabin and confided in his diary once more: ‘I tremble to think what may happen,’ he wrote, ‘if we meet with serious opposition.’

  They did meet with serious opposition, and over the following three days Meinertzhagen experienced the lowest ebb of his military career. It began with a misplaced exhibition of British fair play. Aitken, deciding to honour a naval truce of coastal neutrality, allowed the naval commander, F.W. Caulfield, to sail into the port of Tanga a little after dawn on 2 November to inform Governor Auracher that hostilities would commence unless he surrendered within the hour.

  Three hours later, looking through the flat view of his binoculars, Meinertzhagen could still see the Imperial Eagle fluttering over the neat whitewashed houses of the town. A pointless British mine-sweeping exercise gave the German commanders another twenty-four hours to bring in reinforcements from up the line at Moshi, and Meinertzhagen despaired as his troops only started piling off the transports and wading through the warm water of the landing beach the following night. Sitting on a mangrove root on the beach, he had turned to his diary again, writing by the full moon which also illuminated the massing British troops and their transport ships:

  So here we are, with only a small portion of our force, risking a landing in the face of an enemy of unknown strength and on a beach which has not been reconnoitred and which looks like a rank mangrove swamp.

  Three days later the entire British convoy steamed away in retreat from that same beach, leaving behind them the arms of three companies being inventoried by the German quartermasters and more than 700 British dead and wounded. Officers, sepoys, porters, the British corpses scattered the streets of the town, the plantations and the surrounding scrublands like a cargo of discarded dummies dropped from a passing plane. Meinertzhagen had killed two of these British dead himself. They were both 13th Rajputs, who along with the rest of their company had bolted at the first sign of heavy German machine-gun fire. With the enemy’s bullets whining in the air about him and kicking up spurts of dust at his feet, Meinertzhagen had tried to stem the panicked retreat, first with his boot and then with his pistol. A terrified Rajput had drawn his sword when Meinertzhagen ordered him to advance, so he shot him through the head. The second wasn’t even able to stand, but was crouched like a child behind a wall, crying into his hands. Meinertzhagen was so disgusted he shot him there and then through the back of the neck, more out of anger than in punishment.

  The rest of the battle was equally disastrous. At one point the firing disturbed a colony of bees nesting in African hives, hollow logs tied to the trees. The advancing British soldiers were scattered both by the swarm and then by the German machine-guns that sprayed their retreat.

  It was all
over a couple of days later and on the morning of 5

  November Meinertzhagen found himself suffering the ignominy of being treated to a breakfast by officers of the Schütztruppe as he visited their headquarters to negotiate the British surrender and withdrawal. The Germans laid on beer, eggs, cream and asparagus, and talked over the battle with him as if it had been a football game. Meinertzhagen, however, could not see it in quite the same way. He’d had to walk to the German headquarters through streets littered with the British wounded calling out to him for help, speaking in their native tongues of Hindi, Swahili, Xhosa, Urdu. In their distress, though, they’d all sounded the same; pain, as he had learnt long ago, was a Ianguage that crossed all borders.

  Entering the German compound he’d seen what he first thought was a row of bamboo planting poles stuck in a deep furrow of earth. He’d looked again, wondering who would be planting here. But then he saw the furrow was sown not with seeds, but with men. The bodies of fifteen British sepoys, lying face down, each with his own bayonet stuck in his back.

  Once the details of their withdrawal had been agreed Meinertzhagen left the German officers to their breakfast. He was on his way back to the British beach when he was surprised by the crack of a rifle report, then a second later by his sun helmet flying sideways from his head. He spun around and saw a German askari who, not recognising his flag of truce, had shot at him from point-blank range. Meinertzhagen felt a flood of anger rush through him. He was angry at the fiasco this battle had become, at the generals, at being on the losing side, at the wounded lying in the street and now at this askari who had shot at him. Before the soldier could fire another round, Meinertzhagen strode towards him and, reversing his grip on the truce flag, jabbed its pole into the askari’s stomach. The man bent double, and as he did Meinertzhagen wrenched the rifle from his grasp and stabbed him through the ribs with his own bayonet, thinking of the sepoys in the furrow as he did. Leaving the man curled on the dusty ground, clutching at the barrel of his rifle and choking on his own blood, Meinertzhagen went back to pick up his helmet. He examined the bullet hole with his forefinger, put it back on, glanced towards the writhing askari, then carried on down towards the beach and the British transports, swinging his truce flag as he walked.