The Dust Diaries

by Owen Sheers

  After the failure at Tanga and the disastrous fighting at Jessin, where again Von Lettow had the pleasure of parading defeated British officers and commending them on their gallantry, the morale of the British forces was badly shaken. Kitchener was furious and advised the British leaders in Nairobi to steer clear of offensive actions and stick to defending their positions. So rather than purging Von Lettow and his troops from German East Africa, Force B had spent the last seven months having to satisfy themselves with just containing them instead. Rather than wiping out the Schütztruppe before Christmas, they had merely tolerated and endured its presence. For Meinertz-hagen, this was a sorry state of affairs, and one which rubbed raw on his nerves. British naval dominance meant the Germans had no supply access, and no reserve troops to call upon. Every casualty for them was crucial. The British had more troops and were better armed, and yet despite this Von Lettow conducted his guerrilla warfare against the British railway and any other target he could reach. It was like having a gun and no bullet, like hearing your prey on the other side of the wall and being forbidden to go and hunt it.

  So far, Meinertzhagen’s intelligence work had been his only success of the war; he was particularly proud of the network of African scouts and agents he had nurtured in German East Africa. The jewel of his intelligence work, however, was a practice he called his ‘dirty paper method’. Through this he had acquired the signature of every German officer, details of troop movements, private letters, notes and coded material, all brought to him smeared and crumpled in the hands of his African agents who cleaned the German latrines. Meinertzhagen couldn’t believe his luck, or how careful the Germans were with their communications and code switching and yet how free they were with their choice of toilet paper.

  Rifling in German shit, however successful, still didn’t feel much like a war to Meinertzhagen and to date he’d only had one truly satisfying encounter with the enemy. It was last Christmas Day. Meinertzhagen had seen German troops at Christmas time before. He knew they grew sentimental and relaxed during the season, and he took this opportunity to take matters into his own hands and go on a raid across the frontier. He was accompanied by another European, Major Drought, an English farmer from British East Africa who’d raised an irregular unit of wild Masi whom he commanded over like a tribal god. This unit was known around the lake as the Skin Corps, their own skins being the full extent of their uniforms.

  Drought brought fifteen of his Skin Corps with him on Meinertzhagen’s raid across the frontier that Christmas Day. Padding through the bush next to these lean warriors, stripped of all his gear except a small rucksack, his rifle and ammunition, Meinertzhagen had at last felt he was at war. He revelled in how silently all seventeen of them crept through the grass and the thorn trees, his own breath barely audible in his ear, and he marvelled at the easy control Drought had over these wild Africans. The unsuspecting German outpost they found was unguarded. Open fires smoked between a loose gathering of tents, and Meinertzhagen could see, through the blades of grass that covered him, the Germans’ rifles propped together in neat groups of three at the centre of the camp. Close to where the British raiding party lay in the grass a Schütztruppe officer crouched over a hole in the ground behind a green canvas screen, his breeches around his ankles and his shirt tucked up under his armpits, showing his white, freckled lower back. Two others were playing cards on an upturned crate outside their tent, while a group of askaris sat around a fire talking and drinking from clay mugs.

  Meinertzhagen led the way, moving silently to within a few paces of the card-playing officers, then rushing them with fixed bayonets. Everyone got his man, and Drought excelled himself, stabbing three. Hearing a noise from one of the adjoining tents, Meinertzhagen pulled his bayonet from between the ribs of an officer at the card crate and rushed in through its canvas flaps. A large man was sitting up in a bed beside a table laid with the full trappings of a Christmas dinner. Meinertzhagen covered the officer with his rifle and told him to put up his hands. The German, an older man with greying hair, looked astonished and fumbled with one hand under his blanket. Meinertzhagen fired immediately, the only shot of the raid, and the German dropped back on the bed, a patch of blood spreading above his pyjama pocket like a carnation growing at his breast. On inspection Meinertzhagen found the man had been reaching for his spectacles, not his gun. Hearing the gunshot, Drought joined Meinertzhagen in the tent and the two of them sat down to the Christmas dinner while the Skin Corps outside guarded the nine prisoners and fifteen dead. They were finishing the Christmas pudding as the first flies began to gather on the dead man behind them, multiplying in black over the spreading stain of red like the black seeds of a growing poppy.

  That Christmas Day raid had the been the last piece of positive action that Meinertzhagen had seen. Since then the War Office had reiterated its position that the British troops in East Africa must remain on the defensive. And so for seven months the soldiers of Force B had done little more than endure the flies, the heat, the camp food, and collectively lick their wounds while their leaders came to accept that this war was not the game they had thought it might be.

  Until tonight. Tonight, Meinertzhagen thought as he strode on down towards the body of the camp, his war was starting again. Kitchener had been persuaded to let them off the leash, and they were heading out for the hunt again. Their prey, the German port town of Bukoba and its wireless tower, lay on the western shore of the lake, just 200 miles away. Tonight they would no longer be defending. Tonight they would attack. Tonight, they would be an army again, and this thought alone lent Meinertzhagen’s stride a revived energy that he hadn’t felt for months.

  As he came into camp Meinertzhagen spotted the chaplain, Father Cripps, walking in from the direction of the Fusilier tents. From this distance he looked like a regular soldier, khaki shorts and a khaki jacket. Only the faint gleam of the bronze crosses on his lapels and his dog collar gave him away for what he was. Seeing him now unsettled Meinertzhagen; he didn’t like it when the vultures flapped about on the masts of the steamers, stretching their raw necks, and he didn’t like seeing priests before battle for the same reason. Both were too portentous in times of war.

  Reaching his tent, Meinertzhagen bowed into its dark interior, sat heavily on his folding canvas stool and shouted out to his askari batman to bring him his dinner. He leaned back and breathed in. Canvas, leather and steel. The smells of war. He felt his battle excitement rising in him, a dipping in his stomach and a tingling sensation running along the nerves of his limbs. Reaching onto his bed he picked up his revolver, black and heavy in his hand. Taking a cloth from a hook in the centre pole he laid it on his knee and began to clean it, rubbing his thumb and forefinger hard through its curves and hollows.

  ♦

  Arthur had been looking for Tendai in the carriers’ camp for over an hour. Passing between the shambas, shacks, torn tents and open fires with pots of sadza and pans of tremoring peanuts propped over their flames, he scanned the faces. There were so many his mind had trouble keeping up with his eyes. Women, children, babies swaddled to their mother’s backs, Indian coolies, gaunt men and boys of every African tribe. He looked at them all, but recognised none of them as Tendai. A few he had seen before, Christian converts who had been to some of his services, but most were new to him. The ranks of the carrier corps seemed to be filled as quickly as overwork and disease depleted them.

  Tendai had been recruited into the carrier corps late in 1914. The British Army did not consider the Mashona one of the ‘martial races’ suitable for combat so the Enkeldoorn area had been saved the recruiting officers of the KAR. Porters, however, could come from any tribe or creed and Arthur had soon noticed that large numbers of young men were absent from the villages and his church services. And now, with the help of Reverend Liebenberg, Tendai’s mother had written to Arthur to say that he too had been recruited and she had not heard from him for several months. She thought he was at the lake but as yet Arthur hadn’t found him or
heard mention of his name.

  Ever since that night when he’d softly translated Gufa’s speech to him, Arthur had noticed that Tendai was a child of rare intelligence. Over the years he’d been a regular attendee at his school and although farming his mother’s land had taken up much of his time Arthur had fostered real hopes of recommending him to the Bishop for ordination. But then the war came and now it looked as if like himself, Tendai had been drawn into its vacuum.

  Reaching the far end of the carriers’ camp he looked closely at one more young man struggling back from the shore with a bucket of water. He studied his features but like all the others, he wasn’t Tendai, so turning back towards the main camp he began to make his return, aware that he should hold a communion before the steamers were boarded for the journey across the water to Bukoba.

  Coming out of the carriers’ camp he walked down the long line of open stables where a group of men were dragging another dead mule from its box. Its slack muscles hung off its bones like half-empty sacks of grain and its open eyes stared through a film of green fluid. Another victim of the tsetse fly. Arthur walked on, hearing the intermittent drag and slump of its hooves across the ground as the men heaved it away from the stables. As he got nearer the main camp he passed the orderly tents of the 25th Royal Fusiliers, where he heard a man shouting. He carried on walking, shouting being common enough in these camps. But then, as the shouting continued, he realised the man was shouting at him. He stopped and turned towards the voice.

  ‘Hello there! It’s Father, er…Father…isn’t!?’

  A short man with balding, greying hair and a salt-and-pepper moustache was striding out towards him from the Fusiliers’ tents, his hand outstretched in greeting. Arthur didn’t think he recognised him, but there was something in his voice that loosened a memory. The man, who wore the uniform of a Fusiliers officer, reached Arthur where he stood on the edge of the camp. He was red in the face from running to catch up with him. He looked up at Arthur, as if checking for something on his face, and then, apparently at a loss as to what else to do in the absence of his name, he smiled. Arthur smiled back down at him.

  ‘Cripps,’ he said. ‘Father Cripps.’

  ‘Yes, that’s it. Cripps, of course.’ He offered his hand again. His face was that of a man who had been larger and fuller than he was now. Thinned by heat or illness, the skin hung from his cheekbones and shook around his jowls and his throat when he spoke. ‘Pruen, S. Tris-tam Pruen, MD. Zanzibar, ’ he added helpfully. And then Arthur remembered. It was hard to forget an introduction like that. His visit to Frank in Zanzibar. The Cathedral built over the slave cells. The Princess’s palace, the open balcony, the warm night beyond the candle’s burn. The Governor’s love story about Salome and her German. It all felt such a long time ago. And Pruen, sitting at the end of the table offering his African advice. He still had his book somewhere. In his trunk in his rondavel in Mashonaland probably. That too, he thought, felt far away now.

  ‘Yes, sorry,’ Arthur said, taking Pruen’s offered hand. ‘I should have remembered.’

  ‘Nonsense, of course you shouldn’t. Must have been over fifteen years ago, and a lot’s happened since then.’ Pruen cast a glance around the spread military camps, the steamers sitting grey and bleak on the lake, a vivid red and orange sunset firing up the sky behind them. ‘But you’re still with us nevertheless, eh, Father?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘In Africa. When we met all that time ago you were starting a two-year tour as I remember.’ He smiled again, but this time with pride. ‘Still got my memory you see. Can’t afford to lose that in my game.’

  Arthur nodded, not entirely sure what game that was. ‘Yes, yes, still here. Somehow that lure of a country parsonage never developed for me.’ His attempt at a joke fell weakly on his own ears. ‘And two years, well, it didn’t seem enough time to, I mean, well, even get started on the work I wanted to do.’

  ‘Still in Southern Rhodesia, though?’ Pruen asked, hooking his thumbs into the straps of his Sam Browne.

  ‘Yes, Mashonaland, near Enkeldoorn’

  ‘Oh, I know the land around there.’ Pruen looked off up the little hill by the lake and narrowed his eyes, engaging his memory again. Looking back at Arthur with another proud smile, he said, ‘Wrening-ham is the mission station there, am I right?’

  ‘Yes, you are.’ Arthur laughed. ‘But I’m not there actually, not any more anyway. I have my own mission farm now, near Wreningham.’

  ‘Have you now?’ Pruen asked, like a father showing admiration for some feat performed by his son. ‘Well done, well done.’

  Out of the corner of his eye Arthur became aware of another figure approaching them from the direction of the khaki tents of the Fusiliers’ camp. Pruen sensed the figure too and turned to see who was joining them. The man was approaching with a quick, confident stride that belied the age written across his face. He was taller than Pruen, but shared the characteristic bearing of a body that had once been heavier, the same loose skin about his neck and chin. He also, like Pruen, wore the uniform of a Fusiliers officer, but had adapted it to the style of a bush ranger, his sleeves rolled to above the elbow and a beaten soft leather hat instead of the regulation solar helmet. The hat’s wide brim was pinned up on one side like a hunter’s, beneath which a pair of bushy white eyebrows and a white goatee sat in shocking contrast to the tanned skin of his face. As he got closer Arthur noticed that whatever emaciation had thinned his face and waist had somehow left his arms and chest intact. They were solid and broad, like those of a labouring man.

  Pruen greeted the new arrival with the eagerness of a dog meeting his master. ‘Ah! Lieutenant Selous! Come here, come here, I want you to meet an old friend of mine.’

  Arthur couldn’t help smiling at the sudden promotion in intimacy despite the fifteen years since their last meeting.

  ‘Lieutenant Frederick Selous,’ he continued, gesturing on either side to the two of them. ‘The Reverend Father Cripps. Father Cripps, Lieutenant Selous—although I suspect the lieutenant needs no introduction?’

  Pruen raised the inflexion at the end of the sentence, turning it into a question. And he was right. The Lieutenant did not need any introduction, Arthur had indeed heard of Selous before. It was almost impossible to live in Charter country and not hear of him. His name was something of a legend in Southern Rhodesia. Second only to that of Rhodes himself, his was the most often mentioned in settler circles when the nostalgic fires of frontier memories were being stoked. For the last fifty years he had been the country’s foremost big-game hunter and naturalist, famously guiding President Roosevelt on his African safari. He had a reputation as a prolific writer, was a gifted musician and at the age of sixty-four was already a veteran of the Matabele wars of the 18905. Arthur had, however, first paid attention to his name not because of his talent for action, but rather his fierce opposition to it. He remembered reading some letters Selous had written to the Salisbury Herald objecting to the Boer campaign and the treatment of Boer prisoners and their families. The letters made a deep impression on Arthur at the time. He had once overheard a friend of Selous’ describe the hunter as ‘a moral antiseptic in a country where men are not saints’. It was a welcome surprise to find the same man standing before him now.

  The dull clatter of the loading process continued on the lake shore behind them and the flies kept up a dog-fighting buzz around their heads as the two men shook hands.

  ‘Yes, your name goes before you, Lieutenant,’ Arthur said. ‘It’s a pleasure to meet you in person.’

  ‘And if you’re the Cripps I think you are, then it’s an even greater pleasure to meet you. I’ve read your work—I admire it. Bay Tree Country especially.’

  Pruen looked on, beaming, like a chemist who had elicited a satisfying reaction from the introduction of two unknown substances.

  ‘And I’d like to talk further,’ Selous continued, ‘but I’m afraid I’ve come to break up your reunion.’ He turned to Pruen. ‘The men are
almost ready, Pruen. Driscoll’s getting jumpy. We should have them fall in.’

  A seriousness fell like a veil across Pruen’s face and Arthur suddenly thought how old he looked. How old ihey both looked. Too old. Too full of examined life to go and risk it all before the German guns. In Flanders they were sacrificing boys. Here, it was grandfathers.

  Selous turned back to Arthur. ‘Will you be blessing us on our way, Father? ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ and all that?’

  ‘Well, yes, I will, but it needn’t end there. I’m coming along as well.’

  ‘You’re coming with us? To Bukoba?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The two older men raised their eyebrows in unison. Selous nodded slowly and looked at Arthur from under the brim of his hat. ‘Are you now? Well, there’s a thing. A parson coming along for the ride. Good for you, Father, good for you.’

  ∨ The Dust Diaries ∧

  1 AUGUST 1952

  Maronda Mashanu, Mashonaland, Southern Rhodesia

  ‘Good for you, Baba, good for you.’

  Fortune’s voice reaches him as if down a long corridor filled with cotton wool. Faint, blurred at the edges. Then he feels the cup again, its tin lip at his own, the taste of the wild apple juice spilling over them, running down his chin.