The Dust Diaries

by Owen Sheers

  ∨ The Dust Diaries ∧

  21 JUNE 1915

  Lake Victoria, German East Africa

  Arthur sat against the handrail of the foredeck, one arm hooked through it, looking down the steep side of the steamer, listening to the sound of the water parting about the hull. It was a clear night, star-dusted, lit by a luminous full moon. He watched the water catch the white light, peeling away from the prow in a frill of foam-headed wavelets as the boat ploughed steadily through the mercury surface of the lake. Minutes before, word had passed up the ship, whispered from officer to officer, that they had crossed the border with German East Africa. Arthur studied the water below him again. He had seen no border interrupt its continuity. He had seen nothing but the moonlight, mineral across its supple surface. He thought to himself how ridiculous it was to take a ruler and a pencil and dash a border through a lake. Like portioning the sky or claiming the stars. And how childlike to label one side of the lake German and the other British. Childlike and futile. The imbricated obsession to own, to possess. And yet that ruler and pencil laid over the lake was enough to send two thousand of them across her waters tonight, weighed down with ammunition and intent. Two thousand of them, steaming towards the land on the other side, the land labelled German. It was all they needed to consider killing and being killed. Words on a map.

  In his heart, after his fourteen years in Africa, he was increasingly sure that the futility of those words was not just in their idea, but in their conclusiveness too. They looked so final, stencilled in black against the pink and yellow of the map. But they may as well have been written in dust. The land they covered with their capital letters could not be labelled. It did not belong to anyone, it could not belong to anyone. Even the African who farmed the soil his ancestors farmed was no more than a tenant. As Bishop Gaul had pointed out to him all those years before when he first looked out over the plains of blond grass, even the name Africa was futile, manufactured, unrecognised by millions who lived on her. In time that label would slip too, as words will, until it has travelled so far from meaning that it is no longer a word at all. Once again only the land it had tried to describe will remain. Un-named, un-owned and the only victor of all the bitter battles fought across her soil.

  He looked back down the steamer across the huddled mass of men crowded on her deck. Their dark shadows were bulky and strangely inhuman, made awkward by the webbing, packs and weapons strapped about their bodies. The unhindered moon caught the gun-metal of the boat, softening edges, lighting the top of the handrail in a clean white strip; magnesium on the point of ignition. It illuminated details of the men too. The flash of a watch face tilted into the light, the tightly wrapped turbans of the 28th Mountain Battery, the still expression of an askari’s face looking out across the water. It lit the tools they had brought with them as well: the corrugated barrel of the Vickers machine-gun; the flat blade of a shovel protruding from a rucksack; the sharper blade of a bayonet, light running down its blood channel like a single drop of iridescent liquid. The moon’s impassive luminosity clothed them all, a benison of light despite their dreadful purpose.

  The familiar smell of old and new sweat infused in cotton and serge reached him on a gust of wind, and he thought how little the labels of countries applied to these men too. This was not Britain going to war with Germany. Nor was it Indians, Africans, Rhodesians, boys from Lancashire fighting against Rhinelanders, Bavarians, Masi, Zulus and East Africans. It was men that went to war, not countries. Men that went to war and brought other men with them, as if it were a force that pulled at a peculiarly masculine substance, a rare ore woven in the marrow of the sex. A force that attracted them like flies to a flame, again and again into its terrible vacuum.

  Arthur’s drifting thoughts were disturbed by a movement behind him. The deck of the ship had been quiet for the last hour, the men either asleep or lost in anxious thought about what lay ahead. Looking up he saw the Company’s intelligence officer, Captain Mein-ertzhagen, picking his way through the prone bodies and the piles of cargo. He was heading towards the foredeck where a Vickers machine-gun perched on its tripod like an insect among the banks of sandbags. As he passed Arthur the Captain looked down and acknowledged him with a curt nod of his head and a quiet ‘Father’. Arthur watched him as he went on, past the machine-gun nest, right up to the prow of the steamer. He stopped, put one foot up on the rail and leant forward, staring unblinking into the night, as if he was trying to catch a scent on the warm wind, the faintest aroma of the enemy.

  Arthur was unsure what to make of the Captain. Their paths had only crossed in the most cursory of ways at Lake Command. He knew he was respected by the men, both askaris and Europeans. And when Arthur had trekked back with the walking wounded from the capture of Mwanza he’d greeted them all into the camp like a perfect host. But there was another side to him too. Before they’d embarked tonight Arthur had held a brief Communion on an altar of oil drums and ammunition cases. The congregation was small, a scattering of European privates and officers and a few askaris, most of the Sudanese, Swahili and Somali soldiers being either Muslim or pagan in their beliefs. He’d preached hopefully on the text of loving your enemies, doing well to those that do spitefully to you. When he had finished, the Captain had stood up and thanked him, then sent out two runners to gather together a larger group around the congregation. Once these men had arrived, he’d given his own brief sermon. His subject was the bayonet. He reminded the men they were there to be used, of the technique of upward thrust and twist, and of the most effective method of removing a lodged blade. Place a foot on the enemy’s chest and discharge a round while pulling back on the stock of the rifle. It was, he informed them, a method that also guaranteed a kill.

  Watching him now, standing at the steamer’s prow like a macabre figurehead, Arthur contemplated this man who could be so genial, and yet kill so easily. He took out his notebook and pencil from the top pocket of his khaki tunic and began to make some notes towards a poem. The war may have disrupted everything else in his life, but it had not stopped him writing. He had been writing poems throughout his time on the lake and now, as they steamed towards the German shore, he wrote again by the light of the moon, trying to sketch a portrait of the man standing before him, staring into the night as if daring it to break its silence.

  The Watcher on Our Theshold

  (Intelligence Department)

  As in a bad dream I may see you now

  Lank, flusht, chin-tufted, eyes as black as coal

  Kindling like live coals, in that mood you well

  Might pose for him who mortgage held of old

  On Faustus damn’d—calling his mortgage in.

  Those iron lips will no refusals own,

  Forbidden witch-smoke curls in rings of blue

  About your head, and your hand sinister

  Fondles a swarthy lash of hippo-hide.

  Upon your shoulder-straps, beneath your stars

  Brass letters spell your errand—

  OUT FOR BLOOD

  ∨ The Dust Diaries ∧

  23 JUNE 1915

  Bukoba, Lake Victoria, German East Africa

  When Meinertzhagen burst the lock on the door to the communications room beneath the wireless tower, it was the flies that hit him first. A manic buzzing and swelling as the rush of air from the opened door disturbed them. Black clouds filling the room as if the day was transforming into particles of night. Thousands of them, coming at him in their stream towards the light, tapping against his face, catching in his beard and in his lips. After the flies, the smell. With the force of heat from an opened oven door the stink fumed into his nostrils and down into his throat, making him gag and bring his hand to his face as a mask.

  Looking over his fingers around the room at the desks, files, telegraph and radio equipment the thought flashed across his mind that the Germans had discovered his ‘dirty paper method’ and that this was their ironic revenge. A couple of askaris from the 3rd KAR and a North Lanes sapp
er sergeant came through the door behind him. He heard them all gag and choke and then the sergeant’s Lancashire accent, ‘Fuckin’ hell, Sir! Oh, Christ, fuckin’ hell!’ Then their retreating footsteps as they ran back out of the door. Meinertzhagen followed them, equally appalled by the sight of that room.

  Every surface, every document, every piece of equipment was covered, daubed and dripping in brown and mustard-coloured human excrement. The room had been the scene of a bizarre act of mass defecation, and leaning against a tree outside Meinertzhagen knew why. They must have known they were outnumbered, that the town would fall sooner or later and this was how they would keep the equipment and documents from falling into enemy hands. Judging by the flies they must have defiled the room at least twenty-four hours earlier. Meinertzhagen tried to imagine it. The British field guns battering the town, the patter of small arms fire in the distance and in here a Schütztruppe officer in his white, braided uniform calling out the command to a company of askaris who stood, waiting, the belts of their breeches undone in anticipation.

  He turned to the team of sappers waiting behind him. The Sergeant still looked pale from his brief glimpse of the room. ‘Go ahead,’ he said. ‘We won’t get anything out of there.’

  The team gathered their equipment, long coils of copper wire, tight bundles of dynamite, and began to climb onto the roof of the communications room to set their charges on the concrete base of the 2oo-foot wireless tower. Beneath them the burst door still swung open, its gap in the wall filled with the low, menacing hum of the flies.

  ♦

  Arthur looked up from the eight shallow graves the porters were trying to dig from the hard earth. Below him thin columns of smoke still drifted up from the white-washed houses of the town and a scattering of huts had been reduced to charred embers. In the town itself, he could just make out a group of men clambering onto the lower struts of the wireless tower.

  The scrape and slump of the spadework brought him back to his own job and he looked back down at the eight bodies before him, each covered with a grey standard-issue blanket. Over the last hour he’d knelt beside each one, carefully noting each man’s identity in his notebook, their names forming a list after the last line of the poem he had written on the steamer two nights ago: OUT FOR BLOOD. He would write to the families himself, and he had taken the liberty to remove what he could from the bodies to send along with his letters: photographs of wives and children, wedding rings, even a bitten pencil with the dead man’s tooth marks imprinted in its wood. Then he’d performed the last rites over each man individually, and now it was just the graves that were left. He sat back on a rock, feeling the weight of the dead men’s possessions in his pocket, the watches, the glasses, the half-written letters, and watched as the eight holes grew deeper with every shovel and swing, the deposits of earth and dust mounting up at their sides.

  The battle that led to these deaths had begun two days ago, when, at one o’clock on the morning of the 22nd, the four steamers had reached their landing positions. The boats bobbed in the shallow water off a gently sloping beach three miles south of Bukoba as the men waited for Stewart’s torch signal from the leading steamer. But instead of a torch flash, another light lit up the sky and Arthur had watched as a burning white point with a long tail described an arc above them, then levelled off and exploded like a giant thunderflash. Two more rockets followed its trajectory. He heard Captain Mein-ertzhagen curse to himself as he pushed through the men to get to the side of the boat where he could get a clean signal to Stewart. As the second rocket lit up the sky Arthur had looked down the deck and seen that the steamers were completely illuminated in the flare’s light: the staring faces of the men looking up, the field guns, even the details of the bridge were all cast in a white brightness that threw shadows in all the wrong places, like a photographic negative. The Germans had seen them and the element of surprise was lost. He thought of Tanga and waited for the guns to start harassing them where they were, but nothing happened. The last flare fizzled out on the night’s black, then silence. Eventually Stewart’s signal came: withdraw, it said, and steam further north.

  Five hours later they disembarked three miles north of the town at the base of a cliff that rose almost vertically three hundred feet above the beach to a scrappy line of thorn trees at the top. A steep path ran diagonally up the cliff face, broken in places by landslides and the roots of plants. Arthur had watched from the shore as the strike force of the North Lanes and the Fusiliers began to tackle the climb, roping up machine-guns and field guns and even managing to coax up a heavily laden mule, its hooves scrabbling and slipping on the fragile path. He saw Pruen among the Fusiliers, directing equipment up the cliff, checking knots and bindings, emitting an energy that belied his age. The Fusiliers were much older and less well trained than the other regiments. An eclectic mix of adventurers, drifters and old soldiers, they had given themselves the moniker ‘The Frontiersmen’, although around the lake they were more commonly known as the ‘Old and the Bold’. Some had seen action before, in the Boer War, the ‘86 uprising or further afield in their home territories, and as Arthur joined them on the path up the cliff he heard the medals of past campaigns clinking against the buttons of their tunics. Most of them, however, had never fired a gun in anger and Arthur watched as a succession of exiled Russians, a troop of ex-circus clowns and acrobats, a bartender, a lighthouse-keeper, an opera singer, a Buckingham Palace footman and a Texas cowboy all scrambled up onto the lip of the cliff behind him, their rifles strapped to their backs and sweat already gathering at their temples.

  The skirmishing had begun as the force marched over a lip at the top of the cliff and down towards a hill that overlooked the town. It was scrappy fighting and hard going. They were covering open ground of bush and swamp while the Germans fired at them from the higher cover of thick banana plantations, rocks, inselbergs and clumps of thorn trees. Arthur had advanced with a company of Fusiliers. Puffs of smoke drifting up from behind tree trunks and boulders was all he could see of the enemy and he’d spent much of his time on the ground as fusillades of bullets spat up flurries of dust around them. He’d been under fire before, on the decks of steamers patrolling the lake and at the attack on Mwanza, but he’d never experienced anything as intense as what they met that day. Lying there, his cheek pressed against the earth, he experienced the same sensation he’d felt all those years ago lying on the deck of the Hertzog on the morning of his arrival in Africa. A desire for the firing to stop, for the fingers to freeze on the triggers, and beneath that desire a deeper fault-line of frustration and pity, fracturing him to the core.

  They were half-way across a swamp when the German 755 started throwing down shells, and Arthur had had to submerge himself almost completely in a deep stagnant pool to escape the shrapnel that whizzed around him, fizzling and spitting as it hit the water. But then the field guns of their own 28th Mountain Battery had answered, and as the shells landed on the slope before them, throwing up brief flowerings of rock, earth and tree, the Fusilier company had taken the opportunity to advance at speed. Arthur jogged forward with them, bent double alongside the Fusiliers’ Sergeant-Major Bottomly. Bot-tomly was an older man and Arthur could hear the effort of his grunting pant with each step he took. A sudden spray of machine-gun fire sent them both sprawling to the ground again, but as soon as it had passed Arthur got to his feet and carried on, only realising after a few yards that Bottomly was no longer with him. He’d turned to see the Sergeant-Major still kneeling behind him, staring back at him, a wild expression on his face. As Arthur went back to him Bottomly opened his mouth to speak, but he got no further than a rasping gasp before the blood frothed up on his lips and ran down his chin, matting in his beard. It was then that Arthur saw the bullet holes, three of them in neat diagonal formation across his chest, like buttons across his tunic. Another burst of machine-gun fire erupted behind him and Arthur had thrown himself down again, shutting his eyes tightly against the spraying dirt. He opened them to find his
face inches from where Bottomly had been kneeling and he noticed briefly how the imprint of the man’s cord breeches had made a corrugated pattern in the dust, like a fingerprint pressed in the earth. Then he’d raised his head further and seen Bottomly himself, on his back now, his left eye and cheek missing.

  Bottomly was a father. His family were back in West London now, and just days before he’d told Arthur how he felt they’d be safer there, ‘back home’. As he’d lain in the dirt, listening to the whizz and whine of the bullets and shells finding their invisible courses through the air, Arthur had imagined the resonance of the death he had just witnessed. The arrival of the telegram on the doormat. His wife reading the official sympathies, and then reading them again. Then his own letter, with the photographs and mementos. The silence after the crying. Her attempts to explain to the children. The erosion of grief over the years and the never-changing strangeness of that name: Bukoba, where their father had left them, staring at the sky through his one remaining eye.

  ♦

  By nightfall the Germans had retreated from their positions on the hill, but they’d still managed to hold the British a mile off from the town itself. With the failing light the firing died down to the odd nervous shot ringing off a boulder, and then nothing, just the dusk chorus of insects and hyenas meeting the moon. The men were exhausted. They had fought all day and for many it was the first action they’d ever experienced. As the adrenalin subsided, tiredness had overwhelmed them. Rations were scheduled to arrive from the shore, but they never came, so both the Fusiliers and the North Lanes had bivouacked down for the night with whatever rations had survived the day. Sharing a biscu it and a lump of cheese with one of the ex-circus clowns from the Fusiliers, Arthur watched the deepening blue of the sky above the hill turn the thorn trees into sharp silhouettes hung with stars.