The Dust Diaries

by Owen Sheers

  Not far from where they camped they’d found the shattered remains of one of the German 755, flanked by her two gunners, an askari and a Schütztruppe officer, arranged on either side, their limbs at impossible angles. Captain Meinertzhagen had looked through the officer’s pockets before Arthur performed the last rites over the dead men: a chain watch with a smashed face, the fine hands buckled; a silver cigarette case; a soiled handkerchief, and in the top pocket of his shirt a crude hand-drawn map of Africa. The continent had been dotted across with an upside-down T and the three portions labelled: German South Africa, Austrian Africa, Turkish Africa. Perhaps he had been explaining to the askari how the country would look after the war, or maybe it was a personal proposal he planned to show the Kaiser one day. Whatever, it didn’t mean much to him any more and now he would never own any part of Africa. But she would own him, if not with her soil, then with her hyenas, her rats, her flies and, come that morning, her vultures.

  The night was freezing. After the heat of the day the cold had been a shock and sleep seemed out of the question. Captain Meinertzhagen and Lieutenant Selous had retired to the shelter of an inselberg, where they swapped hunting stories and naturalist notes while a group of the North Lanes had set fire to a couple of grass huts and dried their uniforms by the flames. It was by the light of this fire that Arthur prepared a simple communion service. He was as exhausted as the rest of the men and as he’d lain a piece of cloth over a flat rock and placed a chalice and a paten on it, he’d felt every movement as an effort of will. After he’d taken off his jacket and covered his khaki shirt with a preaching stole, a couple of askaris and a handful of Europeans had emerged from the darkness and knelt on the ground before his makeshift altar, bowing their heads as if in tiredness or shame.

  With the morning, they’d advanced again, down the hill overlooking the scattered town of Bukoba. The wireless mast, their main target, stood to the south, a mini-Eiffel Tower rising above the simple whitewashed brick buildings. The shells of the Mountain Battery’s 755 landed in puffs of grey-white smoke among these buildings, the sound of their explosions strangely delayed across the bowl of land in which the town sat. A single German sniper, positioned waist-deep in a swamp, had them pinned down outside the town for most of the morning. A machine-gun on the hill kept up a steady rattle as it tried to hit him, but its bullets failed to find anything other than the twigs and branches of the swamp plants. After two men had been killed by his sharp-shooting, Captain Meinertzhagen had lost patience with the delay and waded into the swamp himself, shirtless, carrying his rifle above his head. Arthur had watched him disappear into the dark tangle of branches, and as his white back slipped out of sight, the eye of his imagination had taken over instead. The Captain, circling around a thick clump of mangroves, seeing the sniper standing in the water with his back to him. A Schütztruppe officer, young, fair-skinned, with a red, sun-burnt neck showing over his collar. His ammunition case tied up to a branch at his side from which he picks out a bullet to slide into the chamber of his rifle. Meinertzhagen respecting his bravery and thinking how in another situation he may have taken him prisoner, let him live. But then the heat of the day, the thought of his two dead colleagues, the stink of the swamp. Aiming at the sun-burnt neck, he fires, and the officer’s head jerks backwards, then slumps forward as he slides down beneath the surface of the swamp. His rifle follows him until there is nothing where he had stood. Just some slow-popping bubbles on the water’s surface, and the ammunition case, swinging on the branch.

  ♦

  That was all just this morning, the swamp, the final push on the town, but already it feels like a lifetime away. And now it is over and the porters have finished their work. The graves, a young private tells him, are ready. Arthur stands up and thanks the soldier, then reaches for his Bible in his jacket pocket and makes his way over to the holes in the ground: deep, root-fringed and waiting for the eight men lying beside them to fill them again.

  But then from down the hill, in the town, an echoing roll of thunder. Arthur looks up and sees a plume of black-grey smoke about the foot of the wireless tower, then watches as it leans, wavers, then succumbs to the arc of its fall, like a giant giving into sleep after years of silent vigil.

  ♦

  The whirring sound of uncoiling wire signalled the arrival of the sapper sergeant, buttocks first, to where Meinertzhagen sat behind a thick stone wall. Meinertzhagen handed him the plunger, which he connected to the two copper wires, then placed his hands over his ears and his head down on his knees, eyes tightly shut. He heard the brief travel of the plunger as the sergeant pressed it down. Then nothing. Then everything. The sound of the explosions rang down the street, followed by a billowing wave of dust and debris flecked with excrement. Then the metallic creaking and rush of air as the tower began its collapse. Meinertzhagen heard it come crashing to the ground behind him, then a faint cheer go up from lower in the town. He opened his eyes to see the sergeant signalling to another sapper on the other side of the street. Again a plunger was compressed, and again there was a brief silence, an expectant second when everything was paused. Then the second explosion. But this time it was deeper, sharper, a fissure in the air followed by more detonations and cracks as the German arsenal went up in a cloud of thick black and orange smoke.

  ♦

  It was as Meinertzhagen was walking back into the town from examining the remains of the tower that he realised something was wrong. The men had broken ranks. He could see them further down the hill, running into buildings, breaking down doors. As he passed a house on his right he heard the smash of broken glass and the moving of heavy furniture. The door to the house swung drunkenly off one hinge and looking in he saw a group of soldiers turning the place over. They were men of all ages, European and African, but they all looked like children, smiles on their faces as they ransacked drawers, swept trophies into kitbags and rifled through cupboards and desks. A loud report came from an inner room and Meinertzhagen reached for the revolver at his side, but then a Fusilier, one of the circus troop, entered with a foaming bottle of champagne in each hand and a ceremonial pickelhaube on his head. The other men cheered and rushed the room from where the Fusilier had entered, in search of more champagne, while a young North Lanes lad, still smeared from the day’s fighting approached Meinertzhagen with a large photo album held out before him. He looked genuinely disgusted.

  ‘Look, sir, filthy Boche perverts,’ he said as he handed Meinertzhagen the opened album. It was bound in leather, with a brass spine and clasp, heavy in the hand. Meinertzhagen took the book from the young soldier and flicked back the transparent paper to look at the photograph beneath. It was a large black-and-white portrait of the town’s German commandant standing beside his wife. He was in full dress uniform, crisp white, a parade of medals at his chest, a thick braid looping from his shoulder and a decorated picklehaube under his arm. His wife sat at his elbow, completely naked, her hair undone across her white shoulders and her hands neatly crossed in her lap. Meinertzhagen could just make out where the wicker chair had imprinted its pattern in the flesh of her thighs.

  The young soldier was still standing by Meinertzhagen, looking seriously at him as if he had handed him an important piece of intelligence. ‘Turn over, sir, there’s more.’ Meinertzhagen turned the stiff page to reveal an almost identical photograph. The positions and the expressions of the commandant and his wife were exactly the same. He staring from over his thick moustache into the camera’s lens, and she looking just past it, into the distance. Except in this version it was she who wore the formal dress, a long evening gown melting over the chair to the floor, and he who stood naked. It was a strange effect. His stern, angular face giving way to a surprisingly pale, flaccid body, a thinly haired chest and the fold of a paunch above thin legs, his penis a stub of white in the black of his pubic hair as he stood there, staring out of the photograph, his picklehaube under his arm and the world under his eye.

  Meinertzhagen handed back the album
without a word, looked about at the ruined room, the soldiers swigging champagne from the bottle, then turned away and left the house to go and find out what was going on.

  The street was bright after the dim interior, the afternoon sun reflecting off the whitewash of the houses, and Meinertzhagen had to stop for a moment to let his eyes adjust. When they did he still wasn’t sure he was seeing properly. Further down the hill a group of African porters were strutting about the street dressed in women’s underwear, a group of askari and European soldiers cheering and encouraging them in their pantomime. Meinertzhagen broke into a jog. As he got nearer he saw that the porters were drunk. Fat Henry Clay cigars wagged at their mouths as they paraded in front of the soldiers, their hips swaying extravagantly in imitation of a woman’s. The lingerie they wore over their own greasy scraps of clothing shone out among the dull khaki of the uniforms. Camisoles and knickers in pastel blues and pinks, an emerald slip, white corsets and a black basque with deep red lace and stitching, the straps hanging loose down a pair of thin dark thighs.

  Meinertzhagen pushed past the group. A soldier called out to him, ‘Don’t fancy the local produce, sir?’ But he didn’t stop. He was looking for General Stewart and for a reason why this was happening.

  He was almost at the quayside when he heard the woman’s scream. He stopped. The sounds of the looting soldiers up the hill travelled down to him. A dim rumble of shouting and cheering. The clatter of stones thrown against a portrait of the Kaiser. Then a scream again: wild, terrified, suddenly cut short.

  When he reached the house he couldn’t see the woman, just a chaotic bundle of men. But as he stood on the lip of the doorway, looking down at them, the grim order of the situation revealed itself. She was lying on the floor, two askaris holding her arms. One of these also held her head, his clenched knuckles showing pale through the black of her hair. Another pair held a leg each, gripped by the ankle and pulled wide apart. The line between the black skin of her foot and the pale skin of her soles was so neat it looked as though she had dipped both feet in a fine chalk dust. The broad back of a white soldier heaved and dropped between her legs with hard, rhythmical thrusts. He was still wearing his jacket and Meinertzhagen could make out the officer pips on the cuff of his sleeve. He caught glimpses of the woman’s face too, between the rise and fall of the man’s shoulders. A young black girl. Her mouth was open but she was not screaming anymore. Her lower jaw was tensed and her eyes screwed shut, as if she might squeeze herself back into the darkness behind her eyelids. With each thrust from the officer a tremor passed through her small breasts to her head which rocked back, gave, then rocked back, again and again. One of her eyes was swollen and bruised, like an overripe damson resting on the curve of her cheek.

  Meinertzhagen found General Stewart down at the dock, standing next to the four grey steamers, overseeing the boarding of the wounded. He strode towards him, trying to swallow the anger in his voice.

  ‘General Stewart, sir.’

  Stewart turned to Meinertzhagen. ‘Ah, Captain. Everything all right with the tower? Turn up anything useful?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Ah, well, never mind. We’re just…’

  ‘Sir, why are the men looting the town?’

  Stewart looked shocked at Meinertzhagen’s directness. As was his manner he cleared his throat and began blinking rapidly. ‘Well, Colonel Driscoll of the Fusiliers requested the action. And I, er, granted it.’ He paused. ‘To the victors the spoils, and all that?’

  Meinertzhagen looked him in the eye. The man was out of his depth, he could see that now. Lost.

  ‘With all respect, sir,’ he said, careful to winnow any trace of it from his tone, ‘if you go into the town now you will find no victory there.’

  Feeling the flush of anger rise up his throat into his cheeks he didn’t wait for an answer, but turned on his heel and strode away from the blinking general.

  And then he saw the priest. He was returning from burying the eight British dead where they had been gathered at the edge of the town. A group of porters stood behind him, their shovels over their shoulders. His dog collar was smeared with dirt and Meinertzhagen noticed he had lost one of the brass crosses on his lapels. Their eyes met for a moment, but then a crowd appearing at the end of the street distracted them both. It was the drunk porters, still wearing the lingerie. Reeling behind them came a group of European soldiers and askaris, laden down with candlesticks, ceremonial swords and other trophies from the town. One of them dropped a silver tankard which clattered down the dusty slope. Meinertzhagen made to go and pick it up, but as he did, above the noise of their excited chatter, the short sharp soprano of a woman’s scream travelled across the bay, followed by a single shot. Meinertzhagen looked in the direction of the echoing report, then out across the lake. He heard the priest walk behind him, but he did not turn around. He knew he couldn’t meet his eyes again.

  ∨ The Dust Diaries ∧

  24 JUNE 1915

  British Lake Force Camp, Kisumu, British East Africa

  Private Smith of the Loyal North Lanes lay on his field bed in the hospital tent by the lake. It was early in the morning and the camp was quiet. He had heard the steamers come back from Bukoba late the night before; an hour of endless clatter and movement as the force disembarked, then silence. Now though, with the coming of the sun, there was movement again. The shuffle of feet outside. The stirring of the other wounded around him, the sun’s growing heat distracting them from their sleep. And now Mrs Cole, moving between the beds with her bucket of cold water and supply of fresh flannels. He knew it was Mrs Cole and not the doctor or another nurse because he could make out the red of her dress through a crack in the bandages over his face. A flash of crimson as she passed through his line of sight. And then, as she got nearer, her perfume. Sweet and feminine, rising like a promise from the stale smells of disease, sweat and rotten skin that usually filled the hospital tent.

  ♦

  The young boy with the burnt face seemed to be stirring. She could not tell if he was asleep or awake as the bandages covered his eyes, but she went to him anyway. Dipping a fresh flannel in the water she wrung it out, but not too much, so it was still heavy and wet, then folded it into a long strip and placed it across his forehead.

  ‘There you go, darling, you’ll need that. I think it’s going to be a hot one.’

  She leant over him and adjusted his pillow. He tried to thank her, but his lips were crisp and the bandages tight against his skin. She patted his arm and carried on up the tent between the rows of prone white patients. Further up, after a partition of screens, the faces changed colour: first the pale brown of the sick Indian sepoys, then the black heads of African askaris looked out from over the sheets and blankets. The illnesses and wounds remained the same.

  She called all her patients ‘darling’ for the same reason she wore her old red evening dress and sprayed her neck with perfume. Because she wanted to bring something from the world of women into the lives of these men. Something from life outside the war. A reminder of what else did and will exist. The dress also helped her to remember these things herself. To remember herself. She had forgotten herself once, and she didn’t want to again. But the dress was not just a psychological prop. It was, in its way, practical too. It was red, a good colour for the hospital tent. Blood didn’t show so starkly against it as it did against khaki or white.

  She was on her way out to refill her bucket with fresh water when she saw the chaplain. He was at the African end of the tent, sitting on the edge of a patient’s bed. It was the first time she had seen him. She’d come up on the railway to Lake Command from Nairobi the day after the steamers left for Bukoba, in preparation for their return. She had been told to expect heavy casualties.

  The chaplain stood up and she caught a glimpse of his face that stopped her mid-stride. It was thinner, more gaunt than that night fourteen years ago. All traces of the young man had gone; his hair had thinned and greyed, his eyes sunk a little deep
er under his brow, but it was still unmistakably the face of Father Cripps. She had forgotten many things over the years, but never that night. She watched him move to another bed, bend and speak to the soldier there. The movement confirmed it was him. The same tall, angular body. The strange mix of physical possession and awkwardness.

  Remembering that night she felt a rush of affection towards him. But then, close on its heels, a sudden anger which surprised her in its ferocity. The last time they had met he had listened to her. Well, this time she wanted him to talk. Last time she had spoken freely, answering his questions, but now she had questions of her own, and she wanted his answers.

  She waited for him to finish speaking with the patient before she approached him.

  ‘Father Cripps? It is Father Cripps, isn’t it?’

  He turned at the sound of his name, but his face showed no sign of recognition at seeing her. She helped him along.

  ‘Mrs Cole. We met once in Salisbury. You came to dinner.’

  A moment of thought, then she saw the memory engage.

  ‘Yes, yes, of course. With Bishop Gaul? Of course. Well, how good of you to remember, I mean, after all this time.’

  ‘It isn’t often I entertain a poet and a Bishop at my table, Father.

  You were something of a special occasion for me back then.’

  ‘Well, I’m glad you thought so. How good to see you again. But have you been at the lake long? I mean, I don’t think I’ve…’

  ‘No, I came up yesterday. Posted here for the push on Bukoba.’