The Dust Diaries

by Owen Sheers

  ‘Oh…yes. We got back fronthat last night.’

  ‘You were at Bukoba?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, congratulations. I hear it was a success.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose it was in a way, but…’ He looked away for a moment and she saw he was uncomfortable talking about the attack. Turning back to her, forcing a smile, he changed the subject. ‘It’s strange, I met someone else here just a few days ago. Someone else I hadn’t seen for a long time. It seems as if we’re all being washed up on this lake.’

  Arthur thought of Pruen. He was one of the eight who had not returned on the steamers. Shot through the throat as he stood to rally his men. One of the eight he had buried in the earth of Bukoba, marking their graves with wooden crosses and their rifles, stuck in the ground.

  ‘Well, you shouldn’t be so surprised,’ she replied. ‘There aren’t many of us to go around in this war, we’re bound to bump into each other from time to time.’

  She had not aged in the same way Pruen had. He remembered her clearly now from that night in Salisbury. When he was so new to the country, to its heat and its people. Her face had kept its shape. Age had not obscured the younger woman, but somehow enhanced her. She seemed larger here, not just physically, but in her character. More confident. He couldn’t be sure but he thought she was wearing exactly the same red dress she wore that night fourteen years ago. Dulled and thin at the elbows, but the same dress. She wore her hair in a loose bun, the brown stitched with grey, and she had developed the white African’s characteristic crow’s feet about her eyes, the mark of years spent squinting in the sun.

  ‘I was just going outside, will you join me?’ she said, picking up her bucket. She walked towards the end of the tent and he followed her, surprised by the scent of perfume as she passed.

  Outside, Mrs Cole sat on an upturned crate facing out towards the lake. Arthur joined her. She lit a cigarette from a silver case and he lit his pipe. Together they smoked and looked out over the water, the morning mist still hanging at its centre, and at the distant crowds of flamingos gathered further along the shore. They brought each other up to date with their lives. He told her of his move to Maronda Mashanu, his decision to stay on in Africa, about his schools and his church in the south. She in turn explained why she was there, at the lake. How she had felt she had to do something, had to be involved in the war in some way. Salisbury, like most of the colonies, was apathetic towards the war. Many of the white settlers felt that it was not theirs to fight, that the British army was more an army of invasion than an army of protection. But her daughter Anne was still in England, and her letters made her feel closer to the conflict, to the struggle and the loss of it. When Anne wrote describing a daylight air raid on London, of coming out from the shelter of a department store to see a mother and child impaled on the railings, she knew she could no longer stay at home in Salisbury. She had to be involved. So she travelled to Nairobi and presented herself at the army HQ. She didn’t leave until they gave her a post as a nurse.

  ‘And Mr Cole? Was he happy with your decision?’

  She smiled and blew out a long plume of thin smoke. ‘You never met him, did you? He wasn’t at the dinner as I remember?’

  ‘No, he was away. At the war in the south.’

  ‘Yes, well, as you can imagine, he was pretty keen for this one too. The day after the news came through he was off to volunteer. Doing his duty. Not that he ever did much else.’

  She stopped, took another pull on her cigarette. ‘He was killed at Tanga. That first attack. Apparently he was covered in bee stings. Head to toe. But he’d been shot too, in the legs. They don’t know which killed him.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that. Very sorry. God rest his soul.’

  ‘Oh, if he’s anywhere near God there won’t be much resting, believe me—he’ll be sorting through his ledgers and making plans to expand heaven’s territory or something!’

  Mrs Cole laughed, but Arthur was wrong-footed by her joking about her husband’s death.

  She turned to him and smiled again, ‘Don’t be mistaken, I do miss him, Father. It’s just, well…we were hardly ever together. He lived on a larger scale than me. He organised countries, I had trouble with my pantry.’

  ‘Of course,’ Arthur said. ‘I understand…and you must miss your daughter too?’ A patch of flamingos took flight from the shore. A flurry of water and wings. Arthur watched them, their pink legs held straight out behind them, their slow wing-flap.

  ‘Anne? Yes, I do, though I’ve not seen her for three years now.’

  Her voice petered out, and for a moment just the sound of the flamingos filled the silence between them. Eventually she turned to face Arthur again, but her expression had changed. Her eyes were serious, grave.

  ‘She’s twenty-six now. Has a young man back in England, Jack. They’re engaged,’ she explained, ‘and would be married now, were it not for the war.’ She paused, took out another cigarette and lit it. Taking a deep breath she drew the smoke into her lungs and exhaled it with a sigh, as if she were breathing out more than just smoke.

  ‘Three months after war was announced he volunteered. And do you know who persuaded him to volunteer, Father?’ She looked back at Arthur and her eyes were hard, as if she were reproaching him. ‘A priest. The local church gave a recruitment sermon. All the boys went and listened. The vicar preached about a Christian war, about fighting the good fight. And they followed his words. Jack joined up with three of his friends after that sermon. Well, Anne had told me he’d always been keen on machines, good with his hands, and he was lucky, in a way: he joined the flying corps. His friends weren’t so lucky. They went to the line. I don’t know what’s happened to them. But Jack, well, he went to fly above those lines in his plane, spotting and recording. Three months ago he wrote to Anne and told her about a strange flight he’d had, an early patrol on a fine day, so he could fly high and still see clearly. There had been heavy fighting all week, he said. No-man’s-land looked as if it had been squashed under a giant’s foot. He was high enough to see both sides of the line, and as he said, they were only a few hundred feet apart anyway, when he noticed two identical formations on either side. A large group of men were fanned out around a point in the German communication trenches, and another group in the same formation were spread out opposite them on the British side. He flew lower to get a better look. First over the Germans, and then over the British. And then he realised. It was Sunday. The groups were communion services. They were praying, Father. He flew higher and looked down at them again, and there they were. Two church services worshipping the same God, spread out like a pair of butterfly wings either side of no-man’s-land.’

  She held Arthur’s eye, then looked away, taking another draw on her cigarette.

  Arthur was about to say something when she turned back and spoke again.

  ‘I was treating a young lad in Nairobi last month. He’d been badly wounded at Jessin. One morning as I was changing his dressing he took out two belts from under his bed and said to me, ‘Look at this, Sister, he’s got to be fibbing one lot of us, don’t you reckon?’ One belt was his. It had Dieu et man droit written on its buckle. The other was a German soldier’s. It also had a motto on its buckle: Gott Mit Uns’.

  This time she did not look away but kept her eyes on his. But they were not the same eyes. They had lost their hardness and they were no longer challenging, but questioning him, willing him for an answer.

  She continued, speaking more softly, ‘The thing is, Father, I don’t see God anywhere in this war. With them or with us. And if he isn’t here, where I’d say we need him most, then I want to know where he is.’

  Her face softened even more and Arthur saw she was holding back tears. He laid his hand on hers. He felt exhausted, drained by the attack and its aftermath.

  ‘I’m not sure I have the answers you’re looking for,’ he said. ‘I mean, I don’t know if I have them myself. But I understand your confusion, and you’re right,
in a way. This isn’t God’s war, it’s man’s. But I do believe that God is here. If not in what happens, then maybe in what doesn’t. If that makes any sense. When a gun jams or misfires. When a bullet misses. I believe he is here then.’

  Mrs Cole looked up into his face and he could see she wasn’t convinced. He looked out towards the flamingos, at their question mark necks lengthening to meet their reflections in the water.

  ‘Do you pray before a battle?’ Her voice was still quiet, careful.

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘What do you pray for?’

  ‘Well, not for what I’m meant to, I’m sure. Not for victory.’ He paused. ‘In fact I don’t even pray to St George. I pray to St Michael instead. I ask him to cover our heads in battle.’ He looked out across the lake. ‘And I’m sure that over there, there is a German padre praying to St George to cover his soldiers’ heads.’ He turned to look at her. ‘Because I think that is the only way to pray before battle, Mrs Cole. For its failure, I mean. To pray any other way isn’t a prayer at all, but a petition for murder.’

  She sat back and looked at him, then down at her feet, shaking her head, as if she was still unsure. As if she couldn’t be sure of anything any more. Eventually she looked up again, towards the tent. ‘I should get back. They’ll be waking soon.’

  Withdrawing her hand from under his, she stood and picked up her bucket. Arthur noticed the seam of her evening dress had split. As she bent down it gaped, an opening eye, showing a blink of pale flesh beneath.

  ‘I’m glad we met again, Father,’ she said.

  ‘Well, I’m certainly glad you’re here,’ he replied. ‘If St Michael doesn’t hear me, then at least I know I’ll be in good hands.’

  Arthur watched her walk back towards the hospital tent. Another flock of flamingos took flight from the shore. He turned to follow them, feeling tiredness wash through his body, and thought about what Mrs Cole had said. Had God been there at Bukoba? He thought about the fresh graves outside the town, the body of the girl, the whine of the shells, the eyes of the Captain, burning, and then of Jack, flying high in his plane looking down over no-maa’s-land. The butterfly wings of men spreading out from their shared body of mud.

  ∨ The Dust Diaries ∧

  24 JUNE 1915

  Longido, German East Africa

  Tendai was trying to keep still: as still as a stone in moving grass, as a lizard paused on a rock in the sun. But as the sun rose higher flies began landing on his face and his neck, making him twitch. He kept his eyes closed and willed himself to ignore the tickling hair-touch of their legs, around his lips, over his eyelids. The sound of their wings buzzing loud in his ear.

  He had been lying in the tall grass since late last night, hiding from the German ruga-ruga who were still pursuing him. They’d spotted him the day before when he approached a bush settlement in search of food. Tendai had thought he was still in British East Africa. He hadn’t known the collection of rondavels and one square brick hut was a Schütztruppe outpost. An African was hoeing a patch of ground behind the brick hut, and Tendai had called out to him in English. But as soon as he spoke he knew something was wrong. The man looked up at him with wide eyes, then turned away and called out in Swahili. An askari came out of the closest rondavel. The man pointed towards Tendai and the soldier levelled his rifle at him, shouting at him in German. Then a Schütztruppe officer rushed out of another rondavel and put his hand on the askari’s arm. He also shouted to Tendai, but in English, ‘Halt, stay there!’ But Tendai had heard what happened to prisoners caught by the Germans. So he ran. He heard the askari fire and waited for the bullet to hit him, but it whined past over his head, cracking through the branches of a tree. He ran on as the askari fired again, pushing his way into a thicket of bush as the bullet hit the ground. He kept running, wildly smashing through the foliage, his arms over his face. But he knew it was too late and he could already hear the deep chest grunting of the ruga-ruga streaming out of the camp, making chase behind him.

  That had been yesterday evening. Since then they had chased and tracked him through the night, deep into the veld, down the valley of a shrunken river to a lower plain, dotted with kopjes. His body ached and hurt from the night-long pursuit. He had cut his foot on a piece of wire, his limbs were weak with hunger and his head was full of questions. He didn’t understand how he had wandered into German territory or why the Germans were so anxious to capture him. He wasn’t wearing uniform and wasn’t armed. He couldn’t have posed a threat to them or the people of the area. But what Tendai didn’t know was that the Schütztruppe had recently broken a network of British spies, Africans working for British Intelligence. Von Lettow was said to be furious and the order had come down from the General himself as a matter of urgency: all suspects were to be caught and interrogated or killed. The porters who cleaned the officers’ latrines were already dead.

  The ruga-ruga were Masi warriors recruited as German irregulars. Tendai knew they could track and hunt any animal on the veld. He’d caught a glimpse of one of them the day before as he hid behind a rock by the river. A tall, lean man, about his own age. His hair was shaved into a tuft at the front of his head, a water gourd was slung across his chest and he wore a simple limbo cloth and a blanket, also tied across his chest. He carried an old German musket. As the man had stopped to drink from his gourd, Tendai saw that the stories were true: both his lower and upper teeth had been sharpened. Another porter at the lake once told him the Masi ate the flesh of their enemies. Tendai hadn’t believed him, but now, lying in the tall grass, listening to the ruga-ruga work their way nearer and nearer to his hiding place, he couldn’t help but remember both the porters tale and that flash of sharpened teeth.

  ♦

  More flies were gathering on his back, drawn to the unhealed scars that criss-crossed his spine; long wheals of thickened skin like stout white string. His shirt was thin and torn, and the blood seeped through the cotton in long, dark patches. Worried the flies would attract the attention of the ruga-ruga, he carefully rolled from his side onto his back. Every rustle of the grass against his skin seemed loud in his ears. His breath felt clumsy and his heartbeat so strong he was sure its echo through the ground would be enough for the Masi to find him.

  The scars on his back were from a niboko, a hippo-hide whip. He had left the lake camp shortly after receiving them but his troubles had begun long before that whipping. Lying in the grass, his eyes tightly shut, his body aching and his throat dust-dry, he knew exactly the moment all his pain could be traced back to: one minute on a trek several months before. The minute when they killed the rhino.

  They had been coming back from a patrol. Tendai was with a party of porters bearing for a company of the 3rd KAR. He was used to the assumed superiority of white men. He had grown up expecting the Europeans in and around Enkeldoorn to treat him and his mother as if they were hardly there. To shout orders at them, to hoot their cars to clear them off the road. It was the way of things. But bearing for askaris, other Africans, was something he had been finding hard to understand, to adjust to. They treated him like the white men did, as if their uniforms changed the colour of their skin.

  He remembered that trek as one of the worst, not just because of the askaris, but also because several porters had died, leaving the remaining carriers loaded with more than their usual baggage. And of course because of what happened later. As they marched two abreast in a long line through the veld, his arms ached as if they would fall off his body, and his legs felt as if they were rooted in the earth. Every step was an effort, a tearing of these roots from the dry soil. But then perhaps that is why the rhino had come then. Because he was so unhappy, and the rhino knew he was, because the rhino was his animal.

  ♦

  When he was very young Tendai’s father told him the rhino was his totem. He had whispered it to him, very quietly, as if it were a great secret, an important message to be remembered. He even gave him a totem name, Chipembere. Rhino. Tendai listened carefully
, wide-eyed, to his father as he told him he must never kill or eat his totem animal. If he did, it would bring very bad luck.

  The next day Tendai proudly told his mother that his totem was the rhino: the strong, brave, rhino with a hide like iron. She had picked him up, laughed and said, ‘So, little man, is that your father talking again?’ The next week the white men came and killed his father. Tendai was sure the telling of his secret had brought bad luck. That it had brought the white men and his father’s death.

  ♦

  The rhino’s first charge smashed through the line ahead of him. No one had seen it behind the trees. The marching soldiers must have surprised it; perhaps it had been asleep. Tendai heard its pounding hooves, a scatter of screams from the askaris, and then it was through them, trampling the men like blades of grass. The line broke in every direction as the rhino slowed and heaved its body around to face the fleeing soldiers and carriers. Tendai stood, frozen. Perhaps he would have some power over the animal because it was his totem. He stared at it, watching its blinking short-sighted eyes, willing it to leave. But it lowered its head, pawed the ground and began a second charge, smashing through a Scotch cart, splintering the wood and throwing boxes and sacks of supplies into the air. Again it slowed in a cloud of dust on the other side of the line and turned. Gathering its shoulders underneath itself, it leant forward and began a third charge. But then the machine-gun fired. A cracking rattle of bullets from a juddering Vickers gun mounted on a rock. Tendai saw the shake and stutter of its ammunition belt, the vibrating arms of the askari firing it, the shouting face of the white officer behind him, screaming ‘Fire! Fire! Fire!’

  The rhino was charging straight at the gun. The bullets splintered and shattered its horn, sprayed its face, exploded an eye, raked across its body, breaking its hide. But still it charged, straight into the rain of lead, slowing against the bullets as a person might slow against an oncoming wind. Its gallop faltered to a trot, then to a stumbling walk, then, as the gun kept up its relentless firing, finally it collapsed. The gun stopped, its last report ringing out over the veld, the panicked rattle of its firing replaced by silence, then by squawks and screams of frightened birds. The rhino lay before it, shattered and broken, bleeding into the dusty ground. Its armoured body shook with a last grunting breath and then was still. Everyone stared at its broken bulk while the officer behind the machine-gun walked forward and nudged at its neck with his foot. Satisfied it was dead, he took off his helmet and wiped his pale face with the back of his sleeve.