The Beauty and the Sorrow (49 page)

I had not proceeded very far before I felt something yield and scrunch under me. It was the skeleton of a corpse, its bones picked clean by the army of rats which scavenged the battlefields.
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The rags of a tunic still covered its nakedness. I felt in the pockets to try to discover some means of identification, but they were empty. Someone had been before me. Further on I found another; then another and another. They were the bodies of those slain in the terrible fighting at the beginning of July. All were British.

Angus Buchanan writes in his diary on the same day:

Seven German
askaris
gave themselves up overnight. They report food scarce, and also that numbers of natives are deserting and going off west through the bush, their purpose to try to find their way back to their homes. They also say, as we have heard before,
that the German carriers are partially bound when in camp, so they cannot run away in the night, if they wanted to escape.

THE MIDDLE OF OCTOBER
1916
Florence Farmborough loses her hair

Florence has been suffering from paratyphoid fever. One night a few weeks ago when her fever was at its worst Florence thought she had three faces: one was her own, one belonged to one of her sisters and the third seemed to be that of a wounded soldier. Sweat poured from each of them and they had to be wiped all the time. She knew she would die if the wiping ceased. She tried to shout for a nurse but found that she no longer had a voice. She is now convalescing in the warm autumn sun in the Crimea. The hospital in which she is being cared for is actually a sanatorium for tuberculosis sufferers but she has been allowed to stay there anyway. Everything is still green outside and she has made an unexpectedly quick recovery. She writes in her journal:

My hair was in bad condition and coming out in handfuls. So, one day, the barber came to my room and not only cut my hair, but shaved my head! I was assured I should never regret it, and that it would grow again stronger and thicker than it had ever been before. From that time, I wore my nurse’s veil round my head and no one—save the few initiated—could ever guess that the veil covered a bald pate—devoid of even a single hair!

Michel Corday notes in his journal during this period:

Albert J., currently on leave, mentions how much the soldiers hate Poincaré, a hatred based on the idea that he was the one who started the war. He points out that what makes the men take part in attacks is the fear of appearing cowardly to the others. He also says—with a laugh—that he is thinking of getting married since that will give him the right to four days’ leave and a further three days when a child is born. Also, that he hopes to get the certificate
exempting him from military service once he has produced six little ones.

THURSDAY
, 19
OCTOBER
1916
Angus Buchanan is confined to bed in Kisaki

The bed on which he is lying is made of grass and even though he is now feeling much better than he has felt for the last few days he is still very weak. Dysentery. Everyone knows the symptoms: stomach pains, a high temperature, painful and bloody bouts of diarrhoea. Buchanan has managed to remain one of the healthy ones for a long time but in the long run it was inevitable that he too would be afflicted.

The campaign with all its weary traipsing about has continued. In what has increasingly taken on the character of a pure guerrilla war, the enemy has been pushed away from the Pangani river towards the interior of German East Africa and Buchanan and his companions have been chasing them southwards through the bush. Sometimes they have passed through inhabited regions, in which case supplies have temporarily improved as they have been able to barter goods with the local population.
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On one occasion Buchanan managed to exchange an old shirt and waistcoat for two hens and half a dozen eggs.

They have had some successes, however. On the Lukigura river at the end of June they succeeded for once in engaging the usually elusive German units in a real battle. In spite of being in a pretty poor state the 25th Royal Fusiliers gave a good account of themselves again, firstly by making a rapid flanking march and then by putting their enemy to flight with a bold bayonet charge. The important town of Morogoto, located on the central railway, was taken at the end of August, though only after significant losses and some exhausting and sometimes completely pointless marches through very difficult terrain that ranged from the hilly to the waterlogged and marshy. Dar es-Salaam, the biggest and most important harbour in the colony, has been in British hands since the beginning of September. As Buchanan’s division marched south, the Germans continued to retreat, step by step, and with repeated skirmishing.

Everything came to a halt at the end of September after further costly and unsuccessful efforts to get to grips with an enemy who somehow always managed to slip away. By then the supply lines were too extended, the supplies too few and the men too exhausted. Buchanan’s company is a pitiful sight. Most of the men are emaciated, many of them have no clothes above the waist and lack socks in their boots. News seldom reaches them and letters from home sometimes take six months to arrive. They have only a very vague picture of what is happening in the war.

Earlier this autumn Buchanan caught malaria but has since recovered; then came the dysentery. To keep him company he has the hen with the white comb that he decided to keep. The hen has become very tame and is now a pet. During the marches she travels in a bucket carried by an African servant and when they make camp she runs around free, scratching for food. In some strange way she always finds her way back to him through the forest of feet and hooves, and she lays him an egg every day. On one occasion he saw her kill and eat a small poisonous snake. At night she sleeps beside him.

Buchanan is lying on his bed of grass writing his journal. He is ill and depressed, not least by their lack of tangible success:

Feeling better today and cheerier, but I wish, since I’ve lost patience, that we could get along with “the Show,” and then be quit of Africa for a time, for I have a passionate desire that we should be free to change, just for a little, the colour and the quality of a long familiar picture whose strange characteristics are now indelible. Sometimes, I’m afraid, I feel as if I was in prison, and long for the freedom of the life beyond these prison walls. Those are times when thoughts quickly fly in and out of the old scenes—dear old familiar scenes—and they are touched now with a deep and sure appreciation. Would that they could stay; would that, by the strength of their willingness, they could lift me in body over the vast space and set me in some fair peaceful land.

That same day Paolo Monelli is listening anxiously to the sound of the preparatory bombardment by the Italian artillery, which is hammering away at Monte Cauriol, where the fighting is still going on. He writes in his journal:

The sky is overcast, grey and low. Mist is rising from the valley and cutting off the two peaks, ours and the one we are to attack. If we are going to die, we shall die cut off from the world and with a sense that no one is really interested. Once one is resigned to the thought of sacrificing oneself, one would like to think that it might happen in front of an audience. To die in the sun, in full view, on the open stage that is the world—that is how one imagines dying for one’s country: but the way it is here is more like a condemned man being strangled secretly.

SUNDAY
, 29
OCTOBER
1916
Richard Stumpf finds life monotonous on board SMS
Helgoland

He wonders which is worse—the permanent clouds of blue tobacco smoke that fill their quarters below decks or the ubiquitous coal dust “that seeps into our guts the whole time.” Stumpf is as gloomy as the day itself. He recalls the expectations he had when he enlisted almost exactly four years earlier and he is plagued by the contrast with how things are now. The emotional surge that followed the great Battle of Jutland has faded away. They are back to the old, grey routines—grey as the battleships themselves: short, uneventful patrols along the coast interspersed with long periods in port. The High Seas Fleet, if anything, is behaving even more shyly and cautiously than before. His “iron prison,” SMS
Helgoland
, is once again lying at her moorings, this time waiting for a broken cylinder in the port engine to be repaired.

The tobacco smoke drives Stumpf up on deck yet again: “These stinking bloody pipes! They make me feel ill and they ruin my appetite. I’m only too glad to hear that the price of tobacco in the canteen has gone up.”
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The smoke bothers him and the monotony bores him. And
he has few friends on board. The other sailors find him strange, both because of his intellectual interests and because he spends all his time writing. There are no outlets for Stumpf’s energies here, nothing for him to get his teeth into mentally or physically; and at the moment he has nothing to read, though he has ordered some books from Berlin.

It looks like being another wasted day for Richard Stumpf. In the early afternoon, however, the whole crew is called up on deck to welcome the arrival home of a U-boat returning from patrol. Stumpf watches the crews on nearby ships begin to cheer and throw their caps in the air. There she comes—the slim hull of U-53. The whole of the U-boat crew is lined up on the deck: “They are wearing oilskins and their faces are beaming with joy.”
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Stumpf is envious of these radiant submariners and wishes he could be one of them. At the same time he longs for the war to be over soon; as usual, his emotions are divided:

Did we really have such a good life in peacetime? Even if it might seem as if we did, we weren’t really satisfied. I remember that many of us hoped for war so that things would get better for us.
Whenever I remember how we used to worry about getting a job, about pay disputes and the length of the working day, it makes the thought of peace less attractive. But at the moment it seems like paradise, a time when we could buy all the bread, all the sausage, all the clothes we wanted. Not that that was much help to all the poor buggers with no money to buy anything! Perhaps the real crisis will come when we are all lucky enough to be at peace again.

SATURDAY
, 16
DECEMBER
1916
Angus Buchanan sees reinforcements arrive in Kisaki

It is a period of recovery—for everyone. Angus Buchanan has recovered from his dysentery and his battalion, or what remains of it, has recovered from the hardships of the autumn. In a very short time both Angus and the battalion have regained surprising levels of energy. Buchanan himself has continued collecting birds, has been off on a lengthy reconnaissance mission beyond the Mgeta river and, in spite of a touch of malaria, bagged his first two elephants—a young bull followed immediately by a large cow elephant. Meanwhile the troops have been working hard preparing the route for their continued advance through enemy territory, felling numerous trees and building several bridges over the Mgeta. At Kirenwe they have also cut a wide road through the primeval forest.

Today their spirits were lifted even further by the arrival of a column of about 150 men, a welcome reinforcement for the weakened battalion. At their head is a man wearing a big soft hat and armed with a hunting rifle—it is Buchanan’s old company commander, Frederick Courteney Selous. He is now sixty-five years old. Just a few months ago Selous had been so ill that he was sent home to Great Britain and no one expected to see him again. Now, however, he looks to be in extraordinarily good shape and Buchanan and his companions are happy and impressed. “How fine an example of loyalty he gave, in thus, at his great age, returning again to the front to fight his country’s battles.” Selous is doubly welcome since he can tell them how things are going at home and what is happening in the war in general.

Later, when the day begins to cool and the shadows lengthen, they discuss this and that. Selous talks about his large collection of butterflies, which he took back to Great Britain, and Buchanan tells him about the elephant hunt. Meanwhile the black bearers in Buchanan’s machine-gun platoon build a grass hut for the man they call Bwana M’Kubwa, the big boss. In a few days they will all be moving south-east towards the Rufiji river, where the enemy is said to be entrenched. There is a new sense of expectancy in the air.

SATURDAY
, 30
DECEMBER
1916
Alfred Pollard writes a letter to his mother

It has been a good year for Sergeant Alfred Pollard DCM. The successful fighting around the crater in Sanctuary Wood in September 1915, during which he was wounded, resulted in the Distinguished Conduct Medal, which he is very pleased with, though in his heart of hearts he is a touch disappointed since he had hoped for the Victoria Cross.

After a period in hospital in England and while waiting to be declared fit for active service, he spent his time going to the theatre and to music halls (all free for wounded soldiers), attending parties, practising his grenade-throwing technique in his mother’s garden and writing an application for officer training, which was successful. He has been back in France since May and has been given responsibility for training the battalion in hand-grenade combat. He has also returned to his old habit of making nocturnal trips into no-man’s-land.