1982 - An Ice-Cream War (17 page)

“Huns in those trees, I’ll be bound,” Wheech-Browning said. “I don’t think I’ll come any closer if you don’t mind. How far is it to your place from here?”

“About four miles. It’ll take us an hour to get there, a quick look over, then an hour back. Shouldn’t be too long a wait.”

“Absolutely no trouble. See the outcrop there? I’ll stroll over with my binoculars.” He pointed to an untidy tumbled clump of boulders some six hundred yards off. “See what the old Germani are getting up to.”

Temple and Mr Essanjee looked in the direction he indicated. Temple saw the rocks, warm in the morning sun.

Then suddenly they seemed to explode in puffs of thick black smoke. A second later came the loud report of rifles. The thorn bushes around them seemed to be plucked and shaken by invisible hands.

“Bloody hell!” exclaimed Wheech-Browning. “Damn Germans! Not even a warning.”

“Oh my bloody God,” Mr Essanjee said and sat down with a thump. He looked in horror at his thigh. The starched white drill was being engulfed by a brilliant red stain.

“Oh shit!” Temple said.

“Ouf,” Mr Essanjee sighed and fell back to the ground. Temple and Wheech-Browning ran over and knelt by his side. Another stain had appeared in the middle of his chest.

“Good God!” said Wheech-Browning, holding his hand up to his mouth. The rattle of firing ceased.

“Let’s get out of here,” Temple said. They leapt onto the motorbike. Wheech-Browning attempted a kick-start, but banged his ankle on the foot rest.

“
Christ
!” he wept, tears in his eyes. “That’s agony!” Wincing, he kick-started again and the engine caught. Temple glanced back over his shoulder. He saw small figures scrambling down the rock pile and running up the track towards them.

“Hold on!” Temple shouted. “We’d better get Essanjee.”

“Fine. But look sharpish!”

They dragged Mr Essanjee over to the side-car and toppled him in head first, leaving his legs hanging over the side. Then Temple and Wheech-Browning jumped on the bike and, with rear wheel spinning furiously, they roared off back down the track to Voi.

Some miles further on, when they felt they were safe, they stopped. They confirmed that Mr Essanjee was indeed dead. His suit and jacket were soaking with blood, rendered all the more coruscating by the contrast it made to the patches of gleaming white. They rearranged his body in a more dignified position, so that it looked like he was dozing in the side-car, his head thrown back.

“Damn good shots, those fellows,” Wheech-Browning observed as he wedged his rifle between Mr Essanjee’s plump knees. “He was a plucky little chap for an insurance salesman. What did you say the name of his company was?”

“African Guarantee and Indemnity Co.”

“Must bear that in mind.”

Temple wondered who would process his claim now. How long would it take to find a replacement for Mr Essanjee? And would he be as amenable? He heard Wheech-Browning say something.

“What was that?” he asked.

“I was saying that, if you ask me, the only way you’re going to get back to that farm of yours is to join the army and fight your way there.”

Temple tugged at his moustache. “You know,” he said resignedly, “I think you may be right.”

26 October 1914,
SS Homayun, Indian Ocean

Gabriel Cobb stood in a patch of shade on the aft officers’ deck of the SS
Homayun
. The sun beat down out of a sky so bleached it seemed white, scalding the gently swelling surface of the ocean. The smoke from the
Homayuns
twin stacks hung in the air, trailing behind the ship, a tattered black epitaph marking its ponderous eight-knot passage from India to Africa.

Gabriel had been standing in the same position for nearly an hour, mesmerized by the wake streaming out behind. He was sunk in a profound lethargy, a sense of depressed boredom that seemed to penetrate every corner of the ship, if not the entire fourteen-vessel convoy of Indian Expeditionary Force ‘B’—force ‘C’ had arrived a month earlier—eight thousand men, steaming off, as far as he knew, to invade German East Africa.

He leant back against a bulkhead and exhaled, feeling his shirt press damply against his back. He was lucky to find this corner of the deck unoccupied. Every bit of shade had been claimed by sprawling supine soldiers, desperate to escape from the balmy clamminess of their tiny cabins. God only knew,

Gabriel thought, what it must be like for the other ranks, the Indian soldiers and regimental followers quartered below decks, sleeping in hammocks slung only a foot apart. He took off his pith helmet and used it to fan his face. God only knew what it was like for the stokers shovelling coal into the furnaces in the belly of the ship. He tried to cheer himself up. At least he was better off than the stokers and the miserable, ill-disciplined men he was supposed to lead into battle.

Gabriel sat down on the deck and stretched his legs out in front of him. It was small consolation. He’d never known life deal him such a succession of cruel disappointments. His ambitions had been modest. He wished only to fight in France with his regiment, but even that was to be denied him. He paused. The effort of swishing his hat to and fro was enervating in this heat. He allowed his head to roll to one side. Everywhere he looked he saw ships. Tramp steamers, reconditioned liners, troopships. He saw the battleship HMS
Goliath
, its four stacks belching smoke as for some reason it got up steam. It raised only a flicker of interest. The German commerce raider
Emden
was known to be loose in the Indian Ocean. So too was the cruiser
Königsberg
, recently on display to the inhabitants of Dar-es-Salaam, now believed to be roaming the coastal waters in search of prey. He didn’t really care; anything would be preferable to the numbing monotony he’d been experiencing for the last four weeks. He saw the battleship slowly wheel round and head back in the direction of India. Just another straggler, Gabriel thought, falling behind.

It was now the middle of October. The war had been going on for nearly three months. For at least two of them, Gabriel calculated with some sarcasm, he’d been on board ship. Anyone would have thought he’d joined the navy.

Gabriel and Charis had returned from their shortened honey-moon on the thirtieth of July. Gabriel had gone at once to London in search of instructions but had been told to go away as there was nothing anyone could tell him. They then spent an uncomfortable few days at Stackpole—no one was expecting their return, the cottage was not ready, Cyril was still distempering the bedroom walls—watching the slide into war. He and Charis had been unhappy. Charis had been cool and distant. Every day she pointedly reminded him that they could be walking along the promenade at Trouville. Every day, that is, until the fourth of August when war was declared, thereby vindicating what had seemed like precipitate caution on Gabriel’s part. On the night of the fourth they had also been able to move into the cottage and, as if by magic, some of the happiness and intimacy they had experienced in Trouville returned. But it was clouded by the knowledge that Gabriel would soon have to go away. Diligently he telephoned to London every day, keen to get his orders. On the sixth, he was instructed to report to Southampton where he would find a berth on the SS
Dongola
, a P&O liner, which would take him to rejoin his regiment in India.

The
Dongola
left Southampton on the thirteenth, crammed with officers rejoining regiments in Egypt and India. Sammy Hinshelwood, and a few others from the West Kents who had been on leave, were also on board and the first days of the voyage out were passed in frenzied speculation about the possible length of the war and what role the West Kents would play in it, assuming it lasted long enough. As they sailed slowly across the Mediterranean the now familiar boredom began to infect them all. Interminable games of contract bridge were the main diversion, sessions starting at breakfast and lasting long into the night.

From time to time the odd wireless message brought snippets of news of the progress of the war in Europe: the German advance through Belgium, the fall of Liège, the disastrous French attack in Lorraine, the battle of Mons. The sense of frustration at missing out was acute. But there were no mails at Gibraltar (they were not even allowed off the ship) and none waiting at Port Said either. As they neared Port Said the weather became noticeably hotter. Awnings were stretched over all available deck space and most of the officers forsook their cramped cabins to sleep on deck during the night. Gabriel, fortunately, had a cork mattress that he could lie on and so passed the night in some comfort. The others had to make do with blankets, or at best a deckchair. One break in the routine occurred when they were all inoculated against smallpox and yellow fever. Gabriel was incapacitated for two days with a high temperature.

It took the
Dongola
a week to chug through the Red Sea. The thermometer rose to 114° (140° in the stoke hold) and everyone went about stark naked at night in an attempt to keep cool. “Just as well there are no ladies on board,” Gabriel said to Sammy Hinshelwood one evening as they picked their way through naked bodies towards their mattresses. “On the contrary,” Hinshelwood laughed, “it’s a great shame.” That night as they lay side by side Hinshelwood talked for a long time about sex. About a girl he knew, a tart he’d picked up at the Adelphi theatre. Gabriel lay beside him, uneasy and embarrassed. Hinshelwood made some coarse jokes about his interrupted honeymoon, and described Charis as ‘a truly charming girl’. Gabriel made no response, but the muted talk of women made him excited and he had to roll onto his stomach to conceal his arousal.

One of the stewards died of heatstroke in the Red Sea. Gabriel attended the small religious service and watched as the weighted body was tipped into the water with a forlorn splash. Gabriel found that the death depressed him unusually. He found his thoughts continually on the armies in Europe and the war ahead. One night somebody said that a quarter of the troops would surely be killed. That gave each individual a one in four chance, Gabriel thought. Even when it was figured as personally as that Gabriel found, to his vague surprise, that the idea of war seemed even more exciting.

After the Red Sea the Indian Ocean was cooler. However the
Dongola
caught the tail end of the monsoon season and rolled and pitched the rest of the way to Bombay. Everyone on board suffered terribly from seasickness. Often there were two hundred or more men leaning over the leeward side of the ship being sick into the sea. The sides of the
Dongola
became streaked and spattered with dried vomit and the faint acid smell of sick hung in every corridor and companionway.

They arrived in Bombay after a twenty-six-day voyage. Gabriel and Hinshelwood were given instructions to proceed directly to the regiment at Rawalpindi. “I’m damned if I’m getting straight on a train after a month in that accursed ship!” Hinshelwood swore. He and Gabriel booked in to the Taj Hotel for a night. They bathed, had two enormous meals and went shopping. The next morning they boarded the train at Bombay Station and spent a dusty, but tolerably comfortable, fifty hours crossing the Punjab to Rawalpindi.

For two weeks life regained its sense of composure. News of the German retreat to the Aisne caused great belligerent excitement. Gabriel returned to a means of existence that he had known before his marriage. Except on this occasion there was no Charis nearby. Nor was there much time for entertainment of any sort as the Regiment was busily preparing itself for embarkation. The main Indian expeditionary force for the European theatre was in the process of being despatched, and in addition two subsidiary forces were being raised. One was for the Persian Gulf and one for the invasion of German East Africa. Rumour had it that the West Kents would be embarking for Europe in early October, but no one was sure. Gabriel thought it was typical of the army’s Byzantme reasoning to send him all the way to India just to send him back to Europe. It was, he later realized, equally typical of the army to decide that, of all the officers in the regiment, he was the one chosen not to accompany it. The fateful Movement Order telegram arrived from headquarters in Simla. It informed him that he was being ‘attached’ to the 69
th
Palamcottah Light Infantry, who were due to embark for East Africa in mid October as part of Indian Expeditionary Force ‘B’.

East Africa! The Palamcottah Light Infantry! Gabriel’s disappointment was bitter and acute. A third-rate Indian regiment from the little-regarded Bangalore Brigade in Madras. His prompt protestations and appeals had no effect. His colleagues sympathized but their patience over his relentless moaning and complaints was limited. Sammy Hinshelwood reminded him that the West Kents could end up guarding the Suez Canal and that at least Gabriel could be sure of some action before the war ended.

So, for the second time in a month Gabriel crossed the Punjab, but on this occasion, as if cruelly to remind him how his plans had gone awry, the journey took ninety hours. He shared the train with a hospital unit full of Indian sub-assistant surgeons and with dozens of coolies and bearers. They, it transpired, were are going to East Africa; but the British doctors seemed quite content with their lot. A place called Nairobi, they said: apparently the climate was superb. Gabriel spent most of the journey in a corner of the crowded compartment (the fan wasn’t working) trying to read a book. The doctors repeatedly congratulated themselves on their good luck. All they seemed to care about, Gabriel reflected,. was the weather. One day they spent a full ten hours motionless in a railway siding with nothing to eat or drink except some
petit beurre
biscuits and warm soda water.

Gabriel’s spirits had been set in a decline ever since he’d received the news of his transfer. At the barracks in Bombay they took another plunge when he was united with his new battalion. The 69
th
Palamcottah Light Infantry hadn’t seen active service since the Boxer rebellion in 1900, which battle order for that campaign hung proudly in the mess. A little inquiry on Gabriel’s part provided him with the information that the Palamcottahs had in fact only got as far as Hong Kong.