1982 - An Ice-Cream War (22 page)

“What do you think?” he said to Gleeson who’d snaked up to join him.

“The Rajputs seem to have cleared out completely,” Gleeson said. “Bad show.”

“Yes,” Gabriel agreed. He wondered what they should do. “I suppose we should press on into the town. They must have fired on the Rajputs. Why aren’t they firing on us?”

“Good question,” said Gleeson with a shaky smile.

“Let’s go,” Gabriel said and stood up. He gave a long single blast on his whistle. “Come on!” he shouted to his men.

He set off running in a half crouch towards the ditch, not making the best of progress through the knee-high grass. He dodged round a spindly acacia tree. He thought he saw puffs of smoke beyond the railway cutting. He was being shot at! Suddenly to his utter astonishment the air was ‘thick with bullets’. Unconsciously the expression leapt into his mind. It was a cliché, he was aware, but he never expected it to be literally true: black dots and specks, whizzing erratically through the air. He felt a sudden burning pain in his neck. He was hit! Oh God, he thought, not in the neck. He stumbled, but ran on, clapping a hand to his wound to staunch the blood, bullets buzzing and darting past. But wait, he thought, they weren’t bullets, they were bees! He stopped and turned round. His men were leaping about or writhing on the ground like epileptics as the swarming myriads of bees attacked. He saw Gleeson frantically swatting the air with his sun helmet. The atmosphere shimmered and danced with the irate black objects. With dismay he saw the demoralized remnants of his troops pick themselves up and run hell for leather back to the maize field. Gabriel inflated his lungs and blew the longest shrillest blasts he could on his whistle, in an attempt to check the rout, but they were gone, pursued by the furious bees.

“My God,” Gleeson whimpered as he staggered over. “I’ve been practically stung to death!” The backs of his hands looked lumpy and swollen, his cheeks and neck seemed thickened with incipient carbuncles making him look stupid and loutish. “Look,” Gleeson pointed up. In the acacia tree Gabriel saw what looked like several slim elongated barrels. A few bees still hovered around them. “Bloody native beehives,” Gleeson wept, holding his puffy hands in front of him like a lap dog. They were swelling up at an alarming rate.

Gabriel suddenly realized they were standing in what was meant to be the middle of a battlefield. He looked over to the mound and saw the troops who had been manning the machine gun wildly striking out as if they had been attacked by invisible assailants. Across the railway cutting he could just make out a few German askaris fleeing for shelter in the railway workshops. He looked back at Gleeson who was whimpering in agony over his ravaged hands which now resembled a pair of well-padded cricket gloves. Then little clouds of dust began to kick up out of the grass.

“Come on, Gleeson,” Gabriel said. “Into the ditch.” They rushed the remaining few yards and leapt into the ditch, which was about four feet deep. Gabriel sank up to his ankles into the brackish slimy water which lay in its bottom. With a moan of relief Gleeson plunged his boiling hands deep into the mud. “Put mud on my neck!” he cried, and Gabriel slapped handfuls of the foul-smelling stuff on his cheeks and neck. His own sting was throbbing painfully but he seemed to have escaped lightly.

While Gleeson soothed his hands Gabriel inched up the wall of the ditch and peered back to the maize field. Not a sign of his men. He noticed that the machine gun on the mound had started firing again.

“No trace of them,” he said to Gleeson.

“The swine,” Gleeson swore bitterly. “The cowardly swine!”

“Feel you can move on?” Gabriel asked. “Let’s go on down the ditch. We’ll never cross the cutting here.”

Gleeson nodded his assent, his eyes shut, his bottom lip caught between his yellow teeth.

Bent double, they made their way along the ditch in the direction of the sea, stepping gingerly over the few dead bodies they encountered or rolling them out of the way. Gleeson held his mud caked hands in front of him as if he’d just made them out of clay and they were still fragile. Soon they came to a place where bushes and thorn trees lined the parapet of the ditch and Gabriel took the chance to peer out and get their hearings.

Cautiously, he raised his head. From this position he had a better view of the town. He saw a large stone building with steep tiled roofs and the words ‘Deutscher Kaiser Hotel’ written on it. As he watched, the German flag which was flying from the flagpole was lowered.

“We’re in the town, I think,” he called to Gleeson. “What time do you make it?” Somehow, somewhere, he’d lost his watch.

“Almost four, I think,” Gleeson said. “I can’t see my watch face. It’s covered in mud.”

Gabriel scraped it off. Gleeson’s watch had stopped at ten past three. “I’m afraid your watch has stopped,” he said.

Gabriel looked to his left. He saw white troops moving beyond the railway cutting, dashing from house to house. “The North Lancs are across the cutting,” he reported. Gleeson elbowed himself up to join him.

“What should we do?” Gleeson said. He held his enormous hands before his face, like some grotesque surgeon waiting for his rubber gloves.

“Let’s go on in,” Gabriel said. He couldn’t think of anything else.

“Right.”

They scurried across the patch of ground to the railway cutting and slithered down one side, then stepped across the rails and toiled up the opposite thirty-foot incline, Gabriel with an arm locked in Gleeson’s elbow. Once at the top they ran on through some vegetable plots and fell to the ground heavily in the shelter of a mud-brick house.

“Hoi!” they heard someone shout. “You!” They looked up.

Crouched behind a stone wall up ahead were half a dozen men of the North Lancs.

“You speak Indian?” a corporal was shouting in a thick Lancashire accent. Gabriel and Gleeson crawled over to join them.

“Oh. Sorry, sir. It’s, er, them fooking niggers in t’ Kashmir Rifles. Just down road there. Every time we shows our faces they bloody shoot at us.”

“I speak Hindi,” Gleeson offered. He looked most odd, Gabriel thought, with half his face covered in mud. Gleeson crawled into a nearby house with the corporal and soon Gabriel heard him shouting instructions. Gabriel peered over the wall. He found he was looking up a pleasant street of single-storey, white mud and stone houses. Dead bodies, with their already familiar indecent splay-legged posture, lay in the middle of the road. He couldn’t tell if they were friend or foe.

“Quite a fight here,” he said.

“Yes, sir. We had the signal to fall back. They got jerries in every bloody house. But those daft monkeys keep shootin’ at us. They’re guarding the bridge back across the cutting. None of them speaks English,” he paused. “What happened to the lieutenant, sir? If you’ll excuse me asking.”

“He was stung by bees. My whole company was attacked and driven off.”

“By bees?”

“Yes, millions of them.”

The man shook his head in admiration. “Squareheads, eh? Amazing. They think of everything.”

Gabriel looked over the wall again. The afternoon sun was low in the sky and strong shadows were being cast across the road. Then he saw figures slipping in and out of the houses, moving down the street towards them: three Europeans and about thirty askaris with bayonets fixed to their rifles.

He saw one of the officers—who seemed unaware of their presence—stand for a moment in front of the gable end of a house. Without thinking further, Gabriel levelled his revolver and fired. He saw a big chunk of plaster fall off the wall behind the officer’s head before the man flung himself into a doorway. In immediate response there was a great fusillade of shots and Gabriel ducked down under cover. He cursed his feeble aim: he had had a splendid target. He found himself trembling with excitement, his heart seemed lodged somewhere in his throat. He heard the whup of bullets passing over his head and the charter of a machine gun. Ricochets hummed and pinged off the stonework.

“We want to get out of here, sir,” one of the North Lancs said. “Don’t want to get caught by them jerry niggers.” All the men kept their heads well down.

The corporal scuttled out of the house. “It’s clear now, sir. We can go.”

“Hold on,” Gabriel said. “Where’s Lieutenant Gleeson?”

“He’s been hit, sir. Got him with that last volley.”

“Wait here,” Gabriel ordered and darted into the house. He peered into a couple of rooms. He saw a brass bedstead, cheap wooden furniture. In an end room he found Gleeson lying face down beneath the window from where he’d been shouting to the Kashmir Rifles. The wall behind was pitted with bullet holes. Gabriel was suddenly appalled by the thought that he might have been responsible. If he hadn’t shot at that German…Keeping his head down Gabriel carefully turned Gleeson over and almost collapsed in a faint. One or several bullets had removed Gleeson’s lower jawbone in its entirety, but somehow his tongue had been untouched. It now lolled, uncontained, at his throat like a thick fleshy cravat, pink and purple. Gleeson’s upper lip was drawn back revealing his top row of yellow teeth, his fair moustache was spattered with dried mud and blood. What was most horrifying was the way his eyes boggled and rolled, and his tongue twitched feebly at his neck. With a little moan Gabriel realized Gleeson was still alive, blood welling and pumping gently from the back of his throat. It was extraordinary, Gabriel thought in a daze, how large the human tongue actually was, when its entire length was revealed. He crawled out of the room on his hands and knees and was sick in the passageway. Poor Gleeson, he thought, poor old Gleeson.

After a few moments, Gabriel got to his feet and went back to the side door. There was no sign of the North Lancs. They had all gone without waiting for him. He wondered where the Germans were. He went back inside to the end room, trying not to look at Gleeson. Gabriel lowered himself out of the window. He crossed the back yard and eased himself through the garden hedge. An immense noise of gunfire was coming from the direction of the wharves, but as far as he could see he was alone again. He ran across a dirt road and slid down into the railway cutting. Here and there lay the bodies of sepoys, not all of them dead, as he could hear moans and cries coming from some of them.

He scrabbled up the opposite side. He saw tree-dotted scrub between him and the safety of the forest and the coconut plantations. Head down, he ran across the two hundred yard stretch of clearer ground at full speed, leaping undulations and bushes and the large numbers of dead and dying scattered about. Almost idly he noted how a dead body seems part of the ground, as if the earth were in a hurry to claim it…He told himself he was in shock, poor Gleeson’s horrible injury had unsettled him. He would calm down in the forest, gather his strength and then go back and try to help him. Try to carry him to a casualty clearing station.

He fought his way through the first welcoming thickets, broke through into an open space, tripped and went sprawling. He found a depression in the ground and crawled into it. He lay back, an arm over his eyes, his chest heaving as he struggled to get his breath.

He sat up with a start. He couldn’t believe it, but he seemed to have fallen asleep for a few seconds. He had a pounding vicious headache. His mouth tasted foul with dried saliva. His throat was parched. Still the relentless popping of gunfire came from the direction of the town. He put his head in his hands, suddenly overcome with weariness and the emotions rampaging through his body. He pulled his knees towards him and rested his head on them. He rubbed his forehead on his kneecaps.

He unholstered his revolver. His hands looked like a stranger’s. Black with dirt, scratched, a badly bleeding knuckle (how had that happened?). They felt thick with blisters and callouses. He heard the booming reports of naval guns, and decided to try and make his way in that general direction. Most of the fighting seemed to be coming from the seaward edge of the town. He set off. After some time he came to one of the many rough tracks that lead east to west along the headland from Ras Kasone to Tanga. He debated for an instant whether to return to the beach or go back towards the town. With some reluctance he turned towards Tanga. He hadn’t gone more than twenty yards when he met Bilderbeck running down the path towards him.

“Cobb!” Bilderbeck shouted, “Just the man!” It was as if he and Bilderbeck had met on the steps of his club. Bilderbeck grabbed him by the arm. “This way,” he said and led him a little distance off the track. There, in the shelter of an earth bank were seven Rajput sepoys cowering together.

“Tell them to get up,” Bilderbeck said. “Tell them to take up firing positions up the road.”

“I’m afraid I don’t speak the language,” Gabriel said apologetically.

“What? Oh never mind.” Bilderbeck strode forward and started roughly pulling the sepoys to their feet, yelling “Get up!” and pushing them in the direction of the town and the firing. Two reluctantly obeyed, picking up their rifles and slouching dispiritedly off. The others crouched where they were, wailing and moaning softly. Bilderbeck drew his revolver and threatened them. Then he fired into the bank and there was a flurry of movement as the men leapt panic-stricken to their feet, milling around confusedly in evident terror at this mad Englishman with a gun.

But one man had not moved. He sat in a hunched squatting posture, one arm raised vaguely in protection, muttering distractedly to himself.

“Get up, you filthy coward!” Gabriel heard Bilderbeck roar. But the man wasn’t hearing anything. He was gibbering like a lunatic, high and piping, a loop of saliva hanging from his chin.

“I warn you,” Bilderbeck said. Gabriel couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Bilderbeck levelled his revolver at the sepoy’s head. The gun was only six inches from his head.

“I am ordering you,” Bilderbeck said in an eerily reasonable voice, “to get to your feet and take up a firing position at the end of the road.”

The man stared bleakly at the gun.

“Right,” Bilderbeck said angrily and fired. Gabriel flinched uncontrollably at the noise.

The bullet hit the sepoy just in front of his left ear. The man’s head jerked sharply to one side and he slumped back as if in a deep swoon. There was a delicate spattering sound as bits of expressed brain hit the leaves of the bushes behind the man. Immediately the other sepoys rushed up the track with cries of fear, Bilderbeck running behind them waving his revolver and shouting.