Going Solo (8 page)

I told him I knew it very well.

‘Down that road’, the Captain said, ‘every German in Dar es Salaam will try to run the moment war is declared.
It will be your duty to stop them and round them up and bring them back to the prison camp.’

‘Who,
me
?’ I cried, aghast.

‘You and your platoon,’ he said. ‘We can’t spare any more men. We’ve got the entire country to cover. Make sure you take up a sensible defensive position and deploy your troops under good cover. Some of those Germans may try to shoot their way out.’

‘You mean’, I said, ‘that just me and my platoon are going to try to stop every German in Dar?’

‘Those are your orders,’ he said.

‘But there must be hundreds of them.’

‘There are,’ he said, smirking a bit.

‘What happens if they
do
have guns and put up a fight?’ I asked.

‘Mow them down,’ the Captain said. ‘You’ve got a machine-gun, haven’t you? One machine-gun can defeat 500 men with rifles.’

I was getting nervous. I didn’t want to be the person who gave the order to mow down 500 civilians out there on the dusty coast road that led to Portuguese East Africa. ‘What happens if they’ve got their women and children with them?’ I asked.

‘You’ll have to use your discretion,’ the Captain said, evading the issue.

‘But … but,’ I stammered, ‘that road is the most important escape route in the whole country. Don’t you think that you or some other regular officer should be doing this job?’

‘We’ve all got our hands full,’ the Captain said.

I tried once more. ‘I am really not trained for this sort of thing,’ I said. ‘I’m just a chap who works for Shell.’

‘Rubbish!’ he barked. ‘Off you go now! And don’t let us down!’

So off I went.

I found a telephone and called Mdisho at the house to tell him not to expect me back until he saw me.

‘I know where you are going, bwana!’ he shouted down the phone. ‘You are going after the Germani! Am I right?’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘we’ll see.’

‘Let me come with you, bwana!’ he cried. ‘Oh,
please
let me come with you!’

‘I’m afraid that’s not possible this time, Mdisho,’ I said. ‘You’ll just have to stay and look after the house.’

‘Be careful, bwana,’ he said. ‘You
will
be careful they do not kill you.’

I went out into the barrack square where my platoon was waiting for me. The askaris looked very smart in their khaki shorts and shirts, and they were lined up at attention beside two open trucks with their rifles at their sides. As soon as I arrived, the Sergeant saluted me and told the men to get into the trucks. I sat in the cabin of the front truck between the driver and the Sergeant, and we drove through the town towards the coast road that would lead eventually to Mozambique in Portuguese East Africa. In the second truck the askaris had a huge reel of telephone cable which they were going to lay along our route so that I could keep in touch with headquarters and be told the moment war was declared. There were no radios for that sort of thing out there.

‘How much cable have you got?’ I asked the Sergeant. ‘How far along the road can we go?’

‘Only about three miles, bwana,’ he answered, grinning.

Just outside Dar es Salaam we stopped by a small hut
and two signallers jumped out and unlocked the door and connected up our telephone cable to a plug inside. Then we drove on and the signallers fed the telephone cable out on to the grass verge as we went slowly forward. The road ran right along the edge of the Indian Ocean, and the water out there was calm and clear and pale green. I could see the sandy bottom under the water for a long way out and on the little strip of sand between us and the water there grew those everlasting coconut palms waving their tops high up against the hot blue sky. It was a very beautiful sight and a little breeze was blowing from the sea into the cabin of our truck.

After a couple of miles, we came to a place where the road sloped steeply uphill and curved inland and went right through some very thick jungle. ‘What about over there in the trees?’ I asked the Sergeant.

‘It is a good place,’ he said, so we stopped where the road entered the jungle and we climbed out of the trucks.

‘Leave the trucks outside blocking the road,’ I said to the Sergeant, ‘and see that each man takes up a concealed position on the edge of the forest. The machine-gun and all the rifles must be able to cover the road just beyond the blockade.’

When all this had been done, I took the Sergeant aside and had a little talk with him in Swahili. ‘Look, Sergeant,’ I said, ‘I am sure you realize that I am not a soldier.’

‘I realize that, bwana,’ he said politely.

‘So if you see me doing something silly, please tell me.’

‘Yes, bwana,’ he said.

‘Are you happy with our positions?’ I asked him.

‘I think everything is fine, bwana,’ he said.

So we hung around through the afternoon waiting for the field telephone to ring. I sat on the ground in a shady place near the phone and smoked my pipe. I remember I was wearing a khaki shirt, khaki shorts, khaki stockings and brown shoes, and I had a khaki topee on my head. That was the regular civilian way of dressing out there and very comfortable it was. But I myself was far from comfortable in my mind. I was twenty-three and I had not yet been trained to kill anyone. I wasn’t absolutely sure that I could bring myself to give the order to open fire on a bunch of German civilians in cold blood should the necessity arise. I was feeling altogether very uncomfortable in my skin.

Darkness came and still the telephone did not ring.

There was a 44-gallon drum of drinking water in one of the trucks and everyone helped himself. Then the Sergeant made a fire out of sticks and began cooking supper for his men. He was making rice in an enormous pot, and while the rice was boiling he took from the truck a great stem of bananas and started snapping them off the stem one by one and peeling them and slicing them up and dropping the slices into the pot of rice. When the food was ready, each askari produced his own tin plate and spoon and the Sergeant dished out large portions with a ladle. Up to then I hadn’t thought about my own food and I certainly had not brought anything with me. Watching the men eat made me hungry. ‘Do you think I could have a little of that, please?’ I said to the Sergeant.

‘Yes, bwana,’ he said. ‘Have you got a plate?’

‘No,’ I said. So he found me a tin plate and a spoon and gave me a huge helping. It was absolutely delicious. The rice was unhusked and brown and the grains did not stick
together. The slices of banana were hot and sweet and in some way they oiled the rice, as butter would. It was the best rice dish I had ever tasted and I ate it all and felt good and forgot about the Germans. ‘Wonderful,’ I said to the Sergeant. ‘You are a fine cook.’

‘Whenever we are out of the barracks,’ he said, ‘I must feed my men. It is something you have to learn when you become a Sergeant.’

‘It was truly magnificent,’ I said. ‘You should open a restaurant and become rich.’

All around us in the forest the frogs were croaking incessantly. African frogs have an unusually loud rasping croak and however far away from you they are, the sound always seems to be coming from somewhere near your feet. The croaking of frogs is the night music of the East African coast. The actual croak is made only by the bullfrog and he does it by blowing out his dewlap and letting it go with a
burp
. This is his mating call and when the female hears it she hops smartly over to the side of her prospective mate. But when she arrives a curious thing happens and it is not quite what you are thinking. The bullfrog does not turn and greet the female. Far from it. He ignores her totally and continues to sit there singing his song to the stars while the female waits patiently beside him. She waits and she waits and she waits. The male sings and he sings and he sings, often for several hours, and what has actually happened is this. The bullfrog has fallen so much in love with the sound of his own voice that he has completely forgotten why he started croaking in the first place.
We
know that he started because he was feeling sexy. But now he has become
mesmerized by the lovely music he is making so that for him nothing else exists, not even the panting female at his side. There comes a time, though, when she loses all patience and starts nudging him hard with a foreleg, and only then does the bullfrog come out of his trance and turn to embrace her.

Ah well. The bullfrog, I told myself as I sat there in the dark forest, is not after all so very different from a lot of human males that I could think of.

I borrowed an army blanket from the Sergeant and settled down for the night beside the telephone. I thought briefly about snakes and wondered how many there were gliding about on the floor of the forest. Probably thousands. But the askaris were chancing it so why shouldn’t I?

The phone did not ring in the night and at dawn the Sergeant built his fire again and cooked us some more rice and bananas. It didn’t taste so good early in the morning.

Shortly after eleven o’clock the tinkle of the field telephone made everybody jump. The voice on the other end said to me, ‘Great Britain has declared war on Germany. You are now on full alert.’ Then he rang off. I told the Sergeant to get all his men into their positions.

For an hour or so nothing happened. The askaris waited behind their guns and I waited out in the open beside the two trucks that were blocking the road.

Then, suddenly, away in the distance I saw a cloud of dust. A little later, I could make out the first car, then close behind it a second and a third and a fourth. All the Germans in Dar must have made arrangements to assemble and travel together in convoy as soon as war was declared, for now I could see a line of cars, each about twenty yards
behind the one in front, stretching for half a mile down the road. There were trucks piled high with baggage. There were ordinary saloons with pieces of furniture strapped on their roofs. There were vans and there were station-wagons. I called the Sergeant out of the forest. ‘Here they come,’ I said, ‘and there’s plenty of them. I want you to stay out of sight with the men. I shall remain here and meet the Germans. If I raise two arms above my head, like this, the machine-gun and all the rifles are to fire one burst over the heads of these people. Not
at
them, you understand, but over their heads.’

‘Yes, bwana, one burst over their heads.’

‘If there is violence towards me and they try to force their way through, then you will be in charge and must do whatever you think right.’

‘Yes, bwana,’ the Sergeant said, relishing the possibility. He returned to the forest. I stood out on the road waiting for the leader of the convoy to reach me. The lead car was a large Chevrolet station-wagon driven by a man who had two more men beside him in the front seat. The rest of the car was filled with baggage. I put one hand up for him to stop, which he did. I felt like a traffic cop as I strolled over to the driver’s window.

‘I am afraid you cannot go any further,’ I said. ‘You and all the others must turn around and go back to Dar es Salaam. One of my trucks will lead you. The other will bring up the rear of the convoy.’

‘Vot sort of bull is this?’ the man shouted with a heavy German accent. He was middle-aged with a thick neck and he was almost bald. ‘Move those trucks off the road! Vi are going through!’

‘I’m afraid not,’ I said. ‘You are now prisoners of war.’

The bald man got slowly out of the car. He was very angry and his movements were full of menace. The two men with him also got out. The bald man turned and signalled with his arm to the fifty odd cars that were lined up behind him, and immediately a man, and sometimes two, got out of each car and came walking towards us. There were women and children in many of the cars as well, but they stayed where they were.

I didn’t at all like the way things were shaping up. What
was
I going to do, I asked myself, if they refused to go back and tried to barge their way through? I knew there and then that I could never quite bring myself to give the order for the machine-gun to mow them all down. It would be an appalling massacre. I stood there and said nothing.

In a few minutes a crowd of not less than seventy Germans were standing in a half-circle behind the bald man, who was clearly their leader.

The bald man turned away from me and addressed his countrymen. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Let’s get these two trucks off the road and move on.’

‘Hold it!’ I said, trying to sound twice my age. ‘I have orders to stop you at all costs. If you try to go on, we shall shoot.’

‘Who vill shoot?’ asked the bald man contemptuously. He drew a revolver from the back pocket of his khaki trousers and I saw that it was one of those long-barrelled Lugers. Immediately, at least half of the seventy or so men standing around him produced identical weapons. The bald man pointed his Luger at my chest.

I had seen this sort of thing done a thousand times in the cinema, but it was a very different thing in real life. I was properly frightened. I did my best not to show it. Then I raised both arms above my head. The bald man smiled. He thought it was a gesture of surrender.

Crack! Crack! Crack!
All the guns behind me including the machine-gun opened up and bullets went whistling over our heads. The Germans jumped. They quite literally jumped. Even the bald man jumped. And so did I.

I lowered my hands. ‘There is no way you can get through,’ I said. ‘The first man who tries to go on from here will be shot. If all of you try, then all of you will be shot. Those are my orders. I have enough fire-power in there to stop a regiment.’

There was absolute silence. The bald man lowered his Luger and suddenly his whole attitude changed. He gave me an ugly forced smile and said softly, ‘Vy do you not let us through?’

‘Because we are at war with Germany,’ I said, ‘and you are all of German nationality, therefore you are the enemy.’

‘Vi are civilians,’ he said.

‘Maybe you are,’ I said. ‘But as soon as you get to Portuguese East, you’ll find your way back to the Fatherland and become soldiers. You are not going through.’