Too Close to the Sun (14 page)

IN NOVEMBER 1913, DENYS
set about his most ambitious scheme to date: a six-month odyssey to buy cattle from Italian Somaliland. Cattle were in permanent demand in the Protectorate, but only the richest settlers could ship in Australian or South African breeds: the rest were dependent on the bony Somali herds intermittently driven south by nomadic tribesmen. Few ranchers were prepared to hazard the journey themselves. Denys saw his chance. Galbraith Cole invested half the capital and would initially keep the cattle on his farm at Gilgil, near Lake Elmenteita. Denys was to go up himself with a small team of Africans and a mysterious colleague who called himself Baron Blanc. He planned to buy stock from the Somalis, who raised their herds in Jubaland, the northeastern corner of Kenya, and across Italian Somaliland. It was a nine-hundred-mile round-trip, and it was to be one of the greatest adventures of his life.

With Blanc, six African staff, and his Somali servant, Billea, Denys headed for the oceans of scrub and shale that began at Isiolo, the northernmost limit of the Protectorate’s cultivable zone. The single
duka
where they bought final supplies smelled of frankincense and dust. Beyond it lay the whole Northern Frontier District—a blanched landscape of sandstorms and flies, of burning winds, narrow valleys, and settlements stunned by the sun. Everything was thinner and more enervating than in the fat grasslands to the south. Little was known of the NFD, despite the fact that it stretched hundreds of miles, up to the Sudan and Abyssinia (Ethiopia) to the north and across to Jubaland and Italian Somaliland to the east. It is still largely unsettled even now. Crisscrossed by ancient migration routes, it was an area infamous for lawlessness. That year, Abyssinian
shiftas
(bandits) had been raiding Rendille and Samburu herders, and a detachment of the King’s African Rifles had been dispatched from Nairobi to restore order. Farther north, in British Somaliland, the dervish resistance to colonial occupation was in full spate under the leadership of Mohamed Abdullah, whom the British dismissed as the Mad Mullah. As the wind blew with its desert persistence, Denys and his crew headed past the tiny settlement of Archer’s Post through pink hills and broad alkaline plains. Kapok plants with mauve and white flowers grew among the doum palms; the anthills, which had been red and brown, turned white (some were twenty-five feet high); and gradually the other colors, too, drained from the land. It was a journey of exotic exhilaration. In constant movement through the desert north, Denys found a resting place for the spirit.

They followed the wells east to Gurre country, where myrrh trees grew alongside stagnant pools, their bitter perfume infusing the air with gloom. Under the tyranny of the sun, the white men and the
totos
crossed the Juba River into Italian Somaliland, to straggling settlements where wild dogs loped, men sweltered and dozed, and remorseless flies described circles in the heavy air. Although the Italians administered the territory directly, and settlers cultivated bananas and sugarcane in the extreme south, there was little evidence of the civilizing Roman mission to the Somalis. In practice, the land still belonged to Abyssinian “Tigre” bandits and Somali tribes that included the Aulihan and Marehan, both subclans of the Ogaden—tall, silent men with large black eyes, dusty hair, and lean faces that expressed a certain tense readiness. They existed in a state of perpetual hunger, and blood feuds were handed down the generations like batons, forgotten origins honored in eviscerations. The self-reliance of the nomad resonated with Denys, as did the contempt for discipline and order. (“By Allah, I will not be a slave to the Government,” the northern Aulihan headman and rebel Abdurrahman Mursaal said in 1917.) The Somalis were unyielding and flinty, like their wilderness. They considered themselves superior to the chunky men of the south.
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Somewhere in that desert, in some scorched and gritty temporary camp, Denys bought his angular, sand-colored cattle from a group of Aulihan. The bulls wore bells carved from desert acacia, and a quiet tinkling orchestrated the homeward march like a lonely percussionist marking time. They trekked for weeks and weeks, alone except for occasional herders, who leaned carelessly on their spears, ankles crossed in the stance of pastoralists from the Sudan to Maasailand. Sometimes Denys went on ahead with some of the boys, leaving Blanc to follow with the cattle. At night, the wind mounted into wild fits, ballooning the tents. Occasionally rain whipped down in short, sharp bursts, and when the torrent subsided and the shale cooked in steam, the herders’ camels, even more bad-tempered than usual, showed their bladdered tongues. Denys was off the map, where he liked to be. Simple pleasures took on a heightened intensity: the smell of camel milk in a smoke-cleansed gourd, the thin yelling of Somali singing on five sad notes, the purple hieroglyphs of shadow on the sand below a thorn tree. When the evening breeze whistled in the ant-hollowed bulbs on the branches, the boys built a fence while the sentry tugged his cloak-blanket and fed the fire, a pinprick of light in the granular black. Later, the chalk-faced master emerged to sit by the fire and read the Bible. Denys had left his faith in the nursery, but unlike many of his generation he did not replace it with a guilty conscience. He accepted religion without belief and carried a Bible on all his trips, reveling in the sonorous poetry of the Old Testament. It appealed to his longing for the elemental, and, just as his spiritual self was alert to the intimations of Schubert, he found in the verses of Job or the Song of Solomon a kind of rhapsodic melancholy, an elegiac sense of autumnal transience that set all to rights. He knew chunks of the Bible by heart, and his Muslim companions were impressed by what they perceived to be piety. Few white men would have had the mental furniture to cope with the sparsity of desert life. But Denys recognized something in the wilderness that was more authentic than anything in the overengined material world. Some years later, the Irish soldier-writer Gerald Hanley lived in the Somali desert, similarly stripped down to what he could carry. Like Denys, he appreciated a life close to the bedrock of existence. Death was close, as every nomad knew; just as it was close under the thin crust of civilization that tried so hard to conceal it. “True solitude,” Hanley wrote, “is when the most restless part of a human being, his longing to forget where he is, born on earth in order to die, comes to rest and listens in a kind of agreed peace.”

GALBRAITH HAD BEEN
loafing around the world since being deported, desperate to get back to his thirty-thousand-acre stock farm overlooking Lake Elmenteita in the highlands shouldering the Rift. At the beginning of August 1914, he was on a ship returning to Britain from South Africa, where he had been visiting one of his sisters. When news that war had broken out was signaled to the ship, the captain turned it around and proceeded back to the Cape. Spotting his chance, Galbraith chartered a dhow and smuggled himself back into Kenya during the confusion of the first days of war, hoping that he would be able to serve. He got himself undetected up to Naro Moru, his brother’s farm on Mount Kenya, and there was joined by a weathered Denys, nearing the end of his trading trip. He had left the cattle in quarantine at Rumuruti, on the Laikipia Plateau. Now he set off with Galbraith to collect them, and after a week’s delay to comply with quarantine regulations they drove the herd south to Gilgil, Galbraith traveling under a pseudonym. It was a joyful safari, despite the looming presence of war.

Known in the family as Bim, Galbraith was reputed to be the finest stockman in the country. He was an acerbic figure with lively intellectual interests. “I have never in my life had to deal with so strong a character,” one of his English farm managers wrote. “He reminds me of those stately gentlemen we used to read about in
Westward Ho!
” He behaved “like a vicious highbred horse or some fucking aristocratic snake,” flooring recalcitrant Africans with a punch in the face if he wasn’t actually killing them. According to the manager, he was hard as flint and cold as ice, “but by Jove he has a brain and one can say anything to him, and he will switch his brain on to it and ferret it out. He has more intelligence than anyone else in East Africa and more distinction of mind.” Galbraith was not confident in company, and said that when he met new people he felt as though he had an ostrich egg in his throat. Notwithstanding his brutality, he had a streak of sensitivity, a characteristic that appealed to Denys. Both men, according to observers, were unsuited to the age in which they lived. Cole’s obituary in
The Times
concluded, “It seemed that Galbraith Cole belonged by rightful heritage to a different age than ours. His haughty, dangerous nature would perhaps have been more suited to the ‘spacious days’ of Queen Elizabeth…. His aristocratic nature held the secret of a singular grace…. He was as unregenerate as a hawk or leopard, and combined with his wilfulness a winning delicacy that was impossible to withstand.”

It took seven days to get the cattle down to the farm. “You will imagine the immense pleasure it was for me to see Gilgil again,” Galbraith wrote to a friend. As for Denys, he had brought off a great coup, and his adventure was the talk of Nairobi. At last he had begun to use his gifts, and it seemed that he was finally getting somewhere in his attempts to establish a life in Africa. Later, he told Cranworth that he had never enjoyed six months more.

W
HEN BRITAIN DECLARED WAR ON THE CENTRAL POWERS, THE SETTLERS
were immediately involved because Kenya and German East Africa shared a long border. Once news spread, white men poured into Nairobi from the farms to look for the war. They came on foot, on horseback, by train, or in ox wagons, dressed in torn shorts and pith helmets and brandishing elephant guns, revolvers, and bamboo canes with knives strapped to one end and pennants to the other. But the lights that were going out in Europe had not yet been lit in Africa, and there was no War Office machine to churn out uniforms and instructions. “Men are requested to parade in whatever kit they possess,” the
Leader
advised. Some settlers voiced the opinion that the real fighting was going on in Europe and that they should be there. “This is their country!” thundered Galbraith, pawing the ground up at Gilgil. “Supposing everyone went home….” The existing military force in Kenya consisted of three battalions of the King’s African Rifles (KAR) and two machine guns, one of which was broken. Colonial defense policy was geared primarily to the suppression of native uprisings, not to attack by contiguous Europeans. The heterogeneous new force included Swedes, Australians, and Swiss settlers; a Turk also signed up, until it was discovered that Turkey was on the other side. Many had long licked their lips over the fertile plains of German East Africa—land that was obviously too good for the Germans. “Yes!” Galbraith had confirmed when traveling there before the war. “The Squareheads have entirely spoilt Kilimanjaro, so much so that the disgusted visitor almost sees it cubiform in shape.”
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On August 5, martial law was declared throughout the Protectorate. Imaginary enemy aircraft were sighted, and in many cases shot at. “There is not the slightest doubt in my mind that an aeroplane was manoeuvring in the vicinity of the KAR lines on Sunday evening,” one man wrote feverishly to the
Leader
on August 15. In reality, the East African Luftwaffe consisted of one biplane that had been sent out for an exhibition in Dar es Salaam before the war and crashed on its first flight. Reports of unmarked ships circulated in Mombasa. “Neither I nor anyone else who lived through them will ever forget the first days of August 1914,” one settler wrote twenty years later.

GERMAN EAST AFRICA
was larger than France and Germany combined (as well as what is now Tanzania, it included the regions of Urundi, later Burundi, and Rwanda). It shared a border with six countries, all of them hostile to Germany except Portuguese East Africa (now Mozambique), and when Portugal joined the war in 1916 it, too, sided with the Allies. The aim of the Allied campaign was to overpower enemy forces and occupy their colony. The Germans had a vast territory to defend on many fronts and over terrain ranging from deserts and volcanoes to river deltas and fertile uplands where colonists grew coffee. There were hardly any roads or maps, but there was enough “ready cover to conceal all the armies of the world,” according to one officer. Active operations were impossible during the long rains between April and June and the short ones between October and December, and, in between, troops were dependent on water holes that often ran dry. Few commanders in the history of warfare could have maintained an effective fighting force under those circumstances. But the army of Wilhelmine Germany had its man. When war was declared, the
Schütztruppe
(“Protective Force”) was under the command of a one-eyed Pomeranian lieutenant colonel named Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck. The son of a general, he had attended the best military schools and had served during the Boxer Rebellion in China and the Herrero revolt in German South-West Africa (now Namibia). Spare and square-shouldered, with short bristly hair, he was forty-four at the outbreak, an intelligent and urbane man who, according to Karen Blixen, who met him on the ship to Dar in 1913, gave “a strong impression of what Imperial Germany was and stood for.” His troops at first consisted of two-hundred-odd Europeans and twenty-five hundred Africans armed with obsolete pattern rifles firing cartridges that exploded in a cumulonimbus of black powder. But von Lettow was an outstanding soldier—tactically innovative, adaptable, imaginative—and when he surrendered after the armistice the commanders who had fought against him wanted to shake his hand.

AT THE AGE OF
twenty-seven, Denys had just begun to use his gifts in a meaningful way. There were signs that a more mature figure was emerging from the eternal schoolboy. But the war tore him up by the roots, as it did so many. He viewed the prospects now stretching ahead with gloomy skepticism. Denys considered men in uniform “not human beings,” and he had no interest in the concepts of service and sacrifice that were vital components of the imperial idea. His friend and fellow settler Cranworth, who was to serve alongside him, remembered that he “made no secret of the fact that warfare bored him to distraction.” However, while he didn’t thank God for giving him the chance to fight, like his contemporary Rupert Brooke, Denys threw himself into what he called “sodjering.” War presented itself as an extension of Eton, or as a sport against which to pit one’s wits. (“I can remember thinking that we were the home team and the Austrians were the visiting team,” Ernest Hemingway wrote about driving a Red Cross ambulance in Europe in 1918.)

At the end of August, Denys hurried back to Nairobi, leaving the cattle at Gilgil with the fulminating Galbraith. He had decided to join an auxiliary unit of a hundred untrained Somalis that Berkeley Cole was raising in the Punjab tradition; its proposed semi-independence appealed to him. Once a captain in the Ninth Lancers, Berkeley was a natural leader, and when the Somalis marched into Nairobi to volunteer he judged that they would make able bush soldiers. He and Denys were joined by Tich Miles and two other white officers, and the five of them set about procuring mules—all the racehorses were already spoken for. Many semi-autonomous units sprang out of the crowds of eager settlers eddying around the yard of the makeshift Nairobi recruiting station, among them Arnoldi’s Scouts, Monica’s Own (after the governor’s daughter), and Bowker’s Horse, though the latter was renamed Bowker’s Foot after the Germans rustled its horses.

Berkeley’s unit was sent to patrol Kenya’s most vulnerable target, a 150-mile section of railway close to the frontier in the Kilimanjaro region. Small parties of Germans were already making bombing raids, and within a fortnight von Lettow had captured Taveta, a strategically crucial British border post. While invading German soldiers set Belgium alight in the Northern Hemisphere, their colleagues hoisted the imperial flag on British soil in Africa. Meanwhile Berkeley, Denys, and the Somalis marched between the railway and the border northwest of Taveta, fending off more raids and preventing the Germans from advancing. It was a unique and curiously compelling landscape, the plains on the German side broken by isolated hills that seemed to leap from the earth out of nowhere, as if a couple of unimportant tectonic plates had collided at high speed. Where there were tracks, they were through nine-foot-high elephant grass or nine-inch-deep sand. But the Somalis turned out to be brilliant trackers, as Berkeley had surmised. They also loved drill and ceremonial, and in action they went wild. “Once they began to shoot, their eyes lit up and they became almost unrestrainable,” Cranworth noted with trepidation. Dust got into everything, including guns and food, and once the short rains began in November the ground liquefied. Night reliably left the men marooned and vulnerable: if each slow dusk was a drawing down of blinds on the western front, its speedy equatorial cousin crashed shut like a steel trap. The troops contended with marauding lions and leopards, and one colonel said it was like fighting in a zoo. In the first eighteen months, thirty Allied men were killed by animals, and one battle was interrupted by a rhino that charged one side and then the other. A private wrote home, after complaining about the bully-beef rations, “On guard on a dark night it’s very trying on your nerves listening to the roars these different animals make, and you fancy every black object is coming towards you.” If the large animals sometimes left them alone, the smaller ones never did. “Every known type of pestilential creeping animal seems to think he can take up abode in one’s tent as an ‘Honorary Member,’ from the fat black millipede about 6 in long to that occasional and very unpleasant visitor, the puff adder, whose bite is practically certain death,” one officer wrote. “White ants, black ants, red ants, all thoroughly imbued with military ardour, spend their days and nights ‘digging themselves in.’” Besides malaria and dysentery, tick fever rampaged through the camps. There was no field hospital for miles. “In all this campaign, our most deadly enemy was not the human foe…but…fever,” wrote an English doctor who followed the Second Rhodesian Battalion throughout the war in East Africa. Supply oxen were killed by the tsetse fly, which increased its range during the rains. “It has not always been too pleasant,” Denys commented in a note home to his former girlfriend Pussy—the only one of his wartime letters from Africa to have survived. But there was none of the routine of the western front, or the formalized system of trenches. There was no parapet or wire, no Field Service postcards or Fortnum & Mason hampers, and no official brothels with blue lights for officers and red for other ranks. It was guerrilla warfare, African-style. But, like the soldiers in Flanders, Denys and his colleagues thought it would be over by Christmas. As December 25 approached, he lobbed plum puddings over enemy lines and staved off boredom in the company of Tich and Berkeley. They were known in the mess as the Three Musketeers. Tich, a lionhearted midget, ended the war a major with a DSO and an MC (Military Cross). The
askaris
(black soldiers), whom he ordered around in inaccurate but effective Swahili delivered tempestuously, respected him beyond all other officers. Around the campfire he told “resplendently coloured stories,” sprinkling his speech with French expressions and savoring each dramatic incident. In the quiet hours, his talk occasionally lost its exuberance and he became sad, regretting the passage of time, but like Denys he kept horror at bay by relentless adventuring.

Von Lettow was focusing on the British railway. He remained close to the border at Taveta, the Allied post near Kilimanjaro, his contact with the outside world effectively severed. Occasionally, he was able to pick up wireless messages from Togo, or even direct from Germany, but otherwise he had to depend, for all his news, on intercepted wireless messages or captured mail. Not until February 1915, when he sat down for dinner in the railway station at New Moshi, did von Lettow receive a letter from his sister telling him that their brother had been killed at Libramont, on the western front, on August 22, 1914. As for the Africans, they were bemused at the spectacle of white men shooting one another’s brains out. But they served in the thousands on both sides, either as
askaris
or as porters. Germans and British alike were permanently dependent on porterage. The dearth of roads meant that, away from the railway, supplies had to be carried through the bush. At the peak of the campaign, von Lettow needed 7,700 men just to ferry food to his
askaris.
On the Allied side alone, 44,500 East African porters died in service.
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The unleashing of European-style war on the continent was, in the century that followed the campaign, to have a yet more dire impact on Africans. Along with unnatural borders, mechanized warfare was among the most cataclysmic of colonial legacies.