Too Close to the Sun (16 page)

I saw a man this morning

Who did not wish to die:

I ask, and cannot answer

If otherwise wish I…

Before the year was through, Denys learned that Topsy’s husband, Ossie Williams, had died at Loos, commanding a company of Welsh Guards. He was shot going to the aid of a wounded soldier. After so many years of waiting, Topsy was alone again, this time forever. She and Ossie had a son, Michael, who was not yet two, and a month-old daughter, Anne, whom her father had never seen. Denys remembered swimming across the Dwyryd estuary with Ossie at night, carrying their clothes on their heads; walking together into the bosomy hills behind Harlech in the westering light; and playing Ping-Pong in the timbered games room at the Plas. It was hard for the living to stay sane.

IN EAST AFRICA,
the imperial eagle remained aloft from the mangrove swamps of the Rufiji to the rarefied air of Kilimanjaro and from the shores of Lake Tanganyika to the red-tiled planters’ villas overlooking the Indian Ocean in Dar. Von Lettow had been promoted to full colonel. He was immensely popular. “I doubt whether any army, in any country, has ever looked up to its supreme commander with such confidence and admiration as did the German troops in East Africa, all through that long campaign,” wrote Nis Kock, a Danish-speaking Jutlander who served as an ordnance specialist. German East Africa was now the enemy’s sole overseas territory. The Allies desperately needed reinforcements in order to invade through one of the Kilimanjaro funnels. Salvation came from South Africa. In November, it was announced that between ten and twenty thousand South African troops were on their way. The replenished East African Force deployed at the beginning of 1916 under the command of Jan Smuts, the Union’s forty-five-year-old minister of defense and one of Britain’s most elusive opponents during the Boer War. Now he was leading his old adversary in fresh battles, and at last the Allies had a leader Meinertzhagen admired. He always said that Smuts was the only commander who listened to the intelligence reports he gave. Denys and his colleagues felt a surge of optimism—the first for many months. Frustrated by a year and a half of bitty and inconclusive warfare, and cut off from the main theaters, they had become demoralized. The news they did get of the outside world offered a poor prognosis: every month the war seemed to spread farther, spilling outward from Europe like a poisonous tide. In Europe, people were beginning to call it the Great War. Now the Allies in East Africa had Smuts and new troops, as well as armored cars that had been shipped in to support them on the ground and even their first airplanes. After an unsatisfactory year of deadlock, preparations were under way for a major offensive.

After six more months of bush scouting, Denys returned to Nairobi on leave before the end of 1915 and found the remaining settlers complaining that the generals and captains from India were strutting around “full of their own importance.” They filled the clubs, wrote the indignant Doctor “Kill or Cure” Burkitt, “where they groused about the absence of pukka sahibs, pukka golf, pukka polo, pukka bearers, pukka clubs, and all the other pukkas they had left behind in India.” Soldiers arrived by train in the middle of the night and, finding no billets, dossed in front of the New Stanley Hotel, where the manager served them breakfast in the morning. Denys raced off to inspect his rural properties. Almost every farm in the country was struggling, and many had been abandoned. The export of coffee, sisal, and flax were essential to Kenya’s wellbeing, but the war had cut the settlers off from their markets. (In 1917, coffee was actually declared a prohibited import in Britain.) Nobody was able to renew equipment. And although the wives were managing, there was no reserve of women and older men to keep things going as there was in the more established colonies, or in Britain itself. “One hopes that the war will soon be over, as everybody’s affairs are going to rack and ruin,” Denys wrote.

His observation adumbrated the more universal collapse of the decade to follow. Three years after he inspected his derelict farmland, the war was over. Even then he recognized, as many did, that the armistice was no harbinger of peaceful return. By 1918, few could still believe in the social and political solutions that had led to the war in the first place, and into the void flowed a deep tide of cynicism. In the presence of overwhelming “rack and ruin”—physical, economic, spiritual, intellectual—the futility of accomplishment was apparent to all, and Denys, despite himself, was to become the perfect antihero for an age.

Jack Pixley, Denys’s friend and business partner, was serving with the Grenadier Guards on the western front. There was nothing Denys could do alone on his properties, and the Parklands house had been converted into a military convalescent home, so when he had leave he started going instead to Galbraith’s farm between Gilgil and Lake Elmenteita. Before breakfast, when the air was fresh with the smell of dew and cedar, he walked among the six-hundred-year-old trees and the new green shoots of spring and looked out across the plain at the hammocking stomachs of the zebras, all as it had always been, untroubled by the unfolding catastrophe. He taught himself to play the guitar, and got to know Galbraith’s fleshy-lipped farm manager Llewelyn “Lulu” Powys, whose ten siblings included the writers John Cowper and Theodore Francis. (Llewelyn went on to achieve success as a novelist himself.) He had sailed out to the job in East Africa in the hope that the altitude of Gilgil might cure his consumption. Formerly a teacher, Llewelyn was ignorant of farming, and never took to it; he said that burning off ten thousand lambs’ tails with hot irons was “as frustrating as teaching French at Broadstairs,” and that the mephitic process of dipping sheep to prevent scab was even worse. He had come to hate the sheep individually. For six days a week he drudged from dawn to dusk, lying in bed for an extra hour on Sundays to drink China tea and smoke Egyptian cigarettes. He never really shook off his consumption, and could not go home as there was no one to replace him. His fiancée wrote to break off their engagement. He was so lonely that he befriended local girls; he claimed it was only fear that restrained him from congress (“The Pox is so extraordinarily prevalent that I am scared”). His sensitive temperament was unsuited to life in the African bush, which every day brought death close.

Galbraith, whose presence in the Protectorate had now been legalized, had hoped to be able to do intelligence work, but he was suffering chronic rheumatism and arthritis and was permanently reliant on two sticks. He bought a car in 1915, though some days he was too ill to do anything but sit on the veranda with a rook rifle “and plug at anything I don’t like the look of.” He hated being cut off from news, often speaking of his fear of opening the papers to read the casualty lists. Rumor, a staple of war, drifted even to Gilgil; the most outlandish concerned
askaris
who ate their victims. In the first weeks of 1916, a story spread through the Protectorate about an Allied attack on Lake Tanganyika in a ship that had been carried out from England. When the truth emerged, it was more spectacular than even the most inventive rumors.

Both sides had known from the outset that control of the Great Lakes was critical. Innocent blue ponds on the map, in reality these were uncharted inland oceans that formed unbreachable frontiers. Lake Nyasa, the southernmost, fell gently into British hands in August 1914. Lake Victoria, the northernmost, was trickier, though by March 1915 it, too, was under Allied control. But in between the two the Germans controlled twelve thousand square miles of Lake Tanganyika, and throughout 1915 a new twelve-hundred-ton German warship was shifting large detachments of
Schütztruppen
across the lake to raid weakly held British and Belgian posts on the southern and western shores. In the early months of that interminable year, a white hunter named John R. Lee approached the saturnine first sea lord, Sir Henry Jackson, with a plan. A small, armed motorboat could conceivably overpower the German Tanganyika fleet if its potential for surprise, speed, and mobility was judiciously deployed. To get to the lake, this unfortunate motorboat faced a three-thousand-mile overland journey that included five hundred miles of unexplored bush, as well as forests, deserts, and the odd mountain range. Jackson did not flinch. “It is both the duty and the tradition of the Royal Navy to engage the enemy wherever there is water to float a ship,” he decreed. He decided to order two boats, not just one. The officer chosen to lead the Lake Tanganyika Naval Expedition was Lieutenant Commander Geoffrey B. Spicer-Simson, known as Spicer, a man with a torso densely populated with tattoos of snakes, birds, and butterflies. He had spent most of his career behind a desk, but had once carried out a survey on the Gambia River, so he had volunteered to go back to Africa. Oaths of secrecy were sworn all around. The Admiralty commandeered two mahogany tenders from the Thorneycroft shipyard. They were forty feet long, with twin screws and two one-hundred-horsepower engines each, and they were converted for combat with steel plating, a three-pound gun mounted forward, and a Maxim aft. The firm also built special rubber-tired trailers and furnished a lorry with supplies. On June 8, 1915, Spicer took the improbably named
Mimi
and
Toutou
on a rushed and inauspicious shakedown cruise on the Thames, and shortly thereafter the boats were loaded onto a ship and the whole cavalcade set out for Cape Town, the officers parading in full uniform (including swords) for the send-off. At the Cape, boats, trailers, and lorries were hoisted on a special train to Elisabethville, the capital of Belgian Congo’s Katanga Province, more than two thousand miles away, then on to the village of Fungurume, forty-two hundred feet above sea level in the malarial heart of Africa. Four hundred African laborers with several dozen teams of oxen began hacking paths and building bridges.

On August 6, the boats were craned onto the trailers, which were in turn shackled to two ten-ton traction engines, each with its own wood-burning locomotive. The ponderous three-mile caravan then set off through the Congolese swamps. Exuding clouds of viscous smoke, snorting and hawking, the machines quivered frequently to a stop, clanks yielding to irritable commands barked across the savanna in kitchen Bantu. The smell of lubricating oil snaked through the bush. In total, Africans built 150 wooden bridges to get
Mimi
and
Toutou
to the Great Lake. Much of the territory was tinder-dry, which meant that the traction engines had no purchase either in the dust of the desert or on the soft sand of the valley floor. Grass fires frequently cut off the route, which rose to sixty-two hundred feet at the highest point. The trailers failed and were replaced by the carts that were supposed to be carrying fuel. Toward the end, the men poled everything down the Lualaba River, the uppermost waters of the Congo, and discovered a new enemy: the tsetse fly. After so much labor and hardship, it looked as if they were to fail so close to their goal. Instead, they traveled the final two hundred miles on a narrow-gauge railway, and then, four and a half months after leaving England, Spicer saw the matte-blue waters of Lake Tanganyika. They had dragged a pair of fighting ships across Africa.

Toward the end of December, while half a million Turks and Allies were being killed or wounded at Gallipoli, the boats were launched. On Boxing Day 1915, a Sunday, a German ship emerged out of mist that the sun had not yet burned off the water. In their camp near the newly constructed Allied harbor, as all hands fell out after Divine Service, Spicer peered from the top of a lookout post with a cigarette holder in one hand and a pair of binoculars in the other, ordered his chief petty officer to dismiss, and added, almost as an afterthought, “and man the launches for immediate action.” Crowds of Holo-Holo tribespeople lined the shore and cheered. The fighting was interrupted for six weeks by typhoons that careered off the mountains. In the end, Spicer sank the smaller two of the three enemy vessels on the lake and obliged the Germans to scuttle the warship. A telegram arrived bearing “His Majesty’s congratulations to his remotest expedition,” and another announced a DSO for Spicer. Back at home, one headline read NELSON TOUCH ON AFRICAN LAKE. To the lake-side tribespeople, Spicer was a demigod. Squat clay figurines with tattooed torsos began appearing under the borrasus palms. But the real feet, it turned out, were also made of clay. Spicer had gone marginally bonkers and taken to wearing a skirt. He was sent home.
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