Gabriel passed unchallenged into the red house. Staff officers hurried to and fro with papers in their hands. Engineers were installing a telephone line which had been run up from the beach. Gabriel asked for Lt Col. Codrington and was directed upstairs. There he found a room filled with officers, most pressed around a table covered in maps. He saw Brigadier-General Pughe, a small man with a doleful, flushed expression. The force attacking Tanga had been divided into two brigades: on the left was Pughe’s, on the right was the one the Palamcottahs were attached to, commanded by Brigadier-General Wapshore.
Gabriel paused, suddenly feeling a bit foolish. What should he do? Inform Pughe that he was reporting for duty to the wrong brigade? In the meantime he saluted the row of backs that was presented to him. In one corner of the room a major was energetically cranking the handle of a field telephone and shouting ‘hello hello hello hello’ endlessly into the mouth-piece. Gabriel looked about him: there appeared to be half a dozen lieutenant-colonels in the room, all identically dressed in topees, khaki jackets, jodhpurs and knee-length brown leather boots. Then he saw the tall figure of Bilderbeck.
“Hello Bilderbeck,” Gabriel said, tapping him on the shoulder.
“Cobb!” Bilderbeck said loudly. A few people looked round. “What are you doing here? You should be on Beach ‘C’.”
Gabriel explained about the wrong landing and his lost company of troops.
“God,” Bilderbeck said, dropping his voice. “Between you and me this is what I call a fiasco. I should sit tight till tomorrow, get some sleep and then wander over in the morning. Beach ‘C’ is only about a mile away.”
He walked back down the stairs with Gabriel. The scène of noisy disorder outside prompted a bark of ironic laughter. “Think the Huns know we’re here?” he asked rhetorically. He glanced up at the sky which was lightening perceptibly in the east, out over the ocean. He looked at his watch. “The Rajputs are advancing on the town in half an hour,” he said. “I’d better get back.” He grinned, his teeth gleaming in the strong moonlight. Gabriel smiled back uneasily.
“I’ll look by to see how you’re getting on later,” Bilderbeck said. “See if I can get a call through to Santoras. Let him know the score.”
“I say, thanks, Bilderbeck,” Gabriel said sincerely, but Bilderbeck was already striding back to the red house, which now had lights blazing from all its windows.
Gabriel wandered back through the columns of grunting coolies bringing up ammunition and supplies from the beach. He felt strangely depressed, not having had any instructions, and curiously impotent. ‘A’ company was not meant to be where it was, therefore the purposes of strategy and logistics declared it to be non-existent.
He found Gleeson leaning up against a palm tree looking out at the anchored convoy. The men were lying beneath their unrolled turbans and looked ominously like rows of sheeted dead. No rifles had been stacked, packs and provisions had been dropped anywhere.
“Any luck?” Gleeson asked.
Gabriel told him they’d have to wait until the morning.
“What’s going on?” Gleeson asked incuriously. “I saw machine guns being taken up to the perimeter.”
“The Rajputs are attacking Tanga,” Gabriel said listlessly.
“Rather them than me,” Gleeson said. “I’m shattered. Fancy some tea? I’ve got a flask here.”
Gabriel accepted. “How are the men?” he said, knowing he ought to be passing among them, issuing words of calm and comfort. But they weren’t like his company in the West Kents. They seemed total strangers. Gleeson seemed to have some sort of peculiar rapport with them, but that was because he spoke the language. Gabriel supposed he should at least let the Indian officers know what the latest news was, but they all seemed asleep. It wasn’t surprising, he reflected, after five hours in a tilting, swaying lighter.
He heard the whine of a mosquito in his ear. His uniform was nearly dry now. He strolled to the edge of a knoll and looked down on the landing beach. The coolies and native bearers were still hard at work; they formed straggling lines, moving stores up from the beach to the cliff top. Further out the convoy of ships was silhouetted against the gash of grey and citron yellow that was the dawn sky. Gleeson’s tea had left a metallic taste in his mouth: cheap flask, he thought. He turned round and looked in the direction of Tanga. He heard a cock crow. Out there in the bush, he thought, there are columns of men ‘marching unto war’. He hummed a few bars of the hymn tune, trying to take his mind off the sudden pressures and cramps he was feeling in his bowels. He tapped the rhythm on his holster. “Onward Christian so-oh-oh-oldiers…” General Aitken expected no resistance…He laughed at himself. What was so wrong with needing to perform a natural function? He walked over to a clump of bushes, lowered his trousers and squatted down.
♦
Gleeson woke him up at six. He’d managed only to get a couple of hours sleep.
“The show seems to be on,” Gleeson said airily.
Gabriel looked around him at the unfamiliar scène. The early morning sun bounced off the red tiles on the roof of the red house. The terrain looked quite different in daylight. The patch of cleared ground was dusty and covered by straggling clumps of sun-bleached knee-high grass and low thorn bushes. Waist-deep trenches had been dug around the perimeter and from them Indian troops looked out into the comparative lushness of coconut groves and rubber plantations that lay between Ras Kasone and Tanga. By the red house three reserve companies of Pioneers were drawn up. Scattered everywhere were great mounds of boxes, crates and sacks. Gabriel saw brand new signalling equipment, bundies of stretchers and, to his alarm, ranks of coffins. There were also a dozen motorbikes.
From the direction of Tanga came the cracking and popping of rifles and machine guns. It sounded like a fire blazing in distant undergrowth.
“Good grief,” Gabriel said. “That’s damned heavy. I thought this landing was meant to be unopposed.” Everybody around the house had stopped what they were doing and were looking in the direction of Tanga.
“The Rajputs set off about an hour and a half ago,” Gleeson said. “They must be at the town by now. Probably a rearguard.”
But the noise of firing didn’t stop. Soon everyone went nervously back about their business, as if evidence of lack of concern might work some magic. Gleeson took some men down to the beach and came back with a box of ship’s biscuits and fresh water. Gabriel didn’t feel like eating but happily accepted a mug of warm water and rum. The alcohol made him relax.
From time to time, runners would appear from the forest of coconut trees and sprint into the red house. The noise of firing continued and Gabriel reflected that the ‘rearguard’ were certainly putting up something of a fight. He saw General Pughe himself come out of the house and order three reserve companies to march off in support of the Rajputs.