“Thank you,” the Englishman said, as Liesl von Bishop handed him his crutches. He smiled at her. He had a broad face. Square, as if his jaw muscles were overdeveloped.
“Danke schön,” he repeated.
“Excellent, Mr Cobb,” cried Dr Deppe. “An accent of first class quality!”
Liesl suppressed the usual stab of irritation. Deppe was so smug about his English. Who did he think he was? She was married to someone who was half-English, after all. She had even visited the country. Deppe thought he was so wonderful.
Liesl watched the English officer totter to his feet. His arms and shoulders began to shake with the effort of keeping himself upright. Liesl and Deppe ran to his side and eased him back onto the bed again.
“Gosh,” he said. “Still a bit rocky.”
“It’s not astonishing,” Liesl said. “You are very weak, yet.” The Englishman was surprised to hear her speaking English.
“Frau von Bishop is a linguist too,” Deppe said patronizingly, as he propped the crutches beside the bed. “A good effort,” he said. “Little by little, that’s how we do it. Tomorrow, one step. The next day, two. And so on.”
Liesl moved to the window. Life had been tolerable until Deppe had arrived from Tanga with his wounded and the sick Englishman. A double amputee, a man with one lung, and this one with the bayonet wounds. Remarkable recoveries, Deppe had said. He was keeping notes on them for some article he planned to write in a medical Journal after the war. Liesl saw him now, sitting hunched over a book in the corner of the big ward, scribbling away. She sighed, pulling the damp sweaty material of her makeshift nurse’s uniform away from her body.
Outside the window her view consisted of a wide compound of stamped earth that sloped down to a fenced-off stockade containing a jumble of wooden and grass huts that was Nanda’s prisoner-of-war camp. There were about eighty English and South African prisoners there who had been captured in the numerous small engagements that had made up the war in East Africa since the great victory at Tanga. Not that she knew much about it. When Erich came to her on his rare leaves he would tell her how things were going, but she only paid scant attention. To be honest she didn’t care, now that she was denied the comfort of living in her own home. She was waiting only for it to finish.
She had been moved from the farm at Moshi soon after war had been declared: too close to the fighting, they had said. She had stayed in Dar for two months and out of sheer boredom had offered her nursing services to the large hospital there. But she had been sent further south to Nanda where a new hospital had been established for more seriously wounded men whose convalescence would be lengthy and who were unlikely to return to the fighting. Erich had encouraged the move. He didn’t like her living alone in Dar, and besides, he said, Nanda was safer. The British were sure to bombard Dar before long, he claimed. Nanda was far in the south, a smaller hospital, generally more tranquil.
In that respect Erich had been right. Liesl had found herself in effective charge of the hospital until Deppe arrived. The building had once been an agricultural research station and was situated at one end of the small town. Liesl had a wood and tin bungalow to herself — and Erich, whenever he came on leave.
The prisoner-of-war camp had been set up shortly after her arrival and there was a small garrison of troops based there to guard it. The rest of the population was made up of the wives and families of the rubber planters whose extensive plantations surrounded the town.
To Liesl’s surprise she had found herself quite happy to take up her nursing duties once again. She was even secretly grateful to the war for making this possible. When she returned from Europe in 1914 the first few weeks had been among the worst of her life. Every morning on waking, she was instantly overcome by a mood of poisonous irritation that made her days a misery. Nothing satisfied her, nothing pleased her. She detested the country, the malevolent climate, the demands of the farm. She took out her unhappiness on Erich.
She couldn’t say she was exactly happy now, but at least she wasn’t miserable any more. That is, until the wretched man Deppe had arrived with his text book cases, turning everything upside down, altering tried and tested routines and rotas, busying about like some officious little bureaucrat…
She picked at the wooden sill, prising away a splinter.
“Excuse me. Entschuldigung.”
She turned round. It was the soldier, Cobb, calling from his bed.
“Wasser. Kann ich, um, Wasser haben. Bitte.”
She brought him a glass. “I speak English, you know,” she said. “You don’t have to speak German.”
She remembered when this Cobb had arrived. The journey from Tanga had almost been too much for him: Deppe’s precious case history almost prematurely closed. He had a fever which lasted a week. She remembered sponging his body with damp cloths. He was very thin, his body unreally pale. There were knotted purple weals on his white belly and the huge gash in his thigh, still with its stitches in. Deppe said the dressings on the thigh wound had to be changed every twenty-four hours. More work for everybody. His double amputee as well, both legs gone almost at the hip. Deppe congratulated himself for keeping these people alive. At least Cobb was entire, even though he would always walk with a bad limp. She took the glass for him.
“Thank you,” he said. “How come you speak such good English?”
“My husband’s father was English. He lived in Leamington Spa, near Stratford-on-Avon. Have you been there?”
“No, I can’t say I have. Where’s your husband now?”
“He’s fighting.”
“Against the Germans?” A puzzled but sympathetic look crossed his face.
“No no. He’s a German now. For many years. He’s fighting against you.” Liesl made no attempt to excuse his embarrassment.
“Perhaps you could teach me German?” he suggested in an attempt to regain his composure.
Liesl looked down the ward. In the morning it was quite cool. Later in the day it became unbearably hot.
“Why do you want to learn German?” she asked. But she had already lost interest in his reply. She thought about the ‘bath’ waiting for her in an hour when she went off duty. Every day she got her maid, Kimi, to pour buckets of cold water over her while she stood in a tin bath. Then she would eat. Then she would sleep.
“Well,” Cobb said. “I might as well make some use”—he waved his hands about—“of all this. Get something out of it, at least.”
♦
Liesl wearily climbed up the wooden steps that led on to the rickety stoop of her bungalow. It was small with two rooms — a bedroom and a sitting room — and had belonged to one of the bachelor managers of one of the plantations. It was sparsely furnished. The manager had been called up by the Schütztruppe and was now in the Kilimanjaro region, billeted, for all Liesl knew, in her own large and spacious farmhouse.
For ten months now the war had been little more than stalemate but this, according to Erich, was exactly what von Lettow wanted. He knew that the Schütztruppe could never finally defeat the British but at the same time a well-fought and protracted campaign could ensure that more and more men and materials would have to be supplied, diverting them from the more crucial battlefields of the Western Front.
Now the German army at Moshi and Taveta faced the British at Voi. There had been skirmishes at Jasin on the coast, the Belgians were advancing tentatively from the Congo, but little more. Since the debacle at the battle of Tanga in November of 1914 the British had done nothing. Nothing that is, Liesl corrected herself, apart from sinking the Königsberg in the Rufiji delta.