Felix put down his newspaper and took off his glasses and leant forward to take her gloved hands. Charis smiled at him, his serious face, the pink marks on his nose where his spectacles had rested. She felt a love for Felix, of a different order from the one she felt for Gabriel. It was a kind of gratitude, really. A gratitude for showing her alternatives. In his own very different way, she thought, he is just as strong a person as Gabriel.
“Charis,” Felix said, staring at their linked hands. “Do you mind if I ask you something?”
“Don’t be silly,” she said. “Ask away.”
“About. About Gabriel.”
It was as if the train was suddenly speeding along the edge of a precipice. She felt the sucking, empty feeling inside her that happened when a motor car went too fast over a humpbacked bridge.
Felix glanced at her face, then looked back at the hands. Then he took his hands away and rubbed his forehead.
“I get these terrible dreams, you see,” he said, screwing up his eyes. “About Gabriel. Nothing threatening. No…no accusations. It’s as if everything is normal. Like we were before the war. We’re just doing things together. Ordinary things. In a very normal, natural way. Quite happy too, in an unreflecting way. And then when I wake up, you see, I feel terrible. I feel this awful — I feel I’m…wrong. That I’m disgusting and corrupt.” He looked out of the window, but carried on speaking. “I know I shouldn’t feel this. I know I’m not ashamed about us.” He paused. “But then I think: what if Charis feels this? What if she’s tormented too? And I’m somehow forcing her? You see, if I felt that was true, then I don’t think I could somehow go on. That it would be terribly wrong to carry on.”
He looked back at her for an instant. “I need to know how you feel, I think. I think that’s what I’m saying.”
Charis forced herself to reach forward and take his hands. Tons of evasions seemed to sit on her shoulders. Through the shrill ringing noise in her ears she heard her calm, reassuring voice saying, “I think about it too, Felix. Dear Felix. But Gabriel’s not here, that’s the difference. He’s away. He doesn’t know what’s happening. He never will. We’ll never hurt him. He’s not a part of our world. It’s only because he’s away that our own world came into existence, that we created our world.” She checked herself momentarily: she was beginning to babble. “Our love,” she said slowly, “is a separate thing. It’s not,” she, improvised wildly, “it’s not part of the world we knew before the war. It’s on its own. Enclosed. Quite distinct.”
She saw his features relax. She’d said enough. A deep, infinite sense of disappointment gripped her like clinging ivy. “Don’t worry any more Felix, darling. I don’t worry, I don’t even think about it.” Fleets of regrets hemmed her in.
He was smiling. “Thank you,” he said. He leant forward and kissed her gently on the lips.
14: 11 March 1916, Salaita Hill, British East Africa
On the twelfth of February 1916 the British Army in East Africa finally opened their offensive against the Germans. Temple watched two thousand brawny South Africans assault the gentle slopes of Salaita hill after a four-hour artillery barrage. He sensed the depression and disconsolate moods of the last eighteen months lift miraculously from him as the innocuous hill was pounded with high explosives. He felt sure he’d be at Smithville within a matter of days. The South African troops had loudly vowed to sort out any ‘bleddy kaffirs’ they found that happened not to have been blown apart. Two hours later six hundred of them were dead as they ran away from the withering fire coming from German trenches.
On the twenty-first of February the German Army of the Western Front — in a completely unconnected response — attacked Verdun, thereby initiating a four-month siege.
Temple only had to wait three weeks until a second attempt on Salaita was made, but he found the delay cruelly frustrating, nonetheless. In the interim the British Army was presented with a new commander-in-chief in the shape of General Smuts. Smuts modified the British tactics. Headlong attacks were to be abandoned. The advance on Taveta and the German border was to be co-ordinated with a series of flanking movements through the foothills of Kilimanjaro as well as the previously planned drive from the north under General Stewart. The Germans would be trapped in a pincer at Moshi, their escape routes down the Northern Railway cut off.
But this time Temple found his mood alternating between elation and scepticism. Staff officer friends of Wheech-Browning told him that the war would be over in a few weeks. The possibilities of returning to the farm provided many hours of enjoyable speculation. But whenever Temple looked at the rag-bag army that was meant to bring this about, at the vain and bickering generals, his innate pragmatism would advise him not to raise his hopes too high.
So on the ninth of March Salaita was attacked again and found to be deserted, the Germans having stolen away in the night. Two days later Temple rode his mule down the main street of Taveta, back in the familiar little township after an absence of eighteen months. Thus far everything had been achieved without too much difficulty (the six hundred dead South Africans excepted), the Germans content to pull back without offering a fight whenever it looked as if the forces massed against them were overwhelmingly superior. But up ahead lay the Taveta gap and the twin hills of Latema and Reata. Temple rode out of Taveta to scout them for the KAR who were due to be involved in the first attack. At the foot of the hills the ground was thick with a dense, shoulder-high thorn scrub which seemed to continue all the way up to the top. Temple dismounted and moved a few yards into the scrub. Soon he could see nothing, not even the summit of the hill he was meant to be climbing and upon which the Germans were well entrenched.
He reported as much to his battalion commander, Colonel Youell, a brave weather-beaten man who felt he’d been personally let down by the Germans’ refusal to contest Salaita hill. Temple said that it was his considered opinion that the two hills would be extremely difficult to take without massive casualties; that it would be a good idea to wait until the thinking movement made its way round Kilimanjaro, at which point the Germans, seeing the danger of being cut off, would surely yield their ground.
Youell ignored him. “It may sound sensible to you, Smith, but with respect it’s obvious that you’re not a professional soldier. We don’t want them to fall back. We must force von Lettow to stand and fight. We’ve got to engage him here precisely so that he doesn’t realize he’s being cut off until it’s too late.”
Temple acquiesced, and asked for permission to visit his farm, just to see how everything was. Permission was refused.
“I need you with me,” Youell said benignly. “You’re to be attached to battalion HQ. This is your country around here, Smith. I need your advice.”
Why don’t you take it, then? Temple thought. Nobody in this army listened to a word he said.