“No, it must be a British regiment,” Felix affirmed.
“Well we’ve got the 2nd Battalion Loyal North Lancs and the 25th Battalion of the Royal Fusiliers. The ‘Legion of Frontiersmen’. Sound like a fine body of men.”
“Yes. They sound ideal.”
“That’s the ticket then,” Hyams beamed confidently. “I’ll arrange everything. Leave it all up to me.”
Two weeks later Felix was informed by telegram which Officer Training Corps he was to attend. He looked disbelievingly at the address: Keble College, Oxford. For the next three months he was back in Oxford, living in Keble’s sorry red-brick splendour in the company of two hundred other young men seeking commissions. Throughout the end of the summer of 1916, while the battle of the Somme ground itself into a state of inertia, he received instructions on how to command men, drilled endlessly in the University Parks, fired rifles at the butts in Wolvercote and undertook text-book manoeuvres on the level expanses of Port Meadow. He assailed all these distasteful duties in a spirit of unreflecting determination, resolving to acquit himself adequately so there could be no impediment offered to the task he had set himself. In fact, he wasn’t exactly clear what precisely the nature of this task was. It was born out of a mixture of near-intolerable guilt, unfocused motives of purgation and a simple but powerful need to be doing something. The notion of the ‘quest’, of somehow finding Gabriel, took a slower hold on his imagination. It was the most apt penance he could think of; he forced himself to concentrate on Gabriel and their eventual reunion and tried his hardest not to dwell on Charis.
And so the months of training — hurried and not particularly efficient — had gone past and Felix found that instead of regret and melancholy his moods had been primarily ones of deep boredom, loneliness and discomfort. On the day their postings were announced he had clustered round the noticeboard outside the college lodge with the other cadets searching for his name. “Cobb. F. R…”—his eyes flicked across—“5th btn, Nigerian bde, German East Africa.” The Nigerian Brigade? Who or what were they? He received commiserations from his fellow officers. Where was Nigeria? someone asked. Felix had to go and look it up in an atlas.
“Sorry, old chap,” Henry Hyams said when Felix asked for a transfer. “No can do.” The brigade was just being formed, Hyams said. It was the only unit in the East African theatre that wanted English officers and NCOs.
“Don’t look so glum, Felix,” Henry Hyams said, looking a little hurt. “At least you’ll be in East Africa. It’s a damn tricky job swinging these things, you know. They’re crying out for men in France.”
♦
Felix peered out of the carriage window at the African night. What was it like out there, he wondered? The train moved with frustrating slowness, reducing speed to five miles per hour every time it came to the gentlest of bends. The Indian Army officers had all fallen asleep, one of them was snoring quietly. The oil lamp in the compartment had been turned down too low to read. Felix rubbed his eyes. Somewhere in his kit he had an inflatable rubber cushion which would have eased his stiff and aching buttocks, sore from the slatted wooden bench seats, but he would have woken the entire compartment searching for it.
The train moved sluggishly but inexorably on. Sometimes it stopped in the darkness for no apparent reason. The mono-tony was briefly relieved when they pulled into tiny stations with names like ‘Pugu’, ‘Kisamine’ and ‘Soga’ where it took on more fuel and water.
At Soga Felix managed to get out of the compartment and jumped to the ground to stretch his legs. The night was warm and very dark, clouds seemed to be covering the moon and stars. All around him Felix could hear the relentless ‘creek-creek’ of the crickets, shrill and mechanical. He gave a slight shiver. There was a curious smell in the air, strangely intoxicating, a damp earthy smell of the sort sometimes encountered in old potting sheds or undisturbed dusty attics. Felix filled his lungs with it. He felt seized by a sudden nervous excitement. Up ahead the squat little locomotive was being filled up with water, a faint hiss of blundering escaping steam was carried down the line. He watched other men jumping from the carriages and the cattle trucks that carried the native soldiers. He saw some men relieving themselves and took a few steps away from the train to do likewise. He found himself standing in a sort of coarse kneelength grass. Ahead of him he could just make out a dark line of trees and bushes. He urinated, the patter of his stream silencing the crickets at his feet. He shivered again, the excitement gone, replaced by an apprehensive fearfulness. As he did up his fly buttons the thought crossed his mind that the foaming trembling darkness around him might be harbouring all manner of wild beasts. Lions, leopards, snakes, anything. Hurriedly he clambered back into the compartment. He was not in some country lane, he reminded himself, he was in Africa.
♦
It was almost midday when the troop train crawled into Mikesse. The Indian Army officers obligingly threw down his kit to him and he stacked it beside the rails. To his vague worry he was the only person to get off. The train didn’t stay long. Morogoro, General Smuts’ headquarters, was another thirty miles up the line. Everyone, it seemed, was going there. Felix looked about him. A featureless railway station with no platforms, the tracks laid across packed-down red earth. In the distance a thickly wooded range of high mountainous hills. Under large, shady trees dotted here and there motor vehicles were parked and porters slept or lounged. It was very humid. Solid continents of grey clouds loomed to the north. Felix was about to go in search of some assistance when a small white man in khaki uniform emerged from the station building. The man caught sight of him and marched over. He had a spruce, fit-looking body, but his head looked as if it belonged to a man twice his size. Felix saw he had a sergeant’s stripes on his sleeve. The man had a poor, crude-looking face, as if it were an early prototype whose features hadn’t yet been properly refined. It was utterly expressionless, as if this too were a faculty reserved for later, more sophisticated models. He had one of the heaviest beards Felix had ever seen. Although he had obviously shaved recently his entire jaw was a metallic blue-black, indeed the bristles seemed to need shaving up to within half an inch of his lower eyelids.
“Lieutenant Cobb, sir?” he said. He had a very strong but clear Scottish accent. Felix supposed him to be from Aberdeen or Inverness.
“That’s right. Are you from the 5th battalion?”
“Aye, sir. I’m Sergeant Gilzean.”
He then said something Felix didn’t understand.
“I beg your pardon?” Felix said.
“I said ‘Fegs it’s a bauch day’, sir,” Gilzean repeated patiently, as if this was an activity he was accustomed to. “I’ll just make siccar they beanswaup porters look snippert with your gear.”
“Oh. Yes, fine.”
Men were called from beneath the trees and Felix’s kit was taken round the station building and stacked in the back of a dusty Ford motor car.
“Where are we going?”
“Kibongo, sir. South bank of the Rufiji.”
“How far away is it?”
“About one hundred and twenty miles.”
“Good Lord!”
They bumped down a track that led from the station and drove past a sizeable native village and a huge transport camp. Crates and sacks were piled twenty feet high. Motor lorries and dozens of Ford motor cars of the sort they were driving were parked in long rows. Beneath palm leaf shelters were makeshift engineering and repair workshops. On a hill was a large stone building flying a red cross. A lengthy column of bootless African soldiers in green felt fezzes and flapping khaki shorts were passed.
“Are there no English troops out here?”