“Let’s go,” von Bishop said. He kicked his mule into action and trotted off down the main street, the ruga-ruga loping behind.
7: 22 November 1917, The Makonde plateau, German East Africa
After he left Liesl, Gabriel crept into the rubber plantations and waited for dawn. As soon as there was a faint light he set off through the comparatively open bush, keeping the rising sun on his right hand side. It was fairly easy going. The countryside was sparsely wooded, the ground covered in thick, waist-high grass with the odd tangle of thorn thicket. He kept to paths only if they headed due north. He wanted to make as much distance as possible while he was still fresh. He bypassed native villages but made no real effort to hide himself. The main German force was south of Nanda now, he knew, based at Newala. There was a rearguard to the northwest of the town on the road that led to Nambindinga. His plan was to strike north for a day or two — depending on progress — then strike east, forming the two sides of a right-angled triangle to the Nanda-Nambindinga hypotenuse. He calculated that he should meet up with the advancing British columns in three days or thereabouts.
After an hour or so the ground began to rise as he entered the gentle foothills of the wide Makonde plateau, a sizeable spur of which separated Nanda and Nambindinga. In the dips and valleys the vegetation grew thicker and for a lot of the time he passed through thin woods composed of spindly trees. At mid-morning he found a safe place to stop, a dry gully with a thick screen of bushes and scrub. He found a patch of shade and ate some of the hard unleavened bread that Liesl had supplied and drank a few mouthfuls of water.
He felt curiously exhilarated and quite pleased with himself. His limping gait had carried him along tolerably well. His leg was barely aching. He took from the sack the book Liesl had given him, Die Leiden des jungen Werthers: ‘The Sorrows of Young Werther’, he translated. He had never read it, just used its fine pages to make cigarettes. The first eighty-seven pages were missing. He started to write on the upper and lower margins of the first available page. A little self-consciously he wrote, “Report of Capt. G.H. Cobb att to 69th Palamcottah Light Infantry. Taken prisoner at Tanga. 4⁄11⁄1914. Account of imprisonment and escape.” He paused. He knew that he might fail in his endeavour and the request to Liesl for writing materials had been made with this in mind. If his body should be found, he wanted his identity to be ascertainable, and some record of the facts to be established. That was most important.
“Next of kin,” he wrote. “Major—”: he paused and scratched out ‘Major’ and replaced it with ‘Charis Lavery Cobb, The Cottage, Stackpole Manor, Stackpole, Kent’. As he added the full stop the point of his pencil stub broke. He swore. Writing Charis’s name and the familiar address brought back long dormant memories. He found himself thinking of their days in Trouville, their walks along the promenade. He brought to mind an image of Stackpole in high summer, the field in front of the house, the river, the willow pool. He remembered the boiling afternoon he had gone swimming with Felix, the dinner when the electric light had failed, the major furiously ringing a silent bell. He felt a debilitating sense of homesickness sweep through his body.
He looked down at his legs stretched before him as he sat. His decrepit boots, his tattered socks, his thin knees freshly scratched from the thorn. He touched his right knee, pushing at the knee bone with a forefinger. It slid, oiled and easily, at his touch. As it moved the sun caught the springy golden hairs that covered it. His fingers travelled higher, pulling back the frayed hem of his shorts to exposé the wasted thigh, the contorted pink and white scar that stitched together the severed halves of his muscle. He pulled the trouser leg down. His wound was aching a little more; his leg seemed to be stiffening up. He rubbed his jaw, hearing the rasp of bristles of his three-day beard. Above him the sun beat down as midday approached. Locusts and grasshoppers kept up their monotonous shrilling whine in the surrounding bushes.
He lay down and pillowed his arms beneath his head. I must rest, he told himself. I’ll set out again in the afternoon, when the heat’s gone from the sun. He’d look for a flint later and try and sharpen some kind of point on the pencil, so he could write down the details of his escape. At least the facts would be there, if his body were found. He tried to replace this grim thought by something more agreeable. He made an effort to conjure up a picture of Charis’s face, something he hadn’t done for many, many months, thinking uneasily of the few days they had spent together as man and wife. He screwed up his eyes in concentration but he found he was thinking only of Liesl. Liesl in the bath, her heavy breasts dripping with water, the maid pouring it over her shoulders, rivulets sluicing over her body, dampening the pale coppery triangle of hairs between her thighs…
He sat up. A problem suddenly became obvious to him. How could he write of Liesl’s part in the escape? How would it look to anyone — Charis — reading about it? He decided to wait to think about it later.
He set off again in the middle of the afternoon. The day was still hot but he found the slope he was moving up well-provided with shady trees. His leg had stiffened up considerably and he didn’t make the good progress he had in the morning. Skirting some fields on the edge of a native village some children shouted at him and some stones were thrown, but he kept on going. It took him two laborious hours to break out of the trees and reach the edge of the plateau.
The sun was lower in the sky, the air was dusty and soft. Ahead stretched a vast grassy plain dotted with small stone hills — kopjes — occasional brakes of trees and bushes and delicately beautiful flat-topped acacias.
He set off across the grass plain. He would walk as far as he could before night fell. Then he would make a fire at the base of one of the kopjes. In the morning he would change course and march into the rising sun. By the end of that day, or perhaps the next, he would meet the advancing columns of the British army.
8: 22 November 1917, Near Nambindinga, German East Africa
The 5th Battalion of the Nigerian Brigade plodded along the dirt road to Nambindinga, Twelve company in the vanguard. Felix walked beside Gilzean in the stifling, late afternoon heat. He looked back at his platoon, green fezzes bobbing in an untidy column, the slap of their bare feet on the hard earth of the road. Frearson was somewhere behind. Gent’s platoon was pushed out on the right wing. Young Waller, Parrott’s replacement, was slogging up and down the crumpled foothills and gullies of the plateau on the left. Loveday’s platoon was fanned out across the road several hundred yards ahead.
“Sacré bleu!” Loveday had exclaimed on being told his position. “Advance guard, my, my.”
They had been making slow progress all day without meeting any opposition. This was their first occasion at the head of the column of troops pushing inland from Lindi, ‘Linforce’ as it was known. To the north was another column, from Kilwa, and imaginatively dubbed, in true army fashion, ‘Kil-force’. It was these two columns that were driving the remains of von Lettow’s army out of German East Africa.
Felix looked at Gilzean. His khaki shirt was soaked with sweat. In the shade cast by his sun helmet he looked pallid and drawn, his chin and jaws blue-black against his white cheeks.