Felix threw his cigarette over the ramparts and turned to look at the cluster of huts in the Boma. He saw Pinto emerge from their brick building and watched him stretch and stamp his tubby frame into activity.
“Felix!” Pinto shouted, looking around for him.
“Aristedes,” Felix replied. “Up here.”
Pinto puffed up the steps to the ramparts.
“Telefon,” he panted, showing his array of gold and silver teeth. “Wheesh-Brownim. Stokesh gonz.” He prattled on. Felix registered Stokes guns. Wheech-Browning was coming with Stokes guns. But when?
“Um. Ah…presentamente?” Felix asked.
“Nao. Eh…Demain. Sim. Demain.”
“Tomorrow.”
“Nao. Demain. Demain.”
“Sim.”
They nodded and smiled at each other. Then they turned and surveyed the view. It was extremely familiar. Nonetheless, Pinto started pointing out features in the landscape but Felix didn’t understand him. All the same he nodded, and said ‘Sim’ from time to time.
The sun began to sink and the light thickened. In the ditch frogs croaked and the first crickets began to trill. The mosquitoes came out from the shadows they had been resting in all day and began to whine around Felix’s ears. He felt a great weight of melancholy descend easily on him; an acute sense of how futile all his efforts had been, of all the human cost of the last two years. Charis, Gabriel…The list went on. Gilzean, Cyril, Bilderbeck, Parrott, Loveday. Then there were the wounded: Nigel Bathe, Cave-Bruce-Cave, his father. Then there were the unremembered casualties: the men in his platoon and company, the poisoned porters at Kibongo. And that was just one person. Think of everybody with their own list: Temple, Wheech-Browning, Gabriel, Aristedes — then everybody in East Africa and Europe. He could only mourn in the vaguest sense for the others, but when he thought of his personal list of names he felt his anger return. How could he just accept these casualties? He couldn’t be fatalistic about them any more. That was why he had joined up after Charis’s death, why he felt he had at least to try and find Gabriel…He ruefully acknowledged his own dishonesty here. There had been other motives too: fear, self-preservation, worry, guilt. But it didn’t matter. The important thing was that efforts had to be made, responsibilities shouldered, blame apportioned. He couldn’t simply let it go. But he had his guilty man now. Von Bishop carried the heavy freight of all his grievances.
He accepted another cigarette from Pinto, who was still talking away. Felix thought about Stackpole. He had written a long letter home about Gabriel, telling them that Gabriel had died while escaping from prison camp with vital military secrets of an unspecified sort. But then he’d torn it up. It was better, he felt, to let them live on as long as possible in ignorance. He realized he’d been away from Stackpole for nearly two years. To his surprise he found himself feeling homesick for the ugly house. He set his face, feeling an unfamiliar twitching below his eyes.
To distract himself he looked back at Pinto. But the melancholy mood of the African dusk seemed to have affected the captain too. His plump features were slack, a hand worried at the sore in his nostril. He had abandoned his disquisition on the landscape and returned to his favourite theme: his illness. His voice was doleful and slurred with self-pity. He cupped his fat groin in both hands. Felix saw his eyes glistening with tears as his pathological litany softy continued with the evening garnering kindly about them.
♦
Wheech-Browning leapt awkwardly from the Packard lorry. He sneezed and reached into his pocket, extracted a large checked handkerchief and blew his nose into it.
“Ah, Cobb. Good morning. Stinking cold. Somehow you never expect to get a cold in Africa. Touch of the ‘flu as well if I’m not mistaken.”
Pinto wandered up.
“Ah, morning, Capitao Pinto!” Wheech-Browning dropped his voice and turned to Felix. “How do you say ‘Good morning’, Cobb? I can never remember.”
“Buon. Dias.”
“Buon. Dias. Señor. Capitao.” He enunciated each syllable very clearly.
Pinto bowed. He was still very depressed. “Dias,” he muttered.
“Marvellous gift you have, Cobb. I say, is old Aristedes all right? He looks a bit white around the gills.”
“It’s his syphilis. It’s getting him down.”
“I see. Extraordinary man. Rather hard luck, though.” He turned to the askaris jumping from the back of the lorry. “Come on you men, let’s get those guns out.”
While the guns were being unloaded Wheech-Browning explained his mission. Apparently a column had broken off from von Lettow’s main force, had wheeled north and was heading in the general direction of Boma Durio in search, it was assumed, of stores and supplies. Two companies of KAR askaris were being marched down from Medo as reinforcements but in the meantime it had been decided to strengthen the Boma’s defences with two Stokes guns.
“I said you knew how to fire them, Cobb. That’s right, isn’t it?”
Felix said yes. He had spent many days at Morogoro after Twelve company had returned from the Rufiji learning how to fire the simple mortars.
The guns were taken up onto the earthworks and aimed at a stand of bamboo which stood at the edge of the cleared ground around the fort. Pinto had cheered up at the prospect of a private firing and stood by the Stokes guns expectantly waiting for instructions.
“Right, Cobb,” Wheech-Browning said. “Over to you.”
Felix thought fast. “I’ll tell you what,” he said. “I’ll explain everything to the capitao and then he can drill his men. I’m a bit rusty on the technical terms.”
Some dummy rounds were brought up. Felix dropped in a charge, set the sights on the bamboo stand approximately one hundred yards away, then fitted the round dummy bomb — rather like a large wooden toffee apple — into the top of the muzzle.
“Normally this is done by three men,” he explained.
“Que?” said Pinto.
“Three. Tres, um, homem. Très homem.”
“Eh?”
“Sim.”
“Good, Cobb. Excellent.”
“Stand by.” Felix jerked the lanyard at the base of the barrel. There was a loud report causing everyone to leap back in alarm. Smoke coiled from the barrel and every fissure in the gun. The bomb remained fixed at the end of the muzzle.
“Good Lord,” said Wheech-Browning.
“Let’s try the other gun,” Felix suggested.
The sighting and loading procedures were repeated, the lanyard jerked and this time with a dull thump the bomb went sailing high into the blue morning air and dropped into the jungle a good fifty yards beyond the bamboo stand. Pinto clapped.
“Bit off target,” said Wheech-Browning.
Felix adjusted the elevation of the barrel. Another round was fired. This one went almost straight up and when it came down bounced off the hard ground some thirty yards short. Pinto’s men had by now gathered at a safe distance further along the earthworks, and were looking on with a mixture of apprehension and sceptical curiosity. Pinto himself seemed enormously pleased.