War Read online

  ‘Pity about the dog,’ he said. ‘You’d better get it out of the way before the children see it.’

  The Beginning of the War

  Breakfast in Dar es Salaam never varied. It was always a delicious ripe pawpaw picked that morning in the garden by the cook, on to which was squeezed the juice of a whole fresh lime. Just about every white man and woman in Tanganyika had pawpaw and lime juice for breakfast, and I believe those old colonials knew what was good for them. It is the healthiest and most refreshing breakfast I know.

  On a morning towards the end of August 1939, I was breakfasting on my pawpaw and thinking a great deal, like everyone else, about the war that we all knew was very soon going to break out with Germany. Mdisho was moving around the room and pretending to be busy.

  ‘Did you know there is going to be a war before very long?’ I asked him.

  ‘A war?’ he cried, perking up immediately. ‘A real war, bwana?’

  ‘An enormous war,’ I said.

  Mdisho’s face was now alight with excitement. He was of the Mwanumwezi tribe and there wasn’t a Mwanumwezi anywhere who did not have fighting in his blood. For hundreds of years they had been the greatest warriors in East Africa, conquering all before them, including the Masai, and even now the mere mention of war caused such dreams of glory in Mdisho’s mind that he could hardly stand it.

  ‘I still have my father’s weapons in my hut!’ he cried. ‘I shall get the spear out and start sharpening it immediately! Who are we going to fight, bwana?’

  ‘The Germani,’ I said.

  ‘Good,’ he said. ‘There are plenty of Germani around here for us to kill.’

  Mdisho was right about there being plenty of them. Only twenty-five years ago, before the First World War, Tanganyika had been German East Africa. But in 1919 after the Armistice, Germany had been forced to hand the territory over to the British, who renamed it Tanganyika. Many Germans had stayed on and the country was still full of them. They owned diamond mines and gold mines. They grew sisal and cotton and tea and ground-nuts. The owner of the soda-water bottling-plant in Dar es Salaam was a German and so was Willy Hink, the watchmaker. In fact the Germans greatly outnumbered all the other Europeans in Tanganyika put together, and when war broke out, as we now knew it must, they could present a dangerous and difficult problem to the authorities.

  ‘When is this enormous war going to begin?’ Mdisho asked me.

  ‘They say quite soon,’ I told him, ‘because over in Europe, which is ten times as far away as from here to Kilimanjaro, the Germans have a leader called Bwana Hitler who wishes to conquer the world. The Germans think this Bwana Hitler is a wonderful fellow. But he is actually a raving mad maniac. As soon as the war begins, the Germani will try to kill us all, and then, of course, we shall have to try to kill them before they can kill us.’

  Mdisho, being a true child of his tribe, understood the principle of war very well. ‘Why don’t we strike first?’ he said, excitedly. ‘Why don’t we take them by surprise, these Germani out here, bwana? Why don’t we kill all of them before the war begins? That is always the best way, bwana. My ancestors always used to strike first.’

  ‘I am afraid we have very strict rules about war,’ I said. ‘With us, nobody is allowed to kill anyone until the whistle blows and the game is officially started.’

  ‘But that is ridiculous, bwana!’ he cried. ‘In a war there are no rules! Winning is all that counts!’

  Mdisho was only nineteen years old. He had been born and brought up 700 miles inland from Dar es Salaam, near a place called Kigoma, on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, and both his parents had died before he was twelve years old. He had then been taken into the household of a kindly District Officer in Kigoma and given the job of assistant shamba-boy or gardener. From there he had graduated into the household as a house-boy and had charmed everybody by his good manners and gentle bearing. When the District Officer had been moved back to the Secretariat in Dar es Salaam, the family had taken Mdisho with them. A year or so later, the DO had been transferred to Egypt and poor Mdisho was suddenly without a job or a home, but he did have in his possession one very valuable document, a splendid reference from his former employer. That was when I was lucky enough to find him and take him on. I made him my personal ‘boy’ and soon the two of us had formed a friendship that I found rather marvellous.

  Mdisho could neither read nor write, and it was impossible for him to imagine that the world extended much beyond the shores of the African continent. But he was undoubtedly intelligent and quick to learn, and I had begun to teach him how to read. Every weekday, as soon as I got home from the office, we would have three-quarters of an hour of reading. He learnt fast, and although we were still on single words, we would soon be progressing to short sentences. I insisted on teaching him how to read and write not only Swahili words but also their English equivalents, so that he would learn a little basic English at the same time. He loved his lessons and it was touching to see him already seated at the table in the dining-room with his exercise book open in front of him when I came home in the evenings.

  Mdisho was about six feet tall, superbly built, with a rather scrunched-up flat-nosed face and the most beautiful pure white absolutely even teeth I had ever seen.

  ‘It is most important to obey the rules of war,’ I told him. ‘No Germani can be killed until war has been properly declared. And even then the enemy must be given the chance to surrender before you kill him.’

  ‘How will we know when war is declared?’ Mdisho asked me.

  ‘They will tell us on the wireless from England,’ I said. ‘We shall all know within a few seconds.’

  ‘And then the fun will begin!’ he cried, clapping his hands. ‘Oh bwana, I can hardly wait for that time to come!’

  ‘If you want to fight, you must become a soldier first,’ I told him. ‘You will have to join the Kenya Regiment and become an askari.’ An askari was a soldier in the King’s African Rifles, the KAR.

  ‘The askaris have guns and I don’t know how to use a gun,’ he said.

  ‘They will teach you,’ I said. ‘You might enjoy it.’

  ‘That would be a very serious step for me to take, bwana,’ he said. ‘I shall have to give it a great deal of thought.’

  A few days after that, things started hotting up in Dar es Salaam. War was clearly imminent, and elaborate plans were made to round up the hundreds of Germans in Dar es Salaam and upcountry as soon as war was declared. There were not a lot of young Englishmen in Dar, perhaps fifteen or twenty at the most, and all of us were ordered to leave our jobs and to become, by some magic process, temporary army officers. I was given a red armband and a platoon of askaris to command, but never having been a soldier in my life, except at school, I felt rather at a loss with twenty-five highly trained troops with rifles and one machine-gun in my charge.

  Dar es Salaam

  Sunday, no date

  Dear Mama,

  Last week I finally succumbed to Malaria and went to bed on Wednesday night with the most terrific head and a temp of 103°. Next day it was 104° and on Friday 105°. They’ve got some marvellous new stuff called Atebrin which they straightway inject into your bottom in vast quantities which suddenly brings the temperature down; then they give you an injection of 15 or 20 grams of quinine and by that time you haven’t got any bottom left at all – one side’s just Atebrin and the other’s quinine.

  I suppose that by the time you get this letter war will either be declared or it’ll be off, but at the moment things, even here, are humming a bit. We’re all temporary army officers, with batons, belts & all sorts of secret instructions. If we go out of the house we’ve got to leave word where we’ve gone to so that we can be called at a moment’s notice. We know exactly where to go if anything happens but everything’s very secret, and as I’m not sure whether our letters are being censored or not I’m not going to tell you any more. But if war breaks out it’ll be our job to round up all the Germans here, and after that th