Nothing today had been remotely how he imagined it would be; nothing in his education or training had prepared him for the utter randomness and total contingency of events.
(Gabriel Cobb reflecting on the chaos of the Battle of Tanga, An Ice-Cream War, page 172)
This is a long, deeply researched and immaculately described historical novel, set during the Great War in British East Africa, filling 383 densely printed Penguin pages.
Boyd is a lovely writer. His style is clear and polite, in a very English way. It’s obviously less funny than ‘A Good Man in Africa’, which is a full-on comedy, but it also feels more formal, somehow more old fashioned, appropriately for its historical setting. There are moments of psychological acuity or observational detail or deft phrasing to give pleasure on every page.
Part 1. Before the war
Chapter 1. 6 June 1914, Dar-es-Salaam, German East Africa
Introduces us to Temple Smith, ‘a very fat man with a thick black walrus moustache’ (p.310), the American owner of a sisal plantation in the south of British East Africa (what will later become Kenya). Smith has travelled down to Dar es Salaam, which is in the adjoining colony of German East Africa, in order to collect a consignment of coffee plant seedlings. He is ambitious and wants to expand his farm from just growing and processing sisal
Through his eyes we see Dar as it was in 1914 and the arrival of several German ships at the harbour. Smith is greeted by his nearest neighbour from across the border in the German colony, one Erich von Bishop. An efficient crop-haired man, Bishop is here to greet his wife, Liesl, who has been on an extended holiday to her relatives in Europe (where she has put on a lot of weight).
(There’s a bit of backstory, which is that we learn why Smith is in Africa. He was bored being manager of an iron foundry in Sturgis, New Jersey, and had applied to an advertisement to be the manager of a big game hunt to Africa, in this case for the ex-US president Theodor Roosevelt and his son Kermit when they came on a big game safari back in 1909. When he questioned the need to massacre quite such huge numbers of wild game he was sacked but had come to like Africa and decided to stay on and try to make it as a farmer.)
There is an odd, apparently inconsequential episode, when Smith visits a local prostitute in a bordello. She is rake thin, covered in bangles and ointment and smells. When she spits something out the window which lands with a clatter on some nearby roof he chickens out and doesn’t go through with it…
Chapter 2. 8 June 1914, The Northern Railway, German East Africa
Bishop invites Smith to share the train journey from Dar back inland to the nearest station to their farms. We see the long uncomfortable railway journey through the eyes of Liesl von Bishop who is not happy to be back in Africa and, as angry women do, finds both the men pitiful and pathetic. Smith alights at Moshi station where he is met by his native foreman, Saleh.
Chapter 3. 10 June 1914, Taveta, British East Africa
Smith’s farm (which he has named Smithville) with its acres of sisal plants, barns, warehouse to house the massive decorticator machine, some tramlines. His placid wife, Matilda, and two yapping little boys, Glenway and Walker (p.45).
Chapter 4. 24 July 1914, Ashurst, Kent, England
Long chapter introducing us to the Cobb family through the eyes of the spoilt younger son, Felix, who’s just left private school before going up to Oxford next term. Felix has come under the influence of a charismatic boy called Holland, at school, and so fancies himself as a fashionable, progressive intellectual.
Holland’s sway over Felix had been established in their final year at school, and Felix had accepted it with the zeal of a disciple acknowledging the messiah. (p.189)
With the result that Felix finds his family, and everything about the impressive country estate in Kent, unbearable – his father the permanently bad-tempered retired Major Hamish; his sisters Cressida, Yseult and the twins Albertine and Eustacia; his conventional mother and his various male in-laws, namely:
- Lieutenant Nigel Bathe married to Eustacia
- Sammy Hinshelwood
- the honourable Greville Verschoyle married to Albertine
- Lt Col. Henry Hyam, married to Yseult (who, when war starts, bags a job in the Committee of Imperial Defence)
The only person he likes, adores even, is his older brother, 27-year-old Captain Gabriel Cobb who collected him from the station and with whom he goes for a swim in the old willow pool while filling him in on the latest family gossip. As part of their banter Gabriel chats about his time in the army in India where he hasn’t seen any fighting but he has stuck a few wild pigs. Felix is disgusted and asks whether they squeal. Well, you’d squeal if you were stuck with a spear, laughs Gabriel. This is a characteristically clever piece of prolepsis by Boyd for Gabriel will, himself, be stuck like a pig in the upcoming war (in Part 2, chapter 6).
This grand country pile is, we learn, the reward from a metal company in Wolverhampton which produces items like Felix’s electro-plated nickel-silver cigarette case (pages 52 and 209).
Chapter 5. 25 July 1914, Stackpole, Kent, England
Felix’s jaundiced jealous view of his brother’s marriage to Charis. He is mightily pissed off because at the last minute brother Gabriel told him he was being replaced as best man by Sammy Hinshelwood, Felix being downgraded to chief usher.
Chapter 6. 26 July 1914, Trouville-sur-mer, France
Gabriel and Charis’s honeymoon, filled with details about hotels and seabathing in 1914, but centring on Gabriel’s inability, on two successive nights, to get an erection, despite clambering on top of Charis and sort of rubbing his groin against her (still in his pyjamas) to her complete bewilderment. It’s only on the third night that he bangs his knee, navigating across the bedroom in the dark, she loses her temper and tells him to ‘come and let mummy rub it, you silly boy’ when, to both their surprises, he suckles her like a baby and gets a proper erection, which is a definite improvement, even if he then ejaculates prematurely before he has penetrated her. Sigh. A vivid imagining of the bad old days of total ignorance about almost every aspect of sex.
Next morning he reads a French paper and announces to an astonished Charis that Austria has declared war on Serbia and they must return to Britain immediately, that same day.
Part 2. The war
Chapter 1. 9 August 1914, Smithville, British East Africa
Officious army and customs officer Reggie Wheech-Browning – ‘a ludicrous beanpole of a man’ (p.338) – drops by to tell Smith that war has broken out and to leave his farm immediately. Smith thinks it’s stuff and nonsense and doesn’t budge.
A week later a force of German askaris (African soldiers) led by two German officers marches onto his land and up to his beloved factory. It is von Bishop who he met in the opening chapter. Very politely von Bishop announces he is commandeering Smith’s farm, as his men set fire to his sisal crop and start pulling up the short length of tram track he had lain down. It’s all he can do to prevent von Bishop from vandalising his precious decorticating machine. When asked, von Bishop very politely signs an affadavit itemising all the things he’s burned or is confiscating, but insists he will also be commandeering the farmhouse. Smith has one hour to pack his belongings, wife and two small boys into a mule-drawn buggy, and told to shamble off down the track towards Voi.
On the outskirts he is, ludicrously, fired on by the ramshackle force of askaris led by Wheech-Browning. Once he’s yelled who he is he’s allowed to proceed to Voi where he puts his family up at the government dak, with a view to himself journeying on to Nairobi to establish who’s going to pay him compensation.
Chapter 2. 20 August 1914, Nairobi, British East Africa
Ensconced in snobbish, pretentious, half-built Nairobi, Smith discovers that well-heeled Brits and various foreigners have set up a volunteer defence force while they wait for the relief force to arrive from India but have become disillusioned by two weeks of inactivity. In Voi he’s been greeted by Matilda’s father i.e. his father-in-law the slope-shouldered Reverend Norman Espie.
Smith goes to see his insurance company, the grandly named African Guarantee and Indemnity Company which is in fact a small office above a butcher’s shop on Sixth Avenue run by one immigrant Indian, Goolam Hoossam Essanjee Esquire. Essanjee explains that Smith’s claim of theft of his farm and equipment will have to be confirmed the company’s assessor who is also Goolam Hoossam Essanjee Esquire.
Chapter 3. 30 August 1914 ,Voi, British East Africa
10 days later. Wheech-Browning drives Smith and Essanjee in an early motorbike with sidecar out of Nairobi, past Voi. They stop in the open scrub an hour or so from Smith’s farm when they suddenly come under fire from Germans hiding in a rocky hill 600 yards away. As the reader anticipated, the Indian, Essanjee – the lieutenant dispensable of the situation – is hit twice and dies. Wheech-Browning and Smith bundle his body into the sidecar, and hightail it away from the ambush.
Chapter 4. 26 October 1914, SS Homayun, Indian Ocean
56 days later, and we join Gabriel aboard a tramp steamer sailing from Bombay to British East Africa. He had hung around in Britain waiting for news, then been sent out to India, to Bombay then up to Rawalpindi to join his regiment, the West Kents. But then to his disgust he was separated from them and posted to a subaltern regiment, the 69th Palamcottah Light Infantry, part of Indian Expeditionary Force B, and has to entrain all the way back down to Bombay and then board the smelly old SS Homayun for a hot slow boring voyage across the Indian Ocean.
Everyone is seasick. Incidents including a concert party interrupted by a rainstorm and the flogging of a mutineer. Sammy Hinshelwood distinguishes himself by his coarse stories about sex which, of course, embarrass but also arouse the only recently blooded Gabriel. He becomes friendly with the eccentric, intense Dr Bilderbeck who gives him the best advice for life in the front line: always have a pillow and a basin.
Chapter 5. 2 November 1914, Tanga, German East Africa
Tanga was a major port on the northernmost part of German East Africa, close to the border with British East Africa. Description of Gabriel and his troop loading into a lighter, being towed to the beach, jumping into the neck-high water, making their way to the beach and a little inland. Then the confusing long delay as they wait all through a hot day for instructions, their air of chaos when Gabriel goes up to the ‘red house’ on a hill which is staff headquarters. The constant sound of gunfire from ahead of them. Initial intelligence said the town had been abandoned. Now they realise the Germans have heavily fortified it and are fighting off all attacks.
Chapter 6. 3 November 1914, Tanga, German East Africa
Plausible sounding account of the battle Tanga in that it’s mostly Gabriel stuck in charge of his 70 or so scared Indian soldiers with a cheerfully naive number two, Gleeson. When they are told to go forward they blunder through dense undergrowth, are dispirited by a flight of Indian troops running back from the front, then blunder into an area of bees nest which attack and sting them very severely. At one point in the sequence of events he bumps into Bilderbeck again, who orders the handful of remaining Indian sepoys to advance. When they don’t move Bilderbeck calmly shoots one in the head at point blank range, a spatter of fresh brain landing on his boot.
Eventually it’s just Gabriel and Gleeson left as they make their way forward, are shot at by people with northern accents who they realise are the Lancashire regiment, identify themselves and discover the Lancs are pinned down by a load of Indian soldiers who take shots every time they try to retreat. Gleeson can speak Hindi so he is sent to the side of the house facing the Indians and starts shouting to them that they’re British.
Around then Gabriel sees a German officer emerge from a house a few hundred yards away, leading his men, in plain view and takes the opportunity to fire a shot. It completely misses but triggers an immense fusillade on the house they’re holed up in. When it dies away Gabriel turns to escape the house and comes across Gleeson lying on the floor with his lower jaw show away to reveal the enormous human tongue, glugging down his own blood and still blinking and moving his eyes.
Dazed with horror Gabriel leaps out the back window of the house and runs for the tree cover, telling himself all the time that he’ll come back to rescue Gleeson which we know he won’t. En route back to the beach he stumbles across a troop of German askaris who chase him, (grotesquely enough, through a graveyard), catch up, then slash at him with bayonets, one severing a thigh muscle so that he falls to the ground, taking two other severe stab wounds in the abdomen before he passes out. I assumed he was dead.
Chapter 7. 6 November 1914, Tanga, German East Africa
The Germans win the Battle of Tanga i.e. repulse the British attack. Bilderbeck is the British representative sent to supervise the handing over of British stores to the victorious Germans and ferrying the British wounded back to the ships, liaising with a German officer named Hammerstein, assisted by von Bishop whose eyes we see everything through. After the British had been forced to flee from the beaches, their battleships subjected the town to a heavy barrage. A shell landed near von Bishop giving him loud tinnitus so he asks the German medic Dr Deppe to examine him. Bilderbeck discovers Cobb is still alive though severely injured from the pig sticking he got from the bayonets and has a few words with him, in his hospital bed, before he returns to the beach and thence the British ships.
Chapter 8. 16 March 1915, Oxford, England
Six months later. Cut back to Felix who is now in his second term at Oxford. Things are not well. He continues to copy his hero, Holland, but neither of them make much impact in wartime Oxford. All the able-bodied students have volunteered and gone off to war. Felix has a slight astigmatism, Holland an unspecified ailment. Both are regularly handed white feathers by old Edwardian ladies in the street for being cowards. Felix is horribly embarrassed by this and has taken to wearing an eye patch to visibly excuse himself; Holland, true to his provocative aesthetic attitude, wants to be given white feathers and is jokily jealous because Felix has more than him. It’s that kind of jokey, studentish relationship.
But other things about Oxford are disappointing, too. Felix is at war with his scout, a wizened con-man named Sproat and his mute son, Algy. And his tutor is an ancient decrepit don named Jock Illiffe whose overheated rooms pong of cats. Once Felix read him the same essay that he’d read the previous week and Illiffe, sitting back in his chair with his eyes closed, didn’t even notice. With the result that he’s failed his Moderations or ‘Mods’ in History.
To cap it all he’s developed a cold sore at the corner of his mouth, the size of a sixpence, which refuses to go away, which solidifies into a scab, which breaks when he smiles and bleeds. Very unsightly.
So this chapter is a successfully evocative painting of Oxford in the first year of the Great War. It also gives us a Felix-eye view of the Cobb family. The splenetic Major has pinned up a big map of northern France in the study and forces the entire family and all the servants to attend a daily update on the progress of the war. The family have, of course, taken the news about Gabriel being severely wounded, very badly. There’s also news about the various other brothers-in-law and family hangers-on.
Holland has acquired a mistress in London, an artist’s model named Enid who takes morphine and makes his life hell, so he’s writing some jolly good poetry about it. Felix, very much still the shy virgin, has a crush on Holland’s sister, Amory, who’s at art school, and is invited to a party she’s giving.
Chapter 9. 18 March 1915, Stackpole Manor, Kent
Felix catches the train back to the family home in Kent. Charis is living there, now, in the former servant’s cottage, which was to have been her and Gabriel’s newlyweds home. She keeps bursting into tears about Gabriel. His father is still short and angry, but his flesh hangs off him. He looks like a demented Victorian cleric.
What a horrible old man, Felix thought. (p.199)
The Felix chapters are drily comical, with overtones of Aldous Huxley and Evelyn Waugh. Cyril, the sweary working class man Felix liked, his son now tells him has been killed on the Western Front. Felix is genuinely shocked and upset. Then Charis springs it on him that the family have arranged a birthday party for her on 29 March, he’s invited, in fact everyone’s expecting Felix to ‘squire’ Charis. But it clashes with Amory’s party. Family duty or the (remote) possibility of sex. Decisions decisions for a young man.
Chapter 10. 29 March 1915, Café Royal, London
We meet Felix and Holland in the stylish Café Royal, whence they catch a cab to Cheyne Walk in Chelsea and upstairs to a sordid flat where Amory lives and which is hosting a very bohemian party, packed with artists and models, all smoking and drinking heavily, a girl playing guitar to an adoring coterie etc. Felix is introduced to Pavelienski or ‘Pav’, the east European model Amory models for. Amory herself is a thing chestless woman who almost completely ignored Felix and is irritated when Holland insists he accompanies them to the famed bohemian nightclub, the Golden Calf, as Amory had booked a table for 16 and Felix is supernumary.
(The Cave of the Golden Calf was a real nightclub, a consciously bohemian creation decorated by leading artists of the time – Wyndham Lewis, Charles Ginner and Spencer Gore – praised by Ezra Pound and frequented by Katherine Mansfield, Ford Madox Ford, and Augustus John. Wikipedia)
Anyway, Felix’s attempts to seduce Amory go disastrously awry as she shakes him off and calls him a ‘silly boring little boy’, getting up to go and dance with Pav. Suddenly sober and realising what a fool he’s made of himself, Felix goes wandering through the dark streets of London feeling poetic and soulful till he comes to a baked potato stand, buys one, is propositioned by an old prostitute, taken back to her squalid digs, is fleeced £2 for a horrible experience, unable to get an erection (like his brother Gabriel, in Trouville) so the hooker starts to masturbate him and he climaxes almost immediately (like his brother in Trouville), ejaculating over the sheets, prompting the outraged prossie to tell him to ‘fuck orf out of it’. Felix stumbles into his clothes and down the steep stairs and out into the bleak streets. Sex, eh.
Cut to Felix having taken the milk train back down to Kent and, having been cleaned out by the whore, forced to walk through the dew-drenched countryside to Stackpole. Here he’s surprised to see the light on in the cottage, knocks and is admitted by Charis who is still wearing her gown from the night before, the night of her party, the party Felix rudely missed in order to undergo his series of humiliations in London, as he now ruefully thinks. Sitting in her small front room in front of the fire sipping tea he suddenly feels intimately close to her, his brother’s wife, and tries to stifle the thoughts. The reader wonders whether they’ll end up becoming an item, two damaged ingenues…
Chapter 11. 17 June 1915, Nanda, German East Africa
Three months later. We discover that von Bishop’s wife, Liesl, has been nursing the injured. Kicked out of her house on the border with the British colony, she spent a few months in Dar until, out of boredom, she volunteered to help at the hospital but was then evacuated with all the long-term patients to a hospital far in the south and inland, at a place called Nanda.
A new clutch of patients arrived along with their doctor, Dr Deppe. One is Captain Gabriel Cobb. He is still alive, recovering from severe wounds, learning to walk with crutches. Liesl is a bad-tempered fat woman. So pale and freckled, she sweats continually. Her only pleasure is the brief shower at the end of the day when her maid, Kimi. pours several buckets of water over her head. Then she dries on a frayed towel, slips into casual clothes, eats and goes to bed early. Teutonic joylessness.
Chapter 12. 21 November 1915, Voi, British East Africa
Back to Temple Smith. It’s about a year after he was evicted from his farm. He joined the East African Mounted Rifles but has done nothing except practice drills and acquire more bits of uniform which barely cover his fat frame, while Voi expands into a vast armed camp containing Indian force B, South African coloureds and whites, Kings African Rifle blacks, a huge heterogeneous force.
He’s been called in to meet the head of this force, Brigadier-General Pughe. He’s s short pompous man who turns out to be drunk on brandy and promptly ignores his advice about the lie of the land. Serves the stupid British right.
Talking of which Smith walks back towards the enormous camp, past the fenced areas for donkeys and horses (dying by the dozen due to tsetse fly) to the aerodrome which amounts to a big area of flat, cleared scrubland and a couple of warehouses made out of canvas awning. The entire presence of the Royal Air Force is just two BE2C biplanes.
To Smith’s immense irritation the officious twerp Wheech-Browning is dressed up in flying gear with a reversed cap and flying goggles and about to go for his first flight with flying officer Drewes. it’s a disaster. They bounce along the ‘runway’ but after lifting about 12 feet slowly sink back to the ground. It’s too hot, the air is too thin. But it carries trundling along towards a drainage ditch, pitches head first into it and Drewes is killed. Bystanders rush over to the wreckage to pull his body out but Wheech-Browning, indestructible, emerges as blithe and jolly as ever.
Chapter 13. 10 December 1915, The King’s Arms, Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire
Felix and Charis have ended up becoming an item. We find them in bed in a pub 30 miles or so away from Stackpole. They have had eight sexual encounters and are familiar with each other’s body. We watch Charis inset a tiny sponge dabbed in an unnamed solution attached to a fine thread into her vagina, the thread just sticking out. Contraception 1915. They both know the ghost of Gabriel hovers over their couplings but neither has the guts to raise the subject.
Nigel Bathe came back from Mesopotamia where he lost both arms in a bomb-throwing training exercise when one went off in his hand. Christ. The casual horror not of war but the incompetent preparations for it.
A recap of how Charis and Felix became lovers i.e. he repeatedly kissed her and wore down her rejections. In the end she’s lonely want wanted comforting. They devised stories about visiting distant relatives as excuses for meeting up in remote inns for weekends of love.
On the train back from Aylesbury to London Felix admits he feels dreadfully guilty. Charis reassures her that they have created their own bubble of love. But inside she is full of remorse and guilt. Humans and their ridiculous emotions. But then this is a novel. A verbal artifice created with the aim of describing extreme or complex emotions, all for our entertainment.
Chapter 14. 11 March 1916, Salaita Hill, British East Africa
Detailed description of the war in Africa. Temple Smith is obviously going to be our eyes and ears for this. On 12 February the Brits launch a headlong assault on Salaita Hill where 600 South Africans are mown down by German machine gunners. A second attempt finds the hill abandoned, the Germans have withdrawn from the town of Taveta to scrub country and two hills beyond General Smuts from South Africa is put in charge of the campaign. A month later, against Smith’s advice, the Brits insist on trying to storm the two hills. He watches the whole sorry fiasco and watches the obstinate stupid British officer in command, Colonel Youell, shot in the neck and quickly bleed to death.
Smith accompanies his body in a field ambulance back to staff HQ, reports to General Pughe who is completely drunk then, in utter disgust, goes into town, gets his mule-handler to saddle up his mule and heads off towards Smithville, his homestead which he hasn’t seen for 18 months.
First of all, there are no Germans there. After a lot of tense creeping towards the farmhouse in expectation of being shot he discovers that every surface in every single room has been covered in human faeces. Then he encounters Saleh, the old chief servant, Saleh shows him that a) the grave of his dead baby daughter has been opened and the bones scattered everywhere (they collect them together and rebury them) and b) the Germans have taken the decorticator – almost as soon as Smith left, according to Saleh. Smith vows revenge against von Bishop. The tone and intemperance of his vow reminded me fleetingly of Morgan Leafy’s tone of permanent rage in Boyd’s novel, ‘A Good Man in Africa’…
Chapter 15. 24 June 1916, Nanda, German East Africa
Back at the German hospital several things have happened to Gabriel. He has recovered enough to be able to walk around freely. The research base had been converted not only into a hospital but a prisoner of war camp. The British officer in charge had conceived a plan for Gabriel to keep infecting his thigh wound with dirt in order to remain an invalid and therefore outside the prison camp and in the hospital. He also suggested that Gabriel help out with basic nursing activities, for example washing German wounded or holding them as they evacuated their dysenteric bowels – because from this privileged position he was able to a) pilfer supplies and b) find out the latest military situation (which is that the Germans are slowly withdrawing along the railway line in face of solid British advances, towards Dar).
But the chapter starts a few weeks after all the British POWs have been evacuated to the coast. There is no military reason why Gabriel should continue malingering. The truth is he’s fallen in lust with Liesl. She doesn’t give a toss about him, is a big, solid, no-nonsense German Frau who goes about her duties with angry efficiency. but a few weeks previously Gabriel, dropping off some of the cigarettes he’s taken to rolling from local tobacco for both of them, glimpsed her stripped naked having her evening shower – and was seized with raw lust. Now he can barely be in her presence without trembling although she, of course, is completely oblivious to his behaviour.
Chapter 16. 25 June 1916, Stackpole Manor, Kent
Charis is finding the affair unbearable. She’s spent 18 months writing letters to Gabriel and never had a reply. She stops and feels dreadfully guilty, so guilty that she has a second wind and writes Gabriel a long letter explaining that she’s been having an affair and why – but not naming Felix as the lover, and posts it to the Ministry of Defence as usual.
As usual, Felix drops by the cottage late that night. He’s taken to doing this, taking Charis’s sexual availability more and more for granted. After their latest midnight sex and Felix has returned to his room, Charis writes Felix a simple note saying she is going away, she has written Gabriel telling him everything.
Except that she didn’t tell Gabriel everything in her letter to him, she didn’t identify Felix as her lover. I predict the discrepancy between the two letters will cause trouble. I predict Felix will think Charis has written to Gabriel about naming him and be stricken with panic.
Chapter 17. 26 June 1916, Stackpole Manor, Kent
Felix opens Charis’s letter at an otherwise typical family breakfast, reads its few lines, jumps to his feet yelling ‘Jesus Christ!’ and runs down to the cottage to find Charis long gone. Turmoil. Panic. He is of course distraught that she’s told Gabriel everything but something in the tone of the note makes him panic think she’s killed herself so her runs to the ornamental fish ponds they spent so much time mooning beside. Notices the big stone bust of the emperor Vitellius is missing. Leaps into the freezing water and discovers her body. She had tied round her neck with twine then tied it multiple times round the bust and chucked it in. She looks peaceful in submarine death, her hair floating calmly round her face. Well, this is a fine pickle!
Chapter 18. 1 July 1916, Sevenoaks, Kent
There’s an inquest. Felix lies his face off and claims to have lost the letter in the frenzy of searching for Charis, maybe in the pond. Everybody believes this except the local doctor who Charis had been doing refugee work with, Dr Venables. Venables asks him for a drink at a bar in a hotel not far from the magistrates’ court in Sevenoaks where the inquest is held. Here he asks Felix point blank if he was having an affair with Charis. It takes all Felix’s self possession to try and appear calm as he pretends to be outraged and deny it. Venables then asks whether Charis was having an affair with anyone else, which Felix says he doubts. Thoughts are rampaging through his head. The calm reader, used to this sort of thing, realises that Charis was probably pregnant.
Part 3. The Ice-Cream War
Chapter 1. 25 January 1917, Dar-es-Salaam, German East Africa
It is six months later. Unsurprisingly Felix has enlisted. Equally unsurprisingly, it’s in a regiment which is fighting in Africa and we now meet him on deck the troop ship as it steams into Dar es Salam harbour. He’s with the Fifth Battalion, the Nigerian Brigade, being cobbled together from African conscripts, not at all fashionable. But it is Africa. He is driven by guilt, the need to do something, out of which slowly formed the idea of a quest to find brother Gabriel.
Anyway, long uncomfortable train journey to a station in the middle of nowhere called Mikesse. He’s collected her by a Scot with an impenetrable accent named Gilzean. Five hours bumpy driving to a camp where he’s informed his regiment are the other side of the river Rufiji. Since the British invaded German East (as it’s known) at Kilimanjaro in the campaign Smith had witnessed the scrappy start of, they had driven the Germans steadily south and across the Rufiji river when the rains came and fighting stopped.
From this camp Felix has to continue riding a mule along muddy tracks alongside porters, sometimes through swamps, eventually reaching the wide Rufiji river, across which he is taken by ferry, then into his regimental camp, outside which porters are burning a huge mound of horses and mules which are killed off in epic numbers by tsetse fly. He’s arrived at the dump named Kibongo.
Chapter 2. 15 April 1917, Kibongo, German East Africa
Three months later it has rained every single day, food has run low because the trails to the river on the north side have been flooded and the ferry has been washed away. Felix and his battalion are stuck on the south side and on emergency rations. They’re all wasting away, reduced to eating the few monkeys they can shoot. Some black troops regularly die from eating the corpses of horses or mules. Wretched. Except for the ongoing comedy of Felix’s inability to understand Gilzean’s impenetrable Scottish accent.
Chapter 3. 15 July 1917, Nanda German East Africa
With Gabriel in Nanda. The Germans are losing the campaign. Gabriel is keeping a secret record of everything he hears. Dr Deppe has been moved on and Gabriel has stopped rubbing dirt in his wound to keep it infected. Deppe’s replacement tries to get Gabriel incarcerated with the new contingent of POWs but Liesl insists he is left free to carry on his medical assistance. Ongoing comedy because Liesl appears to have no idea that Gabriel burns with almost uncontrollable lust for her big full-breasted, thunder-thighed body.
The British have landed at Kilwa south of the mouth of the Rufiji so will be fighting their way towards Nanda. Something about the way the narrator keeps reminding us that Gabriel is keeping a secret record of everything he hears begins to make me suspect it will be found and Gabriel will be arrested and shot as a spy. Will he get to kiss Liesl before then or cup her huge breasts in his shaking hands? Doubt it.
Chapter 4. 19 October 1917, Lindi, German East Africa
The British advance, fighting increases, more Germans are taken prisoner, but it is the fate of Felix’s company to do peaceful duties far from the fighting, building latrines or walls, flattening land for airfields, accompanying supplies to supply depots near the front line etc. Felix gets time off from supervising the digging of latrines to go to HQ at Lindi on the coast to see if he can discover anything about Gabriel. Here he bumps into fat Smith and, in a coincidence, it turns out they’re both looking for Bilderbeck. And in an outrageous coincidence the first (unmarked) door Smith opens is to an office occupied by Reggie Wheech-Browning, his nemesis.
Wheech-Browning is able to inform Smith that von Bishop is still alive or that the British Army has no notification of his death (so Smith can continue his quest to kill him for despoiling his farm) and Felix that no news has been received of Gabriel’s death (so Felix can continue his quest to find him).
He tells them about Bildebeck’s end; he was in a siege of some German troop, went up onto the walls to harangue them every night, and one night snapped and charged the German lines shouting how they were preventing him from ‘finding his girl’, one of the many odd obsessions which made Bilderbeck such unnerving company for Gabriel and everyone else on the ship from India.
Chapter 5. 19 November 1917, Nanda German East Africa
Chapters 5 to 10 take place over the course of 6 days and form one continuous episode, the arrest, escape and trek of Gabriel Cobb.
The German army in German East has been commanded by Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck. Now his HQ has arrived at Nanda which is swollen with staff, soldiers and askaris. Liesl and Gabriel discuss the fact that the British are now only 50 miles away. In a few days, chances are, he’ll be liberated. Gabriel is surprised to discover this makes him unhappy. Here in the hospital, as a glorified orderly, he feels safe and secure. He decides to sneak round the back of Liesl’s bungalow for one last surreptitous look at her nakedness but when he sees it packed with German officers realises his folly.
He is caught, lightly interrogated, found guilty of spying but not shot as I expected. Instead he is locked in an old mealie sack shed for several days. On the first night Liesl comes to see him. She says they’re going to take him with them. He almost cries and begs her help. She comes back the next night with a metal hinge. It takes Gabriel ten minutes to dig a channel under one of the loose wooden walls.
He trembles with lust and fear and panic standing so close to that large body, those trembling breasts. Liesl, apparently still unaware of his feelings, gives him a sack containing food and water and tells him not to try to get through the lines to the British but hide somewhere for a couple of days till the Germans have left, then slip back into Nanda and find her.
Chapter 6. 22 November 1917, Nanda German East Africa
To his vast irritation von Bishop is tasked by Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, head of the entire East German Army no less, with recovering the escaped prisoner. He says goodbye to Liesl and notices how big and manly she has become. He doesn’t know her any more. He chooses three of the ruga-ruga, natives with filed teeth reputed to be cannibals, and sets off north to find the fugitive.
Chapter 7. 22 November 1917, The Makonde plateau, German East Africa
Day one of Gabriel’s trek north. He is in poor shape generally, worse after three days locked in a shed. It’s hot, the thorn bushes scratch him, his injured leg starts to seize up. Locals in villages he passes notice him, the children throw stones. His plan is to press on across the wide flat plateau till nightfall.
Chapter 8. 22 November 1917, near Nambindinga, German East Africa
Unusually for once Felix’s company is in the vanguard of an advance. Much good it does them as one of his fellow officers, young Loveday with the irritating habit of peppering his conversation with French phrases, is blown in half by a landmine.
Anyway, suddenly arrives Wheech-Browning, that bad penny, ‘that ludicrous bean-pole of a man’, to inform Felix they’ve heard news of Gabriel. Smith was in an advance force which has taken Nanda, discovered the POW camp and some of the soldiers told them Gabriel had been there for years, had been arrested, had escaped just the day before.
Wheech-Browning drives Felix into Nanda, where they come across Smith questioning Liesl who, of course, he met right back at the start of the novel. He wants to know where Bishop is but now, as WB and Felix arrives, informs them of the enormous coincidence that von Bishop (who Smith is after) is chasing Gabriel (who Felix is after).
Felix introduces himself and asks the all-important question: Did his brother ever receive a letter from home? Liesl answers promptly and authoritatively NO, and Felix feels a wonderful sense of sweet relief flood his body. So Gabriel never learned about his affair with Charis. In fact, the reader knows he wouldn’t have in any case, as Charis never mentioned Felix by name. But Felix doesn’t know this.
He needs to go out into the bush to find Gabriel. Smith wants to find Bishop. They both ask WB but the latter says that if, as they claim, it’s a case of security / intelligence well, he’ll jolly well have to come, too. Is there no limit to the man’s irritatingness?
Chapter 9. 24 November 1917, The Makonde plateau, German East Africa
Exciting description of Bishop and the ruga ruga’s pursuit of Cobb across the plateau. They see a fire as dusk falls. They creep up but one trads on a stick, the mule hears and starts hee-hawing, and they see the figure flee. By the time they get there the small base by the fire is deserted, with Cobb’s sack of stuff, bread, a book, abandoned. Bishop sends the three natives to capture Cobb. Why does the book Cobb had belong to von Bishop. Mysteries. He falls asleep, wakes at dawn next morning. After some time the three natives return. One is carrying a sack. As Bishop sits with his rifle, one of them throws severed Cobb’s head into the dirt at his feet.
And that, children, is what you get for peeping at naked women having a shower!
Chapter 10. 25 November 1917, The Makonde plateau, German East Africa
Smith, Felix and Wheech-Browning come across the camp the next day. There’s a small burial mound. Half a mile away a business of vultures and big birds. When they ride over to it they see it’s a body without a head, already half eaten. Going back to the camp they dig into the mound and find Gabriel’s head buried wrapped in a blanket. Felix is convulsed with weeping. Both he and Smith are plain puzzled: who would do a thing like that?
Part 4. After the war
Chapter 1. 15 May 1918, Boma Durio, Portuguese East Africa
Six months later and the German forces have retreated into Portuguese east Africa but are still at large. Felix’s Nigerian regiment is decommissioned, the men sent back to Nigeria, but he wants to stay on and hunt von Bishop, so he takes up Wheech-Browning’s offer of a job in Army Intelligence. But, in the classic style, instead of being anywhere near the fighting he is turned into a supplies officer at a nowhere dump in the middle of rich agricultural land, Boma Durio, where he makes ragged friendships with some of the Portuguese officers
The chapter opens with the arrival of, you’ve guessed it, Intelligence Officer Wheech-Browning. He gets Cobb to give instruction to the Portuguese officers in how to use the (very simple) Stokes mortar. It doesn’t work very well so he goes to pace out the distance and is horrified when he hears the lick and sees a puff of smoke meaning a mortar has been launched. He yells at the Portuguese captain who’s accompanied him to run but the mortar detonates, ripping his clothes off, covering him in bruises and cuts. Dazed he staggers to the crater and realises it was a direct hit on Captain Pintao who has been vaporised.
Then appears Wheech-Browning who apologises profusely and explains that he had the lanyard in his hand when he sneezed. Terribly sorry, old chap. Wheech-Browning, his rise and rise, might, in a funny sort of way, be emerging as the central subject of the entire novel.
Chapter 2. 13 November 1918, Kasama, Rhodesia
Von Bishop is still with the German army commanded by Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck. After going south into Portuguese, capturing supplies, they’d doubled back north into the German colony then headed west into Rhodesia which is where they now are, having captured a town full of provisions.
Many men and some of the officers are coming down with and quickly dying from the Spanish flu. Von Bishop is still haunted by the horrible killing of Cobb on the plateau. The ruga ruga spoke no English and he didn’t speak their language. They did what they thought would please him (like Pharaoh beheading Pompey for Caesar). Next night the three natives disappeared, leaving von Bishop to rendezvous with von Lettow-Vorbeck’s main force at the river crossing into the Portuguese colony. He lied that they found Cobb’s body dead from exposure and buried it.
Von Bishop is strolling round town when a motorbike courier arrives. He is British so von Bishop informs him he is arrested while the courier gets out his case and hands von Bishop a note announcing that the war is over and hostilities have ceased. At last, he thinks, with huge relief.
Chapter 3. 2 December 1918, Nairobi, British East Africa
Felix is recuperating at a convalescent home for officers in Nairobi. He’s just received a letter from his mother telling him his father has been sent to a sanatorium, and that his friend Holland recently telephoned from Russia to announce that he’s joined a revolution there. Turns out Felix was hit in the occiput by shrapnel from the mortar and it badly affected his sight, which was fragmented but has, mercifully, almost completely recovered as the wound healed. He regrets not writing earlier to inform them of Gabriel’s death.
He had been reading a newspaper when the letter arrived. It had an account of the final surrender of Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck and his vexatious German Army. They had all been transported to Dar. It listed the 30 or so officers and included von Bishop’s name. At that moment Felix conceived a plan. He was going to travel to Dar, find von Bishop and shoot him dead in revenge for the gruesome murder of his brother.
Chapter 4. 5 December 1918, Dar-es-Salaam, German East Africa
Description of how von Bishop, along with the other captured officers, surrendered at Abicorn, were shipped up Lake Tanganyika to the port of Kigama and then the long train journey to the coast. Here they are greeted as heroes by the German community and von Bishop is reunited with Liesl who, he immediately notices, has lost a lot of weight, is back to the slim figure she had when he saw her off to Europe in 1913. They go to the small bungalow she is being allowed as a German civilian. The maid gets him a beer and almost immediately Liesl asks what happened to Gabriel.
Von Bishop tells the prepared lie, that he found Gabriel dead of exposure. Liesl apparently believes him. For a second she was going to say something – ‘Erich, I…’ – probably going to admit that she helped Gabriel escape, but Erich doesn’t want to hear it and talks over her. Liesl changes tack and goes on to say that she recognises one of the British men who came after von Bishop, saw him here in Dar just the day before. We know she’s referring to Felix.
Chapter 5. 9 December 1918, Dar-es-Salaam, German East Africa
The climax of the book. A few nights later Felix sneaks up on the bungalow now inhabited by von Bishop and his wife. He is full of confused moral contradictions like human beings so often are, at least in fictions. He has a great big service revolver. He climbs noisily in through an open window and sees a prone body on the bed and whispers, then pokes, then shouts at the unresponsive German. The door opens a light goes on and von Bishop’s wife tells him Erich is dead. Died three hours ago of Spanish flu.
Felix improvises an excuse for being there, something about wanting to talk to him about his brother’s death. He asks Liesl if Erich told her how Gabriel died and she says ‘Yes’ in a calm manner, so calm that Felix instantly realises she knows nothing about the beheading. Erich must have lied to her. She is ignorant. On the spot, he decides not to tell her. It doesn’t matter any more. Why carry on spreading suffering?
Epilogue
Epilogue. 3 January 1919, Mombasa, British East Africa
Felix and Temple Smith have met up and review the whole story. They’re on the quayside at Mombasa as Felix prepares to get his boat back to England.
Both smile wryly at the flu beating them to the revenge they wanted to wreak on von Bishop. The narrative ends on a comic note for while Felix is still puzzled by Liesl’s complete indifference to her husband’s death, Smith is vexed about the disappearance of his precious decorticator. He’s scoured the farms of the entire region round his homestead and never found it.
They wave him off as he gets the small lighter out to the steamer and he mounts to the railings. Then the decorative canon onshore fire a salute to a battalion of Indian troops preparing to embark on a steamer. The loud noise triggers Felix’s optical problem, the result of the mortar injury, his sight becomes fragmentary and patchy, the sea and sky, the land and the people on it, all reduced to jagged fragments.
Thoughts
English scenes
Of the 18 chapters in the section titled ‘The War’, no fewer than seven are set in England and feature Felix Cobb. Of the total 40 chapters, 10 are set in Britain (or Trouville). My point is there’s a lot of scenes and events set in England for a book supposedly about the war in Africa. Not complaining or criticising, just pointing out that a lot of these scenes are as – if not more – effective than the African ones. I felt I got to know Charis, Felix and Holland better than most of the African characters.
Conveying information
Giles Foden has written five novels set in Africa, each incorporating large chunks of history, including one set in the same region of East Africa during the Great War (‘Mimi and Toutou Go Forth’). So I’m able to do a direct comparison and say Boyd is much better at integrating lots of factual backstory with a complex plot. In Foden it feels like the plot stops while a character clumsily invokes the historical facts. In Boyd the third person narrator tells us everything we need to know then smoothly goes on with the plot. Boyd is a much smoother, more accomplished writer in this technical sense of arranging his plot and integrating factual material. His prose is also much more smooth and finished and not odd and cranky as Foden’s is. He also has a continual dry sense of humour which peeks out at all kinds of moments, unlike Foden who is heavy and humourless throughout. When Foden tries to be amusing, as in ‘Mimi and Toutou Go Forth’, it’s like watching Gordon Brown try to tell a humorous anecdote i.e. you feel embarrassed for him.
Comic coincidences
Stories need coincidence of a kind which don’t happen in real life: old lovers bumping into each other etc. In Foden’s stories the coincidences are unbelievable because he takes them, like everything else, with deadly seriousness. Boyd has a lovely sense of humour which helps you accept his coincidences. Thus, Smith’s life is bedevilled by a tall officious British officer named Wheech-Browning but the way they keep bumping into each other, instead of undermining the story (as it does in Foden), because Boyd plays it for dry laughs, somehow the comedy takes the edge off the improbability and laughs you into believing it. It has (it occurs to me) the same kind of comedy of coincidences Waugh deploys so well in his novels, with the same scapegraces popping up in unlikely places.
Influences and echoes
Isn’t there a scene in D.H. Lawrence where posh people die in the pond of their big posh house? I remember it from the movie version of ‘Women in Love’. The memory of this made me think of the English scenes as a kind of nexus of tropes from Lawrence (for the passion), Huxley (for the social comedy) and Waugh (for the withering satire). Boyd is a very good, very entertaining writer, but maybe the reason he’s never had a breakthrough work and never become a really big name is because what he’s good at is refreshing existing tropes and memes: the comedy of ‘A Good Man in Africa’ contained multiple echoes of English farceurs from Kingsley Amis to Tom Sharpe. I’ve mentioned the English writers who the English scenes in this book bring to mind. Even the war scenes, in their ridiculous futility, remind me of Evelyn Waugh’s (surprisingly numerous) war scenes.
So he’s a very good, very entertaining writer, full of echoes.
Credit
An Ice-Cream War by William Boyd was first published by Hamish Hamilton in 1982. References are to the 1983 Penguin paperback edition.
William Boyd reviews
- A Good Man in Africa (1981)
- An Ice-Cream War (1982)
Books & Boots 